My go-to bling is an Iranian turquoise ring

This story is part of Image Issue 10, “Clarity,” a living document of how LA radiates in its own way. Read the full issue here.

This is the biggest bling we’ve ever owned.

The stone in the center is as wide and twice as long as our mother’s fingernails: her ancestral home in the mountains outside Tehran is as clear as spring water in Shemiran. Away from the shady, pond-filled forests where we now live and still from the coastal area of ​​California where I – I didn’t know then – would one day make my own home.

Falling from turquoise, two rows of diamonds like Saturn’s rings, as wide as dust and in orbit, so many shattered moons were close.

All set in precious gold for its whiteness.

My father’s father’s gift, the story goes, from our parents’ wedding in 1978.

Piroza is a specialty of his city. For thousands of years, from empire to empire, even before Islam came to Iran, it has been excavated outside Mashhad in neighboring Nishapur, where some of Iran’s most beloved classical poets are buried.

To this day, the color of Nishapur turquoise serves as the universal standard against which all other turquoise is judged. That blue. Briming. Plenty. Celestial So powerful that the stone stands for the evil eye, protects from jealousy, to open and blink the empty blue eyes.

Sometimes they say that our grandfather presented the ring to the bride on his behalf, after the vows, according to custom, when the guests followed the imam to offer jewelry and gold coins to the newlyweds. (Our grandparents did not attend the wedding; we know from the photos, the drug store prints, the man in the plastic wrapped in a cheap souvenir album. On the cover: Niagara Falls at night, dancing on Harlequin lights.) Yet our parents are revolutionaries. , We imagine our grandfather as the old emperor, who is too important or too weak to travel, with an angel to mule his treasures in the lands.

Sometimes they say that our grandfather gave this new bride a gift of his own. In the months between the wedding and going to the Midwest, Mashhad went to pay homage to our mother and father. We imagine him slipping a ring on her finger. It falls on its own weight, the turquoise hyacinth blooming on the first day of spring.

He will die before returning to Iran after 14 years. He dies before we have a chance to meet him.

There is no photo of her at home. We have this ring. Turquoise, diamond, white gold. When our mother, my sister and I are looking at it, touching it, studying it, he warns us not to lose anything, then his eyes blink. We try to shape it and maybe something else.

Less humility. However, as good Muslim girls, we do not accept this.

Low grayness. Because we suspect that there is a connection between being a woman and the whiteness of white gold.

We each have a warm, yellow 18-carat nameplate necklace that we wear to school, in bed, in the shower; The most beautiful of the dog tags, they mark us in Arabic script.

It’s more of a child’s play than a ring.

One day, we will give our childhood for femininity. We will trade naked yellow trinkets for cold stone and white gold: we will trade the sun for the moon.

Only one of us will get the sky. There’s a turquoise ring and two of us.

A few winters ago, my friend and I decided to get married. I announced that I would choose my own ring. First, don’t tell me what to wear. But still, I have fond memories of going to Iran to buy bells, a family affair in which fiancs choose their own halos. An American Down-on-One-Knee Proposal with Amazing Stone is a public demonstration of alleged private intimacy – you show intimacy to the audience, social media. Before the letter. In Iran, you accept that you and everyone’s mother will have an opinion on Bling and will move on by trapping and tomaing through jewelry stores.

My hybrid, hypnotized way was to do it alone. Carrying only the burden of one’s own taste. My own values. No family Just like my parents left their parents to study and then live in the US – they came to Cleveland for graduate school in ’78, but then the Iran-Iraq war kept them away until the 80s, and then something led. Another, from one year to the next – I moved thousands of miles between us as I moved west to do a PhD at UCLA.

To find the ring, I set an intention: a yellow marquee diamond, a yellow gold band. From those days of playing dress-up with my sister, I had already sworn white gold.

All gold jewelry is made of alloy, with relatively soft, pure, yellow metal combining with their hardening shapes. Light mixer, light results.

14th Century Manuscript Historians of the Mongol court provided recipes for the golden rainbow: white, black, red, yellow, green, and more. Then in 19th century Iran, jewelers preferred yellow gold to yellow and they dripped like sunset. The transformation into white gold in the 20th century – and in the 1970s, on the brink of revolution, when my parents got married – coincided with top-down westernization: white was good. Intellectually and politically, my parents and their families rejected this “wastexification” as if it were in revolutionary language. But culture runs deep in the bone, fun.

Decades later, a gray woman in America, I like my bling to smooth my skin. Beautification Whiteness – whether in metallic colors or the clarity of the stone – strengthens the white power. Embracing yellow is a way to embrace grayness.

I found myself at Beverly Hills Jewelers after having my hair cut with an intent set, a red and yellow clearance banner. I hummed inside. From “hello” I knew the pronunciation of the shop was Iranian. Veterans were shining with the usual stuff. Diamonds and sapphires, pearls from here to Damascus wire. There is no turquoise. They imagined themselves upstairs – it was the type of installation that required a pause in front of the door. But what could be higher than heaven?

Still, two objects caught my eye: a pair of evil eye studs and a diamond thrower. I urged her to try the ring.

Solitaire was set to 14-carat gold, American Standard. Yellow, darker and brooding than the 18 carats flickering around my neck and wrists – but still yellow, uncompromising. The stone was the right size, not the worst, reserved, and at any rate, the budget allowed as much – bigger, in fact, than I expected, thanks to the liquidation sale. And the cut was just what I wanted: do-eye marquees, sharp corners and uncomfortable. But white

I picked up a business card and just got on the house.

A few weeks later, after spending hours on the Internet for Eastside and Vintage Yellow Diamonds – all more expensive than my clearance marquees – I returned with my fianc. Many stocks were cleared. Vitrines were filled to the brim, with many mines exploding in the dry landscape.

My Marx was still there. Left behind, waiting. Not yellow, not perfect, but mine. I took it home.

Also, my partner in the last minute waste, evil eye studs. One eye stays in my right earlobe, the other in the piercing (I always wear my earrings asymmetrically; the other stays safe in its box). Dust-shaped diamond with central sapphire. I use it to teach, in bed, to take a bath. Opening and unlinking, blinking.

At my wedding this fall, my mom let me choose my own gift. Anything from his drawer.

I picked up the old big bling. I am not the modern, humble Muslim woman that my mother wanted, nor the good wife that my grandfather imagined in his daughter-in-law or granddaughter. But this ring is my property. In all its complexity and my dilemma. I wear it as a ring in the middle of many, a grand confrontation.

Turquoise eyes shine and protects me. White gold turns yellow to the moon and the sun bends to the sun. Diamonds rotate the rainbows. Business lighting for lighting.

Maryam Rahmani is a writer and translator based in LA. Her contemporary Iranian cult hit “In Case of Emergency” was published in the autumn of 2021 by Mahsa Mohebali. She is currently working on her debut novel.

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