As the poet says:

Even if your father was a learned man,

It’s nothing to you – you must do what you can.

“In any case, after my father’s death I became his successor, and I examined our circumstances. He had left us a house and a handful of stuff. I was still a theology student, and I had a monthly pension of four tomans plus fifteen kilograms of wheat. In addition, during the months of Muharram and Safar we were in clover. Our bread was buttered on both sides. Since it was well known that the breath of my father, God bless him, would work miracles, one night I was brought to a sickbed to pray. I saw a girl, about eight or nine years old, hanging around. Sir, I was drawn to her at first glance. Well, that’s youth, with all its ups and downs.

“Before her I had had two temporary wives, both of whom I had divorced, but this was something else. You’d have to have been me to understand. Anyway, two days later I sent a handkerchief full of nuts and dried fruit and three tomans, and I married her. At night when they brought her, she was so tiny that they carried her. I was ashamed of myself. I won’t hide anything from you. For three days, whenever the girl saw me she trembled like a sparrow. Now, I was only thirty, I was in my prime. But talk about those seventy-year-old men with all kinds of diseases who marry nine-year-old girls.

“Well, what does a child understand of marriage? She thinks it’s all about wearing a sequinned shawl and putting on new clothes and being patted and caressed by a husband instead of being in her father’s house where she would be beaten and cursed. But she doesn’t know that life isn’t just a bed of roses in her husband’s house either.

“In any case, it took me so much trouble to tame her. She was afraid of me. She would cry. I pleaded with her. I would say, ‘For God’s sake, stop embarrassing me. All right, you sleep at one end of the room, I’ll sleep at the other’, because I felt sorry for her. I really restrained myself not to force her. Besides, I had had a lot of experience and I could wait. In any case, she listened to my advice.

“The first night I told her a story. She fell asleep. The second night I started another story and left half of it for the next night.

“The third night I didn’t say anything, until she finally said, ‘You told the story up to the part where King Jamshid went hunting. Why don’t you tell the rest?’ And I – I couldn’t contain myself for joy. I said, ‘Tonight I have a headache.