The Good Wife

It's clear enough that Ebrahim Ebrahimi would do anything in his power to extinguish completely the events of the past several years.  Yearning to turn back the clock and restore his family to where it was when father and mother were still able to steer their four daughters comfortably into the cultural track they were most at home with.

But it is difficult to maintain cultural traditions when a family is transplanted and deeply immersed within another country whose own cultural normatives are so at variance with that found in traditional Muslim societies.  Girls who are taught to be modest and above reproach suddenly become infected with the virus of rebellion.

And what are caring parents to do?

For Mr. Ebrahimi and his wife Johra Kaleki were by all accounts - their own, corroborated by their daughters - caring, supportive parents.  "In one second, whatever I built in my life was destroyed", mourned Mr. Ebrahimi, recalling the shock that overtook his life, for the edification of a Quebec Court.  "My daughter was taken in an ambulance.  My wife was taken by police."

A living nightmare.  A surreal misery from which Mr. Ebrahimi yearned desperately to awaken.  His wife accused of attempted murder.  That much is true; she did attempt to take her daughter's life, to stab her to death, determined to send her daughter to a more peaceful place than the life she chose that so roiled their relationship.

Yes, he said, his wife attacked their daughter, Bahar Ebrahimi.  And because he had heard the screams from the basement where his wife and oldest daughter were and ran down to separate them, he spared his wife from committing murder and his daughter from death.  Despite which reality, he described his wife as gentle, a "best friend" to their four daughters.

"She's a very lovely woman.  She's a good wife.  She's a good mother.  She loves her children."

She just didn't love her oldest daughter's impudent insistence on being independent, on going out at night, on spending the night heaven-knows-where, like a street prostitute.  It was to spare their daughter from that kind of horrible future that Johra Kaleki took the unusual step of attempted murder.  To shock her daughter out of her destiny with whoredom - by death.

Johra Kaleki's four-hour testimony given freely to police during a post-arrest interrogation led Montreal police to describe the attack as an honour crime.  When her husband had interrupted the process, grappling with his wife and his daughter to separate them, his wife insisted: "let me finish the job".  

All these details mean nothing to wife and mother; she recalls nothing now.

"My wife and daughter, they were grabbing each other by the hair.  There was blood everywhere."  He barely recognized his wife; bulging eyes, strange voice, unnatural strength as she fought him off.  She had "a freaky laugh, like horror movies", he said.   His fault that a kitchen cleaver was available; he had forgotten leaving it in the basement.

But look, now everything is all right, all is well.  Normalcy has returned, everyone loves everyone else again.  No harm done.