al-majus

Mahin Banu Sameni came from a long line of wealthy bazaari merchants. With hair like a soft, swift death and eyes that just knew better, the Sameni women married well above their social sphere. In 1938, at the age of fifteen, Mahin Banu, the most luminous of her sisters by far, married Asqar Aqa Moftakhar, a chubby, young gentleman with increasingly insignificant ties to the deposed Qajar dynasty.  By age nineteen, Mahin Banu had already given birth to three daughters.  The first, named Mansureh, but called Homa, died while still in her cot.  The second, named Homa after the first child, but called Shuku, frequently became the unfortunate victim of Mahin Banu’s rage tantrums.  The third was named by an anonymous civil registry clerk – a name so hideous, so unfashionable, it was immediately wrapped in a dirty cloth and jammed into an old cupboard. There, in the dust-veiled shadows of shame, it grew sharp-toothed and feral;  shivering, growling beside other Moftakhar family secrets, like the real reason why Ameh Shokat cried in her room every night and why Khanum Kuchik carried that glass eye in her dress pocket.  She was simply known in the family as Niku.

written by Alaleh Mohajerani

an earlier version of this text was first published by Cardiff University in 2008 and featured in an anthology published by Cinnamon Press, also in 2008, entitled Black Waves in Cardiff Bay