al-majus

Every family member who visited us from Iran in my youth, with their smoky blazers and suitcases full of embroidery, pistachios, handmade trinkets, saffron, and gold for our future wedding days, also brought with them a far more precious collection of family folklore and personal memories that were shared over cups of tea as we sat patting our bloated bellies in the evenings, dozing off on a rug by the fireplace like a mountain of fat cats, oblivious to the ephemeral sumptuousness of these moments that our parents so lovingly composed for us.

When I was a young undergraduate student, studying literature, I began recording some of these family conversations on tape. I spent seven years collecting stories with my dad’s little handheld cassette recorder, which made me feel terribly important, a feeling that was quite possibly shared by my interviewees as they bent over the table and shouted into the recorder, gazing into it as if it were some magical scrying bowl. 

As part of my master’s dissertation, I finally began writing some of these sometimes comical, sometimes tragic stories down as vignettes – mostly the ones narrated by my mother, a charming storyteller in her own right. Wherever there were holes, I inserted my own imagination, my own piaz daq as they say in Persian (literally ‘hot onions’).

The result is a sort of spiced up family tree of folk tales, stories like little hand-wrapped dolmas, with my mother’s voice as the grape leaves and mine as the fried barberries and plums and piaz daq that have been sprinkled on top.  

After graduate school, the project morphed into a book. A fool for patterns, I am delighted to report it took another seven years for me to write and finish the entire project.

And then, as is often the case with me…I just sort of put it away. Life came along and new projects filled my heart, and besides the first few vignettes that were part of my dissertation and later featured in an anthology, I never published it.

And so my little book has been sitting there in its pot, marinating in its own juices – for twelve goddamn years.

Sometimes I read little bits of it and make a few edits. Some of it makes me smile; some of it needs an older, wiser hand. 

And then yesterday, on a bus in a remote corner of Sweden, after a total of twenty-six years, in the middle of what to us West Asians is very much already a world war, I decided, for no particular reason, to publish it online myself. Vignette by vignette. Chapter by chapter. Between Substack and my own website. No querying the thing to agents and publishers. No book deals. No warmongering financial backers. No paywalls. Just a storyteller giving you a story. A picture of Tehran as my mother and her family lived it in the late-nineteenth to mid-twentieth centuries. A paradise for some; a living hell for others; some sort of a combination for the rest.

I give you, dear reader, White Mulberries.

Alaleh Mohajerani

April 15th, 2026