al-majus

The Moftakhar house snaked itself around Moftakhar Alley with all the wiggling hips of a Wednesday market girl.  When they first assigned surnames in Tehran, Asqar Aqa’s father, Ali Aqa, chose the name “Moftakhar” because he had studied Arabic and in Arabic moftakhar meant “proud.”  In Persian, it lent itself rather easily to ridicule and could be translated literally into “gratis donkey.”  Alas, Ali Aqa’s love of foreign languages blinded him to even the most conspicuous of Persian puns, and in the end Moftakhar it was.

Like their name, and their noses, the Moftakhar home reflected a simple, unpretentious sort of pride.  No ostentatious gardens stood mocking passers-by in the front; no festooned gates boasted of the dusty, half-faded luxuries within.  Tall, pale brick walls wound around the entire back and side of the residence, for the Moftakhars were a private people, who preferred to keep the beauty of their gardens, and their women, to themselves.  On the other hand, the gratis donkey in them frequently left the front door wide open to strangers, accepted promissory notes from amputated Saudi merchants, and allowed themselves to be robbed by the household staff of every last Qajar coin that sparkled in the giant cut-glass urns in the salon.

The front of the Moftakhar house faced a long avenue named Mosalsal-Sazi that ran adjacent to Moftakhar Alley.  The avenue was named after a military arsenal that took up much of the block and which, in its heyday, was famous for the production of Iranian Brnos.  As if to mask the stench of the death machines in production behind the arsenal’s blonde brick walls, a long strip of rose acacias had been planted from one end of the avenue to the other, filling the neighborhood with the twisted odor of flowers and firearms.

To the left of the Moftakhar house, the avenue eventually led to a square called Jaleh; to the right, Mosalsal-Sazi was home to all manner of specialty shops – Hassan Kebabi’s kebab house, Akbar Aqa Sabzi-Foroosh’s produce market, Hajji Eye Crust’s grocery store, Mamad Aqa Labaniati’s dairy shop, Yadollah the Booby Grabber’s bakery.  The rest of the neighborhood was largely residential, though one could hardly call it quiet.  Several other old Tehrani families built their houses here, rearing their minimum of half a dozen children each.

The main door of the Moftakhar house opened into a silk-carpeted corridor that stopped unsuspecting guests before they had a chance to remove their left shoe.  It was like walking inside the Daria-i-Nur – everything blushing, iridescent and cut into delicate facets.  The birds on the pink silk carpets flew out into the sky at the end of the corridor.  The rosy, dancing lights of the crystal chandeliers and the stained-glass window panels mingled as if at a fancy party.  The sound of the fountain flirting with the pigeons in the garden and the smell of lunch being dressed downstairs like a fine lady, all met here in the corridor.  It was such a contrast to the plain bricks of the outside of the house, such a sudden overwhelming of the senses, that only the occasional foul-mouthed child screaming through the courtyard in his dirty play-clothes could have broken its spell.

To the right of the glittering corridor was the large salon, where guests were received; to the left, the Russian sitting room and Russian dining room, which were in fact Persian, despite the sumptuous velvet and damask Imperial armchairs, and polished marquetry tables.

Though in most neighboring households, it was the rooms used for entertaining guests that were furnished with the lavish furniture, and the rooms used for day to day living that were equipped with either the more modest seating arrangements or none at all, the opposite held true at the Moftakhar home.  Mahin Banu’s repugnance to strangers’ bottoms contaminating her furnishings left the salon devoid of any seating whatsoever. “Let them sit on the floor!” the young mistress declared like a miserly Antoinette.  Her decree was issued – the smaller family rooms were crammed with her wedding furnishings, she herself perched up onto a pile of cushions, and the guests dumped onto the carpet in the long, empty, echoing salon.

Though bereft of seating, the salon was still decorated in the same motif as the rest of the ground floor – crystal chandeliers reigned over all the rooms like sun gods; massive Syrian mother-of-pearl inlaid chests stood solemnly along the peeling papered walls; cracked stained-glass windows let in a soft, pink light that moved around the house with the family’s matriarch, who always positioned herself and her needlework in a corner where her legs could enjoy the full warmth of the day’s sun; crystal dishes, painted with portraits of arrogant Qajar monarchs, poured out of the marquetry cabinets, filled to the brim with gold coins.  And everywhere, like so many dandies out for a stroll, the silk, rose-coloured carpets crossed, sidestepped and politely bowed before one other.

Downstairs, the basement was laid out in a more somber manner.  A long corridor ran directly parallel to the one above, with the kitchen and water storage to the left and the summer living rooms to the right.  Everything downstairs was duskier, heavier; all the furniture in cooler, moonlit colors.  Blues and greys replaced the pinks and golds of the upholstery upstairs; horses and deer substituted the birds and flowers of the carpets.  In lieu of colossal chandeliers twinkled small starry lamps and silver candelabras with dangling, crystal earrings.

Once she reached the stony basement kitchen, Beauty slipped off her mirrored shoes and reposed.  With three ovens spitting and smoking until well into the afternoon, the kitchen was not really decorated at all – except for a vase or two of roses that were clipped from the garden – and for this very reason, became the family’s favorite gathering place.  It was here where Ameh Shokat did all the family’s cooking year-round and here where some of the deepest of confidences were exchanged between the women of the household over a cup of cardamom tea.

Behind the kitchen, at the end of the long basement corridor, was an even longer bath house which absolutely nobody used.  As the women preferred to make a picnic out of their bathing day, packing their wedding embroideries up with nuts and fruit; and as the men would hardly have considered it bathing at all lest it involve being lathered up and thoroughly beaten by some burly, Turkic professional first, the Moftakhars, like the majority of their neighbors, turned to the local public hamam for all their bathing necessities.

These rooms formed what was the main building of the Moftakhar home.  Overlooking a large courtyard with a turquoise pool in the middle, the brick structure was stuck between two weeping willows that constantly nagged at its windows and shed long, furry tears into the water below.

The rest of the courtyard was surrounded by eleven bedrooms, with the family rooms on one end, the servants’ quarters on the other and the guestrooms in-between, looking out over a smaller pool, just across the main building.  In the summertime, little wooden cots were taken outside for the family, with everyone tucked under the same kilim of stars.

East of the courtyard was another smaller, enclosed garden, which included a larder, a second kitchen, a laundry area, two outhouses and a large linen closet of sorts.  North of the courtyard, curving around Moftakhar Alley, was the almond grove, the pomegranate orchard and two clusters of apricot trees, all linked together by a single gravel path.  Sweet and sour cherry trees lined the entire back garden walls, providing ample privacy for Asqar Aqa and his wife, should they feel inclined to frolic under the cherry blossoms come springtime.

The garden culminated into what would later be known as Mehdi’s pigeon house, a small pavilion built from the leftover turquoise mosaics that had been used to tile the courtyard pool.  Featuring only the whitest of Persian pigeons, the pavilion was surrounded by flowerbeds that changed according to the tastes of whichever lady was running the household at the time.  Under Mahin Banu’s reign, any flower or plant with a white or silvery cast to it that could compete with the white of the pigeon plumes was permissible – milky Persian buttercups, snow-white peonies, and the fairest of climbing poet’s jasmines, all serenading the quivering pigeons with their sweet, perfumed couplets.

written by Alaleh Mohajerani

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