al-majus

Mahin Banu had a dark but lustrous imagination, which unlike her static coiffures, ran windswept and untamed. One winter afternoon, as the curly trees and clouds of Tehran blew across the city, Asqar Aqa came home from work for his daily lunch break and siesta and found that something other than the leaves from his favorite fig tree were missing. He stepped into the dust and wind that had disheveled the Moftakhar garden’s elaborate Poodletop and Pompadour hedges calling, “Mahin! Mahin!” but his wife was nowhere to be found.

He called his mother, who lived with her son and his wife as any widowed Iranian matriarch with half a penchant for puppeteering gladly would have. Khanum, however, was sadly not the type. She mostly kept herself to herself; and so, when Asqar Aqa asked her, “Khanum Bozorg, where is Mahin?” her answer was naturally, “How the hell should I know?” She was seeding a pile of pomegranates on the floor. “That girl is like an enema.” She swept her hand side to side. “In she goes and out she comes. Slamming doors. Back and forth, back and forth. All day long like a panther. There is a faded strip on the rug where she paces.” She shook her head wearily, “Try your bedroom.”

Asqar Aqa stuck his head into the couple’s bedroom, where his wife could frequently be found playing with her jewelry collection, like a greedy, meticulous little bowerbird, but still found no sign of her.  His appetite beginning to set in, he wondered if it would not be a better plan to wait in the sitting room instead, helping himself in the meantime to a nice hot cup of tea from the samovar and some of the Turkish delights that he had brought home from the town centre.

He sat down with his tray, his stomach rumbling, his lips smacking, but before he could get the first powdery delight in, he heard something, somewhere, make a tick, tick, tick. At first, he thought it was only the perverted old maple tree, tickling the sultry, giggling wind against the sitting room windows. After listening more intently, however, he realized that the ticks were not coming from the window at all, but rather from a large trunk that stood in the corner of the room.

He held his tray over his head, tiptoed over to the trunk and peeked in, ready for a mouse, a jinni, anything at all. But there was no mouse, no jinni. No, there was just a Mahin, barely conscious in the trunk, gasping for air.

“Mahin?” said Asqar Aqa, dumbfounded at finding his wife inside the sitting room furniture.

And Mahin Banu began to weep. She had worked herself up all morning to the idea that if she left the house, her husband would bring another woman home. Something about the way her mother had said, “Keep an eye on that husband of yours.” Something about the way his prettyish cousin had tossed her hair at him the previous week. And then, of course, she was pregnant, always pregnant.

Having experimented with several different hiding places after breakfast, she had decided that the sitting room trunk was her best bet, as it afforded a perfect view of the front corridor, through which Asqar Aqa and his mink-clad mistress were sure to come tumbling in with their impassioned, cinematic embraces and flushed winter cheeks.

Unfortunately, once she got in there, she couldn’t pry the lid open again from the inside and was stuck in the blasted thing all day with hardly any air.

After hearing her confession, Asqar Aqa burst out into his half-silent belly laugh and threw his arms around his wife, whose current state of agitation was not of her usual (and considerably more dangerous) ceramic variety that would have come crashing in against his embrace.

“My love, did you and Heshmat watch that Gone with the Wind again? By God, I curse the man who invented these damned motion pictures!” He stroked her raven-feather hair. “Once again, my darling, I swear to the Pir and the Prophet: I am not Scarlett O’Hara! There is no one I wistfully yearn for in my heart of hearts while I make love to my wife!”

Mahin said nothing. “Oh, try to think about this logically, my precious,” Asqar Aqa sighed, cupping her face in his hands like a lotus. “Why would I bring another woman into my own home, where my wife and my mother and my children all live?”

This, what he considered, a perfectly rational argument, naturally opened up new coffers of doubt in Mahin Banu’s imagination. All too familiar with the enraged white elephant that charged across her already exaggerated eyes at such times, Asqar Aqa quickly changed tactics. He spent the rest of the afternoon at home, reassuring his young wife at random intervals that there were absolutely no other women; that Mahin Banu was the only girl he ever loved in his life.

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