al-majus

The story of my grandmother, Mahin Banu (Persian for “lady like the moon”). Written in three vignettes, No. 2.

Mahin Banu’s imagination, though impressive, was still only second to her temper; a peppery teenage temper that could bite and scratch and claw out the beast. But it wasn’t a patient mother or a loving father who was left alone at the mercy of this temper every morning. Nor was it her young husband, who usually crept out of the house while it was still bathed in a morning blue and his wife lay snoring softly under her blanket. No, it was her baby daughter, Shuku.

Regularly subjected to her mother’s whims and experiments, Shuku was something of a living doll to Mahin Banu, and most of Mahin’s projects involved some manner of primping and gussying her up.  There was the time she decided to shave the toddler’s forehead into a widow’s peak, so that she might look more like herself.  And the time she was determined to line Shuku’s eyes with kohl, accidentally poking one of her eyeballs in the process.  When Shuku whined and whimpered and complained during any of her mother’s endeavors, Mahin Banu would bite her on her little pink sausage arms, just to get the tears out, as she put it.

One day, Mahin got it into her head to thread Shuku’s sideburns off.  When Shuku resisted, Mahin Banu bit her so hard that the child’s purple-faced screams looped around the entire house, into the courtyard, and all the way down to the almond grove, where Asqar Aqa’s mother lay snoring after having raided the fuzzy, green almonds all day.  

Dizzy and disgruntled, Khanum Bozorg hurried into the kitchen, only to find Shuku there all by herself, her little arm already speckled in a ring of bruises and coated with saliva. 

There was no doubt in her mind that this was Mahin Banu’s work.  She searched the entire house for her daughter-in-law, who upon finding that her bite had inspired such shrieks, had tucked herself away in a cupboard in her bedroom.

“You’re crazy! Your temper!  It’s out of control!” shouted Khanum Bozorg, not the least bit surprised to find her son’s wife folded up in the cupboard among the towels and the bed sheets.  “She’s a child; a human being, not a plaything!”  And with that, she slammed the cupboard door shut and collected Shuku in her scarves, spoiling her for the remainder of the day with pretty white muslin dresses, rice cookies and strings of teeny tiny pearls.

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