“I don’t want this one,” Mahin Banu whispered to her miniature mother over tea. She was pregnant with her third child and was convinced it was another girl. How she knew she was bearing a daughter would forever remain one of the great Moftakhar family mysteries, but whether it was a conclusion she drew based on old wives’ tales or something witchy she felt in her bones, Mahin Banu was right.
“You have no choice,” said her mother, sucking on a sugar cube. “I told you not to eat all that citrus. Sour lemons, sweet lemons, bitter oranges, tangerines. No boy could possibly survive all that acid.” She dropped her half-melted sugar cube into her tea. “Anyway, it’s too late now. All you can do is wait and pray. Who knows? It might turn out to be a boy after all.”
But Mahin did know. When she realised that her first child, Homa, would be a girl, she cried ruby pomegranate tears in the pomegranate orchard. When Homa died of a severe case of meningitis, Mahin Banu became pregnant with Shuku and cried for weeks in circles around the courtyard pool. This time, though, this third time, Mahin Banu resolved to cry no more.
“This is a girl,” she said, like thousands of women around the world before her, and thousands of women after, “and I do not want her.”
Skulking around in every secret corner of the house, she concocted various folk remedies, in the hopes of inducing a miscarriage.
For six months she tried. She consumed bizarre potions made from turmeric and castor oil, which besides making her vomit, did nothing much else. She stuck great egret feathers into her vagina, in order to pierce her womb. She rubbed opium around her labia to try and poison the fetus. Every tonic, every superstition that her mother’s friends and the local hakims prescribed were carefully checked off her list one by one. But still, the baby would not die.
“I will not let go,” it hummed, from the depths of her belly.
Mahin bit her perfectly manicured nails until her fingertips bled. In one final attempt, she called on a notorious Unani physician who lived in the outskirts of Tehran. Short and gnarled, with a nicotine-stained mouth full of worm-eaten teeth, the charlatan herbalist prescribed gigantic effervescent tablets, which he ordered Mahin to dissolve in water and drink daily.
“If you see yourself bleeding,” he snivelled, “make sure to flush the remaining tablets and the prescription down the toilet. A preliminary precaution, nothing more.”
Mahin followed the doctor’s instructions that night. As soon as Asqar Aqa fell asleep, she snuck down into the kitchen, plopped one of the tablets into a glass of water, and drank the fizzy white brew. It did not taste ominously bitter. It did not taste deceptively sweet. Smooth and natural as undyed silk, it went down in a few easy gulps, and Mahin Banu wondered whether she had not been swindled after all.
When she woke up the next morning, however, Mahin was confident that something was happening at last. Her face had puffed up to twice its normal size and turned a putrid yellow. Every visitor who came to see her for the next two days was so taken aback by her sudden physical alteration that they could not help but stare, even if only through a mirror on the wall. But Mahin always caught them out. “Here it is! Here’s my big ugly face!” she’d shriek. “Take a good look and go home triumphant, you with a face like –” and here she would insert the appropriate simile, “ – a chicken’s asshole, a toilet brush, a leather sandal!”
On the third day, Mahin Banu saw blood. Adhering to the doctor’s orders, she flushed the wrinkled prescription and left-over tablets down the toilet. All evidence was now a soggy mass of script and powder.
As she flushed the last of the pills away with her silver ewer, watching them disappear into the darkness below forever, Mahin’s water finally broke. Blood began to pour onto the handpainted floral tiles, drenching the tips of her black hair as she collapsed onto the floor. Hearing her hollow, conch screams, Asqar Aqa rushed to the outhouse, only to find his wild and beautiful beloved writhing and hemorrhaging on the bathroom floor.
Having no knowledge of Mahin’s secret schemes, nor of the poison she’d been ingesting for the past three days, he called the midwife and carried her into her bedroom where, despite all her endeavours, she gave birth to a baby girl.
Her attempts to poison the fetus had failed. Mahin absorbed the entirety of the poison herself, while the baby, smelling war and venom, separated herself from her mother’s contaminated body. She came out teeny and premature but sturdy as a little stone.
Notwithstanding the efforts of a handful of nuns from the American hospital, Mahin Banu died that rainy evening in the month of Aban on some sheets and blood-soaked newspapers in her bedroom. She was nineteen years old.
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
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