al-majus

If real events are the bones of these stories, and my shall we say, “embellishments” make up the rest, then this particular tale of Khanum Bozorg’s death is perhaps best described as an inner ear.

There are only three tiny truths buried in this little vignette: one, Khanum Bozorg was my mother’s primary caretaker when she returned home from Mohtaram Khanum’s house and a large part of this caretaking involved feeding the rather scrawny, insatiable preemie; two, Khanum Bozorg died of diabetes-related complications when my mother was five; three, Khanum Bozorg had a broken nose (see Leila Mishmast). So how does one weave an entire tale from these three delicate ossicles?

Well…one makes stuff up. And in the spirit of transparency, I thought I ought to clarify a few points:

Every one of my mother’s elders has a story, maybe two. Entire lifetimes were distilled into a small handful of their most fantastical moments that resonated most with the family’s storytellers, leaving a sort of aftertaste of the person that lingered on the tongue long after they were gone. The figure’s story was told and retold until it became legend, and alas, the rest of the person was lost.

The majority of the stories that I’m sharing here about the older generations will contain facts that could be more or less summed up in a page, sometimes a paragraph. Mahin Banu’s story is the story of her death. Khanum Bozorg’s story, the one everyone regales, is the story I told last week – the story of Leila and Ali, a love story. Her role in my mother’s early life was significant, but there wasn’t much for my mother to share in terms of personal memories, because Khanum died when she was still very young. And so I was left with a good deal of guesswork, and an empty page that I was happy to fill with my own overactive imagination.

There are, of course, other details mentioned in the tale about the characters that are also truths – Asqar Aqa was indeed a school dropout, Mehri would have been pregnant around this time, Heshmat was still at university – and I always try to inject these details throughout the book whenever I see an open slot. But the rest of this scene, you should know, is dastangoi – fantasy, conjecture, patchwork…storytelling.

written by Alaleh Mohajerani

first published on Substack on June 18th, 2026