al-majus

Salty Eye, Sweet Play. Written in Four Vignettes, No. 1.

“That child has a salty eye, I’m telling you.”

The two neighbours who wore too much makeup crossed their fat nylon calves and exchanged lipstick-smudged theories between bites of lipstick-smudged halvah.

“Sameni women have always brought on bitter ends.  It’s all the black they wear.  Remember Mahin Banu with her black lace gloves and her black dresses? Her poor mother used to tear at her own hair in desperation. But would she listen? No. Black is chic, she insisted. Then her first daughter died just like that. She was never the same after, sure she wasn’t. And you know her second one, Shuku, is a pest.  Her father has to carry her to school practically every morning, kicking and screaming like a kohli on his shoulder.  Every morning, it’s the same spectacle.  And you saw what happened to Mahin herself in the end.”

“Yes, but this one is different.  You know it’s a bad sign when a child’s first breath is its mother’s last.  From the moment I heard of it, I said to myself, this one will be dark.”

They paused, nodding their heads in unison to Mehri as she passed by their seats for what was perhaps the fourth time.

“No doubt, the child is a peculiar one,” continued the throatier of the two, even with Mehri still within earshot.  “Hardly ever utters a word.  And that strand of yarn she’s always playing with! Like she’s weaving some sort of magic without even knowing it.”

“More halvah ladies?” said Mehri, thrusting her tray in their clay faces.  All she could make out from across the room was a muffled composition of fet-fet-fet-fet.  It floated out of their mouths on its own musical staff and lingered above the blue cloud of smoke that had permanently settled in the Moftakhar sitting room since the death of Khanum forty days before.  That all too familiar sound, combined with the way their squinted eyes avoided her, and the feigned apathy with which they spoke – loud enough to appear as if they were hiding nothing but soft enough to confirm that they, in fact, were – was enough to keep Mehri close by.

“Oh, no darling, I couldn’t,” said the peepsy one.

“Perhaps just the one piece,” the throatier one suggested.  After regurgitating the same condolences previously offered at the door, this time through teeth jammed with bits of red and sugar, the duo hastily munched their way back into a syrupy sweet fet-fet.

“You know what I overheard Heshmat saying the other week?  And this is from the child’s own aunt,” said the throaty one.  She leaned in further, kissing her poison into the other’s ear.  “Apparently, the very last piece of yarn the child was playing with on the day Khanum Bozorg died,” she swept her teeth with her tongue, “was black.”

written by Alaleh Mohajerani

an earlier version of this text was first published by Cardiff University in 2008

collage citations: women in chador, Lotte Rheiniger, halvah, esfand flowers, eye