al-majus

Salty Eye, Sweet Play. Written in Four Vignettes, No. 2.

Niku licked her new doll on its button eye.  It was as cold and tasteless as the shop windows she and her brothers stuck their lips against on Jaleh Square, and it was her last hope.  For weeks now, she had overheard neighbours and relatives whispering, gasping, looking sideways in her direction.  “That’s the one with the salty eye,” they murmured, knocking on anything wooden within reach.

Niku had no idea what any of this meant.  She had made repeated attempts to try her eyes by sticking her index finger in them and then licking it, but tasted nothing but a bit of goo. Her tears were decidedly salty, but her aunt Mehri had assured her everybody’s were.

“Stop poking at your eye, do you want to go blind?” her aunt would shout, whenever she caught her in the midst of her experiments. 

But Niku had to know what this salty eye business was all about.  She wasn’t even sure which eye it was that was allegedly salty.  All she knew was that it was because of her salty eye that both her mother and grandmother had died, and because of her salty eye that she was no longer allowed to play with her pieces of yarn, even the old ones.  It was not until Ameh Shokat promised to sew her her very own doll that Niku began to think that maybe a salty eye wasn’t such a bad thing to have after all.

Ameh Shokat was Asqar Aqa’s aunt who worked as a cook at the Moftakhar house.  She had been widowed ages ago, and left alone with no inheritance, initially moved in with her brother – Asqar Aqa’s father, Ali Aqa – and his family.  After her brother’s death, both she and Ali Aqa’s wife, Khanum Bozorg, moved in with Khanum’s second eldest son. As Ameh Shokat refused to live on the charity of her own nephew, it was finally agreed that she take on the role of cook, a job for which she was paid handsomely.

Although a woman of good thoughts and good words and good deeds, with the finest white fish concoctions south of the Caspian Sea, Ameh Shokat was also notorious for being a bit light-fingered, and any unattended piece of jewellery might as well have just been stuffed directly into the secret compartments of her waistband.  In no way did any of this bother Niku, however, who enjoyed sleeping in her grandaunt’s thin, leafy embrace and watching her prepare breakfast in the mornings.  Long and slender, her beloved Shokat swayed around the kitchen sunrise like a palm tree, an image that Niku found terribly amusing, because hanging from her drooping earlobes were a pair of coral earrings that dangled down on either side of her like two clusters of tiny dates.  Lucky too that she appreciated her grandaunt’s gangly appearance, because it was with her own image in mind that Ameh Shokat designed Niku’s first doll.

She made the body out of a crinkled, old pillow, which she first pitted and then re-stuffed to a firm, bony finish.  The dress was fashioned from some leftover linen that she had used to make Niku and herself a pair of matching amorphous house-dresses.  Despite heavy protest from Mehri’s mother, the hair was created from Khanum Bozorg’s last roll of black yarn, which Ameh Shokat wove into a long braid identical to her own.  The rest of the details were standard – eyes made from buttons, lips sewn on with red thread, nose – well, there was no nose.

Standing face to face, Niku and her new doll were almost exactly the same height.  For days, Niku merely held the miniature Ameh Shokat at arm’s length, observing the splendour of her stitched smile and slightly uneven, water-stained hands.  Next, came the poking and prodding period, the undressing, the de-stuffing, the weaving and unweaving of the hair.  This led, quite naturally, to more salty eye research.  A few licks of Ameh Shokat’s punctured buttons, a couple more jabs at her own dark, mosaic pools, a final nervous flutter of lashes until Niku finally began to play.

Shuku did not understand the games her little sister played with the Ameh Shokat doll.  She often watched from inside the salon as Niku walked in circles around the pool, dragging her oversized toy behind her like a wild animal with its prey.  She did not play house, she did not play dress-up.  She did not pour her doll tea in dainty, little cups or garnish her hair with flowers from the garden.  She just walked.  For hours on end, for days at a time, chatting happily away to herself with a variety of hand gestures.

Shuku looked down at her own faded doll.  It was the same one she was supposed to have given Niku the day her sister had returned home three years before.  Nothing much had changed since then.  Out of all the dolls Shuku had, this one with the bisque head and the potato body and the eyebrows that met was still the ugliest.  But it was the only one Shuku could bear taking off the shelf and actually playing with.  Her European bébé with the white ruffled petit four dress and the eyes that opened and closed never left her box.  She stood there for years, locked in the shadows of Mahin Banu’s tiger-coloured cabinet, gazing out into the darkness from a thick layer of plastic, waiting for the day when someone might take her out and actually hold her with human hands. 

Occasionally, Niku would bribe her older sister with her ice cream money, just so she could stand in front of her cabinet and look at her dolls.  But in less than a minute, just as she would begin to move in closer, Shuku would rush in and lock the cabinet shut.

“Hey!  I just paid you all my money.  Can’t I just look at them for a little bit longer?” Niku would beg.

“No, no, you’ve already looked plenty.  There’s nothing more to see here,” Shuku would say, shoving her away.  “Now, here’s a carton.  You can tie a piece of string to it and make it into a car for your own doll.”  And she would hand her an old shoe box or something of the sort, slam the door in her face, and go back to abusing her own unibrowed monstrosity.

When her friends came to visit, Shuku hid the ugly doll deep down inside her cabinet, choosing instead one of the new little plastic dolls her aunt had bought her from Naderi Street.  Only one though, because her friends had runny noses and sticky fingers, and Shuku could not have them groping her entire collection.

Once her friends left, Shuku tucked whichever little doll she had chosen for the day back up on the shelf, and before nightfall, the old potato was out of the closet again.

“Niku, get away from that water!” cried Mehri from the garden steps.  With every one of her pregnancies skittered off another little turtle of her patience.  “One of these days you are going to fall in and drown and none of us will hear you.  Asqar Aqa!”  Her shriek bounced off her husband’s heaving siesta stomach.  “Tell your daughter something!”  

“Something,” yawned Asqar Aqa from the bedroom, raising his index finger.

Shuku shrugged at her sister from behind the glass doors.  What was Niku thinking when she walked around in circles all day with that hideous doll, dressed in that hideous old house-dress?  Circles and pirouettes made Shuku dizzy. Even when she danced, she avoided them.  

Shuku looked down at her own emerald green velvet dress, and wondered if the skirt had any twirl in it. On a whim, she grabbed her doll by the hands and began to spin.  Faster and faster, round and round. A whirlwind of curls tearing across the room.  A roll of emerald yarn unravelling itself in the middle of the salon floor.  Before her eyes, rugs and chandeliers merged into one.  Windows and mirrors switched reflections.  The garden came in and the salon stepped outside.  

Shuku squeezed her doll and stopped.  She was standing in the middle of a swirling, bejewelled sea, with nothing to hold on to but a unibrowed, old potato.  Her bunched curls bounced like grapes on a vine as she danced drunkenly up and down the room.  Her feet tripped, hesitated, sprung back.  And then, for no particular reason, she began to laugh.  

It was a dizzy and dangerous jinn-and-pari sort of laughter.  The kind that stings the face and buzzes in the belly.  The kind that is almost always followed by a dangerous jinn-and-pari sort of cry.

The Ameh Shokat doll floated face down in the water.  As if nothing had happened, as if it was not her fault.  She had plopped into the pool like a bad wish, and without giving it a second thought, Niku had followed.  Flapping her soggy, fledgling arms, Niku let out a hollow cry that was lost in the rumbling of the fountain jets.

With the room still swinging back and forth like a pendulum, Shuku stood mesmerized as her sister drowned to her left and then drowned to her right.  Then suddenly, as if one doll couldn’t live without the other, Shuku’s potato leapt crashing to the ground.  Its bisque head shattered into three jagged pieces.  Its decapitated body just lay there, a freeloading aristocrat who had finally met her doom.  But Shuku did not turn back to mourn her.  There was a different potato to tend to; a potato with mud hair and deer legs and salty eyes they said could kill.

written by Alaleh Mohajerani

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

collage citations: fish; doll; cat’s cradle; bubbles