notes
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Notes on Hammam Days
There is a Persian saying, بکشید و خوشگلم کنید (bokoshid o khoshgelam konid), meaning “kill me and make me beautiful” that immediately sprang to mind when I was researching the ingredients in vajebi, a traditional depilatory powder used in Iran. The ingredients in traditional vajebi are calcium bicarbonate, arsenic sulfide and clay. In recent years,…
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Notes on The Ameh Shokat Doll
Or rather on “the eye.” In my family, the eye, cheshm in Persian, was not evil; it was shur, salty. A salty eye could be directed at anyone, either intentionally or unintentionally. Although often springing out of Envy’s poisonous bosom, it could also be transmitted quite innocently, in passing, from a half-sincere compliment bestowed out of thoughtless civility. Every so…
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Notes on Fet-Fet
Or rather on Persian halvah. Halvah is a confection of Persian origin with an Arabic name (Arabic root ح ل و or ḥ-l-w, meaning “sweet”) with varieties that stretch from Northern and Eastern Africa up to Eastern Europe and the Balkans, down all the way through West, Central and South Asia. Persian halvah is a paste…
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Notes on White Mulberries
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…
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Notes on Leila Mishmast
I know it’s a strange political moment to be sharing what is essentially a princess story, but it’s the next chapter in a book written some twenty years ago, and seeing as I’m sharing tales from the family hearth, at this particular junction in the story and as part of the historical record, I’m afraid…
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Notes on At Mohtaram Khanum’s
Families rise and fall, and pridefulness and humility wax and wane, two moons dancing around the same hearth. If I could draw how I see late-modern Iranian society (and I admit, my view from here is limited), it would be as a pyramid of piled-up noses all looking down on one another. The Iranic Bakhtiari…
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Notes on The Persian Princess and the Pea
The image of my newly born, premature, motherless mother forgotten on top of a pile of mattresses in a closet for three days left me clinging to her as a child whenever she would tell me this tale. What loneliness, what cruelty! There is a part of me that still wonders whether she was not…
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Preface to White Mulberries
Every family member who visited us from Iran in my youth, with their smoky blazers and suitcases full of embroideries, pistachios, handmade trinkets, saffron, and gold for our future wedding days, also brought with them a far more precious collection of family folklore and personal memories that were shared over cups of tea as we…
al-majus 