family
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The Ameh Shokat Doll
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…
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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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Fet-Fet
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. …
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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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Shuku and Niku
Mahin Banu’s Baby. Written in four vignettes, No. 4. Shuku propped the bisque-faced doll up on her lap. It was an ugly doll. Nothing like her delicate, golden-haired bébé. Flat, black eyes covered half its vacant face. Its painted eyebrows stretched from one temple to another, like the shadow of a bird in flight. Its…
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At Mohtaram Khanum’s
Mahin Banu’s Baby. Written in four vignettes, No. 2. Mohtaram Khanum lived in Shahbdolazim, in the ancient city of Rey. Home to the shrine of Shah Abdol-Azim, Rey was reconnected to Tehran under Nasser ed-Din Shah Qajar by the Tehran-Rey railway – known affectionately by locals as the machine dudi, the “smoke machine” – and…
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The Persian Princess and the Pea
Mahin Banu’s Baby. Written in four vignettes, No. 1. Smoky silhouettes of Mahin Banu’s death lingered for some time in the Moftakhar household, acting and re-acting the events of that solemn day on the walls in a macabre shadow play. Aware of the chaos that was sure to ensue, Mahin Banu’s eldest sister, Badr al-Zaman,…
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Aban, 1943
The story of my grandmother, Mahin Banu (Persian for “lady like the moon”). Written in three vignettes, No. 3. “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…
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Baby Bites
The story of my grandmother, Mahin Banu (Persian for “lady like the moon”). Written in three vignettes, No. 2. Mahin Banu’s imagination, though impressive, was still only second to her temper; a peppery teenage temper that could bite and scratch and claw out the beast. But it wasn’t a patient mother or a loving father…
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Part One. The Moftakhar House in Moftakhar Alley
A vignette describing my mother’s house in Tehran in the 1940s. Most of Part I of my book is set here. The Moftakhar house snaked itself around Moftakhar Alley with all the wiggling hips of a Wednesday market girl. When they first assigned surnames in Tehran, Asqar Aqa’s father, Ali Aqa, chose the name “Moftakhar”…
al-majus 