tehran
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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 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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White Mulberries
The story of my great-grandmother, Khanum Bozorg. Written in two vignettes, No. 2. Ever since she fell off her horse and broke her nose into a calligrapher’s mim, Khanum Bozorg lost the ability to smell and taste food properly. She couldn’t tell the difference between rotten meat and fresh meat, wouldn’t know it by the sweet…
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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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For Name’s Sake
Mahin Banu’s Baby. Written in four vignettes, No. 3. Every woman who married into the Moftakhar family was given a new name and a laqab, a descriptive title that replaced however unadorned a past a girl may have had in her father’s household, with the silver-threaded (albeit slightly moth-eaten) flourishes of her husband’s home. Over…
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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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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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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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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…
al-majus 