white mulberries
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Aban, 1943
“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 would forever remain one of the great Moftakhar family mysteries, but whether it was a conclusion she drew based…
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Baby Bites
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 who was left alone at the mercy of this temper every morning. Nor was it her young husband, who…
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Mahin in the Wind
Mahin Banu had a dark but lustrous imagination, which unlike her static coiffures, ran windswept and untamed. One winter afternoon, as the curly trees and clouds of Tehran blew across the city, Asqar Aqa came home from work for his daily lunch break and siesta and found that something other than the leaves from his…
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Part One. The Moftakhar House in Moftakhar Alley
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” because he had studied Arabic and in Arabic moftakhar meant “proud.” In Persian, it lent itself rather easily to ridicule and…
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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 