writing
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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…
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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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Mahin in the Wind
The story of my grandmother, Mahin Banu (Persian for “lady like the moon”). Written in three vignettes, No. 1. 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…
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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”…
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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…
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Little Tree, Prelude to White Mulberries
Mahin Banu Sameni came from a long line of wealthy bazaari merchants. With hair like a soft, swift death and eyes that just knew better, the Sameni women married well above their social sphere. In 1938, at the age of fifteen, Mahin Banu, the most luminous of her sisters by far, married Asqar Aqa Moftakhar,…
al-majus 