The Good Daughter: A Memoir of My Mother's Hidden Life Read Online Free

mother’s milk.
    He would not stay at their side for long, though. By the age of seven Sohrab was already the acknowledged leader of the pack of neighborhood boys who wiled away the afternoons in the alleys riding bicycles and shooting homemade slings. By eleven he had the run of the whole city and would often linger in the streets or the qaveh khaneh , coffeehouse, where men recited the Shahnameh , Ferdowsi’s eleventh-century verse epic, for one another. Sohrab would linger in the city long after school ended, leaving his mother to curse her fate and pray, hour after hour, for his safe return.
    As a young man of twenty Sohrab had somehow secured a high post in Iran’s national textile bureau. No one quite knew how this had happened. He had neither money nor connections, and it was a job for which he had no qualifications besides his charm and his taste for finery, but these had proved sufficient. On their way to Europe and America, many of the country’s most opulent carpets passed under his hands and exacting eye and could be shipped off only with his consent. His salary was generous by standards of the day, but to satisfy his luxurious tastes he supplemented his income with gambling, a favorite diversion since his teenage years. Within a few years of his marriage to Kobra, Sohrab had done well enough to dress in perfectly tailored Western suits, then still rare in Iran, andalso to drive a black Chrysler of which he was no less vain than of his own brilliantined hair.
    It was no secret that even after he married Kobra my grandfather’s eyes still lingered on the smartly dressed ladies who had recently begun to appear on the streets of Tehran. It was also a fact known to many that for several years before his marriage Sohrab had courted a lady so chic and lovely it was said she could pass for an aroos farangi , a European’s wife. But this woman, Simin, was twice divorced and unable to bear children; Sohrab knew that until he produced heirs to his family name, he could never marry her. So when his friend Ali-Ahmad had offered Sohrab his sister, whom he’d once seen at Ali-Ahmad’s house and still remembered as a plump and pretty girl, Sohrab had not thought long before saying yes and bringing her to live in Khanoom’s house on Avenue Moniriyeh.
    Sohrab’s sisters and three stepmothers took Kobra in with smiles and compliments. “Look at her pretty hands!” gushed one. “And her lovely eyes!” added another. She was given her own small room in Khanoom’s house, and in her first months there Kobra sewed herself a quilt and embroidered a cloth on which she set her prayer shawl and rosary and also her hand mirror and hairbrush. All day she worked in Khanoom’s kitchen, cleaning and chopping herbs for the sabzi , picking pebbles from the rice, and tending the grains over a charcoal brazier. At night she went to her room to wait for Sohrab. In the first years of their marriage, he came to her a few times a week, and it wasn’t long before a baby appeared in a basket by her feet in the kitchen, and her breasts and belly were still swollen when two months later a second child began to grow in her.
    They were her pride. As a boy Nader was especially prized by the family, but Lili was a beautiful child, plump and rosy cheeked, with sparkling black eyes, dimples, and an exquisitely tiny nose. Theneighborhood women cooed and fussed over her whenever they dropped by the house on Avenue Moniriyeh. Even Sohrab, little given to children as he usually was, seemed charmed by her.
    Kobra loved the courtyard of Khanoom’s house and the deep blue tiles of the hoz , the shallow pool that stood there in the shade of a large persimmon tree. Khanoom’s persimmon tree was also a favorite of the neighborhood birds, who would gather to feast on the fallen fruit under its branches. While her children napped in the afternoons, Kobra would steal away from her work to sit on the edge of the hoz and watch the birds as they pecked greedily