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

sat bolt upright hour after hour, drenched in her own sweat, crying for her mother and unable to look away from her hand, but by morning her fever began to break and slowly she understood that she would survive.
    Although it was my grandmother Kobra who prayed five times a day, taking care each time to fold her prayer mat and veil into neat squares afterward, in the end it was Sohrab who found deliverance from his marital woes. In the ordinary course of his days, Sohrab had little use for the rituals of faith, but his religion extended him several important privileges then in place for men, one of which would prove especially useful: he could divorce his wife without documents or witnesses. To free himself of Kobra, he had only to speak his desire.
    The argument started like any other of their arguments. He’d come home late from a party. In the circles in which he then moved, it had lately become fashionable to take a puff of opium with liquor, a combination that had brought him home even more bleary-eyed and unsteady on his feet than usual. The old curses and recriminations flashed between them, though this time he didn’t strike her with his open hand but instead made a fist. He struck her just once this way, but even in his state he managed to do it with such perfection thatthe room went black and she fell to the floor. When Kobra opened her eyes it was to the sight of her own blood, streaming so profusely onto the tiled floors that it had formed a small pool beside her.
    She left the house on Avenue Moniriyeh with nothing that night—not a single coin—and no clothes but the nightgown she was wearing and the veil she drew around her to hide her bloodied and swollen face. The next morning she would awake in her mother’s bedroom to find that the flesh of her nose had collapsed and spread across the middle of her face. The local bonesetter could do no more for Kobra than slice out the crushed bones from her face and bind her nose with gauze to quell the blood, and you might have said (as many did) that from then on her honey-colored eyes were wasted on her.
    “Who can understand the ways of God?” Kobra’s aunt remarked coolly. “It is her qesmat , destiny.”
    Her mother, Pargol, was enraged by this callousness. “Bite your tongue!” she hissed.
    On the night of Kobra’s wedding six years earlier, Pargol had kissed her on both cheeks and whispered the warning with which Iranian mothers had always sent their daughters into marriage: “You are leaving in a white dress—come back home dressed in white.” By this it was meant she should not return home until she was covered by a white funeral shroud. To do otherwise signified the worst fate that could befall a woman: divorce, and all that it meant to live without the protection of a man. When Kobra appeared before her that night in not a funeral shroud but a bloodied veil, Pargol would not have thought to turn her away, but in truth not even she knew what would become of Kobra now.
    One thing, at least, was clear: the children belonged to their father, as Iranian children always had. Neither of them would call Kobra maman , or Mother, again. When Sohrab sent her from the house, Lili and Nader stayed on to be raised by Khanoom and Sohrab’s sistersand stepmothers. Kobra was forbidden from seeing her children, but she missed them terribly and so some afternoons she would draw her veil over her face and stand outside the gates of their school, waiting to catch a glimpse of them. She’d call out their names, slip a handkerchief filled with little candies through the bars of the gate, and warn them not to forget her.
    Now that Kobra was gone, Khanoom would have to be mother to Sohrab’s children. She had much to do and was therefore always the first to rise in the house on Avenue Moniriyeh. She’d wake before dawn, when the streets were still empty and quiet. Downstairs in the courtyard she rinsed her face three times from her hairline to her chin, washed the