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

length of her bony, white arms, scrubbed her feet from the tips of her toes to her ankles, and then she ran a trickle of water down the part of her hair. She was a fastidious woman—had never been known to miss a single namaz (prayer) and was so thorough in her ritual cleansings that her palms were perpetually mottled and chafed. By the time she was done performing her ablutions and had turned back into the house for her morning prayers, the first dark figures would be hustling down the alleys outside her house—husbands and wives on their way to the hammam (bath) to purify themselves of last night’s couplings before the muezzin’s voice pealed through the half-lit sky.
    Her prayers complete, Khanoom began preparing the samovar. Urn-shaped, wider than a tree trunk, and wrought of pure brass, the samovar sat in the center of Khanoom’s parlor, and from dawn to dusk it would be kept at a boil so that anyone who came to the house could always be offered a freshly brewed cup of tea. Khanoom struck a match and tossed it over the coals, and while she waited for the water to boil she rolled a few leaves of lettuce between flatbread for her breakfast and pulled out one of the dozen hand-rolled cigarettesshe always kept in her pockets. She held the cigarette to the coals until it lit and then, cigarette dangling between her lips, she steeped the day’s first fistful of tea leaves in her small china teapot.
    Then, once she’d finished drinking her first tea of the day—which she took black in thimble-sized draughts from a tiny crystal teacup—Khanoom pulled on her shawl and took her morning walk through the walled garden behind her house. Khanoom’s father had been a scribe who went by the name Mirza Benevees, or Mirza The Writer. Although she herself could neither read nor write, even in such private moments she always carried herself with the same proud and graceful bearing as that learned forebearer.
    From Mirza she’d also inherited her great passion for flowers. She kept little vases in all the rooms, morning glory and honeysuckle and whatever else she found in bloom, but she loved jasmine flowers best of all. Each morning she placed a saucer full of the star-shaped blossoms beside her samovar and then she tucked a few sprigs under the folds of her breasts as well. As the day wore on and Khanoom smoked her cigarettes and poured teacup after teacup and performed her prayers and set about her work, the scent of jasmine rose with ever-deeper sweetness from her chest.
    The first month, Lili asked after Kobra every time she sat at the samovar for her first tea of the day. “She’s gone to visit her mother,” Khanoom would tell Lili. “Don’t worry, madar-joon . She’ll come back.” And then Khanoom would pour Lili a small cup of weak tea and with a silver spoon stir in a lump of crystallized sugar until it had dissolved completely. If the tea was too hot, Khanoom would tip some of it into a saucer for Lili and let her drink it from there.
    From the time she was four years old, Lili could drink as many as five little cups of sugared tea from Khanoom’s samovar in a single sitting. Lili loved everything that was sweet—candies and pastries,cherry-rice and orange rind–rice—but best of all she loved khageeneh , the thin pancakes Khanoom drenched in honey, saffron, and rose essence and served each morning along with hunks of sheep’s milk cheese and fresh sheets of seeded bread from the bakery down the street.
    While her appetite seemed only to have grown with Kobra’s absence, Lili’s brother, Nader, had become nervous and very thin and his eyes seemed always to be searching the rooms of Khanoom’s house for their mother. When he cried at night, Lili took him into her own bed and tucked her quilt around him. He had a face as white as the moon and black eyes fringed with eyelashes even longer and thicker than her own. Since Kobra had disappeared, Lili’s beatings had grown less frequent, but for Nader they