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

seemed only to have gotten worse. Lili knew that if their father heard Nader crying in the night, he’d hit him for it, and so she’d acquired a mother’s ear for even his softest whimper.
    One day she came home from school and found her brother dressed in a pair of white cotton pantaloons and a crimson sash knotted at his middle. A large party of women had gathered in the parlor. She saw presents stacked up high along one wall, and when she reached for one her aunt told her she should not touch because the gifts were all for Nader. When he descended the staircase in the strange pants, naked from the waist up and crying like a forlorn kitten, Lili puzzled over what they had done to make him so unhappy and why they’d bought him so many presents to make up for it.
    Nader had been circumcised that day and the white flowing pantaloons had been sewn especially to ease his recovery. Kobra had been gone two months by then. Khanoom would regret her absence at such an auspicious event, but the celebration had been long in the planning and so there was nothing to be done for it. As he sat in the center of the room with a pile of new toys next to him that afternoon, her little brother’s eyes were full of all he’d learned, and lost.
    But before the end of three and a half months Kobra appeared before the wooden doors of the house on Avenue Moniriyeh wearing her old black chador, a weathered suitcase by her side, looking not so much relieved as exhausted.
    Sohrab had divorced her on a whim, without any formal procedure whatever, but just as surely as marriage under traditional Islam comes in several forms—ranging from the temporary and transient to the formal and final—so, too, does divorce. In the days of Sohrab and Kobra’s marriage, a woman living outside her husband’s house could be claimed back within three and a half months, thereby nullifying the divorce. Ostensibly this was to ensure that she’d not left bearing his child—an act tantamount to theft—but in Kobra’s case the rule would serve a different purpose.
    Over the next years Sohrab would cast Kobra out many more times, though on occasion she’d grow so miserable that she would leave of her own accord. Each time she found refuge in her mother’s house. Kobra would weep for her children and she’d weep for herself and no one, not even Pargol, was capable of coaxing her from her misery.
    However, Kobra’s exile always proved temporary. For the first few weeks following Kobra’s departure Khanoom would be glad to have an end to the midnight rows on Avenue Moniriyeh, but eventually she and Sohrab’s sisters would tire of caring for Kobra’s children, so they’d all head out together to Pargol’s house to claim Kobra back.
    Sohrab said nothing whenever Kobra reappeared, but he hardly ever came to her room anymore, and his sisters were never as kind to her as they’d once been. After Sohrab first turned her from the house, Kobra’s stews were deemed too salty, the grains of her rice too short, and her puddings far too bland to eat. Weeks or months would pass, Sohrab would again send her away, and then, before three and a half months had gone by and the divorce could becomefinal, Khanoom would once again pull on her veil and bring Kobra back to the house on Avenue Moniriyeh.
    At first these abrupt departures and reclamations set neighborhood tongues wagging, and this shamed Khanoom into hastily fetching her daughter-in-law from Pargol’s house. But over the years so many unmarried cousins and widowed sisters were eventually absorbed into the house that its rooms were always noisy with the voices of women—gossiping and bickering, confiding and accusing. Except for the two hours of the afternoon when everyone went down to the basement to nap, it was impossible to tell who would be coming and who would be going and what would be said about it all, and in time Kobra’s disappearances and reappearances were folded into all the other stories of that