the gift

“Six hundred Monets”.

“Five hundred? Or the bunny hop it is!”

She smiled.

“Five! You’re such a charming little boy!”

Five double-bats. Emerald twinkle. Monetary exchange. 

Marjan pressed back into the sofa and closed her eyes. Her left hand reached for the knot. Her long black tresses spread into a giant tassel. 

This won’t take long.

With a swerve, Farhad wrapped the green embroidered shawl around his shoulders and covered his head and face so only his eyes were uncovered. A strong smell of saffron shot up his nostrils. Not his favorite bit.

I must be in overdrive. That’s a shit-load of suppressant.

It was ten to seven. Outside, another day lay dying. The decrepit old star had lost another round. Licking snow off the top of mighty Damavand was tough business (let it be said, the tongue was no longer young). 

He looked out the window. The street was emptying. People were hurrying away from darkness, into darkness. Some pursued by dark figures on stilts, others still were shadowing their own stilt-walkers.

It was getting colder inside. The saffron was searing through his sinuses...

He heard a sputter! Soft white brightness flooded the room. He blinked a few times but he couldn't keep his eyes open. Warm, yellow sensations began swimming in his head.

Rotten creepers! I can’t see myself…

Majeed had just finished paying for the rabbits when his eyes caught Leila’s lavender scarf flitting between shelves in the bookstore across the street. Without a word, he tossed the fur-balls into the arms of the bug-eyed shop assistant and ran out. 

Leila turned. She looked surprised and smiled. 

He had lost his facial hair. She hadn't changed a bit.

“Three years? No, wait, four!”

“How are you? I thought you were….”

A gentle breeze brushed the scarf across her lips.

“I came back a year and a half ago. I’ve been staying with Amu in his Niyaazi apartment.” 

He told the story of how he had run out of money in Nishapur and become a vagrant for a few months before giving up.  His promised job hadn’t held out. 

She glanced at her turquoise watch.

“I’ve got to be home before dark. Idris is waiting…”, she said. Her green eyes darted across his youthful face.

“Idris! Chicken-neck Idris! That’s what we called him, didnt’ we? So it seems that he persisted…”

He gave a nervous laugh. She lowered her gaze and bit her lip.

“Did Marjan get married too?”

“No. She works at a florists’ across the Haraz. Baba doesn’t approve a bit. He hasn’t given up looking but her dreadful gift scares all of them away.”

“I can see why.”

A gust blew the scarf off her forehead for a moment. He noticed her hair was as auburn as ever.

“Some of the neighbors have been consulting peers. They think Baba is under a spell. They say the whole affair brings shame to the mahalla.”

“I’d like to visit your Baba sometime. You know I always held him in special regard.”

“Baba has a lot of affection for you too. He often mentions you.”

“He does?”

“He wishes you had stayed back in Larijan. He would have liked to have you for an apprentice.”

“Haha! With my eye for detail I would have brought down many a cursed dwelling! I wanted to  wrestle just like Behram and Aliraza, you know.”

“Idris must be hungry. I think it best if I depart before the sun goes down. I’ll tell Baba you’re in town.”

“Yes, same baksh.”

“May God protect your chosen path.”

The path to the rabbits. My fate.

“Goodbye, Leila. Let my skinny old brother be fed well tonight!”

Dusty red cherries bow down the top left corner of a large mirror in the wall. Hundreds of glittering strands form half an arched column a foot across from the mirror’s right flank. A small faded painting hangs between the mirror and the threaded half-arch. It depicts the snow-clad Roof of Khorasan across a poppy meadow on a bright summer day.

Marjan glances at her crystal watch. She looks at Farhad’s face. It is twisted in a frozen expression of terror. His eyes are open wide now. All she can see are quivering whites.

Six more minutes. 

She remembers the first time it happened.

She is seven and playing suk-suk with Ali, Mehran and Leila  one evening at her uncle’s house in Chelav. Ali blindly wanders through the stable door. Hiding from the others at first and then from strange animal noises, he cowers under one of the stalls. Ali, the master teller of ghost stories (Night Terrorist they called him), taken captive by his own gremlins. A quivering whimper catches Marjan’s ear as she hunts the eremurus-lined courtyard. As she gets closer, she hears the old boy reciting from the Ayat Al Qursi.

She decides not to announce herself. She tiptoes up from behind. A gentle tug at his shirt-tail. A soft summoning in her favorite jinn voice.  A flick of the flashlight switch! Ali turns around. There is no sign of horror or even surprise. His gray eyes are shrouded in a catatonic calm.

Hours later, Ali recounts visiting an alien land populated by tall benevolent beings made of papier-mâché. He describes places and events in such number and detail as scarcely anyone would imagine a dream (even a waking one) of three or four minutes as having spawned. The Fountain of Horseradish-Paste that he had emerged from in a stupor, sticky and coughing from its noxious vapor, that overlooked the Harbor of Red Ink with its Teapot and Saucer ships. The fantastic chase across the Gurgling Marshes the Pulpy Benevolences had given the Scurrilous Alligator-Men and The Pack of Ochre Jokers whom they rescued him from. Those swarms of bright metallic threadbare leaves  traipsing along and bouncing against tubular canopies of luminescent cobweb circumambulating the Filigree Forest in ghostly silence… 

  

Ali never completely recovers from these visions (or ceases his visitations as he sees it). This sore fact gradually frays the relationship between his and Marjan’s families till it ruptures one day. For more than a decade, his father Kaveh seeks help from sufis and occultists of various orders and reputes. One Baba Hooshyar persuades the desperate, aging barrister with a Western education to feed his adolescent son ground mixture of molted snake-skin and owl-feather. Another Attar Qalandar (The Silent One) hands him a tameemah (silently of course) filled with arcane inscriptions in Old Arabic.  Ali despairs,  weighed down by this scraggy green pendant around his delicate neck day after day, before another dervish declares the intricate calligraphy (in deathly grim intonation) as direct, fervent, cursed pleas to Iblis and Shaitan! 

As all else falls apart, so does Kaveh’s heart. He dies nearly broke and haunted by his son’s madness, obsessed with demons of a little girl’s making; a conviction he carries with him to the beyond...

It was an unusually hot Friday afternoon in Isfahan. 

Noise blared in from the window overlooking the street, slightly ajar behind the airy azure drapes made from fine muslin, patterned with golden quatrefoils that appeared darkened against the translucence of mid-day light. Below, a lorry screamed at a wayward pedestrian. Fuming, rattling diesel cars steered by fuming, rattling drivers honked at the world at large, as if to underline their insignificance in the face of inescapable oblivion. A carpet-seller stood at a corner accosting abaya-clad housewives hurrying about town, who peered sneering from under their veils at his craggy, ancient face with its toothy grin and sweet-talking mouth. The muezzin and the mullah from the Shah mosque across Naqsh-e-Jahaan square took turns, with the one’s melodious chanting of the adnan and the other’s livid haranguing of their audiences, each captive in its own way. 

Omid lifted his face from the pillow.

“Madaar, what’s the point of carrying on like this? Couldn’t we just leave like Sohail’s family?”.

“Did Mr. Asghari bother you again at school today?”.

Turning his head away, he fixed his gaze out the open courtyard window into the flower-bed of red Mohammadis .

“It doesn’t matter. He’s not the only one.”

“Look, boy. It’s not easy leaving just like that. Sohail’s father had no choice — he was marked by the Hojjas.”

“What about when we get marked? It’s only three more years before I enter university. Besides, you know what happened to Montezar’s cousins in Shiraz — they were just kids!”

Ruha’s dark eyes narrowed into a glint.

“Do you have any idea what Sohail’s Ammeh had to go through?”.

“Aren’t you suffering anyway?”.

“I’m not leaving our home, our beautiful city.  After we had you and Firoz, your father and I thought about it for a while. Then we decided it wouldn’t be any good for any of us. That’s exactly what they want — to drive us out! Besides, who’ll be left behind to carry on the word?”

“What about me?”

“You grow up a bit and you’re free to do what you like.”

“It’ll be too late, Madaar. You know it.”

Ruha stood up, gathered the linens and walked slowly towards the door. 

...to be continued