The Good Daughter: A Memoir of My Mother's Hidden Life by Jasmin Darznik Page A

snaking its way up from her stomach, hot and fast, and she’d race to the bathroom and thrust her head into the washbasin to relieve herself of it.
    For a while she’d thought the sickness was on account of the beatings, but then one night Ma Mère caught Lili’s eye over the dinner table, tipped her chin up with her thumb, and delivered a diagnosis: Lili was pregnant and there would be no going back to school that year.
    “But how could you let this happen?” Kobra asked Lili when, later that week, the neighborhood midwife confirmed the pregnancy. “Did your cousins tell you nothing?”
    Such intimacies were, in these years, not routinely conveyed by mothers but rather by the bride-to-be’s recently married relatives, usually her closest female cousins. Lili’s cousin Soudabeh, however, had conveyed little more than giggling assurances of pleasures of the conjugal bed; contraception thus eluded Lili as wholly as that promised pleasure. Indeed, such were the limits of Lili’s knowledge that Kobra’s question completely baffled her, and it was through tearsthat she begged to know what she could have done to stop a baby from coming. At this Kobra slapped her own cheeks and shook her head sadly, by which she meant that the situation was too far gone for such discussions now.
    “You need to take her away,” Lili next overheard Ma Mère telling Kazem. “I can’t stand her swelling up like a cow, and then all the noise of a child! It will be the death of me!”
    Within a week Kazem moved Lili to an alley close to the train station in South Tehran, or Tayeh Shar, the Bottom of the City. The two-room flat was part of a squat family compound long since cordoned off into half a dozen individual apartments. The larger of the rooms had no windows and no electricity and consequently became a storage space for her trousseau and most of their furniture. They took their meals and slept in the room with the sink and a makeshift stove, shared a toilet with the landlord, his family, and the other tenants, and for baths they walked seven blocks to the closest hammam .
    On the first day of every month Kazem placed three hundred tomans —his entire month’s wages—onto the dining table and told her it was her responsibility to manage their household expenses. Two hundred tomans went straightaway for the rent, and with the rest she was supposed to feed and clothe and otherwise care for the two of them. How such a meager sum could be made to accommodate not just herself and Kazem but also a child was yet another worry Lili added to her steadily mounting heap. She also found it impossible to sleep in the new apartment, and soon the misery of these early months of pregnancy was exacerbated by an unrelenting bout of insomnia and an understanding that she’d likely never return to school now that she was expecting a child.
    Lili might have gone to her own mother to unburden her heart, but by that time Kobra was nursing what would be the deepest grief of her days: the death of her youngest child, Omid.
    That horrible day, Kobra had been in the kitchen cooking ricepudding, which Omid always ate by the bowlful. It was a delicacy that, when left too long without stirring, quickly congealed into black clumps, and Kobra had already been stirring the pudding for some time when Omid wandered out of the kitchen to play by himself.
    Lili would never know for sure what happened to him. Once she’d hear a cousin speak of the child mistaking a chunk of opium for chocolate, but it could just as well have been a spider bite. And of course autumn had brought droves of baby tarantulas to the garden. No one paid them much mind even though they were known to be poisonous, but to two-year-old Omid the tarantulas would have been new, and maybe also beautiful, and perhaps he’d caught one and let it plunge its stinger into his small fist. In any case, when Kobra finished dusting her bowls of rice pudding with cinnamon she stepped out into the garden and