Untouchables
by Pegah Ouji

In northern Tehran, at the turn of the Elahiyeh neighborhood, the ghost of baby Jamsheed kicks the metal vent of his mother, Masumeh’s, bedroom. He lashes the bony Banyan branches against the stained glass windows. Starved for his mother’s blood,  he sucks greedily on her arm, neck, and breast, leaving behind eggplant-colored bruises. Sitting on her vanity table’s crooked bench, Masumeh Hariri rubs Vaseline on her arms. If only she could understand ghost language, could tease apart phantom syllables. What does he want from her?

The neighborhood kids play hopscotch behind the Hariri mansions’ brick walls. When Muazzin’s last call to prayer ribbons through Tehran’s dusk pollution, the parents call their children inside. The narrow street is riddled with pebbles left behind after hopscotch. Masumeh is watering the heaving purple basil plant when baby Jamsheed’s breath sends a phantom ripple, leaving her arm goose-fleshed, tender and volatile. She is seized by a sudden fear. She too might evaporate, become an apparition overnight. When in the dark belly of midnight, her husband Arash snores next to her, and in an instant she hates the world and senses the world hating her right back, that too is Baby Jamsheed, scrabbling his small fingers into the hollow cave under her jaw, blocking breath. Can a baby be capable of such venom? Of course a baby can. A mother knows.

Especially the ghost of a baby seven years in the making, rounds of fertility medications, Intrauterine Insemination, In Vitro Fertilization, Intracytoplasmic Sperm Injection. Eight months after his parents reverse immigration back to their homeland, from L.A. to Tehran, Baby Jamsheed quietly announced his presence through two pink lines. Over the following weeks, Arash chewed his nail into a jagged rim, the sharp edges scraping the pale skin of Masumeh’s belly.

“Isn’t it too soon to decorate the nursery?” he had asked.

“Don’t jinx our baby.”

If only life took the trajectory of imagination. After the bump of her belly hollowed, all the neighbors agreed, “It’s the most terrible luck,” but also privately debated whether this was karma, what you got when you left mighty America for rotten Iran. The parents warned their kids not to play too close to Hariri Mansion or talk to the Taffy Lady, a nickname they gave Masumeh. During the first week of their move back, Masumeh had knocked on all the doors, dishing out bags of saltwater taffies. For weeks, Hariri’s arrival had pumped to full production the neighborhood’s factory of gossip and imagination.   

“The taffies are piss-yellow but taste like bananas!”

“My dad says they are Khar-pool, even their pillows are stuffed with cash.”

“My grandma says it is Haram for two of them to live in that huge mansion when we are squeezed in a matchbox.”

The soul’s plasma flutters around like stardust trapped in a jar. In the morning, Baby Jamsheed’s ghost becomes dawn dew, spirit condensed. An eerie quiet drips from the mansion’s walls. Outside, the neighborhood kids form two lines on the sidewalk, boys-girls, waiting for the school bus. Masumeh trails down the Carra marble stairs. Arash is already in the kitchen, combing Bergamot oil into his eyebrows with an old toothbrush, sneering at the sinister new pimple reflected in the silver Samavar on the kitchen counter. Masumeh had found this habit, taking meticulous care of his abundant hairy harvest, endearing when they first met at UCLA ten years ago. But time has a way of warping what you once loved and spitting it back at you. Lifting the drape of her robe over her left thigh, she points to another purple bruise, the blurry shape of two tiny lips.

“Did you hear all that thumping in the vents last night?” she asks.

“It’s probably just rats or squirrels. Maybe you bumped into something, the bed, or the table.” Masumeh hates that for Arash, all of this is a problem in need of logical explanation, the solution lying in the right perspective. Turn your head upside down, right to left, and poof! Your problems vanish.

“This is the ghost of our baby, wanting revenge,” she says.

“Revenge for what?” A sliver of impatience cracks Arash’s usual demure tone. Masumeh has always been both thrilled by this crack and afraid of it, like someone swimming in the ocean only after knowing pools.

To answer is to admit. Admission implies defeat. Is she defeated already? Revenge for not being good parents, for failing to carry a baby full term, for coming back to Iran where prenatal care is a joke. Revenge for all that saffron.

“We don’t know if it was the saffron,” Arash says. After ten years of marriage, it doesn’t take much to anticipate each other’s thoughts, decipher them like lemon juice messages on paper only needing a flame. There’s something both comforting and unnerving about someone knowing you so well. Sipping his cardamom tea, Arash says, “Maybe we’re just not meant to be parents. There’s still plenty left of life. We’re in Tehran. Isn’t this what we’ve always wanted?”

The edges of life have become blurry. Masumeh remembers vaguely a longing shadowing all her life, a longing to be real Iranians, Nawruz a national holiday, not an obscure event explained to kind but clueless teachers and friends year after year, a longing to be wrapped in Farsi’s silky syllables on the bus, in a line at the bank, for bazaars where flies plotted over sour cherries, sweet lemons, unripe green almonds soaked in saltwater. This is not fair. She was supposed to be happy in Iran. Where is her happiness?

“If we go with the ghost theory, wouldn’t it make more sense for it to be Mamani’s ghost rattling that old cane of hers in the metal tubes?” Arash is teasing her, the tell-sign being that half-slanted goofy grin chalked over his face, that slight tilt of his eyebrows, now glistening with too much oil.

“You can be surprisingly unimaginative at times,” she says, pouring herself day-old Earl Gray, craving he comfort of that punishing metallic aftertaste.

“And you can be surprisingly imaginative,” he says, kissing the top of her head which smells like sprouted Samanoo wheat that has turned hopelessly sour. “Take a hot bath. Relax. Wash off these old stories. It’s time to move on,” he says, shutting the door behind him.

As Arash crosses the mansion’s garden on his way to his work at the Pars Architecture firm, exhaustion gurgles in Masumeh’s veins, radiating at the center of her skull. This exhaustion has been growing, almost drowning her, since the appearance of her ghost baby, or rather since the disappearance of her real baby. She’s taken to calling the last day of his residence in her womb the Day of the Most Great Blood. A pathetic attempt at humor.

Scrub the kitchen counters. Wash the two saucers, the empty cups. Wipe them dry like bad memories. Shut tight the curtains that Arash has thrown open. Keep the day at bay. Everything scoffs at her: the living room’s giltwood Italian couches, the paisley patterned silk carpets, the tasseled ceiling. Everything crawled away from her overnight. Even the goldfish in the turquoise houz swim away from her and huddle in the far corner. In the portrait hung in a dim corridor, Masumeh’s male ancestors peer down at her from under bullying eyebrows. Yesterday, even the paint-splotched table in her studio, covered with her sketches of Damavand, seemed to be going through puberty, giving her an attitude, one leg wobbling moodily.

Maybe Arash is right about Mamani’s ghost. Mamani, Masumeh’s grandmother, lived in this mansion for fifty years, the scent of her Nivea cream and rosewater attar permeating the very walls, haunting every crook. Mamani, the only person not to call Arash and Masumeh pure idiots when they decided to move back to Iran, Mamani who up and died in her sleep two months after they returned, Mamani who left this too big of a mansion as a gift for them, despite the angry, pomegranate-red faces of the entire family, Mamani who warned them, “There is no place on earth where your problems don’t follow. Don’t expect Tehran to be paradise.”

Mamani’s tea parties had the mansion crowded with Tehran’s chess club members, Mamani the co-president. On quieter afternoons, Mamani and Mrs. Rahimi, Mamani’s close friend and neighbor, over tea and Baqlava, engaged in epic Moshaereh poetry battles that left their pudgy cheeks flushed, like almost-ripe peaches. “Masumeh, join us!” they invited, but Masumeh was intimidated by the sheer volume of poetry these ladies had accumulated over a long life in Iran. How could she ever compete?

“I want to be sandwiched in these brick walls for an eternity or two,” Masumeh tells her ghost companions, as she sits on the mosaic table under the persimmon tree. Baby Jamsheed settles in between her breasts, like a parachute deflating, causing her to sweat drops larger than fuzzy caterpillars. Masumeh scrunches up her nose, almost
certain that sweet scent is baby Jamsheed’s sweat. The smell of Mamani’s rose perfume, the one she dabbed before her noon prayers, slices the air. Who knew that even ghosts can leave a trail of scent. She’s grateful for these faint footprints.

Separated by worlds, she still senses Baby Jamsheed’s angst. He was a willful fetus. The mistakes she’s been making are suspiciously baby-like in softness and consequence. Burning an iron-shaped hole in Arash’s favorite shirt, forgetting to FaceTime her parents (7:00 a.m. L.A., 10:00 p.m. Tehran), forgetting to trim her pinky toenail, the one biting into her flesh, leaving tiny drops of caked blood.

Every tragedy needs an instigator. Who is to blame this time? Was it her fault for being clueless that large quantities of saffron could cause miscarriage? Was it Rooha Khanoum, Arash’s grandmother, who had cooked all that mouth-watering Shole Zard, poured cup after cup of that saffron drink? Rooha Khanoum didn’t know Masumeh was pregnant. Maybe it was Arash’s fault for not having sperm strong enough to withstand saffron shock.

Outside the mansion is a whole wide world, a whole country, her country, even the dust containing decomposed bones of her ancestors as far back thousands of years. Some even buried in the local cemetery, Behesht Zahra.

Behesht Zahra: Zahra’s paradise. The younger kids, uninitiated in religious studies, speculate: who’s Zahra? Aunty Zahra? The local butcher’s daughter, Zahra? Why does she get a whole paradise for herself? The older girls scoff, flick their long braids behind their shoulders, “Fatemeh Zahra, the prophet’s daughter, you infidel fools.” There’s one kid consistently left out of these exchanges: Soghra. At the cemetery, Soghra scans the mourning crowds, searching. Even gravestone-washing children must find ways of luring their customers. “Pay for one wash, get the next one free,” “Flat rate wash for a whole month,” “Grave washing with complementary prayers for the dead.” Pity, if she can elicit it, guarantees the best rates, mostly conjured through slightly widened eyes, lips a downward squiggle. Occasionally a single tear. Young mourning mothers tip most generously. Grieving fathers are impossible to please, asking for a rewash before reluctantly dropping a coin, half the amount they promised. Children are mean creatures, the sting of their “Eww, you stink, you dead washer, you nasty” leaving a dull ache long after their families drive them back to homes with China plates and glowing bedside lamps.

For Masumeh, Behesht Zahra is a sanctuary, all the mourners shedding tears; her own eyes are dry. Rushing out of the mansion, Masumeh bumps into Mrs. Rahimi, causing her plastic bag of groceries to scatter on the ground. Key limes roll down the asphalt, plop into the street gutter’s murky water which seems to be holding a grudge against the whole neighborhood. “I’m tired of carrying all your crap. Get away from me. All of you,” the gutter seems to say. But where is there to flee to in the narrow streets of Elahieh? When Masumeh plunges her hand to rescue a few key limes, the water is icy cold.

“Hurry is the work of Sheytoon, Masumeh,” Mrs. Rahimi says.

“Sheytoon,” Masumeh repeats, half-dazed. The devil. Where can Masumeh flee to that is far enough from the devil’s shadow? In L.A., the devil made the other Iranian girls poke fun of Masumeh’s mother’s Ghormeh Sabzi. Masumeh still remembers how they stuck up their slim noises, complaining, “Real Ghormeh Sabzi is cooked with meat, not tofu. Eww.” It didn’t help that in Farsi, the word tofu meant “something you’ve spit out.”

At the Behesht Zahra cemetery, two million dead decay underground, divided into sections: military martyrs, navy martyrs, air-force martyrs, Iran-Iraq martyrs, Mecca martyrs, Haram-defender martyrs. Real Iranians sure like their martyrs. The phrase, Shaheed Parvar—Nurturer of Martyrs—is written in calligraphy all around Tehran’s brick walls. Maybe we should all seek therapy as a nation, Masumeh thinks every time she walks by the dead.

At the children’s section, time stands still. The swaying cluster of SpongeBob balloons, the American Girl dolls’ cheeks smudged gray with the soot of Tehran, gravestones with smiles of children who never grew up and away. Mamani used to take Masumeh to Behesht Zahra when she was little and still living in Tehran. Mamani read stories from Hans Christian Anderson’s collected stories, fables from India, stories of Delileh and Kemneh. Masumeh once cried for the little match girl, the one who died on a snowy night, clutching in her hands her last matches, burnt for fleeting seconds of joy. She buried her face into Mamani’s embrace who, patting her back, replied, “It’s all just a story. Nothing less, nothing more.”

In the little match girl, Masumeh’s soul recognized the prophecy of her own life. How could she have known that her tears were a premonition about the lonely life she was destined to live?

No one thanks Soghra for the faint scent of rosewater in Behesht Zahra. Her mother believes in honest work, but Soghra reasons diluted rosewater is still rosewater. Just a little less. Filling up the jar with water by the public bathrooms, Soghra looks around for the Taffy Lady. Usually by this time the Taffy Lady is sitting in that spot between the two Cyprus trees in the children’s section, sketching. She has yet to find the courage to ask the Taffy Lady if she can see any of the sketches.

Mamani was Soghra’s regular customer who paid thrice for one wash of her husband’s gravestone and tipped the cost of one SpongeBob-shaped ice cream. After each wash, Mamani rubbed a dollop of Vaseline into Soghra’s hands, massaging it firmly into the cracks. Mamani would also stuff Soghra’s palms with gaaz. That chewy, sweet treat left Soghra wanting more. Mamani read stories for Soghra from an old book with a faded leather cover, Majeed’s Stories. They laughed for hours at Majeed’s silliness. Soghra’s favorite story is the one where Majeed writes an essay about a Moorde Shoor, a person who like her mother washes corpses, as a response to his teacher’s question, “In your opinion, who has the most important job in Iran?” Soghra wishes sometimes that Mamani was still alive, she could at least have introduced her to her granddaughter, the Taffy Lady, whose eyes are the same hazel as Mamani’s.

She heard about the taffy bags from the neighborhood kids. She hasn’t gotten any. How could she when her home is a corrugated metal shed blooming patches of orange rust, hidden at the end of the cemetery? Some days later, however, Soghra found a bag of bubble gum taffies on a gravestone. Usually, she delivered the cemetery treasures to her mother, once a golden statue of an angel, another time an entire chocolate cake topped with two strawberries, even a wrinkled copy of Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone with the first thirty pages missing. But that day, she had stuffed the entire bag of taffies in her mouth, some still wrapped in their waxy wrapper. Her jaw ached for hours.

Soghra is washing the gravestone for her customer, a grumpy old woman constantly running her tongue over her top teeth, when the Taffy Lady arrives. Soghra hurries to finish. So many questions to ask the Taffy Lady, if Soghra can find the courage. Is her mansion Tehran’s Hogwarts? If it is, can Soghra join? If it is not, what does it feel like to be protected by those thick walls? Does it really have six hundred bedrooms? Is the neighborhood pretty when you look at it from behind the stained glass windows?

“The corners are dry. You think I’m khol? I’m not paying for this terrible wash.” The grandmother’s screeches send a few crows fluttering away.

“I’m sorry, Khanoum. I’ll wash it again.” Soghra pours more rosewater. The grandmother limps towards Soghra and pushes Soghra’s shoulders down. Soghra falls easily, bones like hollow caves, light starved.

“Leave before I call the police.”

Soghra is so sick of Muggles, is so ready to join the Gryffindors.

Usually it hurts Masumeh to watch the humiliation of others, especially children. But now, Masumeh’s own pain has left bruises on her skin. When she sees the old woman push down the little girl, her instinct is to flee. Mamani would never have done that. Mamani would have wiped away the little girl’s tears, patted her on the back and said, “Our God is a good God, leave the people to themselves.” Mamani in the soft breeze presses against Masumeh’s shoulders. Baby Jamsheed’s wraps his arms around her neck, stiff, airless, the world spinning without an end. Gulp in the air. Breathe.

Masumeh, sprinting ahead of the little girl, drops a white handkerchief, the one Mamani needlepointed an owl on, before fleeing back to the mansion.

When your wildest dreams come true, you might be too stunned to speak. All Soghra can do is to sniff the handkerchief, rub her hand over that tiny, sweet owl. What if this is her invitation letter? What if in Iran, instead of real owls, wizards are alerted through needlepoint owls? Heart thumping, she runs back to the shed.

Usually Soghra goes to bed early, scrunching up her blanket, curling her toes and legs. Where is Harry Potter’s invisibility cloak when one needs it?  Soghra imagines the sheer volume of the dead seeking forgiveness, ghostly phantoms untethered from their coffins. One of these Thursdays, she fears the dead will finally demand blood payment from Soghra and her mother for living in their midst, for disturbing their peace all these years. “The dead are not to be feared, Soghra, it’s the living that you must be wary of,” Soghra’s mom has told Soghra every Thursday. But the words don’t stop the shivers.

Today, with her needlepointed owl, Soghra is invincible. What if she really is the Harry Potter of Tehran?

When Soghra’s mother has finished embalming the charred corpse of a five-year-old girl who died in a house fire, her shoulders pulse with pain. The smell of formaldehyde and methanol, once nauseating, now barely register.

When you work with the dead, there is no running away, only surrendering. Otherwise, the thought that no one will marry the daughter of a Moorde Shoor can drive you to the brink of insanity. Squash questions such as, “Why did it have to be your husband who fell off a roof and died? Why did it have to be you, an orphan who became a mother to this poor girl? Why won’t anyone rent you a room the moment they find out you are a corpse washer?”

Working at a cemetery, you learn to fight practical demons. One night, when Soghra was four, some teenage boys raided the cemetery. Under the white bed sheets draped over their heads, they chuckled. Their Knock! Knock! rattled the shed’s metal walls. Soghra’s lips trembled, a pale look quivering in her eyes. Soghra’s mother held up a finger to her nose—shush!—and yanked one of the boy’s hands through the small window crack. Next came the boys’ screams, their scrambling footsteps, then Soghra’s mother’s laughter, soon mixed with Soghra’s. That night, cemented into memory, thickened their skin leathery and rough.

“Did you buy bread?” Soghra’s mother asks, stepping into the shed.

“He wouldn’t sell the moldy ones at first but then I told him it was for our cows like you said.”

Soghra’s mother fills up their dented pot with water, sets it to boil. She takes out a small pocketknife Soghra found months ago by a gravestone, and carves out, with the tenderness of a sculpture, the mold blooms out of each slice. She tongues the new blister on her upper lip, the price of eating extremely sour, although cheap, yogurt every day.

“Mama, do I have a secret name?” Soghra asks.

“A secret name? Like what?”

“Something sweet, like Rose. Maryam. Even Mehri.”

“Why?”

“Soghra is not a magical name. It leaves my mouth feeling like I’m choking on camelthorn bushes.” Soghra stops herself from blurting, “If the Taffy Lady was my mom, what do you think she would’ve named me?” Soghra is certain she can love two mothers at the same time. But will her mother believe her?

“This stuff is nonsense for people like us. Go outside if you are still awake and find more customers.” A girl living in a cemetery must learn that some things in life will never be hers. Magic, fate, and destiny are especially dangerous notions for the poor.

Outside, Soghra wanders in between grave rows, eventually spotting another customer, a couple with a son. “I’m dead, can you wash me too, please?” their fat boy whispers as Soghra scrubs. His hair is parted in the middle, glistening with gel.

“Of course,” she says, baring her teeth. “In fact, there is a ghost standing right behind you, with red eyes. What did you do to make her so mad?” The boy scampers away, stifles a small scream when his parents turn to look. He sticks out his tongue at her. She sticks her tongue right back at him.

This is an old story. If Soghra can be the first person to bolt out of classroom, if her lungs can hold enough oxygen, she stands a slim chance of dodging the neighborhood kids in the streets. At school, when everyone refuses to sit next to her, it’s their loss. Her imaginary friends need all that extra space anyway. When her teacher snaps up her black plastic gloves before handing back her homework, refusing to touch Soghra, that is because Soghra is spun out of pure gold. Haven’t you heard? Pure gold bruises easily, must remain untouched.

The neighborhood kids are back playing in the street behind the cemetery wall. Soghra climbs up the overgrown willow tree spilling over the wall into the street. A few girls with braids sticking out from under their Roosaris draw chalk rainbows on the asphalt.

“Did you know the Taffy Lady is American?”

“My dad says they are Khol for coming back to Iran when everyone’s selling their kidneys to leave.”

“My mom says Taffy Lady doesn’t know how to cook real Persian food. The Taco they made at the Mehmooni tasted like cow shit and cardboard.”

“She killed her own baby.”

“My aunt calls her the princess who tells her butt not to follow her because it stinks.”

Soghra feels a gurgling pot of hot water in her stomach. Thirty minutes later, under the last draping rays of Tehran’s setting sun, she has captured five lizards, each arrested under a plastic cup. The lizards writhe inside the plastic bag she found stuck in a bush. She climbs back up the willow tree. The plastic bag pops with the frenetic scramble of the lizards. Once on top, she unties the bag, raining lizards on the neighborhood girls. Soghra covers her mouth to stifle a chuckle and feels like she has drunk a cool cup of icy water, her insides refreshed. The girls jump like mad bees finally free from a jar, looking up at the sky. Tehran: cloudy with a chance of lizards.

Soghra falls asleep that night smiling, forgetting the ghost mass reverberating the air. Is the Taffy Lady’s pencil her wand? The way she holds it, it looks like an extension of herself, a magical finger. She remembers the only time she saw the Taffy Lady crying, over Mamani’s gravestone months ago. Taffy Lady has the same warmth as Mamani but also something more, like a magical cloud hovering over her. In Soghra’s mind, Lily Potter looks exactly like Taffy Lady. No one should hurt Tehran’s Lily Potter.

Masumeh and Arash sit at opposite ends of their fifteen-seat ebony dining room table with lion-heads carved on each leg. They chew pizza
—a black-burnt rim around a soggy center. Masumeh has somehow managed to both burn the pizza and have it be undercooked. Another mistake smelling of Baby Jamsheed’s ghost. Masumeh lays her hand on the tabletop. White gauze wraps her palm like a burial shroud.

“What happened?” Arash asks.

“Glass from a teacup.” Baby Jamsheed’s wrath has followed her all day. Ever since she came back from the cemetery, the ghost of Baby Jamsheed has been forcing his little body into the crevices of the mansion. Now, this evening, Masumeh senses that he has become absorbed by the bricks. At midnight, he will break free once more, whirl his way back to her, and stamp her with another purple bruise.

“Did you find the rats that are making noise in the vents?” Arash asks, excavating the dinner remnants with a toothpick.

“These bruises are real,” she says.

Despite the “I’m a man of logic” act that Arash puts on, he too is bent in more ways than one. Some things in life are too big to admit. Water must be contained, containered. Emotions are like water, some even like big bodies of water devouring victims. If not, then what explains the unspoken, unacknowledged nightly ritual that Arash and Masumeh began the day of the Most Great Blood? What can explain, past midnight, Arash’s slipper scraping the kitchen floors, the gurgling of boiling water, the almost apologetic slurp of his tea in the darkness of the living room? For her, the creaking of the nursery’s rocking chair, her lullaby whispered into the tiny ears of a doll she swaddles in her arm, stolen from a grave at Behesht Zahra.

This evening, Arash brought home a bucket of red paint. “We have to stop,” he says, pointing towards the nursery door as if that room is the source of their problems, as if any room can contain this pain. His brush strokes leave a dripping trail, like blood tears. On the nursery door, he paints a red STOP sign, resembling the ones in the streets of L.A. which, in all honesty, Masumeh treated more as suggestions than rules. You may consider slowing down here. You may consider getting fertility treatments. You may consider that you don’t belong in America. You may consider that you suck.

Masumeh flees to the backyard, to Mamani’s Peace, Gallica, Damask, and Double Delight roses. Her favorite is the one Mamani called cabbage rose, pink pastel petals wide as her palm. Mamani’s ghost shivers behind the green apple tree. Masumeh has seen, so many times, Mamani’s bent figure, her nails dirt-smudged, fussing over a yellow-spotted leaf, saying, “Masumeh, look how pretty is this ladybug.” Maybe that is the secret to a long life, an endless admiration for all things, big and small. It would have been nice if Masumeh could have taught Baby Jamsheed how to admire life. If only he had given her a chance.

“No more going in here,” Arash says when she is back inside. There is a dot of red paint on one of his eyebrows. She lets it be. A red eye for his caterpillar eyebrows.

Masumeh washes the grater she used for the mozzarella cheese. Pieces of burnt pizza crust plot against her by getting stuck in her molars. The red STOP sign on the door dares her. You know you want to come inside. Then suddenly the red is in the sink too: she has been scrubbing the grater with her one good hand. What a Khol! The pain at first has jagged edges, then is muffled, like screams under water at night. She wraps the other palm in another gauze, and now both of her palms are ready to be buried, white and clean.

Arash has fallen asleep on the giltwood Italian sofa with seats as hard as elephant teeth, the empty tea glass next to him on the carpet. If she takes a Faal with those tea leaves at the bottom of his cup, might there be good news? Might there be some clue as to what Baby Jamsheed’s ghost is trying to tell her? Will there be an end to her misery?

She drapes a cashmere blanket over Arash’s shoulders. His stubble, the gray puddles under his eyes, that unruly neckline hair, the gray patches that have been appearing since the day of the Most Great Blood. So much left to love about him.

A knock at the door. When Masumeh answers, she finds Mrs. Rahimi there, holding up a silver tray with two bowls of something that looks like Ashe Sabzi. Mrs. Rahimi says, “Masumeh Jaan, don’t worry anymore. This recipe will get you pregnant. It has a special herb from the mountains of Rasht. I picked some yesterday when I visited my son there. Eat both bowls. Before you know it, baby cries will be driving you mad.” Part of Masumeh wants to hug Mrs. Rahimi and cry. Part of her wants to slam the door in her wrinkled face and never see another human being for the next one hundred years or two.

Masumeh doesn’t know what to do with these real Iranians, how to live among them. Their care, their Fozooli, their nose in everyone’s business, their incomprehension of privacy. When Arash and Masumeh invited neighbors for a taco party, they never anticipated how the kids would sneak into every room, how the ladies would ask about Masumeh’s plans for losing that rim around her waist or recommending best plastic surgeons for her hawk-beak of a nose. Who knows how they found out about the baby. It’s like the neighborhood has a thousand eyes and ears.

Masumeh sits at the table, Baby Jamsheed’s ghost thumping now in the vents, the aroma of steaming Ash tickling her nostrils. She has no appetite. Since the day of the Most Great Blood everything tastes like chalk. She eats only to avoid Arash’s lectures on health and wellbeing, on the necessity of moving on.

Soghra wakes to find her white handkerchief, which she  stuffed under her pillow at night, scrunched in her mother’s fist. Her angry expression harboring bad news.

“What’s this?” her mother asks. What might be a miracle for a child can be an unbearable humiliation for a mother. When Soghra’s mother has heard the story, she says, “Take this back to her. We don’t need her pity.”

Later, at school, Soghra is writing down possible things she can say to the Taffy Lady when her teacher’s black-gloved hand snatches the notebook away.

“Is Hogwarts pretty? Can I play on the moving staircases? Do you need a daughter?” The class bursts alive with giggles. “What is this nonsense, Soghra? Have the dead finally made you crazy?”

Biting her lowering lip, Soghra mumbles, “Avada Kedavra! Expecto Patronum! Avada Kedavra!” She waits for her teacher to transform into an ugly rat no one will ever love. One day she will find magic. One day, she will show them.

After school, she runs the entire way to the mansion. Finally, a reason to talk to the Taffy Lady. She rings once, running her finger over the giant wooden door’s carved flowers, then rings again. The asphalt scrapes her sole through a hole in her shoe. She rings three more times, puts her ear against the door, rings once more.

She rehearses what she will say. “Salam, Lady, I can love two moms. Here is your handkerchief. I washed it for you.”

The door swings open, and the Taffy Lady is so near. Behind her giant rose bushes popping with color, Soghra blurts, “Lady, do you need a grave wash? For free. I can also talk to the dead.” A lie. In moments of panic, habit takes over.

“You can see ghosts?” Masumeh asks. Desperate times have a way of mushing you into a Khol. Or maybe you have always been one.

“I’ve lived at Behesht Zehra all my life. If you search all of Tehran, you cannot find anyone better than me when it comes to ghosts,” Soghra replies, taking out the handkerchief from the pocket of her baggy, brown corduroy pants. “I washed this for you.”

“Come in.”

Now, Masumeh, you cannot invite little girls into your house without their parents’ permission, cannot offer them leftover pizza along with a glass of milk.

The Mansion looks nothing like Hogwarts. Soghra, eyeing the oil portraits, waits for the figures to move, to brim with magic, but they are still like cold corpses. In the turquoise houz at the center of the inner courtyard, a few goldfish swim possessive circles around one another. Soghra looks out at the cemetery through the stained glass windows. The world has become a dizzying, beautiful kaleidoscope.

This pizza tastes almost as good as Mamani’s gaaz. Soghra throws a pizza crumb and watches tiny fish mouths open and shut, gobbling the food.

“This house smells like Mamani,” Masumeh says.

“You knew her?”

“Kindest lady I’ve ever met. Used to read to me Majeed’s stories.”

Masumeh smiles, amazed that even from beyond the grave Mamani never fails to surprise.

If you find yourself seated across from a little girl in your kitchen, if you find yourself worrying about what this little girl eats to be so small, do not be alarmed. Some degree of musing is normal. But when you catch her sharing her food with the goldfish in the houz and ask her if she wants to swim in there, you’ve successfully crossed the border into the land of the crazy. Congratulations: you have become the Khol everyone already suspected you of being.

“What’s your name?” Masumeh asks.

“Soghra. But I am open to having other names,” Soghra replies, taking off her thin pants and shirt, and hopping, with both legs, into the houz’s water. Without her clothes, she looks even smaller, a brown spread of skin pulled over stick bones. No scratches, no bruises, no birthmarks. Masumeh is surprised. She expected all Koodake Kar to be marked with bruises, crusted scabs over lash wounds. Unloved. But this girl smells like sunbaked clay, like freshly cut grass, like spring wind. Would Baby Jamsheed have been her size when he turned her age? Would he have the same twinkle in his eyes when swimming in houz with goldfish? Why is Baby Jamsheed so quiet now?

Masumeh does something her body had almost forgotten. A smile. Tentative at first, then wide as her whole face. Her teeth ache at contact with the cool air. Soghra splashes water out of the houz. Water droplets land on the red potted geraniums. Catching the rays of the sun, they sparkle. The mansion walls seem to crawl back closer, thawing their frozen grip at the sound of the laughter. It’s as if this little girl has magic. Even the portraits in the oil paintings seem amused.

Arash, walking to the mansion, is content with another day at the firm tucked away. He can feel the grime of Tehran over his cheeks, heat trapped under his suit. A woman in black chador stops him right as he is about to enter the mansion. Despite her stoic face, her voice is hushed like someone speaking from the bottom of a well. “Have you seen a little girl this tall?” she asks, hands at her hip level. He’s sorry. He has not. Her eyes dart with worry side to side, tadpoles begging to be let loose.

The mansion’s living room door is ajar, and an alarm rings in Arash’s ears which he tries to quiet. Perhaps it’s a good sign. They might have a guest. Some neighborhood mother Masumeh can go to Zumba class with or take flute lessons, crack sunflower seeds, watch Bollywood movies.

No one’s in the living room. The nursery door is open. The stop sign ignored like a slap on his cheeks. Masumeh, with a strange little girl on the rocking chair, look at a book together. Or is that a photo album? Towels are wrapped around both of their heads like turbans. Is that really a smile?

Arash runs his hand over his mustache several times, taming his rage. Tehran was supposed to be good for them, for their marriage, but his wife has turned into a fish since coming back, since losing the baby, a fish that slips from his hands every time he attempts to hold her. And now this, his wife smiling at him like a dolphin released back into the sea. He had forgotten how much warmth could be in that smile.

“Look! A little girl,” Masumeh says.

The little match girl must have come alive. A miracle. God’s gift for them for returning to their birthland. What else can explain this strange girl in the nursery?

Police sirens wail outside. Already, Soghra’s mother has asked the neighborhood kids if they have seen Soghra. Heads shaking no, in denial or apathy toward that untouchable girl. A girl raised in the cemetery is tough. She’ll find her way back. Won’t she?

Masumeh holds out for Arash a bowl of popcorn, sprinkled with lemons and chili powder, after giving a handful to Soghra.

Taking the bowl, Arash wonders how to sneak the little girl back to her house, wherever that is, how to dodge the police questions, the eyes of the neighbors, the gossip that is sure to come. Does he have to? Is this little girl a gift from Mamani?

Baby Jamsheed is quiet, his belly breaths like calm waves after a storm. Masumeh, tucking the girl’s wet hair behind her ears, wonders how to keep her. Possibly forever. Soghra, in her mouth a party of salt and spice, wonders if she can really love two moms.

Pegah Ouji is an Iranian-American writer who writes in Farsi and English. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming from Joyland, Epiphany, Fugue, and Split Lip, among other publications.