Free A Teaspoon of Earth and Sea by Dina Nayeri Page A

milestone today— because aren’t they identical and tied together by shared blood? If her mother was here, Saba would tell her that she actually feels older. Maybe Maman would reply that, yes, she certainly looks grown-up. But then Saba considers that it might be ungrateful to focus on her mother now—when these other women made such a show of tending to her and even endured the shame of discussing topics that every self-respecting Persian knows to push under a rug.
“I’m sorry I yelled,” she says to Ponneh, and takes a becominga-woman chickpea cookie directly from her best friend’s unwashed fi n g e r s .
The Storyteller (Khanom Basir)
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    very woman has a talent, and if you ask me, every talent is worthwhile and important. But as always, Bahareh Hafezi didn’t agree with me. She told her daughters: If you don’t prove yourself smart enough to heal bodies alongside men or design heaven-onearth structures like the thirty-three arches or write beautiful verses like the Rubaiyat , then the world might decide that you will be the lady who makes the best cakes or the most savory stews or the best opium pipe for her husband. That will be your role.
    “A sad fate! Worthless work!” she said, when she wanted the girls to read a book.
What crazy bazi ! The woman was as one-sided as a mullah’s coin. After all, Khanom Omidi’s talent was cooking, and if she had chosen to be a brain surgeon, who would make the perfect saffron rice pudding, exactly thick enough, full of almonds, never clumpy? The girls used to watch her make the pudding, patiently grinding the long fiery tendrils of saffron with a fist-sized mortar and pestle, the scratch scratch of pollen against rock, releasing the aroma of both a heavy feast and a soft perfume, and staining her fat, already yellow fingers a deeper orange. Like a magician, she had so many tools she wouldn’t let me borrow. A cherry pitter. A flower-shaped mold on a long stick for Window Bread. The tiny mortar and pestle.
That woman was the Sorceress of Saffron.
And this was the reason she was happy and still healthy at such an old age, because as everyone knows, saffron makes you laugh. When the sun sets at the end of each day, all the women in the soggy rice fields in the North go home tired, with their pants rolled up and their legs soaking and diseased, a bright triangular cloth, the chadorshab , tied securely around their waists to protect their backs and carry this and that. Elsewhere, women who work in the rose fields of Qamsar or the tea fields here in Gilan go home smelling of roses and tea, their skirts full of the leaves and petals they have spent all day pulling. But in other parts of Iran, still, women in saffron fields arrive home in tight, jolly clusters, crazy with laughter, and they continue on like this, well into the night.
The Hafezi girls were told that their talents lay in their brains, and that this would make them different. They would continue the family tradition of success and moneymaking. This expectation was there in every word, every gesture, every promise.
“Can we go to the beach?” they would ask their father.
“My daughters, I will take you to the sea and dry you with hundred-dollar bills,” he would say, because that was a sign of his love and commitment.
Later, after the day their plans went wrong and he was left with Saba only, he said to her, “Saba jan, you don’t need to go to America. You are brilliant and you have fine taste.” And that meant that Saba would still shine here in her baba’s eyes.
Talents, the Hafezis believed, transcended location and circumstance.
You know, I too have a gift—the best one, a power over words, over legends, truth, and lies. For money I weave rush into baskets and hats and small rugs, but for my friends I can weave a tale so subtly, so beautifully, with such rises and falls, such whispers, that children and adults are lulled like snakes in a pot. They sway with me, allow me to carry them away. Then when