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

to become pregnant was therefore judged yet another sign of her husband’s lack of regard.
    Over time this very lack of regard had only managed to augment Kobra’s love for Sohrab. As both her spirits and her standing in the family sank with each childless year, Kobra sought different strategies for wooing Sohrab back from the blue-eyed jinn who’d ensnared him. Kobra always set aside the most succulent pieces of meat and the very thickest pieces of crisped rice for him. By day she laundered and pressed his suits, and by night she painted her face, plucked her brows, and groomed her nails for him.
    Such ordinary wifely duties were supplemented with supernatural devotions. She patronized back-alley spiritualists, called jadoo-jambals , who charged one fee to fend off plain mistresses and another, much higher fee to fend off beautiful ones. Every time, Kobra paid the maximum fee and returned with her head swimming with fresh hope and elaborate spells. She whipped up concoctions involving such things as cat urine, dill weed, and rose petals, recited the spiritualists’ recommended incantations, and proceeded to sprinkle her love potions along the doorways and windowpanes of Khanoom’s house.
    One year on Chahar Shanbeh Soori, the first of the New Year festivities, Kobra grabbed a handful of golden coins, pulled on her veil, and picked her way through the bonfires in the streets. When she reached the Jewish baths, she disrobed and threw her lot in with the unmarried, the infertile, and the generally accursed who flocked there on this night for the Jews’ famed cures. As she was led from corner to corner of the bathhouse and doused with purifying waters, Kobra offered up prayers to Moses’ mother, Jochebed, then dressed without toweling off the precious moisture. Kobra passed back over the threshold of the house on Avenue Moniriyeh whispering thename of Moses’ father to herself over and over, just as she’d been instructed. “Amran, Amran, Amran…”
    Nothing she did had any effect whatsoever on Sohrab.
    Indeed, he might never have returned to her but for his ever-shifting fortunes. Kobra’s third child had been conceived during one of Kobra and Sohrab’s “reconciliations”—one of those interludes when Sohrab’s finances had dipped dangerously low and he therefore had no choice but to return to his mother’s house, and to Kobra’s bed. At such times Sohrab found in Kobra an unlikely but reliable source of financial support. He knew she regularly skimmed a few tomans off whatever housekeeping money he gave her, and although her savings did not amount to very much, on more than one occasion it would be just enough to pay off his most pressing debts.
    He was not exactly kind toward her when he took her money, but Sohrab certainly grumbled much less than usual, and when Kobra sewed herself a long, pleated dress and began sweeping through the house in it, grinning and stroking her belly with great emphasis, it was obvious to everyone that she’d more than exacted her due. Kobra strung up a moleskin hammock—a nanoo —from one of her bedroom walls to the other, unfurled a mattress for herself on the floor, and waited for her baby to arrive. He was born in the spring and she named him Omid, which means “hope.”
    For a long time Kobra believed that Omid’s birth would bring Sohrab back to Avenue Moniriyeh for good. When this did not come to pass, she simply threw all her love and longing at her little baby boy. As Lili was by then twelve (and fast approaching the date of her marriage to Kazem) and Nader eleven years old, Kobra’s days were taken up entirely with Omid. Never in her life had she been happier than when she was bent over his nanoo , cooing him into sleep. Kobra would have loved him no less if he’d been the picture of ugliness, but Omid was a perfectly beautiful baby—fair and plump, with a thick fringe of lashes around his black eyes and a sweetly dimpledchin. She dressed him in navy blue