Consulting Detective by Alan Manifold

Author:Alan Manifold
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bahai Publishing
Published: 2018-02-01T16:00:00+00:00

That evening was the Bahá’í Nineteen-Day Feast, a gathering held on the first day of each Bahá’í month. It is one of the primary events in the Bahá’í calendar, and Andrea and Mihdí made an effort to get their children to it as often as possible. Enoch and Lua didn’t mind, as they had some good Bahá’í friends they enjoyed seeing.

Mihdí helped get the kids into their shoes and coats while Andrea gathered up a few letters and other correspondence to share at the Feast. As the Local Spiritual Assembly secretary, she had a responsibility to make sure such things were presented at the Feast. When they were all ready, they got into Andrea’s car, a ten-year-old dark green Toyota Camry, and drove to the home of Behzad and Fereshteh Rouhani, the hosts for this Feast. Before they went in, Mihdí reminded the kids that they needed to enter the house respectfully and take their seats quietly to maintain a prayerful atmosphere.

Behzad and Fereshteh’s house was immaculately kept. Other people had arrived before Mihdí and his family, but Mihdí could still see that every chair, pillow, throw, picture, and rug was exactly in its place. Bezhad was seventy-eight and was a retired radiologist. In his retirement years, he had decided to get a degree in religious studies and had gotten his Master’s degree the previous year from the University of Chicago. Fereshteh was seventy and still extremely active in the community. She represented the Bahá’ís in the Interfaith Alliance. Fereshteh had not worked outside the home but had somehow created a large network of friends and colleagues all around the region. She and Behzad had immigrated to the United States from Iran in the 1950s and had raised their family in this house in Pine Bluff. Now that their children were parents and grandparents themselves and were scattered throughout the world, the couple devoted their considerable energy to the activities of the Pine Bluff Bahá’í community.

The Feast, like all Bahá’í Feasts, had three separate parts: the devotional, the consultative, and the social portions. The hosts had chosen a number of short readings and prayers for the devotional portion. Fereshteh took Mihdí aside just before the devotions and asked if he would chant a prayer to open the devotions and then lead everyone in a few songs at the end. Since his promotion to detective, Mihdí no longer had time to sing in a choir, but he had a rich bass voice and was happy to get a chance to sing now and then at Bahá’í events.

When the devotions had ended, all of the children went to the basement for children’s classes with Cheryl Bryant and her teenage daughter, Corinne, while the adults consulted on the affairs of the community. Fereshteh, as the chair of the Assembly, guided the meeting, but Andrea was the one to share most of the information. The coming termination of the lease for the Bahá’í Center was a topic of great interest, but much of the

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.