The Pomegranate Lady and Her Sons by Goli Taraghi

Author:Goli Taraghi
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company

TEN YEARS HAVE passed since I last saw Amina. The doorbell rings. It isn’t the children’s restless and persistent ringing. It is a stranger’s hesitant finger on the doorbell. Someone who thinks he or she might be at the wrong address.

“Who is it?”

Silence.

I stand behind the door. In the old days, when someone knocked, I would open the door without fear and without asking who it was (as was our tradition). It took a long time for me to get used to questions and cautions, to latching the door chain, to looking through the peephole.

“Who is it?” I ask again.

An unfamiliar voice says, “It’s me.”

Whoever “me” is, she has a delicate and shy voice. I think she has come to the wrong apartment. I open the door slightly. A dark-skinned girl, with large, timid eyes, long braided hair, and strappy sandals on her feet, is standing in front of me. She is wearing a sari—a pistachio green sari.

She says hello in fluent French and without a foreign accent. Her name is Shalima. She is looking down and fidgeting.

When I take her in my arms, I smell her mother’s scent. But she doesn’t have her mother’s beauty. She says she is in her last year of medical school. She wants to become a pediatrician. She laughs. She has her mother’s white teeth. She says Mohsen is in high school. She shows me a photograph of him. He is wearing sneakers and he’s still a little chubby. They have French passports, and a brother and sister, eleven years old. Her stepfather is a good man. He pays for their expenses. She has a scholarship and works in an English bookstore three days a week.

I want her to tell me about Amina, about their home in the park, and about her own plans for the future. She is silent. She looks down and a gentle sorrow settles over her face. My heart sinks.

Shalima’s silence is timid and comforting. She opens her handbag and takes out a yellow envelope. “My mother wanted me to give you this photograph,” she says. “She wanted me to thank you. She was very ill. We took her to the hospital. She passed away six weeks ago. She twice opened her eyes and spoke your name. I will finish my studies this year. Then I’m going back to Bangladesh. My father is ill. He has lost his eyesight. I have to take care of him.”

She talks of her mother’s death so serenely that I, too, simply accept this implausible event. I take the photograph out of the envelope. It is a color photograph. Amina is standing in the middle, with her husband and her children around her. She is smiling. She knows that her illness is incurable and that she will soon die, but she doesn’t look troubled. Her hair has turned gray and there are beautiful wrinkles under her eyes. She is wearing a white sari; it is wrapped around her thin figure like delicate ivy. All these

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