She’s sixteen years old — a young woman in a city with blue mountains.

She’s walking to school with her books in her arms. She has on a faded gray uniform, a pale lipstick that she has had to hide from her parents and put on only after she has left the house. It’s a golden spring morning, the light as clear as polished glass, the air imbued with the scent of poet’s jasmine that blooms on slender vines everywhere in the city. The sun is just rising behind the tall maple trees that line both sides of the Avenue of the Peonies, creating a gallery of light and shadows where the girl’s image is by turns eclipsed and illuminated and eclipsed again — until she turns the corner onto the Square of the Pearl Canon and emerges into a sea of brightness.

As she steps off the edge of the sidewalk she feels a breeze, looks up in time to see a cloud of cherry blossoms rain down on her like a blessing. She lets out a cry of joy, opens her arms and turns full circle amid the flowers. Her books fall to the ground and her papers fly into moving traffic but she’s laughing because she knows this is a good omen, a sign from the heavens that her luck has turned for the better. Any moment now, she thinks, providence will sweep toward her with a flap of its giant wings, land on her shoulder, and transform her life.

Once upon a time in a land of miracles.

When she looks down again, she’s standing inches away from the shiny bumper of a car. A dark, angry man in a chauffeur’s cap and uniform is leaning out the window and yelling that she should look where she’s going, get herself killed under someone else’s car if she wants, just don’t mess up his tires. The girl isn’t frightened by him at all. From where she’s standing, she can see her own image reflected in the tinted black windshield of the car, see the flowers that have been caught in her hair, in the folds of her skirt, on top of her books that lie around her feet. The driver is still livid, hurry up and get off the road you’re holding up the boss people have work to do, but instead of moving out of the way, she leans closer to the car, peers through the glass at the passenger in the back seat. She has blocked the entire lane now, and cars are honking from every direction but she takes her time picking up her books. God damn it girl, you’re just a kid, you have no business causing a nuisance for people bigger than yourself, don’t you know how to behave in civilized society? the driver yells again, but the answer is obvious.

This is what my father sees as my mother stands before him that early spring morning in the city of my dreams: he sees a girl of limited means and abundant spirit.

*

Of all the stories I will tell about my mother, this is the one I cherish most. I like to see her at the point of inception, the moment that would set the course for all our lives and all the stories that followed. And though I know the end even before I have said the first word, I like the possibility, the promise inherent in each new telling, of a different finish.

*

The girl on the street — her name is Bahar — would not stand out in any crowd. She’s not particularly beautiful, or smart, or endowed with exceptional wit, but she has a zest for life, a wild and irrational optimism that is alarming because it is so out of sync with the reality that surrounds her. Her father — my grandfather–is a former cantor’s apprentice who has not managed to rise to the ranks to which he had aspired, and who now sings at weddings and funerals instead. Her mother works in the house as a seamstress. She takes orders from rich Jewish and Muslim women who send their maids to bring her fabric and thread, and to pick up the work when it’s done. The women hardly know the seamstress’ name, don’t trust her with anything more expensive than plain cotton or wool. They have her sew sheets and table-cloths, their children’s school uniforms, their husband’s caftan pajamas, and they’re always complaining that she can’t make a pattern to save her life, can’t even cut a straight line but still, she’s honest and doesn’t steal fabric, and she has mouths to feed, it’s just a form of charity, this, and besides, no one charges as little as she does.

There’s a son who has never worked a day in his life, who goes around in a second-hand suit and a borrowed tie. He pretends to be rich when everyone knows he wants for his next meal, lives off his parents instead of helping support the family. His one asset in the world is a deep and baritone voice, and this alone has got him convinced that he should be an opera singer. He has never seen a real opera and wouldn’t know where to go to see one, but he loves the idea of being allowed on stage so he can showcase his talents, earn the adoration of fans, become famous. As it is, he doesn’t sing anywhere but at the homes of friends and relatives, and he only knows the lines to one song — a little-known and quite possibly mangled thing called “Granada”, which he sings in his sixth grade English-as-a-second-language accent. The rest of the time, he sits on the roof of Sorrento Restaurant on top of Pahlavi Avenue, sipping iced coffee which he gets free from the waiters who humor him in the slower hours, reading government propaganda in yesterday’s paper and bragging to the handful of other patrons about a life they all know he does not lead and a future they know he will not reach, but what’s the difference anyway? It’s all illusion when you think about it and who’s to say what is or isn’t likely? Wasn’t Reza Shah an illiterate soldier one night and king of the country the next?

Real life, the Opera Singer likes to say, does not always rise to the occasion.

There’s another son who has died when he was only ten years old but who keeps coming back, dropping in on the family without any warning or invitation and staying for as long as he wants before he takes off and breaks his mother’s heart as if for the first time. And a third one still — the youngest of the three boys and probably the smartest too. He’s realized early in life that there is no great advantage to being either poor or Jewish, and so he has converted to Islam, married the daughter of a rich mullah who has promised him a great deal of money in this world and seventy-two virgins in the next. He’s changed his name from Moshe to Muhammad, printed his picture in every newspaper in the city under the heading “Jadid-al-Islam” — new Muslim — and he’s doing a fine job of convincing everyone he’s worthy of his new station and newly acquired wealth.

Jadid-al-Islam’s parents don’t dislike him for converting as much as feel contempt for him: he couldn’t tough it out as a Jew, they say; he chose the easy way out. Still, they can’t shake the embarrassment his conversion has caused the family and so they go around pretending he’s still a Jew, invite him to funerals but not weddings, ask if he could please leave the wife at home when he shows up on Cyrus Street where they live, if he could take off the Muslim Aba when he comes around, think about his unmarried sisters whose chances at a good union have forever been spoiled by his selfishness.

The sisters’ chances, in truth, had been less than stellar even before Jadid-al-Islam’s conversion. The oldest one has already passed the age by which young girls become old maids. She stays at home plucking chickens and washing rice, waiting for the suitors who didn’t call when she was fifteen and eighteen and who certainly won’t call now that she’s nearing thirty. She looks for them in the black lines cast by coffee grinds at the bottom of the fortune-teller’s cup and in between the lines of Omar Khayyam’s poetry, listens to her parents chastise her for not managing to find a husband as if a man is something you buy at the fish market — put on your best smile and someone is bound to follow you home — but even they know there is more to her fate than meets the eye, that she’s neither beautiful enough nor rich enough to be able to overcome her parents’ circumstances or the damage her brothers have done to her desirability but they blame her any way, blame her and their own destiny because of course they can’t blame God — that would make them ungrateful and make Him angry; it could always be worse, you know, and besides, other girls in the family have managed to find a husband. Even Tamar, the cousin who’s so dark, everyone thinks she’s Arab, eventually got married, and you know that’s no small feat, given how fiercely Iranians hate Arabs, call them “rat-eaters” because that’s what those savages do — they conquered half the world only to burn the books and tear the tongues out of the heads of any poets or philosophers a nation had produced and where are they now anyway? Still wandering the desert with their camels and many wives, watching the world leave them behind.

The second sister, thank heavens, is married and has two kids and she’d be just fine, really, she could have herself a good old time if she didn’t raise her husband’s ire so often.

The husband is a doctor who barely made it into medical school — everyone knows this because the results of the college entrance exams are printed every year in the daily newspaper for the world to see — and who may or may not be a real doctor at all; he may be a hack, really, though he claims he’s a “psychiatrist,” treats crazy people as if a person’s brain is like a bone you can reset, or an appendix you can remove, since when does the soul get cured with a couple of pills? Who died and put him in charge of saving the Lost anyway? Still, it’s nice to have a son-in-law you can call Doctor, even if he does lose his temper once in a while. After every beating, he takes her onto the roof of their house and locks her up in a room with a broken window through which a hundred pigeons fly in and nest. It’s a drafty, frightening place — too cold in winter and dangerously hot in summer — and the kindly psychiatrist keeps his wife tied to a pole with a padlock on the door and the key in his own pocket. Twice a day, he sends his children — a son and a daughter — to bring food to their mother, but he refuses to allow the neighbors or her family members to visit her while she’s in confinement, leaves her there for days on end until the house in overrun by dirt or he gets tired of the meals his nine-year-old daughter has to make for him in her mother’s absence. Then he sends for his wife’s parents to come to the house, gives them the key to the pigeon room so they can free their daughter. She emerges with her hair matted from dust and pigeon droppings, and her face and hands scratched from too many pigeons landing on her. She stands before him terrified and trembling, her eyes sewn to the ground because she can’t stand to see her children looking at her in that state and, after a long apology to this savior-of-all-human-minds, sets about cleaning the house and cooking a meal before she’s even allowed to take a bath.

Some families, I have learned, are stranger than others.

I used to like this — their strangeness — about my mother’s family. It made them fascinating in the way that fairy tale characters are fascinating — tragic to the core, but also mesmerizing. It never occurred to me, at first, that I might have inherited this strangeness, that I might have been born into the same weird spell and, with it, the solitude of the charmed.