A Teaspoon of Earth and Sea by Dina Nayeri Read Free Book Online Page B

will need a dowry to escape the moral police. In five or six years she will be a woman. According to the adults, beautiful single women often find that they’ve broken some rule. So who knows what will happen to someone who dares to have a face like Ponneh’s.
Sun and Moon Man (Khanom Basir)
S
    aba thinks I don’t like her, but she’s too young to remember everything. When the girls were seven I started to notice that one of them was the real trouble. Mahtab used to watch us cook, and she used to concentrate so hard that I would get nervous and send her away. She obeyed, but I knew better than to let that girl put a fool’s hat on my head. Saba may have been loud, but Mahtab was always quietly doing something bad, and I knew every time Saba got into trouble that the onion had been hanging with the fruit. Saba blamed her sister each time they were caught and I believed her.
    It is a mother’s job to teach a girl to be crafty. But Bahareh Hafezi didn’t pay attention to village ways. She was too young and she thought being a good mother meant being strict with the small rules, the ones about candy and pesar-bazi (playing with boys), and kalak-bazi (playing tricks), and gherty-bazi (playing at vanity), while teaching the girls to rebel against impossibly big ones. She didn’t bother to teach them how to make ordinary moments turn their way. But Mahtab already knew how. Saba never learned.
    One day we were cooking smoky rice in their kitchen—do you know this rice? It is the best in the world. So rare and produced only here in Gilan—and the girls were hanging about under our skirts. Their mother said that if they behaved they could join us for tea, so they sat still and whispered, Mahtab feeding Saba some crazy story ( kalak-bazi! ).
    The girls had a lot of books, but their favorite stories were the kind you hear in the village square from the hundred-year-old toothless goats with long water pipes and tiny stools. Those men talk all day about jinns and pari s and how to bring good luck. They tell old stories like Leyli and Majnoon, Rostam, or Zahhak, with the snakes growing out of his shoulders. I recognized the story Mahtab was telling Saba because it came from one of these old men, but I assumed Mahtab didn’t believe it.
    “What are you telling your sister, Mahtab jan?” I asked. “Don’t interrupt me,” she said. “I’m behaving!”
So I just listened as Mahtab told Saba about the Sun and Moon Man, who takes down the sun every night and puts up the moon. Saba played with a teaspoon she had stolen from a bowl of honeycomb, while Mahtab lectured on and on. “He takes longer in the summer to do it, because he likes to play outside,” Mahtab said, and Saba believed her. And some small creature in my belly said that Mahtab was playing at something.
    Then they changed topics for twenty minutes until Saba brought up yesterday’s hiking trip in the mountains—the one Saba had missed because she had been too sick to travel. “I saw the Sun and Moon Man there, you know,” Mahtab said with a careless, fox-eyed look. Saba didn’t interrupt as Mahtab talked about having seen him and his yellow shirt and yellow pants and yellow basket where he kept dina nayeri the sun and moon. She only licked honey off her teaspoon, and Mahtab talked about the Sun and Moon Man’s office, with its pulleys and buttons and levers, a big teapot and papers everywhere. Then Mahtab taught Saba the song you have to sing to him to get him to work fast, “ Hey, Mr. Sun and Moon Man, put up the sun for me .” She sang it to the music of a foreign song that their mother said was called “Tambourine Man,” which was one of their favorites.
    The little devil. All that spinning, just to make her sister jealous. I guess that’s what you get when you’re lucky enough to learn English and listen to English songs and have a foreign education. Devilry disguised as cleverness. Mahtab liked playing these naughty catdance games with her sister.