Chapter 12 · Chapter 12

The steward in my uncle's house poured the first round before anyone had said why we were sitting there, and I have always thought that was the honest way to open a majlis. Coffee first. Papers can wait, and a man who reaches for the folder before the second cup has already told you what he is.

I stood at the edge of the carpet until a chair was brought for me. The carpet was Sarouk and older than I am, worn pale where forty years of shoes had come off at the door.

I set my own shoes down beside the others, stepped onto the wool in my stockings, and sat—abaya buttoned to the throat, tarha pinned flat, hands resting in my lap where they could be counted. There is a way of sitting in that room that neither concedes nor claims ground, and I had learned it long before I learned to read a balance sheet.

My uncle sat at the head, where he always sits.