Chapter 13 · Untitled Chapter

They called the majlis for eight, and the coffee had already made one full round before I was brought in, which in that house was the first thing said to me, and no one had to open his mouth to say it.

Eleven men along the walls. The oldest of them had the sadr cushion at the head of the carpet, and the finjan had gone to him first and would go to him first again, and that was the whole of the family's constitution, written in the order of a cup.

For me there was no cushion. There was the strip of plain weave in the middle of the carpet, worn thin where people stood when they had come to ask for something.

I stood on it. I had washed and dressed properly, abaya, the shaila pinned with two pins because one had never held through an argument, because I had learned on Tuesday that in this house a woman without her veil is a woman whose case can be dismissed as a mood.

Bakhoor had been carried through before I came, and the smoke sat in the cold air over the carpet.