Fiction: Afgar, orphaned in childhood, will one day depart for Cambridge in pursuit of a doctorate

Afgar had lost her parents so long ago she had no recollection of them at all. They’d had no time to enjoy their marriage and contemplate the joy of spending their lives together before they’d fallen prey to cholera and entrusted nine-month-old Afgar to her maternal grandmother. It was with this grandmother that she had lived when she was not being passed back and forth from house to house between her paternal uncles, paternal aunts and maternal aunts. She had no maternal uncles. When she was five, her grandmother passed on as well, leaving her care to the world. The events following her grandmother’s death were still vivid in her memory. She had no recollection of anything before that, just a handful of faint, meaningless images, whereas those incidents were clear in her mind. They were not particularly pleasant.

The rearing of Afgar had been a thorny problem for her relations. If she had had only one uncle or one aunt, then, as they say in Persian, qahr-e-darvesh barjan-e-darvesh – a poor man’s rage hurts no one but himself – and they would consider Afgar their own responsibility and put up with her. But she had three maternal aunts and two paternal uncles,...

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