In the Time of Our History by Susanne Pari EPUB & PDF – eBook Details Online
- Author Name: Susanne Pari
- Book Genre: Contemporary, Cultural, Family, Fiction, Historical, Historical Fiction, Iran, Literary Fiction
- ISBN # 9781496739261
- Edition Language: English
- Date of Publication: January 3rd 2023
- File Format: PDF / EPUB
- PDF / EPUB File Size: 4 MB
September 1998
She came to the East Coast for the first anniversary of her sister’s death. It
was the Shia way, to mark the Death Day—first at seven days, then at forty,
and finally at one year.
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Not that Mitra was a believer. She came because she
felt sorry for her mother, still crestfallen and clutching tightly to the
traditions she’d been trying to instill in her two daughters since they were
born at Bergen County Hospital. Mitra had fought hardest against those
rituals—Persian New Year parties, Zoroastrian festivals, Ramadan fasting—
but now Mitra was her mother’s only child.
Dawn at Kennedy Airport. Round-edged melamine furniture, miles of
burgundy carpet, burnt coffee smell—the air of a banquet hall the morning
after a raucous party. A janitor harpooned candy wrappers and dirty napkins
from the floor. Mitra heard the drone of a vacuum cleaner as she ordered an
espresso from a café cart, then took a seat at the end of a bank of bucket
chairs facing the windows. She was in no hurry to escape the boundaries of
transit.
On the tarmac sat a gaggle of airplanes tinged pink in the daybreak.
From a distance, say, from the point of view of the logy barista who had
served her espresso, Mitra looked unapproachable. This was not only
because the barista was a young twentysomething and Mitra just over the
cusp of forty.
Despite her jeans, plain white shirt, and tight-fitting leather
jacket, Mitra exuded the self-assuredness of a power-suited executive. And
there was strength in her face: the olive skin, chocolate eyes, long arched
eyebrows, and especially the angular nose—not exactly hooked, not exactly
humped, but definitely a feature that would have inclined most girls to opt
for a slight surgical correction.
Mitra scalded her tongue on the coffee, and her eyes watered. One of the
airplanes trembled at the strain of its full-on engines, and she remembered
tramping across the tarmac all those years ago in the shadow of her parents,
little Anahita clasping her ears and squinting against the noise of the rush of
air, while Mitra jumped and giggled in the thrilling vortex of mechanical
energy.
Mitra belched softly, rubbed two fingers over the heartburn behind her
sternum. Espresso and anxiety—well behaved on their own, rambunctious
as urchins together. She dropped her coffee into a trash can. Transit was just
another word for limbo, and there was no such place. Except maybe death.
She got up, kicked her carry-on to a wheel-perfect slant, and made her
way toward the moving walkway.
Nearing the edge of transit, she
quickened her pace, focused on the resolute clip-clop of her heels on the
terminal’s stone floor and on a faraway Exit sign, not once eyeballing the
small crowd of impatient, neck-craning welcomers straining at the
stanchions and barrier ropes. And yet, she caught a whiff of Anahita’s
Chanel No. 9, a glimpse of little Nina’s pink hair ribbons, a snatch of
Nikku’s pubescent belly laugh. Phantom memories. The car crash had taken
all three of them—sister, niece, nephew.
At baggage claim, Mitra stepped outside and bummed a cigarette from an
oily-haired businessman with a French accent. She hadn’t smoked in fifteen
years.
* * *
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