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house.
    Sohrab’s room had five wooden doors, each carved with intertwining vines and many-petaled blossoms. It was the largest room in Khanoom’s house, the only one with a water closet, and it took up nearly all of the second story.
    As a gesture of respect, Lili began each day by purifying her father’s hands. She would creep into Sohrab’s room and fetch the jug beside his bed, then go down to the courtyard and pump water from the cistern beside the hoz. Back in the room she quieted her breathing and watched her father as he slept. His eyelashes were so long that they rested on his cheeks when his eyes were closed. She longed to brush her fingers along them, but she dared not touch him for fear of waking him.
    She dipped a fresh cloth into the jug and then she began slowly to wash her father’s hands. Soft and exquisitely tapered, Sohrab’s hands were white and unblemished except for where cigarettes had stained two fingers of his right hand a deep yellow. Sometimes he stirred and sometimes he slept right through her ministrations. Because theritual was her only opportunity to observe her father closely, she always stretched out these moments at his side each morning, washing and rinsing his hands many times over before stealing finally from the room.
    At times there seemed to be no end of money in their house and Khanoom worried about where it had come from, but she was happy all the same, always busy buying things for the parlor—new vases, candlesticks, cushions, and carpets. One day Lili came home from school to find a suitcase in her bedroom stuffed with bills. “Do you like this money?” Sohrab had asked her. She glanced at the suitcase and said that surely she didn’t need it. At this he nodded and smiled warmly at her. “Some people will do a lot for this money. But you answered well. You are a good girl.” Then, before closing the suitcase and locking it, he pulled a single crisp bill from the pile and pressed it into her palm. She kept it in a box with her earrings and bracelets and never dared to spend it.
    No family of means would ever allow a daughter to walk in the streets alone, even for just three paces, so when Lili started school at age six Sohrab ordered his young manservant, Mamm’ali, to walk her there and back every day. Knock-kneed, skinny, and pimply, Mamm’ali did not speak to her at all, not a word the entire way, but just stared into the distance with her books and notebooks tucked under his arm. She was not at all sorry when Mamm’ali disappeared and instead a driver came for her each morning at seven thirty with her father’s black Chrysler. His name was Saeed and he was a young man of twenty-three with wavy brown hair, dimples, and sometimes a sweet smile for her, too.
    Then there were months when Sohrab gambled away all he had and the house on Avenue Moniriyeh became a different house altogether. Khanoom’s trinkets would disappear one by one from the parlor, and at night the family sat down together with only a bowl of unbuttered rice before each of them. If there was any meat, it allwent straight to Sohrab’s bowl, though he was known to drop some into Lili’s and Nader’s bowls as well. Saeed the driver disappeared and not even scrawny, pimple-faced Mamm’ali came round to fetch Lili from school. Instead it would be her own smartly dressed father standing by the gates of the School of Virtue with his silver-tipped cane and black fedora. When his debts grew truly substantial, Sohrab went out less often and was surlier than ever. Lili did not mind. It pleased her to have him walk her to and from school, even though his temper was far worse than even Mamm’ali’s. And at home she fluttered around him with tea and sweets, washed his hands each morning, and massaged his brow each night if he let her.
    Such intervals of poverty always threw Kobra’s resourcefulness into high relief. With a handful of flour, a cup of water, and a sprinkle of sugar she conjured a stack of