AIAW Featured Writer: TAHA EBRAHIMI

Taha Ebrahimi - Writer

Asik arrived early in the morning with a suitcase at the London Sufi house, the khanikha. She had nowhere else to go. She had traveled overnight from Geneva. Everybody could hear her crying upstairs in Amir’s office. He shut the great wooden double-doors and Pari stood at the bottom of the stairs pretending to dust the banister, periodically making trips to the kitchen “to check on the tea” and report to the rest of us.

The Sufis often came to the khanikha to resolve personal matters. When I was young, my own parents had sought advise on the state of their marriage, whether they should get divorced. The Master also advised on whether a couple should get married. Every summer, there was a procession of weddings held on his property. He named newborns. He advised where the wealthy should place their money, where they ought to donate. My father once bought the Master an oven. If there were disputes between disciples in any of the khanikhas, the sheiks were required to telephone the Master, describe the situation and defer to him. The London khanikha was unique in that the sheikh was also the Master’s son and would eventually be the Master himself.

Behind the closed doors of sheikh Amir’s office, romantic matches were made, business decisions that ran Sufi khanikhas all over the world occurred, and a magazine was edited and published. Personal and professional had no separation but it always seemed that most often than not, the issues of greatest concern were that of love.

That morning, Asik’s cries woke the whole cavernous house on that London street, her weeping piercing the quite, making us all morose. We shared loss in common.

“It’s horrible!” said Pari, as she busied herself putting away dishes. Reza and I sat at the kitchen table. “That poor girl upstairs...” She clucked her tongue, bent over the fishbowl to feed her darling goldfish. “It’s all the fault of you men,” she said to Reza. “All of you: disgusting.”

“My grandmother often said the same thing,” said Reza, smiling and winking at me. He had begun eating cereal in the mornings, despite his longing for traditional Iranian feta and pita.

By the end of the day, everyone would know that Asik’s Sufi husband, Majid, had abandoned her in Geneva. “I hear,” Pari whispered, “That they were going on a routine walk and Majid suddenly said he needed to go buy new strings for his sitar and they simply went different ways. Asik returned back to their apartment and Majid was not home. She looked around and noticed that all his instruments were gone. He had packed them up! And Majid is a musician! He never leaves without taking all his instruments, so it was clear that he had fled!”

“He gives musicians a bad name,” said Reza, shaking his head, stroking his long gray beard.

Majid was one of the great Sufis, one of the travelers with long hair that poems are written about. He had lived in Africa at the khanikha in Cote d’Ivoire, a place I was headed myself. Like Reza, he had the traditional Sufi’s long beard and he wore white gowns like a wise man. Asik, an immigrant peasant from Kazakhstan, had married him against her family’s wishes and now she would have to return home shamed. Divorces were the end of a woman’s life in her culture and she would have little future. We heard her cry these words from upstairs. Nobody would want to marry her again. “Men!” Pari shook her head. “Sufi or not, they are all the same!”

We quickly scurried back to our business when we heard Amir’s footsteps coming down the stairs. He looked disheveled. His eyes were bloodshot. He turned to Reza. “Take the suitcase Asik has brought to the basement,” he said. The brown suitcase was torn in spots and clearly overpacked. I thought the suitcase belonged to Asik and wondered why Amir was asking that it be taken to the basement and not a sleeping room. Reza began dragging the suitcase to the basement door.

“Asik says Majid left that suitcase already packed in the house,” said Amir. “She says he left a note on it telling her to take it to the khanikha because he will return here some day for it. The audacity! To even assume she’d take the trouble to bring it here!”

I thought to myself: Asik did bring the suitcase; they were going to take care of it. The suitcase was put in storage and Amir walked out of the room, muttering, “Majid will have a lot of nerve to show up here, if he ever does!” But still, the suitcase was stored. Majid did not communicate with any family members. Nobody knew where he was. His only belongings were stowed in the one place he might return to: the khanikha.

Taha Ebrahimi

Jump to top