Like many other Iranians, my mother visits the cemetery at the end of each year, right before Nowruz—Persian New Year—to honor her deceased loved ones. She brings hyacinth bouquets in a rainbow of colors and Sabzeh—sprouted wheat she’s grown herself—to lay on the tombs. Hyacinth and Sabzeh are among the items that Iranians use to set their Haftsin, a table featuring seven symbolic items meant to bring health, wealth, love, and joy for the new year.

The last Nowruz I was in Iran, I drove my mother to the cemetery. That was in March 2014, and even then, I hadn’t visited my grandmother’s tomb for several years. That year I had a feeling it was time. “I want to say goodbye to Aziz Joon before going to Canada,” I told my mother. I called my grandmother Aziz Joon, a corrupted form of Aziz-e jaan in Farsi, a name that can be loosely translated as “dear to my life.”

At the cemetery my mother squatted beside Aziz Joon’s grave, took a small pebble from the ground and tapped it on her tombstone. “Mother, I’ve come,” she said. “Look who is here too!”

Tears slid down my mother’s cheeks. I squatted beside her, laid my index finger on the tombstone, and like my mother, whispered a prayer.

The cemetery was deserted, perhaps because it was so early in the morning. I heard a caw caw not far away, and when I looked up, I saw a crow high in a pine tree, and there, beneath the tree, two women sitting beside a tomb, their faces hidden by their black chadors. From the shudder of their shoulders, I guessed that they were crying and their grief still fresh.

I helped my mother to rinse Aziz Joon’s tombstone with a bucket of water and as I poured the water, she rubbed the surface with her right hand. I watched her gentle movements. It’s as if she were washing her mother’s face. Pressing with her fingers, she wiped the dirt off the name engraved on the stone, and Aziz Joon’s name shone in the rays of the rising sun—"Bilqis Khajevand,” and in brackets, “Behjat.”

My grandmother had been named after the queen of Sheba, Bilqis. But when she married my grandfather, he called her Behjat, which means happiness. She was the woman who’d brought joy and pleasure to his wretched life.

My grandfather was a highly educated man for his time. He had graduated from Dar-ul Funun, the first modern institution of higher learning in Iran. He spoke French and was the manager of a post office in Tehran. I never met him, but when I look at his photos I can see that he was tall and sturdy, a handsome man. He had a look about him. He had money and prestige. He seemed an ideal man for any woman. Even so, things had gone terribly wrong in his personal life. He had been married twice, and both wives had died childless. People would talk behind his back, saying he was under a spell that had killed his wives. By the time he was in his late thirties, and twice widowed, he was considered bad luck. No one at his social level was about to let their daughter become his third victim.

Then the mother of a girl he’d courted told him to marry a naïve and ordinary girl and divorce her after a month, to break the spell. This would be the only way, she told him, that she’d let her daughter marry him.

It sounds like a fairy tale, but that’s what happened.

My grandfather found Aziz Joon, a beautiful, so-called ordinary girl half his age. He married her, but when the month was up, and it came time to leave her, he couldn’t bring himself to do so. He was in love.

A photo of my grandparents in my mother’s room dates to their first months of marriage. Aziz Joon stands shoulder-to-shoulder with my grandfather. She too is tall and slim. Her eighteen-year-old face is so pure, with large hazel eyes and bony nose. A polka dot chador is draped over her hair. Is she shy? She seems so, from the way she holds the edge of her chador so that it covers part of her face. My grandfather stands with his shoulders back and chin up, in a European-style suit and peaked Pahlavi hat. A smile breaks out beneath his thick mustache. It’s clear he was delighted to have her by his side.

After cleaning the tombstone, my mother poured a bottle of rose water over the stone. The smell of rose infused in the air, reminding me of the smell of my grandmother’s prayer mat. I closed my eyes and envisioned Aziz Joon in her floral chador, saying her prayers, my five-year- old self sitting on her prayer mat playing with her amber rosary. She would gently push me away, showing me how to prostrate, and I imitated her right away.

We were inseparable, she and I. We lived in two houses facing each other, separated only by a big courtyard, and she would take care of me during the day, while my brother was at school and both my parents worked. Together, she and I cleaned, played, knitted, gardened, and cooked. Aziz Joon was a great cook, who made everything from scratch, cleaning, peeling, cutting and cooking vegetables, making all sorts of pickles, jams, yogurt, and cheese. The smell of her stews simmering in the stockpot and the taste of her golden Tahdig—a crispy layer of rice that clung to the bottom of pot—are alive still somewhere in my memories.

On nights when I couldn’t sleep I would grab my favorite fluffy duvet and tiptoe quietly down the stairs, careful not to wake my parents so I would not be sent back to bed, then close my eyes and run as fast as I could through the courtyard toward Aziz Joon’s house. The sound of wind blowing through the leaves of the Eucalyptus tree and the shadows of the branches waving in the moonlight scared me to death. But they would never stop me. I would bang with my fist on my grandmother’s window—I wasn’t yet able to open the door, and when Aziz Joon opened the door, she’d say, “Velkeleh, you are still awake?” She called me this after one of the characters in her stories. Velkeleh was a girl who avoided sleep to protect her siblings from a giant in the jungle who stole sleeping children.

I would find my place under her Korsi—a short square table with a heater underneath, covered with a heavy patchwork quilt my grandmother had made from worn-out clothes. (One of our plays with my cousins was to find our clothing fragments in that quilt. Those with more fabric in the quilt would claim that Aziz Joon loved them more.) I would settle into a cozy, comfy spot and wait, and she would bring me a glass of warm milk with biscuits. Then she would start telling me a story, “yeki bud, yeki nabud,” which roughly translates to “Once there was one and once there wasn’t one,” our version of “once upon a time.”

I don’t know if it was her fairytale-like marriage or something else that made my grandmother a great story teller. She was illiterate until the age of fifty, but she could spin a story like a bestselling author. There was a magic in her voice that kept me spell-bound.

My mother never had that magic. She would read books to me, but Aziz Joon would tell stories from her heart, from her soul. These are two different things, and my mother knew it. That was why, when we moved to England for my father’s studies, my mother had Aziz Joon to record her voice on cassette tapes. She knew that Aziz Joon’s voice and stories would be the one place where my brother and I would take refuge night after night in a foreign land.

I could never sleep while Aziz Joon told me stories. My eyes glued to her lips, I was all ears till she would say, “Ghesse-ye maa be sar resid, kalagheh be khoonash naresid”—And so hereby ends our tale, and the crow didn’t get to its lair.

“Why didn’t crow get to its lair?”

“Because he has more stories to tell before going home.” Then she would turn off the lights and put her hands over my eyes. Eventually, I would fall asleep beneath the roughness of her fingers, and tucked under the Korsi, I would dream about the stories.

My grandmother never ran out of stories, be they mythical or mystical, humorous or actual historical events. Not all of her stories were fairytales and happy endings, either. She had dark stories, which my mother wasn’t happy about. She would tell Aziz Joon not to tell these stories, but when my mother was not around Aziz Joon spun stories of betrayal, hatred, and enmity. A friend kills another friend because of greed, a son leaves behind a mother because his lover has lied, a father abandons his children in the jungle because of a jealous stepmother.

With no happy ending, I would get sad sometimes. “Why did this happen?” I would ask. “I don’t like the ending.”

“Life is not always fair, honey. You should know that,” was her answer.

Those summers were a lot of fun. They began with Aziz Joon moving two king-size wooden beds out of storage and placing them beside each other in a corner of the yard. She covered them with a Persian carpet, thin mattresses, and cushions, to make it comfortable for her guests to sit and lean back against the yard’s thick brick walls. In the afternoons, when the sun’s strength began to wane, she would water the garden and get ready to host her neighbors. The afternoon breeze mixed with the freshly watered plants to make a pleasant environment that no air conditioning could compete with.

Aziz Joon would cut watermelons and prepare snacks of cheese and bread. Then came my favorite part, when she prepared her Russian samovar. She began by placing lighted charcoals in the vertical pipe to heat the water in the brass bowl. When the charcoal was glowing steadily and the water boiling, she would place the samovar on a silver tray at the corner of the great bed in the yard, to the right of where she herself would sit. Then she’d put two spoons of tea leaves in a porcelain teapot, add cardamom, rose flowers or chamomile, and fill the pot with boiling water. The pot was then placed on the top of the samovar, to brew the tea.

Her neighbors would show up one by one, each with something to do during the visit. Some afternoons they bought kilos of mixed herbs, like mint, parsley, dill, cilantro, and tarragon, and while chatting, they would trim the stems and chop them. Other days they peeled twenty kilos of eggplants, or trimmed and chopped green beans. From time to time, when they’d take a break, Aziz Joon would serve tea with pastries, snacks and watermelon.

On the afternoon they broke sugarloaves, Aziz Joon would spread out a clean cloth on the beds and set out tens of tall cone-shaped sugarloaves shaped like snowy mountain peaks.

“Besmellah”—in the name of God—Marzi khanum, our next-door neighbor, said. Taking the first sugarloaf, she would break it into pieces with a hammer. The other women would then use their sugar nips to break the pieces into sugar cubes. In minutes our courtyard was filled with the sounds of breaking sugarloaves and women’s chattering. Clouds of dusting sugar were flying all about, the yard as sweet-smelling as a confectionary shop.

I would sit cross-legged beside Aziz Joon and dip my fingers into the pile of dusting sugar, and when nobody noticed, I’d lick my sweetened fingers, one by one.

On this day, Aziz Joon would serve only tea. “A scalding tea is just the ticket,” she would say. Pouring freshly brewed tea from the teapot into a thin-waist glass on a saucer, she would gauge the color of tea and adjust its strength by adding boiling water from the samovar. When the tea was perfect, she would pass it to her guests.

My other entertainment was to watch how everyone drank their tea. Each had her own style. Some, like Marzi khanum, would ask Aziz Joon for a darker, stronger tea. Marzi khanum wouldn’t wait until that tea cooled off. Her hennaed nails would lift a sugar cube off the cloth and put it between her teeth, then sipping the hot tea, she’d slurp it in delight. I wouldn’t take my eyes off her mouth till the sugar cube melted slowly as she took the second and third sips.

Mrs. Zahedi, by contrast, liked light tea. She would dive into the pile of sugar cubes, push some away with the back of her fingers and, selecting the biggest one she could find, bite down on it to cut it and get just the right amount. Then she’d raise her glass to her lips, and sip through the sugar cube. And so on, for the next sip.

Aziz Joon tended to pour tea into the saucer to let it cool off, then dip a sugar cube in the tea and drink straight from the saucer. Like all other things, I would imitate her way of drinking, but instead of melting the sugar in the saucer, I kept the cube inside my mouth. I liked the way it sizzled slightly when I placed it on my tongue. Then I’d slurp my tea from the saucer, and with each sip, another sliver of the sugar melted.

At the end of the day, the women would pack up the sugar, dust off their clothes, wash their face and hands in the yard basin, and leave with their share of sugar cubes.

“Now, bring all the sugar cube bowls,” Aziz Joon would instruct me.

So I’d run all over the two houses and grab the sugar bowls to fill with the remaining cubes. All the while, Aziz Joon was cleaning the samovar to make it ready for next day.

When I was six, our lives changed dramatically. We sold both houses and moved into a three- bedroom apartment. The courtyard, garden, summer afternoons with charcoal samovar and winter nights under the Korsi all disappeared. Aziz Joon came to live with us and became my roommate. I didn’t understand why all the changes, but I couldn’t ask for anything better than to sleep head-to-head with my grandmother, and drink in her stories every night.

Aziz Joon, though, was not so happy. Once I found her sitting by the window, watching the pouring rain. “I’ve missed the sound of rain falling on the roof and dripping from gutter,” she said. We lived on the first floor of the building, and could hardly notice the downpour.

She would miss her home of many years. Since marrying she had lived in that house. All her children had been born and grown up there. She held their wedding ceremonies in its courtyard. Her grandchildren grew up playing there. She knew everyone in that neighborhood. The baker, the butcher, the greengrocer all called her by name, “Behjat khanum.” And now, that whole world was gone.

The samovar was also not so lucky. It became another decoration in our living room. Every Nowruz my mother would disconnect its parts, dab a globe of tomato paste on its brass surface and wipe the tarnish off. Then she would put the gleaming samovar back together again, where it sat as décor until the next year.

For three decades, the samovar sat dormant.

My mother came to Canada to visit in 2018, her luggage filled with sweets and savories, with nuts and chopped herbs for stews, fried eggplant, and so on. I had told her not to bring a thing.

“What’s this?” I asked when I found an irregular shaped package under clothes, buried in her luggage.

“Aziz Joon’s samavor,” she said. “She left it for you. It’s in her will.”

“I know. But what can I do with it?” I said, trying to unwrap the odd-shaped package.

“Put it somewhere as a decoration,” my mother said, looking around. “How about there?”

She pointed to a corner of the kitchen.

I shrugged unwillingly.

“Is this still functioning?” my husband asked.

“It should be,” my mother said. She sounded doubtful. “We haven’t tried it for years.”

A few days later we tried to use the samovar in our backyard. In addition to the samovar, my mother had packed thin-waist glasses with saucers, a porcelain teapot with painted roses, and its matching sugar bowl. Sitting in the backyard, gazing at my grandmother’s treasured samovar after all these years, hearing the sound of boiling water and smelling the rose flowers in the brewing tea, I felt something happening in my heart. I couldn’t put it into words.

Aydin and my mother sat chatting, but I wasn’t listening to them. My body was there, but my soul was somewhere in the distant past.

Taking a sugar cube, I set it inside my mouth, poured tea into the saucer, and blew on it like Aziz Joon would do. Then I took a sip, and I was five-years-old again, sitting beside Aziz Joon on the great wooden beds in the open courtyard, drinking tea, my face and hair covered with dusting sugar.

I had lost so many things with my immigration. I felt lost and displaced. I’d felt my broken heart would never heal. But in that moment, sipping tea again with my grandmother’s samovar, I felt a piece of my heart come back to me.

“Everything might be gone,” I thought, “Aziz Joon, motherland, and home, but their memories, love, and spirit will live through me.”

Now I take the great brass samovar to every picnic and barbeque. The first thing my friends say is, “Don’t forget to pack the samovar.” It is the heart of our outdoor gatherings in Canada, like it was for Aziz Joon and her friends.

My grandmother’s charcoal samovar that created memories for three generations is making more, for future ones. Just like her stories. When my nephew, Sahand, was born, I digitized the stories on Aziz Joon’s cassette tapes, thirty-five years after they were first recorded. I sent my presents to my brother’s newborn, “A gift from Aziz Joon,” I wrote on the CD.

Aziz Joon left me with two legacies—one tangible, her samovar, and one intangible, the art of storytelling. I will be forever in her debt.