The living room downstairs had a curved wall with custombuilt cabinets. Inside sat framed family pictures: an old, grainy photo of my grandfather and King Nadir Shah taken in 1931, two years before the king's assassination; they are standing over a dead deer, dressed in knee-high boots, rifles slung over their shoulders. There was a picture of my parents?wedding night, Baba dashing in his black suit and my mother a smiling young princess in white. Here was Baba and his best friend and Business partner, Rahim Khan, standing outside our house, neither one smiling--I am a baby in that photograph and Baba is holding me, looking tired and grim. I'm in his arms, but it's Rahim Khan's pinky my fingers are curled around a police shieldcould hold me upside down and drain
my gutschange your mind
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The curved wall led into the dining room, at the center of which was a mahogany table that could easily sit thirty guests-- and, given my father's taste for extravagant parties, it did just that almost every week. On the other end of the dining room was a tall marble fireplace, always lit by the orange glow of a fire in the wintertime.
A large sliding glass door opened into a semicircular terrace that overlooked two acres of backyard and rows of cherry trees. Baba and Ali had planted a small vegetable garden along the eastern wall: tomatoes, mint, peppers, and a row of corn that never really took. Hassan and I used to call it "the Wall of Ailing Corn.?
On the south end of the garden,
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