The Mouthful of Khánum

A retelling based on The Priceless Pearl by Rúḥíyyih Khánum.

In The Priceless Pearl Rúḥíyyih Khánum copies from her diary a sketch Shoghi Effendi once gave her of lunch time in the Master’s household. It belongs to the years before ‘Abdu’l-Bahá’s journeys to the West, when, she writes, the household was much more oriental in its habits.

At about eleven in the morning the maids would spread a cloth on the floor of the old tea room and bring in a huge round table with low legs. On it they put some metal plates and some spoons, never enough to go round, and scattered bread over the table. The Master would come in, sit down and call whoever was there to come and sit with Him: His sons-in-law, His uncle, His cousin. Sometimes He served the others rice with His own hand.

When He was about half through, Bahíyyih Khánum, the Greatest Holy Leaf, would come in from the kitchen, change her slippers at the entrance of the corridor and sit by the Master with a plate of tit-bits. Her place was always kept for her. After the Master and the men had eaten and left, the women guests, the children and the Master’s daughters came in. Then, Shoghi Effendi said, bedlam would break out, with the children crying and shouting and everyone talking at once. In the diary she records:

...what the grandchildren used to watch for [himself included] was the mouthful of Khanum’s food that she would give to this or that one as it always tasted best. They called it ‘the mouthful of Khanum’; the Guardian usually got it as he was a favorite of hers!

Elsewhere in the book Rúḥíyyih Khánum writes that the Greatest Holy Leaf watched over Shoghi Effendi for thirty-five years “as far more than a mother.”

A retelling based on The Priceless Pearl (Rúḥíyyih Khánum, 1969), chapter 1. For the fuller account, see the original.

Khánum, R.. (1969). *The Priceless Pearl*. Bahá'í Publishing Trust.