I am the creation of two women: my mother and my grandmother. Both are Turkish and Muslim, and there, pretty much, the similarity ends. Though always close, and from a similar background, they could not be more different in personality, physique, and style. My mother, dark-haired, dark-eyed, and delicately built, is a diplomat (now retired); well-educated, Westernized, secular, modern, urban. She has a soft, kind heart, a great passion for music, and a tendency to panic easily. Had circumstances permitted, she would have become a professional musician, composing songs and playing oud, rather than spending years in the Turkish Foreign Ministry, where she was not the happiest, to tell the truth.
Grandma, on the other hand, is more Eastern, more traditional, more irrational, less educated. With olive-green eyes, fair skin,…
