The Bastard of Istanbul

Banu is the eldest child in the Kazanci clan. She married Sabahattin, “a good man who deserves a better wife” (222). After losing the two sons that she bore with her husband, she could no longer stand living with him (222). Occasionally, she visits Sabahattin, performing chores in his home and cooking meals before leaving him again. Auntie Banu is a soothsayer who only accepts female customers and follows a carefully regimented life. To prove her commitment to her craft, she once stayed in her bedroom for 40 days, emerging only to eat bread and water and to use the toilet. She never spoke, except to recite the Holy Koran. 

Though her family thinks that her quirkiness may border on madness, Banu proves that her gift of clairvoyance is real when she exposes the long-buried secret of Asya’s paternity. She consults with a pair of djinni (genies) named Mr. Bitter and Mrs. Sweet. Mr. Bitter, a gulyabani, or a darker spirit, helps Banu to see Armanoush’s family history, particularly their experience of the Armenian Genocide and the way in which Armanoush is connected to the Kazancis. She also discovers how her brother, Mustafa, raped and impregnated their sister, Zeliha. When Mustafa returns to Istanbul, Banu prepares the cyanide-laced ashure that kills her brother. 

Otherwise, Banu is a caring person who often looks after others’ welfare. When Armanoush awakes from a long, jetlagged sleep, Auntie Banu goes to the kitchen to get her some lentil soup, assuming that she’s hungry. In another instance, she gently scolds Armanoush for “studying too much” and brings her a plate of peeled oranges. Knowing Zeliha’s secret, she cuts an onion and encourages her sister to smell it so that she can cry at Mustafa’s funeral, like the other mourners. Banu expresses a maternal sensitivity toward her sisters that they didn’t receive from Grandma Gülsüm.

Mustafa appears in the second chapter as an anonymous shopper at Fry’s Supermarket, eyeing a can of garbanzo beans in the International Foods section, when he piques the interest of Rose Tchakhmakchian. He has short, “sable hair…fair skin, a slim, well-proportioned body, hazel eyes, and a pointed nose” (40). He is living in Tucson. His grandmother, Petite-Ma, pawned her jewels so that he could leave Istanbul at 18 and go to study agricultural and biosystems engineering at the University of Arizona. 

As the only son in the Kazanci family, Mustafa was treated like “a precious gem” (31). Zeliha would later nickname him “a precious phallus,” in reference to how he was doted upon for no other reason than being male (315). From a young age, Mustafa got the sense that he ought to be treated like a king, which made it difficult for him to make friends at school, due to an “inability to socialize” (31). When Grandma Gülsüm tried once to throw him a graduation party, none of Mustafa’s classmates wanted to come. In Arizona, Mustafa is more subdued, though he has retained his sense of entitlement. He shares an apartment with an undergraduate from Indonesia whose aloof silence contributes to Mustafa’s loneliness. He is hounded by “voices inside his head” that will not allow him to forget the past he has tried to leave behind in Istanbul (45). 

He marries Rose and becomes a stepfather to Armanoush, though he doesn’t seem to have much of a relationship with his stepdaughter. Mustafa does not want children, as he believes he would make a terrible father. His relationship with Rose is tender, but not passionate, due to long-standing discomfort around sex. In his youth, Mustafa was both repelled by and obsessed with sex, masturbating compulsively and visiting brothels. His unhealthy obsession with sex, fostered by religious fanaticism and sexist ideas about his role as the only male in the Kazanci household after his father dies, culminates in his raping his younger sister, Zeliha.

Rose first appears in the second chapter as a shopper with a sweet tooth in Fry’s Supermarket in Tucson, Arizona. She is recently divorced from Barsam Tchakhmakchian, the father to her infant daughter, Armanoush, whom Rose renames “Amy” in an effort to identify more easily with Armanoush and to distance her from her father’s Armenian family. 

Rose is an attractive woman with “high cheekbones, gold blond hair, misty blue eyes [and] perfect ears” (36). Due to depression, she has gained weight as a result of eating a lot of junk food. She dropped out of college a year before to become a stay-at-home mom. She is a native of Kentucky who never fit in with her husband’s family, particularly due to the differences in their tastes in food. Rose prefers hot dogs, barbecue, and garbanzo beans. She meets Mustafa in the International Foods section of a supermarket and watches him shop for a can of the beans. She recognizes Mustafa as a student at the University of Arizona because she works at the Cactus Grill— “the big restaurant […] inside the Student Union” (41). 

As a mother, Rose is overprotective and needy, calling her daughter frequently when she goes to San Francisco to visit the Tchakhmakchians, as though she fears that the family will turn her daughter against her as she believes they turned her husband against her. Unlike Armanoush, Rose is not intellectual. She is also codependent and disinclined to travel internationally. Her marriage to Mustafa is comfortable but not passionate. However, she regrets not having had more children with him.

Armanoush first appears in Chapter 6, preparing for a date with the handsome law student Matt Hassinger. Both her Armenian aunts and her mother, Rose, discourage her from revealing on the date how intelligent she is. Armanoush is a bookworm with a fondness for fiction. She is also very beautiful, “[w]ith a well-proportioned body, delicate face, dark blond, wavy hair, huge gray blue eyes, and a sharp nose with a slight ridge” (92). Despite her attractiveness and the fuss her family makes over her date, Armanoush has little interest in any man other than Baron Baghdassarian, a cyberfriend in Café Constantinople, a chatroom for Armenians in the diaspora. 

She is the namesake of her great-grandmother, Armanoush Stamboulian, the wife of her grandfather, Hovhannes, who was a poet living in Istanbul when Armenians were first exiled, then killed. Though Armanoush likes San Francisco, she still feels lost there, despite the presence of her family. Both this feeling of disconnection and her conversations with her cyberfriends encourage her to go to Istanbul. There, she stays with the Kazancis—her stepfather’s family—and develops a close friendship with Asya, Mustafa’s niece and, as the narrative later reveals, her father. 

Armanoush arrives in Istanbul believing that Turkey is a conservative country in which people live by the strict tenets of Islam. She is surprised to see how Auntie Zeliha wears short miniskirts. She also notices how freely people drink alcohol in cafes, including Café Kundera, where Asya introduces her to her social circle and Armanoush engages in her first debate on the subject of the genocide. Armanoush’s journey to Istanbul not only brings her closer to her family’s long-lost history, helping her to better understand the grandmother who died while she was abroad, her journey also helps the Kazancis to engage with their own family history and to heal past wounds.

When Asya is introduced in the novel, it is her nineteenth birthday. She is the age that her mother, Zeliha, was when she gave birth to Asya. Asya spends her life being referred to as “a bastard” because Zeliha never revealed to her family the identity of Asya’s father, and Zeliha was never married. Asya is described as having “frizzy, sable, wild hair” and a large bust, like her mother. She also strongly resembles her aunts. She has Auntie Banu’s “almond-shaped fawn eyes,” her Auntie Cevriye’s “high forehead,” and Auntie Feride’s hot temper (64). She is surly, fond of existentialist philosophy, and loves listening to Johnny Cash. She spends some of her time writing a Personal Manifesto of Nihilism—her own moral guide for how to live. 

Like her mother, Asya hates showing vulnerability. She also dislikes other women. She is having an affair with the Dipsomaniac Cartoonist, a member of her social circle at Café Kundera, who reveals that he loves Asya and will divorce his wife to be with her after he is released from prison for offending the prime minister. Asya keeps the relationship a secret from her family, telling them that she is attending ballet classes or going to Chinese film festivals when she is actually going to meet him. Asya is unfazed by this offer due to her lack of interest in romance and her skepticism toward men.

Asya’s relationship with her mother is distant, though she desires more closeness, a prospect that becomes realer after her mother finally reveals the identity of Asya’s father. On the other hand, Asya develops a close friendship with Armanoush, finding a good complement in the Kazancis’ relatively innocent Armenian American visitor. Aside from Zeliha, she is the only member of her family who speaks fluent English. Her skills, however, are superior to her mother’s, so she acts as translator during Armanoush’s visit.

Asya eventually learns, to her shock, that her uncle, Mustafa, is her father—a fact that Zeliha reveals to her during Mustafa’s funeral.

Born Shushan Stamboulian in Istanbul, she is the daughter of the poet and children’s book author Hovhannes Stamboulian and his equally intellectual wife, Armanoush. In 1915, Shushan is exiled from her home and joins many other Armenians on a march that is to lead, ultimately, to their deaths. Shushan is the only daughter in a family with three children. When she is 14, she goes into an orphanage, where the cauldron-maker and former apprentice of her Uncle Levon, Riza Selim, discovers her and marries her, despite being 33 years her senior. They marry and she gives birth to a son, whom they name Levent. They originally wanted to name him Levon, after Riza’s master, but the clerk refused, alleging that the name sounded too “Christian.” 

Shushan has an elder brother named Yervant, who later finds her. They lost each other for years after being separated on the march from their home. He invites her to go to the United States with him, where the rest of their family awaits in San Francisco. She secretly packs a few belongings and meets her brother at the harbor in Istanbul. In addition to leaving behind her son and a husband who spent the remainder of his life resenting her, she also left behind the pomegranate brooch that her father had intended to give her mother as a present before being taken away by Turkish soldiers. She leaves the brooch in an envelope and instructs Riza to give it to their son.

In San Francisco, Shushan becomes the matriarch of a large clan, over which she presides with quiet, dignified authority. She is the mother of Barsam Tchakhmakchian and the grandmother of Armanoush. Rose, Barsam’s ex-wife and Armanoush’s mother, was intimidated by Shushan and resented what she perceived as Shushan’s meddling in her marriage. Shushan dies in her sleep while Armanoush is in Istanbul, looking for her grandmother’s childhood home.

Petite-Ma is Asya Kazanci’s great-grandmother and the grandmother of Zeliha and her sisters, though she is not related to any of the by blood. Petite-Ma lives with the Kazancis and is the second wife of Riza Selim Kazanci. He married her after being abandoned by his first wife, Shushan. Petite-Ma then became stepmother to Levent Kazanci, though he never accepted Petite-Ma as his mother. 

Petite-Ma was born in Thessaloniki, Greece. She moved to Istanbul with her widowed mother in 1923, when she was still a little girl. In her youth, Petite-Ma was blonde, and she has blue eyes. She married Riza Selim Kazanci—a tall, portly man 33 years her senior. The only item she could claim as a dowry was a Persian cat. She chose him because his agony over being abandoned by his first wife indicated that he could love someone more than himself, which made her feel safe. She and Riza never had children because they could not get the timing right. However, she believed that others’ judgment over their childlessness indirectly led to the sudden death of her husband. Meanwhile, Riza’s son, Levent, never accepted Petite-Ma as his mother. Petite-Ma took piano lessons from a white Russian who escaped the Bolshevik Revolution and became his best student. She was a gifted pianist who expertly played Rachmaninoff, Tchaikovsky, Mozart, and the works of other composers, particularly for distinguished guests who visited her home. 

By 2005, Petite-Ma is an elderly woman suffering from dementia. Asya one day overhears her playing a discordant song on the piano, as though trying to recover the gift she has lost.