Managing a diplomatic household also meant responsibility for practical affairs: running servants, arranging education for children, handling correspondence, and sometimes dealing with financial pressures when circumstances changed. If the family did face financial strain after Habibollah’s death — as some family memoirs and recollections about the children suggest — Afsar-al-Moluk would have been the primary steward of the household during the crisis.
Afsar-al-Moluk raised two sons who later became prominent in their own right: Amir-Abbas and Fereydoun. Even when these boys attended French schools abroad and absorbed Western intellectual fashions, their mother’s imprint remained central. She appears to have insisted on Persian language and cultural identity at home. For a child growing up in a cosmopolitan foreign environment, a mother who preserved language, stories, and religious rituals provides an anchor — and this may be why Hoveyda’s recollections often return to the family home and his mother’s storytelling.
