11. Aunt Banafsheh’s Food

I HAD NEVER SPENT TIME in the rice paddies. We had always driven by them and watched the women working. One day, I asked Baba to take me to Uncle Jafar’s rice farm in Neshta, which was near our orange grove. We ate lunch with all the workers at my uncle’s farmhouse. The shiny green colour of the vegetation and the smell of the rice paddies were comforting and relaxing. I was fascinated by the female workers, who showed up early in the morning with their babies wrapped around their backs to work in the rice paddies. They were bent over all day long in water up to their knees. They worked in rows and sang songs together as they harvested the rice. The view was spectacular, and the sound of their singing was magnificent. I wanted to join them and experience what it was like to work all day in those lush green paddies.

I had a brand-new camera, and I began taking photos of the rice paddies and the workers. The scene was beautiful: women in colourful clothes, working in rows, moving in unison among slender, deep green stalks waving in the flooded field.

First, I had lunch with the workers on the floor of the farmhouse balcony. Then, I followed the women into the water, and they assigned me a row. I bent down and began harvesting the rice side by side with the other workers. I suddenly realized, to my horror, that I was surrounded by snakes. I let out a blood-chilling scream and leapt onto the back of one of the workers. I could not get down; I would not get down, and I could not stop screaming.

Baba had to run to rescue the poor worker and peel me off her back. He carried me piggyback all the way out of the rice paddy. Everyone was laughing except me.

“They’re water snakes,” Baba explained. “They’re harmless.” He couldn’t stop laughing.

To my surprise, I realized that I was a true city girl, even though I spent so much time in our orange grove and in our villa by the Caspian Sea. Although the villa was remote—twenty minutes from the next town—it was nothing like country life. Servants and gardeners did all the work while I simply read books and magazines about the lives of celebrities in Iran, Europe, and America.

During those days, the favourite television show of many Iranian families, including my own, was Days of Our Lives, an American soap opera. It was broadcast once a week for an hour on Wednesday evenings. It was all Homa talked about all week. By this time, Vafa was the cook and Homa did the errands, including serving tea, an all day and evening job. But there was a rule: when Days of Our Lives was on, Homa was off the hook from getting anyone tea. She sat the closest to the television set, and she would make us all be quiet, even when the commercials came on. Maman and Baba sat with us too and didn’t let us distract Homa. She paid special attention to the Oil of Olay commercials because she was obsessed with her complexion, and she bought every product she saw.

“I told you that you are not allowed to waste your money on skin products. You have to save your money for when you get married and leave our house. This money will buy your independence in your marriage,” Maman always insisted.

When friends and relatives stayed with us, they gave Homa and Vafa huge tips. Maman wanted them to save their tips. But Homa did not listen to Maman, unlike Vafa, who loved and adored Maman and always tried to please her.

Vafa didn’t want me in the kitchen; he didn’t like me distracting him. But if he was cooking just for us and not for a big dinner party, he liked it when I sat in the kitchen and read him romantic stories from women’s magazines while he was cooking. Vafa became famous for his cooking among our relatives and friends. At first, he was asked to go to their homes when they hosted large dinner parties to assist the chef, but soon Vafa became the chef himself.

His specialties were Tehrani dishes cooked with spices like saffron, turmeric, cinnamon, and cumin. They were flavourful without being too spicy. Vafa’s tahchin was the best: he marinated boneless chicken pieces overnight in yogurt, saffron, onion, and salt. Rice was boiled in plenty of water and then drained. Yogurt flavoured with beaten egg yolks, saffron, butter, salt, and pepper was placed at the bottom of a pot while the cooked marinated chicken and drained rice were layered on top. This creamy, buttery, and saffron-flavoured rice was a crispy yellow-orange on the bottom.

Vafa remained Aunt Banafsheh’s student when it came to Northern Iran’s dishes, which were mainly vegetarian and seafood, flavoured with garlic and green herbs. They were different from Tehrani dishes. We did not use garlic or eat the northern dishes in Tehran because our dry climate was not forgiving of the smell of garlic on the breath. But we could not wait to go to Aunt Banafsheh’s house in Tonekabon—the whole place exuded garlic. She had a touch for making the best garlic pickles, and she had big jars of them in her attic. I loved watching Aunt Banafsheh grind herbs with a stone in her round clay dish. Her hands moved so quickly, mincing garlic or herbs. She even made her own rice flour by hand in that clay mortar. Years later, when food processors came to the market, she refused to use them. “They take the flavour away,” she claimed.

Uncle Jafar and Aunt Banafsheh’s oldest daughter, Ghazal, was getting engaged. This was the first engagement party among my Massoudi cousins. When the groom came with his family for the khastegari, Maman and Baba were invited to attend as well.

Typically parents negotiate the mehrieh and the location for the wedding reception. The mehrieh is a sum of money that the families of the bride and the groom agree upon; this is the amount that the husband would be obligated to pay if he were to divorce his wife.

Traditionally, the groom’s family pays for the reception hall, so they frequently offer to host it in a less expensive place. The bride’s family, on the other hand, often have a better place in mind.

For Ghazal’s wedding, the adults made all the final decisions, including planning a huge engagement party for over one hundred people. We decided to host it in our villa.

Our home was perfectly set up for such an event. When Maman and Baba were going over the plans for building our villa, Maman had wanted a liquor and tea bar off the kitchen big enough to host wedding parties. The architect had designed a window from the kitchen to open up to the bar area of the living room. There was a large half-circle bar for serving drinks, and the meals were handed through a window to the people standing behind the bar. Maman didn’t want heavy traffic going through the kitchen. Only the cooks were allowed in the kitchen, and they handed the dishes out through the window.

It took Aunt Banafsheh, Vafa, and Maman days and days to plan the menu for the engagement party. They were trying to balance the meal so it would appeal to both Tehrani guests, who didn’t like garlic, and Tonekaboni guests, who loved it. In the end, garlic won! Vafa was in charge of Tehrani dishes, and a chef was hired for Northern Iran dishes. But Aunt Banafsheh still prepared her specialties in advance, and Maman could not keep her away from the kitchen during the engagement party.

“Mahin jan, I just have to do one more thing, then I’ll leave the kitchen.”

Aunt Banafsheh could not bear the idea that the meals might not be made to her standards of perfection. The only one she trusted was Vafa. He made the Tehrani dishes better than even Aunt Banafsheh could.

The future groom’s younger cousins were very handsome. All of us girls did our best dance moves to see whose attention we could get. I was obsessed with boys. I had one crush after another, but the boys didn’t even know that I liked them. We didn’t call what we felt a crush; we called it love.

We weren’t allowed to have boyfriends. Girls had to remain virgins until they got married. I had a poster of a Charlie Chaplin quote on my wall: “Your naked body should only belong to those who fall in love with your naked soul.” Baba and Maman did not understand what this poster meant to me. I wondered if they ever even read it.

There was even a custom-made fabric that was used on the wedding night to collect the blood from the virgin bride, proof of the bride’s chastity. Once in a while, there was no blood on the fabric, and the family began to gossip. Then the bride would have to be checked by a doctor to find out if she had indeed been a virgin on her wedding night or not.

“You know what some brides do, when they are not virgins? They bring a small bottle of blood that they collected from cutting their fingers, and pour it on that fancy fabric. They pretend they were virgins.” I heard this at school.

“Those men deserve to be cheated like that. If they don’t remain virgins themselves, why do they expect women to stay virgins?” The girls and young women in my generation started having these kinds of conversations, but as a teenager, I didn’t really think that I had the courage to break this tradition.

I was in love with a young man, Navid, who lived on the same street as my grandparents. He had long curly black hair, deep black eyes, and a hairy chest. He used to wear a black shirt with the top buttons open and a big skull necklace.

“Mehrnaz jan, what do you find attractive in this guy? The jewellery he wears is so weird. This guy is a bum.”

“Baba, you are so old fashioned. Skull necklaces are in style!”