Chapter Two: Life in Transition: From Old House, to New

One might think that because I experienced revolution, war and exile in my twenties, I am entitled to use the term “upheaval” to describe that period of my life. Truthfully, I would rather use the term to describe my childhood. I was born and came of age in the ‘60s and ‘70s--a time of major transformation in both my homeland and my household. The industrialization and intensified modernization prompted by Iran’s rapid growth shaped economic and social developments that were felt and seen in the lifestyles and kitchens of every urban, middle-class Iranian family.

Throughout my childhood, my family’s economic status improved in step with the positive changes in Iran, rewarding my parents’ hard work with an increasingly comfortable and stable life-style.

Just a few years before I was born, my family had finally settled down in Shiraz in our first house, after spending a decade moving around Iran, following my father’s job. My parents had lived in ten different cities some bordering Iraq and Afghanistan, and had had nine children, six of whom survived beyond the age of three. By the time I was eight, my family had moved from a house with exterior kitchen and privy, to a fully modernized home. We went from a manual water pump to an electric one, and eventually hooked up to a municipal water pipeline system. We also upgraded from a charcoal-burning brick stove to propane gas and finally a natural gas range. Soon after I turned eight, the results of my father’s hard work enabled our family to afford a new house, a modern life and the advanced equipment that came with it.

At the center of all the changes that I witnessed during my childhood and adolescence, large and small, stood our kitchens and the food we made there. I am a child of roghan nabaati, vegetable oil. Each time a child fell ill without an obvious reason or burst into tears upon receiving a mild injury, an elder would mutter that they were “a child of vegetable oil.” The animal fat used as the cooking oil of choice in my mother’s generation and before continued to be perceived by many to have a higher nutritional value than its “tasteless, smell-less, useless” successor, hard vegetable oil. In fact, vegetable oil was so disreputable and unwelcome that a popular song cleverly rhymed the major brand, “ghoo” (meaning swan), with “righoo” (meaning puny or frail). “Roghan nabaati-e ghoo, makhsoos-e bachehh-ye righoo!” Swan vegetable oil, for sickly puny kids! Even many years after vegetable oil came to dominate the market, animal oil--also known as “yellow oil,” “Kermanshahi oil” or “the good oil”--was still used sparely, often for dressing rice. That practice, too, was gradually abolished in our home; partly because animal oil was becoming less and less readily available, but also because its unpleasant smell provoked a collective outburst of protest from us righoo children all. And it wasn’t until I was a teenager that liquid vegetable oil replaced hard vegetable oil in most kinds of cooking.

Life and Food in the Unnamed Alley

The first house my parents purchased in Shiraz in 1955 was located in a lower-middleclass neighborhood at the end of a short narrow alley that led to the long and slightly wider Hakim alley. Hakim, in turn, led to the eight-meter-wide Naader Street, which seemed like a highway compared to our tiny, nameless alley.

Food intended for children was usually carried on carts, perhaps to entice them to buy it. Ice cream was the year-round favorite, while unripe almonds soaked in salted water, with their furry skins washed off (chaghaleh badoom) and bright, green, sour plums (gojeh-sabz) and small, green, sour apples were the top choices for spring and summer. We would squeeze the green apples patiently until they were soft, and stuff them with salt, black pepper and dried mint and savor them for hours in a cozy corner. The squeezed apple was deformed alright, but an extremely tasty one-- sour, salty and aromatic.

“Hakim Alley was so overcrowded with little devils, no cab driver risked entering it at any time of the day or night--even if he was offered a triple fare--for fear of hitting a child and getting into trouble,” my older siblings still boast. The events that took place in Hakim Alley were described so often by my big brothers and sisters that I feel like I was an eyewitness.

Our old alley resembled a mobile food market operating noisily on a long, overcrowded playing field open to motor and bicycle traffic. Hakim Alley and all of its smaller, adjoining alleys each hosted about twenty homes, each housing an average of seven permanent residents and numerous frequent visitors. A good majority of these roughly 150 residents consisted of children and adolescents who hung around in the alley whenever they were not at school or in bed. Our family, in particular, functioned like a House of Commons because we had one representative for each of the alley’s age groups.

My eldest sister, Pari, who was eighteen by the time I was five, hung out with an all-female group who snuck cigarettes behind locked doors, snubbed the girls and boys who were just a bit younger and mothered or bossed around the youngest ones. My eldest brother, Hossein, was fifteen, and a member the boy’s soccer team, whose hobby was teasing and annoying the younger girls like my next eldest sister, Atefeh, thirteen at the time. These younger girls had their own volleyball and dodge ball teams, and competed in various bouts of tug-of-war and a tough game called “Rescue” in which players split into two teams of six each. The “hunters” had to capture the “prey” one by one and carry them to a designated area, where the prey would have to leave the game. The challenge for the prey team, in addition to avoiding capture, was to touch hands with a captured teammate and call out “rescue” before the hunters got them to the designated spot, freeing both prey teammates to once again run for their lives.

My third sister, Naubi, age ten was part of a multitasking group of boys and girls who busily engaged in hopscotch, sandman, freeze tag and jump rope. Finally, my other older brother, Mohsen, age seven was an enthusiastic member of the noisiest and nastiest group, all boys from seven to twelve. They played soccer and haft-sang –a primitive form of cricket that involved knocking down “haft sang”, or stack of “seven stones”, and running a designated distance before the opposing team had a chance to reassemble the stones. They also spoiled the girls’ hopscotch games, dared each other to try newly-acquired swear words and occasionally ran errands for the older boys. Mohsen always volunteered for any opportunity to raise hell. He was also partially responsible for the alley’s reputation as a vehicular danger zone. More than once, he darted out of the smaller alley and was grazed by a passing car, only to spring back onto his feet like a bouncing ball and run away for fear of being caught and punished by an older sibling. When my group, the youngest children were not playing pretend indoors, we were wandering off or getting into the older kids’ games. Sometimes we were reluctantly included, and other times cruelly rejected.

Whether exclusive or collective, our games and activities were the blend of kindness and meanness that seems to be such an integral part of growing up. Secret sweethearts sometimes ended up as life partners. Spontaneous allegations were randomly made against unfortunate families, like the family whose father was considered an old scamp and rumored to get drunk on Friday nights and fart in a rhythm while calling out his children’s names, “My Laleh..., fart-fart, my Kaveh..., fart-fart” “as a way of entertaining his family,” children said “because they are so poor.” There were bad days, when a window was broken or a prized ball was ripped and all hell broke loose, and there were good days when sixty or so children united to rescue the neighborhood’s dog and her puppies from the city officials’ stray-dog-killing operation.

Watermelon War

No matter the day or the hour, our small alley was always alive with neighbors, vendors and peddlers of all sorts. In those days, many goods and services in our neighborhood were supplied by regular and seasonal peddlers, most of whom traveled on foot. They carried their products on their backs, balanced them on donkeys or pulled wheeled carts and wagons through the streets.

Peddlers sold the aromatic green herbs, sabzi, used in large quantities by most families on a daily basis for cooking and eating as a side dish. Armfuls of fresh, blue-green, feathery dill and musky coriander were punctuated by sharp wafts of mint and tarragon and the delicate, emerald tickle of basil, the high, clean whisper of watercress and baby leeks that were then purchased and taken inside to be cleaned, rinsed and sorted. They were then chopped and mixed by the deft hands of a mother, a sister or a naneh, to be used for different purposes. They might be fried for a shrimp or fish dish (ghalyeh) or a mixed-herb stew (ghormeh sabzi). Various types of sabzi were minced and mixed with rice in herb rice (sabzi polow) and cabbage-mixed rice (kalam polow). Abundant piles of sabzi were also chopped and sundried during the summer and fall for use in winter cooking. At its simplest, an assortment of seasonal sabzi, freshly sorted, washed and fluffed on a nice platter along with radish and scallions was often served with lunch and dinner throughout the year, as long as a pair of those deft hands was willing.

In addition to selling food, mainly fruits and green vegetables, peddlers provided services with the desperate determination and persistence of a modern day Jehovah’s Witness. There were junk buyers, a job predominantly performed by the working class Jewish minority in Shiraz, who traveled by foot. “Kola, mola, hoooo,” they chanted “We buy jackets, pants, suits, knives, bowls, plates, books; we buy used watches, radios, chairs, carpets.” We also had the namaki, the salt man, who traded salt in exchange for old bread. Bread, the stuff of life, was never thrown in the garbage. That would have been an ungrateful, disrespectful and wasteful act. Stale bread was collected by the namaki to be processed and fed to stall animals. There were also cart-toting knife grinders and even peddlers offering entertainment like hand-driven merry-go-round and seasonal gypsy musicians and fortunetellers. Whether you were purchasing food or fun, bargaining was as much a part of each transaction as honking the horn was an inseparable part of driving.

In summer, peddlers hawked stacks of white mulberries, sour cherries, apricots, honeydews and watermelons--chanting temptations like, “Bebor-o-bebar hendooneh,” (cut and take a watermelon). Generous, confident vendors would let you see and taste the red sweetness of a watermelon before asking for payment, but such offers were not always made, which meant that you must employ special knowledge or skill to distinguish between a good watermelon and a bad one.

Finding the best watermelon takes keen eyesight and careful hearing. You flip the melon in the palm of one hand a few times, tapping the surface in different places with a finger. If the melon produces a hollow sound and your finger bounces back, it will be ripe and sweet. If it gives off a solid, bass sound, it’s no good. A good watermelon, by Iranian standards and definition, is a bright, vibrant red inside, sweet in taste and fragrance. Perhaps most importantly, it is firm and crisp enough that when you take a bite, a juicy rush of intense flavor invades your entire mouth. I still employ this flipping technique to select a good watermelon, and more often than not get the best that the Montreal market has to offer—however inferior that may be compared to the watermelons I remember.

I was playing in the alley one day when a conversation between a peddler on a donkey and several young women grew heated and loud, attracting spectators. The shouts of everyone involved and the testimony of witnesses who later helped reconstruct the story in some detail revealed that the peddler was accusing a young woman of having stolen one of his watermelons. He was convinced that one of the women--who was wearing a traditional, multi-layered Ghashghayi skirt (similar to those of the Azari)--had hidden a watermelon beneath its long, loose fabric. The peddler had barely mentioned looking “there” for the proof when a rage-stricken young male member of the woman’s family attacked him with the force of a lightning bolt. The peddler, obviously no match for the furious young man, quickly retreated behind the jostling crowd.

While I didn’t witness the physical confrontation between the two, I heard the flow of swear words and threats well up from the roar of the crowd, and the scene registered in my six-year-old mind as the ultimate violence.

“I’m going to suck your brain out of your nose, you sonofabitch,” the young man screamed, looking everywhere with bulging, bloodshot eyes for the peddler --his switch blade slicing the air. “You mother-fucker, I’m going to spread your guts before your eyes and skin you alive.”

I dashed towards our house, tears running down my chalk-white face. I ran with trembling knees and a pumping heart, screaming hysterically, “blood… sword…blood… sword…” then passed out in the middle of our courtyard. I woke up to the familiar, soothing voices of my mom and elder sister and my younger brother’s amused smirk. They made me sip water from a glass with a gold ring settled at the bottom. I remember feeling important and grown-up to be receiving an adult’s shock-therapy treatment, but even with the gold-touched water I was distressed for days.

It took me longer, much longer, to understand that the young man’s outrage had less to do with the accusation than the suggestion that the peddler might attempt to look under the woman’s skirt or even touch some part of that forbidden area—an unthinkable violation of the laws of female chastity (naamoos). As for my certainty that I had seen blood on the street, everyone agreed that a watermelon must have broken open and spilled its flesh on the ground in the midst of the turmoil. This could well have been the case, although I would like to think of myself as more creative and imaginative than that!

Magic Box of a Kitchen

Life inside our Hakim alley house was defined by the minor discomforts and onerous chores that went hand-in-hand with that home’s rudimentary equipment. With Dad away in southern ports, working to provide for the family, and Mom preoccupied with her sewing and embroidery classes, the household chores--including taking care of six children--were shouldered by Saleheh and my half sister, Maji. Human labor was so cheap and abundant that most middle-class families could easily afford domestic help, so we were also assisted by regular and irregular errand boys, a laundry lady and a gardener. Mom supervised Maji and Saleheh in important matters, such as the children’s hygiene and what made it onto the shopping list, but when she could, she let them run the kitchen as they saw fit.

If you asked Maji or Saleheh, they would tell you that Mom was a tyrant. I was only three when 23-year-old Maji was married off against her will, so while I do not have any recollection of her life with us before her marriage, I can imagine she felt dominated, or at times, even overwhelmed by Mom’s authority. But, I think it’s fair to say that if my mother was tyrannical, it was in the manner of a “liberated woman”, long before the concept made its way to our world.

Let me explain. Consider the year 1961, some twenty-five years into Reza Shah’s forced unveiling of women as part of his modernization scheme and twenty years before Khomeini brought the veils back down as a part of the Islamization of the country. My mom, a relatively young mother of six, was dressed up and heading off to tend to one of her business-related matters. She was waiting for a cab when a young cyclist made a pass at her--not an unusual occurrence, as young men harassed young women on the streets in Iran as far back as anyone could remember. They only stopped after the Islamic Republic of Iran, established in 1979, started penalizing such behaviors with public flogging.

Mom was wearing a pair of high-heeled, stiletto-type shoes that seem designed specifically to prevent women from running. Undeterred, my mother chased after the lad, and, with uncanny coordination, grabbed his bike by the back of the seat with one hand while using the other to slide a shoe from one of her feet. She then drove the pointed heel into the man’s head hard enough to make blood spray from the wound. She proceeded to hail a cab and, with the help of the driver, threw the bicycle into the trunk and the young man into the backseat. She took him to the nearest hospital and paid for the stitches--the poor fellow’s price for his ignorant behavior.

It is no surprise that my blurred memories of life in the Hakim alley house are dominated by the preparation and happy consumption of food. Each meal seemed a brief, still moment to treasure between endless episodes of walking, tending, carrying, washing, canning, sun drying, peeling, frying and cooking. Each dish, rolling away in endless variety along the length of the clean, cotton sofreh, was so memorably delicious that even as a child, I never ceased to be amazed at how such fine food could come from such bare and basic facilities.

The house was a one-story building enclosed by high, thick walls. At one end of the property, about three steps off the ground stood the main building. It was comprised of one small and three large rooms and a rarely-used washroom that all opened onto a small, square, carpeted hall where we spread the sofreh and took our meals. The largest room was where mom held her classes, the small one was for visitors and the other two were shared by all nine of us to live and sleep in.

At the other end of the property and directly across from the living area was a baariksazi: a row of individual, adjoining rooms that received significantly less sunlight and included the kitchen, the room where we bathed, the charcoal room, the tool shed and the privy. In order to go from the comfort of the living space to any of the basic but vital facilities in the baariksazi we had to walk twenty meters across the open area of the courtyard or hayat.

An internet search of the term hayat today might produce romantic descriptions of a Persian paradise with breath-taking pictures of the ancient cypress trees growing in the historical homes of the most affluent. While they were not typically miniature Gardens of Eden, the hayat was the heart of every home. Our yard was a sun-filled space enclosed by brick walls, where we gathered in the evenings on carpet-covered wooden beds or on bamboo mats spread on the ground. Adults would come there to soothe the aches from their daily chores or, in good weather, to joyfully welcome and entertain guests. The outdoor gatherings were often scented by breezes off a nearby jasmine shrub and the perfume of freshly washed tiles. Guests were served seasonal fruits from colorful bowls, and tea, accompanied by “dry sweets” (different types of cookies), “wet sweets”, (a variety of pastry-like or deep fried delicacies), and salted aajil (a luxuriant mix of pistachios, roasted seeds and peas, walnuts, hazelnuts and cashews.) On hot, summer nights we slept on the same beds and mats covered with mattresses.

The two borders of our tiled yard that did not meet buildings hosted long flowerbeds that cradled persimmon and sour orange (naaranj) trees. In the spring, my mom and sister spread sheets beneath the trees to collect sour orange blossoms (bahaar-e naaranj). They used them to make sherbet (a drink of sweetened, diluted fruit juice) and jams, or sundried and preserved them for the coming year to be mixed with loose, black tea. The fact that I have never liked bahaar-scented tea’s invasive fragrance does not prevent me from longing for those days of falling blossoms each time I open a neatly packed parcel of bahaar from my relatives in Shiraz.

In the center of the yard was a polygonal, concrete pond or hoze that stood about a meter off the ground and had a gutter running all around it. It was just big enough for me and Mohsen to “swim” in it on sultry, summer afternoons. Once or twice a week, the “Aab-hozi”--another kind of street peddler---emptied the pond, bucket by bucket, into the flowerbeds. He then washed and refilled it with clean water, so that the laundry lady, on her appointed days, could use the pond to rinse the clothes before hanging them in the sun to dry. That rinsing and hanging came at the end of a very long and tedious day of scrubbing loads of dirty pants, socks and sheets, piece by piece, in a big, iron basin installed on the top of a charcoal-burning brazier that kept the washing water warm.

“Those were easy years,” Pari recalls, “compared to a few years before, when we first settled in Shiraz. When we bought it, our house had water-pipes, but they were not yet linked to the city’s water system. Nobody’s was. We used a well that we had in the yard. In the very beginning, the well had a manual pump, but a few years later we installed an electric one, which made things a whole lot easier. The water was pumped out of the well into a water tank, which sat in the kitchen right next to the stove and adjacent to the bathroom. The position was ideal because the water received heat from the stove and was close to where hot water was needed and used most. The water tank was actually piped out into the kitchen sink, the bathroom, and the privy, which were just few meters away. Obviously, the closer the pipes were to the tank and the stove, the warmer the outgoing water.”

I suppose that explains why taharat (washing, as opposed to just wiping in the privy) in the winter was not for the faint of heart. Washing one’s own rear, with the use of hand and water, is among the first things you learn in your two-legged life as an Iranian and the very last cultural trait you lose. I know perfectly assimilated Iranians in the Diaspora who remain helpless in only one place - public toilets with no access to private running water to practice taharat.

Our small, dark, comfortably warm kitchen in the Hakim alley house seemed to my young mind like a magic box from which my naneh Saleheh the magician pulled the most dazzling dishes. Heaps of greens, whites and pinks were brought into the box and transformed into edible delights in an incomprehensible way. Daily meals, along with the required utensils, were carried from the kitchen on big round trays all the way to the living space across the courtyard. Whatever remained after the meal made the trip back via the same route. The dishes appeared, as if from a puff of smoke, onto the empty stage of our sofreh and disappeared with a flash of hands. I was the youngest girl of a big family-- carefree and adorable, with few responsibilities-- yet attentive enough to the rhythm of my home to appreciate this everyday magic.

Our kitchen consisted of three essential pieces of equipment: a water tank that stood on the cast iron counter, a stove, and a sink--all of which were lined up against one wall under a flue. We also had a refrigerator—a rare possession in Shiraz-- but only because my family had moved it from our former home in the hot Khuzestan province. The fridge was treated as a luxury item, kept in the living place for the express purpose of making ice cubes to dispense to neighbors upon request. Later, we acquired a propane gas stove, which we placed next to the fridge in the living area and used only occasionally for light tasks such warming milk.

The hard-working stove in the Hakim alley home’s kitchen was a thick, rectangular box made of bricks and clay built off the wall like a counter, at a convenient chest height. The brazier-like foundation was divided into three equal parts by two cemented bricks and was fired with charcoal right on the top, inside the box, in one or more of the partitions. The pots and pans were placed on top of the brick-stands over the fire, and a small kettle or teapot could be placed directly on the hot ashes. Stand-alone oil burners that could be easily and quickly adjusted were used for cooking small amounts of food or for taking the cooking into the yard. Heating up a meal or frying fish was achieved on the barely “portable” stove my parents referred to as “galvanize” that was basically a multi-plate base burner or coal stove.

One of the seasonal culinary events of my childhood that remains bright in my memory is waking up at 3:30 a.m. to the dizzying fragrance of freshly cooked lentil rice (adas polow) with juicy, fried onions and chicken, or any of the dozen kinds of mixed rice. I sat in front of a full spread of dishes and delicacies, surrounded by family with eyelids drooping. We ate quickly, finishing up before some mysterious deadline, and went back to bed just before dawn’s light. Shortly afterward we got up to face a normal, albeit hungry day that was marked by yet another, even more elaborate and colorful spread at sunset. The evening sofreh swelled with a parade of dishes. First came mashed garlic mixed with cooked spinach and fresh yogurt, almond pudding and hot water and dates. Then, a wholesome, yet light main meal followed that might include any of the dozen kinds of aash, a thick mixture of cooked grains and herbs with or without meat, or aab-ghoosht, a spicy stew of meat, potatoes, onion, haricots, chickpeas and dried lime. This main meal was accompanied by hot-from-the-bakery flat bread and plenty of green sabzi. Dessert was a saffron rice pudding with cinnamon (sholeh-zard), or deep-fried dough covered with syrup and slivered pistachios formed in two different shapes (zolbia and bamieh).

The first meal of such a day is called sahari, literally “of dawn”, and the second is called eftaar. The occasion, as you may have guessed, was Ramadan--the Muslim fasting month and one of the few times in the course of the year when Islam popped up in our house.

In those days, Mom made all the children who had reached an appropriate age fast. They woke up to eat at dawn and then tried not to eat or drink again until sunset, at eftaar. I was not that age yet, and was not obligated to get up at dawn, but one would have to be in a coma not to wake up to the smell of drifting scents and the noises of rattling dishes and rumbling voices. Add to that the laughter of eight people and a prayer-chanting radio, and there was just too much excitement for us youngsters to miss. We were able to enjoy both sahari and eftaar without having to starve between the two meals like the adults did. Nevertheless, since the adults were not cooking and eating between the two meals, we smaller children had only leftovers to gnaw on all day. In our minds, this did not count as real food, so we were indeed fasting in our own way.

During the same period, my Mom made an effort to ensure that all the children learned and said their prayers five times a day. She sent us to a pious female friend who offered free, private religious tutoring. Her efforts succeeded only for a short while. They were doomed to fail, largely because she herself did not say prayers and fasted only irregularly. She loved observing Ramadan however, for the wonderful foods. The rituals of Ramadan, moved with us to the new house, but they eventually stopped. As we grew up, we grew out of the ideas behind them.

For my semi-traditional, semi-secular, middle-class parents and many families like ours, Islam “came around” a few times a year--casually, unapologetically and inconsequentially. That was long before Islam hijacked the 1979 revolution and invaded every aspect of some 50 million people’s personal, social and political lives. Outside Iran, in the Diaspora, well intentioned “culturally sensitive” people often assume that since we were born in a country perceived to be Muslim, we must be practicing Muslim. “This is pork!” they may warn in a restaurant, believing that we might die on the spot upon mistakenly eating a forbidden meat.

New Neighborhood, New Food Adventures

When my family moved to Shiraz to settle down in the late ‘50s, my father hoped that he would spend the remaining years of his career in its hospitably moderate climate. However, the household expenses, coupled with Mom’s business ventures forced him back into the solitude of hot, humid Bandarabaas for the benefit of a higher salary. In 1968, my mom decided that we should climb the social ladder and move uptown to a larger, newer and more modern house. By this time, my father had earned and saved enough money for Mom to pursue her ambitions and for him to benefit from the country’s robust economic development.

The neighborhood we moved into was so quiet and deserted, so seemingly kid-free, that it could have been alienating if not for the big, bright, brand new house waiting to be filled with curiosity and joy. Our house was located on a wide avenue called Hedayat, off Ghasr-edasht Street--one of the oldest streets in the city--in a relatively affluent neighborhood. Hedayat ran east and west, and was lined on both sides with townhouses behind rows of cypress trees and a joob, the narrow stream of water flowing through a trench that separated the sidewalk and the street.

Our neighbors were few in numbers because the houses were fairly large and scattered, and because none of their homes were as populated as ours. Thankfully, the street venders and menders gave Hedayat a life of its own, albeit not a very vibrant one compared to the crowded Hakim Alley. It was in this part of the city that I saw women peddlers for the first time, save the gypsy women fortunetellers in our old neighborhood. There was old naneh shiri who brought milk (shir) to our door in the days before milk was pasteurized and sold in bottles. A middle-aged woman, poor but cheerful, sold bath soap and rubber gloves while nomadic women walked their donkeys carrying goatskins of doogh.

Doogh is a popular, yogurt-based drink found in many parts of the Middle East. It is made by beating plain yogurt until soft and then diluting it with flat or carbonated water. In Iran, we often added salt, black pepper and dried mint for a cool drink that would, either rejuvenate you or make you drowsy depending on which version you chose. The doogh that the nomadic women brought to our doors, only in the spring, was processed in a traditional way and tasted completely unique. In the process of making butter from yogurt, the yogurt was beaten in goatskins until it was divided into a solid butter and liquid residuals, or doogh that was naturally carbonated through fermentation. Those afternoons when we sat eating rice and meat kebab for lunch while the doogh woman passed by, chanting, felt as lucky to me as finding a four-leaf clover.

While throughout my childhood I hated school, I could not wait to start the school in our new neighborhood, where I would be in second grade. It housed both elementary and junior high in the same building, and was one of the few coed schools in town. I stayed there for eight years and left only when I had to move on to the high school. I particularly liked my new school because it was only a six-minute walk from home, which meant that I was allowed to come and go on my own and experience the sweet taste of independence. I was also free to walk to the nearby stores after school and explore their unlimited world of new tastes and familiar flavors arranged in exotic pairings.

The food stores near schools typically carried and seductively displayed the kind of “fun foods” that weren’t available in the ordinary corner stores that dotted residential areas. Among these items were dried sour cherries (albalu khoshkeh); dried fruit rolls (lavaashak), and kashk, oh the darling kashk! This is a dairy by-product used in liquid and dry forms in many Iranian dishes which we particularly loved, and devoured, as a snack, rolled into small balls. The freshly made kashk of my childhood was shaped into huge, palm-sized balls and supplied to Shiraz-based stores in the spring by the migrating Ghashghayi tribes of the Fars province.

The balls were just firm enough to hold, yet soft enough that they melted under a gentle bite. “Too much kashk makes you sleepy and dull and dumb,” the adults, especially school officials would reprimand when they caught us with a kashk-painted, clown-white face. “They are not clean; you can see for yourselves there is even animal hair in them!” We did see, but could not care less.

Another hot spot close to my school was the small ice cream store named Fard (3). It was a tiny shop that could only seat ten people and was always full. The chubby, bald owner conducted most of his business through a slot in a mini cabin that opened onto the sidewalk where he served takeouts to students. Twice a day, at noon and in the evening, when school shifts ended and during class breaks, a flock of children swarmed the tiny window, shouting and climbing over each other to reach the shopkeeper’s hand. He made sure he had a good grip on our five rial coins before handing over to us the Iranian-style wafer-sandwich or cone of saffron ice cream or the cups of faloodeh that we ordered. Faloodeh, a famous Shirazi iced dessert, is made of frozen cornstarch in the shape of short, thin vermicelli noodles and is eaten with either lemon juice or flower syrup (araqh).

Fard also sold fresh carrot juice and another famous Shirazi drink, carrot juice and ice cream (aab-havij bastani)--essentially a big glass of carrot juice with two scoops of ice cream floating in it. This was the choice of my brother and I, his two most faithful customers, for many years when Mohsen wanted to treat me out of his pocket money. I jabbed a long spoon into the glass, dunking the floating ice cream into the juice one moment and sneaking a taste the next. A sip of the tangy carrot juice was flush with chunks of heavy cream, and we stretched out the experience not wanting it to end. Those happy moments stirring glasses of aab-havij bastani remain so special to me that never again in my adult life in Shiraz did I want to consume this delicacy, for fear of altering those sacred memories.

My quest for the longest and most flavorful route home, testing this and tasting that, remained the primary motivation for attending school through my junior high years. I accompanied small and large groups of classmates and friends to the half-lit Café Lido a few blocks down from the school, where we fooled around or flirted depending on our talents and interests under the pretext of having coffee and Napoleon tart (shirini napeloni).

In addition to the nearby food stores in our new neighborhood, there were street venders who sold snacks, finger food and fast food from makeshift stalls, stands and pushcarts, huddled at every busy intersection and street corner. Their juicy skewers of lamb liver were touted by adults as so “nutritious, good and healthy” that we could hardly develop a heart-felt liking for them. Freshly grilled kebabs tucked between layers of fresh bazari or sangak bread, nestled next to long stems of heavenly Iranian basil and hot broad beans served in small, disposable bowls exclusively in the winter.

My sharpest memory of street food embraces another winter taste unique to Shiraz--steaming turnip or shalgham. The most popular turnip stand in our new neighborhood, which we frequented often on cold days, was in front of Cinema Paramount. The turnip vendor installed himself and his wheeled cart in the middle of the wide sidewalk. He started at 4:00 in the afternoon, when the second school shift ended, and peddled until the end of the last movie showing, around midnight. The turnips were steamed in a gigantic pot that sat in a big hole in the cart above a portable, gas-burning stove. The vendor skillfully covered and uncovered the pot in a rhythm that allowed him to both adjust the cooking temperature and send the peppery steam wafting into the cold air among the pedestrians. The scent enveloped everyone that passed by, wrapping us in an inviting blanket of sudden warmth.

The colder it got, the less visible the vendor became, hidden by flock of customers pressing him. “Shalgham-e daghe vallah; nakhordanesh gonahe” he would cry, “By God, it’s so hot; it’s a sin not to try it!” He charged by the bowl, each filled with tender, egg-sized turnips topped with plenty of salt and powdered black pepper. It was torture, when walking home from high school alone, to resist the temptation to stop at the cart and treat myself to an on-the-spot bowl. Back then, flirting with girls and young women was practically a national pastime for men both young and old. That particular corner in front of the movie theater hosted gangs of restless boys who could get pretty excited, especially when an erotic movie was showing. At their least harmful, they whispered or hurled “matalak,” playful, lusty and, at times, insulting remarks at passing girls. We felt less intimidated traveling in groups, so my older sister and her friends would take me with them when they stopped for a bowl of shalgham. Even in larger numbers, we risked some nasty mouth burns as we nervously swallowed the hot turnips so as not to appear purposeless, thereby more prone to matalak and other forms of assault.

The turnips we made at home never tasted as delicious, especially if they were meant to cure a cold either as aash-e shalgham, a chicken soup of mixed turnips, spinach and grains, or on their own. My mother, a devotee of antibiotics like many Iranians, believed that turnips had an abundance of these bacteria-busting compounds. She swore by their miraculous ability to cure colds and a long list of other ailments. The prescription was simple; eat a bowl of turnips and you will feel better.

Unique House Indeed

It strikes me how our new house remains more populated, in my mind, than the Hakim alley home--despite its considerably larger size. It may have to do with the ways that the more distant memories fade, but more likely it is because our new house was a modern, integrated place that embraced walking, talking, cooking, eating, washing and sleeping together within a single structure. The new home’s design prompted a major lifestyle shift. Our days were no longer divided between the living area and the baariksazi. The kitchen was a bright, beautiful, spacious haven inside the house, as were the bathrooms and washrooms. We did not blindly approve of all the changes, but selectively incorporated some while modifying or rejecting others, such as our decision to abandon our indoor toilet and build an outhouse.

The new house was a large, two-story building with seven rooms that served no predetermined purpose. The neatly enclosed, tiny space under the stairway was immediately allocated to Saleheh, who was thrilled to have a space of her own. She always kept the dark room sparklingly clean and fully decorated with various pictures she cut from old magazine and newspapers. We rarely remembered to bend down in time when ducking through the short, metal doorway to pay her a visit, and Saleheh grew a permanent lump on her head from the same mistake.

Over the years, each room’s function altered as it switched hands, except the one room whose purpose remained constant: the food storage room. It occupied the strange, windowless space on the second floor which was too big to be a linen closet and too small to be a room. Mom had shelves installed in it and kept it filled at all times with canned and bagged food supplies, as if there was an imminent threat of famine. (This was before the revolution and war made this a real possibility in Iran).

Our new home’s two stories were topped by a third level: a large, asphalt roof enclosed by a meter-tall wall with a small storage area in one corner. That open roof space provided us with a vast, yet cozy place to sleep on summer nights, beneath a sky brimming with splendid stars that hovered mere fingertips away. Roof sleepers were free from the fear of gigantic, flying cockroaches crash-landing on them in the middle of the night because the beasts couldn’t fly that high. The younger children would slide all the way down the roof stairway’s handrail, braving the height for the fun of dangling in the air. The most mischievous would throw a water balloon from the rooftop down to the sidewalk below, right in front of a passerby, aiming precisely to soak but not to hurt.

Like most houses in Iran, ours was a north-south building. In Iranian urban architecture, the direction in which houses are oriented relative to sun exposure is of vital importance and significance, with a north-south layout being the rule and east-west the exception. Additionally, the courtyards in such houses always faced south so that the rooms where life commonly unfolded caught the most sun. Houses located on the opposite side of an east-west street were built in a “mirror-reflection” design, with those on the south side of the street opening directly to the sidewalk and those on the north side featuring yards between the street and the house. The passionately held preference among Iranian expatriates for a south-facing house over an east or west facing one persists. The fact that we now live much higher up in the northern hemisphere where city structures, climate conditions and street layouts are essentially different from those back home makes little or no difference--the preference remains.

The new house in Shiraz was located on the southern side of Hedayat Street. A large, metal gate welcomed visitors into a small front yard (used as a car port) which lead to the house. In the back of the house, at its south end, the building met a modest courtyard or hayat with a proportionally petite hoze surrounded by flowerbeds. The larger, brighter, more desirable bedrooms were all washed with southern sun through windows that opened onto balconies that overlooked the yard.

My parents soon extended the backyard, along with its hoze and flowerbeds, to almost triple its original size because our family had more extensive outdoor needs than the builder had not predicted. There were an array of summer visitors to be fed and lodged; big, stinky fish to clean and scale and many week-long tomato paste-making and lemon juice-extracting rituals to perform--not to mention wedding receptions for daughters and sons.

Our new yard was not perfumed by jasmine shrubs, as at the Hakim alley house. Instead, we had several fruit trees which could be depended on to produce succulent black cherries, tart green grapes, wild pomegranates and sour oranges. We picked the riches on a daily basis rarely allowing the fruits to accumulate enough to be gathered by an elder and served in a basket. The new, extended hoze--surrounded on three sides by flowerbeds--was a four-by-two meter pond about one meter deep, made of blue, ceramic tiles. When I was ten years old, I used to sit at its edge for hours in what must have looked like a pose of deep meditation as I patiently waited to spot a floating ant. Using a short stick or a dry leaf, I then rescued it from the surface of the water and joyfully watched it come back to life under the sunbeams on the yard’s hot tiles.

By the time I was 25, the blue ceramic tiles of the hoze had slightly deteriorated, but I was still able to extract some joy out of it. I would invite my friend and her three-year-old son--along with my nephews, aged four and eight--to play water -splashing games all summer afternoon. Apparently the sweet memories of this simple time are not mine alone. After more than twenty years, my nephews still fondly recall the fruit salads served by “Auntie Afsaneh’s pool.”

The Hedayat house had apparently been custom-built by a professional home builder for himself, and then sold to us after some convincing. It was unique in many ways, and stood apart from all the similar-looking houses in its section of the city. We were told that the builder, a contractor with the National Iranian Oil Company, had built his golden-age dream house in Shiraz with the company’s “most expensive, rare and top quality” materials, employing a “modern design vision.” This builder was not, however, an architect.

I can still remember his sales pitch, perhaps because my mother repeated it many times to visiting relatives and friends as a way to explain the house’s “quirks”. “The foundation is so hard and durable, you cannot hammer a nail into any of the walls,” he stated with pride, intending to highlight a positive feature. “Show me a door, a knob, a window-frame,” he boasted “show me floor covering like this in the entire city and I will give you the house for free!”

The laminated staircase and vinyl-tiled floors which flowed from room to room in distinct patterns and colors were admittedly beautiful, but what the builder prided himself on most, next to the house’s durability, was his vision. “I am giving away a treasure! You know why?” he whispered conspiratorially, “I have inside information that the city will have natural gas distribution lines running in the streets in a couple of years. This house you’re standing in already has gas plumbing installed!” He then gleefully spread out the oversized blueprint of the house’s plumbing layout, showing my parents all the underground and inside-the-wall steel gas lines branching in all directions from the main, as if waiting anxiously to reach out to every room. “Once the gas flows through, all you have to do is hook up the main: no ugly external plumbing, no messy digging in the house! You will be so grateful to me!”

The builder was absolutely right. Due to its proximity to the oil refineries and gas fields, Shiraz was among the first cities to receive affordable and convenient natural gas from the National Iranian Gas Company. He was also right about the house being fully equipped with gas plumbing, except that all the pipe connections were wrapped with water-sealing teflon tape that allowed gas to leak freely, like a drip irrigation system, as soon as the gas began to flow. This led us to make a sad, untimely and unexpected renovation. A team of contractors, plumbers and workmen pick-axed the truly hard cement floor--sweating and swearing over each square foot--to reveal and repair the faulty plumbing. The builder could not have been more accurate when he said that the house was durable; so durable that it resembled a nuclear bunker. Even the plastic floor tiles were glued so securely that they refused to come off in one piece, if they came loose at all. And yes, they were unique too. We could not find anything like them in the entire city. As a result, rows of new, unmatched tiles crept around the house along the plumbing lines, serving as permanent scars.

Perhaps the builder’s most grievous architectural error was the indoor toilet, which had been conveniently placed on the second floor next to the bedrooms--facing Mecca. There is no written law in Iran against installing a Mecca-facing toilet; it’s just common sense to avoid doing so. One faces Mecca to say their daily prayers, not ease nature.

My parents had already purchased the house when they noticed this grave error, so there was not the slightest thing they could do about it at first, but the orientation was not the upstairs toilet’s only problem. It soon proved to be victim of another, arguably more serious design flaw. It simply could not live up to the needs of the entire population of the house, let alone those of a never-ending army of visitors and guests. In what seemed like an emergency rescue mission, my parents hired workmen to build a temporary outdoor toilet, and later, a proper permanent one at the far end of the extended yard.

Unfortunately, the new toilet was built with external plumbing, which meant that we had to wash ourselves with scalding water in the summer and icy water in the winter. Within a few years we were all tempted to overlook the improper positioning of the indoor toilet and take advantage of its comfort in the middle of the night or for minor business, but it resisted us. The more we battled it with long sticks and hand pumps, the uglier the punishment, in the form of overflow. Eventually, this useless indoor toilet was completely abandoned, except by the occasional innocent guest unaware of its malfunction.

A Modern Kitchen to Feed Many Mouths

The Hakim alley house’s small, magic box of a kitchen transformed into the spacious, bright, busy command center on Hedayat street that featured the advanced technology that went along with my family’s new configuration and status. We now had a fridge, a gas-burning water heater and two stoves next to the built-in, stainless steel sink. Two rows of stylish, white cabinets stood at attention over roomy countertops made of a material called thermo vinyl that proved to be extremely durable. These countertops were quickly filled with china sets and cookware, as well as a variety of appliances, including a blender, a lemon squeezer and a grill.

The house in the Hedayat street house was gradually equipped with a stunning array of modern amenities imported from Europe or manufactured by the newly-established Iranian industry. A washing machine, an air conditioner and our first black-and-white television set joined sofas, a dining set (reserved only for our chichi guests) and bedroom sets. Our family was not rich enough, or perhaps modern enough to be among the first in Iran to buy such luxury items as a dryer or a vacuum cleaner, but when it came to kitchenware, my mother was a pioneer. She bought one of the first chest freezers on the market, many years before frozen food made its way into Iranian households. We used the freezer to store large stocks of bread and leftovers for the poor who frequently came by. We also used it to preserve homemade frozen food and various mixed, chopped herbs. The microwave oven did not arrive in Iran until 1989. By the time it would have found its glorious place on our kitchen’s shelf, I was no longer in residence. By then I was in Montreal trying to obtain a second-hand microwave at the Saturday garage sales, compliments of “economic downward mobility.”

Our Hedayat street kitchen also featured a rare and novel character, namely my father. After his retirement, Dad finally moved to Shiraz to join us for good in 1969, when I was nine. My father was among the few who occupy an entire space on their own without ever dominating it. In the kitchen he would casually knot an apron around the waists of my mom or sisters while they washed dishes and meticulously tend the tea while singing a pop song--spontaneously replacing the lyrics with his own mocking ones. He spent hours on his feet cutting the flat bread he had just bought into equal, palm-sized pieces for the day’s consumption. He used a pair of large, brass-handled scissors that had survived my mother’s sewing classes to snip the thick, undone dough along the bread’s margins into tiny bits for the pigeons.

“Mohammad, have you fed the pigeons?” Ameh--my father’s eldest sister who loved him dearly--once asked. Upon hearing an affirmative answer, she babbled disbelievingly, “Well, I see they’re still pacing up and down, so…”

“They’re pigeons, for heaven’s sake!” My dad snapped defensively. “Of course they pace. What do you expect them to do? Leave for the office?!”

A few years later, when Saleheh had left the family in the wake of a serious dispute with Mom and we had been pared down to a small family of four, every morning began with a closely-shaved, fresh-smelling, handsome Dad cheerfully rattling the kettle against the background of the seven o’clock radio news broadcast. The delightful scent of half-burnt bazari bread curled from the stove burner as he served my brother and me breakfast. At that early hour of the morning, Mohsen and I resembled a pair of meek sheep in a hurry to finish our milk, cheese and nuts, or butter and jam with tea. My father watched as we took our daily pocket money from where he had placed it on the kitchen countertop and sent us out the door on our way to school, all the time trying to the best of his ability, but failing miserably, to appear as uncaring, unloving and dismissive as he could.

During my adolescent years in the Hedayat street house, the headcount was as fluid as the tides. As one sister married and left or a brother went off to university in Tehran; another sister married and stayed on temporarily, accompanied by her husband and newborn while yet another sister went off to continue her studies in another city as the first went to live in a village and start her career as a teacher, and so on and so forth. The meals were typically so big that our standard stove could not handle our daily pot of rice on any of its top burners, so we bought and installed a large, stand-alone gas burner for the routine, heavy duty cooking. That was a particularly appealing stove because its height allowed the cook to actually sit on a short stool right in front of it while frying loads of onions or preparing any kind of time consuming and attention demanding stew-like khoresh.

For many years, Maji--my eldest sister from my father’s first marriage who married beneath her in every sense thanks to my parents, but still kept her spirits as high as the CN Tower--visited us every-other Friday with her three children. On those Fridays, we had plain rice and home-made kebab (chelow-kabaab). The menu was constant, nonnegotiable and considered by all to be a treat no matter how the kebab was made. Depending on the season, the cook’s mood, or the news of the day, the kebab might be exquisitely charcoal-grilled in the back yard, prepared in the electric kebab maker or flattened in a pan and fried—yet somehow still called a kebab.

Another reason behind oversized pots and pans was that we hosted a constant stream of visitors from all over the country and beyond, who stayed for a few nights, to a couple of months and some for several years. You see, the decades of ‘40s and ‘50s had seen a gradual but steady enrichment of my family’s culinary repertoire of traditions from Iran’s Southern and Western cities. My parents’ circle of friends and acquaintances expanded and diversified accordingly, and I grew to appreciate the effects of both phenomena during my own adolescence in the ‘70s and ‘80s.

Dad’s friend’s son from Bandarabaas lived with us throughout his high school years, while a female cousin from Tehran stayed a single summer to attend an art course. A gorgeous, male second cousin stayed a month to booze around at a safe distance from his parents. And my sister’s university classmate came with her newborn baby from Botswana to live with us for six months until they could go back home. Many groups of visitors, like my aunts and uncles and their families from Bushehr, spent the summers with us in order to take advantage of the change in weather and to tend to their pains and problems in the well-equipped, reputable Shiraz hospitals. Some of my favorite guests were Dad’s acquaintances from Dargahan, a tiny, free trade port on the island of Qeshm in the Persian Gulf.

Our Dargahani friends usually came to Shiraz in search of a good doctor. They always arrived laden with gifts including imported jeans and other clothes for each family member. They brought exotic, colorful foodstuffs: boxes of mangos that we unabashedly hoarded and varieties of dates not found in the Fars province, such as the dark, soft, slender dayri, crunchy, yellow unripe dates called khaarak and the syrup-soaked, slightly overripe rutab.

Another unique food item our Dargahani friends brought was a kind of miniature, dried shrimp barely bigger than a grain of rice once its tiny tail and legs had been brushed off. This was one of my mother’s favorite choices when she wanted to prepare a hassle free yet homey lunch. She soaked the shrimp while chopping and frying onions. She then rinsed and added them to the stir fry with black pepper, turmeric and dried lemon powder before folding the delicious mixture into a pile of freshly-steamed rice. The hint of the sea drifting over the sidewalk from our kitchen window never failed to charm our neighbors.

Our Dargahani friends appeared just as exotic as the delicacies they brought. The men’s clothing corresponded to the heat and humidity of their homeland. It consisted of white cotton dishdaashehs exactly like those of their neighboring Arab countries beneath white, cotton, knit skullcaps like the zucchetto worn by the Pope. The women’s wardrobe was both more complicated, and more elaborate. It included the traditional mask, the borqa –despite the heat and humidity of their homeland- with a bright, airy, knee-length headscarf wrapped at the neck like a shawl to leave their busy, henna-painted hands free. A colorful dress reached to their knees over beautiful, richly gold-embroidered trousers. Their henna-painted feet peeked from within comfortable sandals. Dargahani women were among the few rural minority groups whose traditional clothing saved them from the Islamic dress code imposed on all Iranian women shortly after the establishment of the Islamic regime in 1979.

The ebb and flow of visitors came and went, sometimes with barely enough time in between to wash the sheets and prepare the beds for the next group, and it was not uncommon for the sojourns to overlap. My Tehrani artist cousin made my father’s friend from Dargahan sit as still as a statue for hours to draw his portrait, with an outcome that the model determined was nothing short of disastrous. At other times, my Bushehri aunt would stay just a few more months, out of the kindness of her heart, to baby-sit for my sister’s classmate, the Botswanan, all the while employing a sign language only the two of them could understand.

Most of our guests that had travelled from other cities depended on my father and later, me and my siblings, for advice in the fine art of doctor shopping. Our Dargahani friends, in particular, relied entirely on my parents because they knew no one else in the region. Even the language they spoke, a variation of Persian, was not fully intelligible to the uninitiated.

All guests, regardless of their specific intentions, hoped for a comfortable stay in a welcoming home, which my parents provided through the serving and offering of food, or paziraie--the undisputable core of one’s hospitality. I gradually came to understand that food is much more than something that joyfully fills your belly. Food is a tool so versatile that it can be used to ignore and insult or to convey affection and respect—a dual edge that makes it both a blessing, and a burden.

The meals we prepared in the kitchen and served in the living room on the long sofreh were always consumed by a noisy crowd, each two people carrying on a separate conversation. The standard fare was some mix of rice and meat for lunch and a lighter meal served with bread for dinner. The more favored the guests or the shorter their stay, the more colorful the sofreh with its side dishes and appetizers called mokhalafaat: sabzi, salad, condiments or torshi and mixed yogurt. Guests were invited to help themselves to the food, but were rarely left alone to have their meal in peace. Small and large dishes were rushed along the sofreh, shuffled around and passed from one hand to another. All the while, the cook or the hosts extended a plate of sabzi, or a bowl of torshi, or dumped a good portion of mixed rice on someone’s plate without warning, urging, “Taste this one,” “Eat up,” “Don’t you like it? Have more then.” Scooping this and slipping that onto one’s plate was not a practice reserved for guests; elders did it with the younger ones until they grew old enough to protest. We used to tease my aunt, much to her annoyance, because she always reached for a plump, boneless piece of meat in the stew, only to plunk it down onto the plates of the family’s boys.

In the summer months, this gaiety was carried into the courtyard. In the evening, as soon as the sun had retreated to the rear part of the yard, we sprinkled water on its tiles and gathered around a table piled high with delights. Scarlet watermelon blushed next to cool lemon juice sherbet and slender, crunchy cucumbers. Plump, tender peaches and moist apricots seemed to dwarf the small, sweet, pale-red cherries. I am convinced that fruits smelled much richer back home than they do anywhere else.

Ignoring the rare, unwanted visitor was easy: you simply did not make much fuss over the quantity and quality of food and mokhalafaat offered to them. In our house, the hospitality rules were not too complicated. Food was provided and offered with a smiling face in an unpretentious and relaxed manner, without much ta’ruf involved in the process. Iranians are not the only people who say things out of courtesy that they do not mean, but we have a specific name for it: ta’ruf.

Ta’ruf must involve at least two people, and acts like a dance of insistence and resistance that is intended to make the addressee feel welcome and wanted. Ta’ruf occurs when you greet someone using specific, stilted phrases; or when you ask a friend to stay over or offer them a ride when you may not truly wish for them to accept your offer. Ta’ruf can also be performed when you hold out a tray of sweets to your guest for the third time in half an hour. As a person with skilled ta’ruf manners at the receiving end, you are expected to say “no” several times before accepting the offer, whatever it might be. Problems can arise when you do not want to submit to the offer at all in the first place but your rejection is perceived merely as ta’ruf.

Since the offering of food is a central part of Iranian hospitality, food-related ta’ruf, despite being meant to please and welcome, can get downright annoying, especially for short-tempered people with little appreciation for cultural traits. Our Bushehri relatives would mock Shirazi people as excessive ta’ruf junkies whose participation was largely phony. Likewise, the stereotype believed by some of the capital-dwelling Tehranis suggested that the “small town people,” the shahrestani (everybody except them) used excessive ta’ruf, suggesting a quality of mixed warmth and simplicity.

All of this is sheer nonsense and intra-national prejudice. I have been in turns pleased, overwhelmed and perplexed at the homes of many Tehrani and non-Tehrani alike, both back home and in Montreal. Consider my assimilation-resistant brother-in-law, originally from Tehran, who is offended if he is not served some tea within the first ten minutes of his visit. He considers a host asking whether or not he would like some tea an indication of their reluctance to bother with making it and serving it to him. If you visited someone in Iran and they asked you upon arrival, “Would you like this or that?” or “What should I get you?” instead of simply going and getting you whatever they had at home, you could speculate to some degree of certainty that the person in question had been exposed to and influenced by some aspects of western culture.

At my brother-in-law’s home, as well as the homes of my perfectly integrated Iranian friends from different cities in Iran, ta’ruf and paziraie manners are strongly retained, perhaps even enhanced. The stream of mixed nuts, peeled fruits, cheese and dip, ice cream and tea with homemade cake flows between lunch and dinner. More importantly, the hosts never sit down and relax once they have brought you a sample of everything in their fridge and on their shelves. They keep passing out a tray of this, holding out a bowl of that, all the while urging you to eat. Another aspect of the complex ta’ruf ritual requires the host to be extremely modest about their cooking skills, causing them to deflect any praise of the results.

I am not critical of ta’ruf, and definitely do not disapprove of paziraie. In fact, I would rather have food pressed upon me than have it be denied. No matter how engaging my host’s tales or how entertaining the choice of music, I still feel neglected if I am offered a scrap of a snack in lieu of a proper dinner. As for the inter-generational, inter-cultural food manners, I suspect my Canadian-raised nephew secretly enjoys being served a small plate full of peeled apple and orange, although he does not appreciate it when his dinner plate is invaded when his mother tries to land a fine chicken breast on it.

Doom and Gloom Inside Out

The years of family flux, abundant guests and scented kitchen were followed by the dim years of the 1980s in my household and homeland. The first year after the Islamic-revolution and the beginning of the Iran-Iraq war coincided with the loss of my father to cancer and a couple of my siblings to their emigration to Europe and Canada.

Saleheh had also left us permanently (or we had left her, to be more precise) at that point. Over the course of at least a decade after we moved into the Hedayat Street house, Saleheh had left in protest several times after disputes with Mom. Over those years, she managed to develop a network of families that would allow her to stay on as a live-in servant. Saleheh always claimed that she was a tenant or a guest in those houses, and while she moved several times in as many years, she always stayed close enough so that the children in our family could visit her regularly. Usually, Mom’s temper would eventually abate, and one of us would fetch Saleheh back home after a few weeks or months.

Once my father had passed, the absence of his interventions and aura of respectful authority made the thought of returning to a life under the same roof with my mother almost unthinkable to her. The physical distance from our family gradually earned Saleheh something she had never owned before--her time. She started going to adult literacy courses at night (once she learned to sign her name as “Mrs. Abdi,” she was satisfied with her accomplishments); and most importantly, she began to be paid for her labor--for the first time in her life.

Saleheh began working at temporary, seasonal, but stable and increasingly high-demand jobs. For almost all of the religious mourning ceremonies (be they for Shitte Imams or deceased relatives) and celebrations (paying off a vow or celebrating an Imam’s birthday) held by Bushehri or other Shiraz southerners, Saleheh was hired to “sit on tea,” as she put it. On several occasions I attended those memorial ceremonies and saw a beaming Saleheh at work. She sat on the carpeted kitchen floor of a house or salon among five or six simultaneously running samovars. She poured hot water into one kettle, added some black tea to a tea pot, watched the steeping and simmering processes, ordered someone to wash the glasses, poured tea into the glasses, ordered someone else to take the trays out to the crowd, all the while bragging about some incident in the past as she proudly took an unreserved drag of her cigarette--no sneaking behind the door of her room, as was the case at our house.

Watching Saleheh at work and witnessing her satisfaction helped me dismiss all of my regrets for the orderly kitchen and moderate, yet regular, meals that departed from our home along with Saleheh. No amount of contentment that Saleheh showed in her newly acquired independence, however, could overcome the guilt that I felt at not being able to give her a ride whenever she needed it, or not paying her a visit on every single cold and rainy night.

As her arthritis progressed, Saleheh was less welcome in the homes of strangers as a “tenant” and less wanted as an employee. For a few years after my father passed away and most of my siblings had left, I challenged Mom vigorously and desperately to bring Saleheh back home. Finally, I accomplished the deed myself, bringing her to our house one day after taking her to a rheumatologist. Saleheh stayed with us another two years and shared the remains of our family’s collective destiny.

The late ‘70s to early ‘80s were years of protest, struggle and hope followed by anger, anguish and despair for Iranians. A popular uprising toppled the Shah’s monarchy, and the political repression embedded in it, but was immediately replaced with yet another autocracy--of the theocratic type this time around. The entire decade of 1980, which opened with the devastating, Iran-Iraq war, ushered in electricity and gasoline shortages, as well as rationed rice, cooking oil and eggs. Frustrated queues for the essential and the mundane alike seemed to sprout overnight.

Those were the years of the ruling mobs crying out, “Either a headscarf, or a knuckle to the head.” Obviously, I chose the former option, only to receive chicken shit on top of it all. Thankfully, that only happened once, but it is a story that reveals much about the gloom and confusion of those years.

On an otherwise beautiful spring day in 1982, I made the humiliating trip to one of the newly established food-retail cooperatives, ta’voni. These huge, godforsaken warehouses occasionally offered a limited amount of essential living items at “government-rated” low prices. One could usually find soap, tissue paper, biscuits and other items there that used to be stacked on supermarket shelves. The alternative was the black market—which few could afford.

I stood on the sidewalk for five hours with more than fifty other men and women waiting to get in too. I then passed through a curtain-separated inspection space where two “sisters” covered in black from head to toe passed their rude hands over me to make sure I was not carrying explosives or exposing any sexually provocative and thus forbidden traces of lipstick, perfume or strands of hair that might have escaped my headscarf. Having been approved as a deserving consumer of government-priced products, I finally got to the ta’avoni only to find that there was nothing useful left to buy. I was heading back home on an overcrowded bus which, in compliance with another Islamic rule of segregation, was divided into two sections, for “sisters” and “brothers”. This was never a wise or fair regulation, because during shopping hours, women bus riders far outnumbered men. I squeezed into an aisle seat, utterly humiliated, frustrated and empty handed, when I noticed a middle-aged woman standing right above me, holding a struggling chicken tightly in her hands. She must have been returning from another queue, albeit triumphantly.

Chicken was no longer an affordable and abundant food staple to be found in the chicken shops’ metal coops or on the supermarket shelves. Most people now had to wait in day-long lines to buy a rationed, live chicken and pay extra to have it killed before they could take it home to be plucked, cleaned, washed and cut before preparing it for cooking. The butchering was no longer done by the shopkeeper at the back of the store in a “professional” way; as he was now too busy running the long queue. However, if you were lucky you might spot an underpaid teacher or a laid-off worker hanging around with his knife, ready to lay the chicken by the joob and cut off its head for you at a small price.

Evidently, the woman on the bus had not found a killer or was unable to pay the extra money for the killing. The chicken, I presume, was under tremendous physical pressure, just like the rest of us, or so I reasoned when I felt a heavy, wet drop of something fall right on top of my headscarf. It took me a few seconds to realize where it had come from, and by then the woman was already hurriedly dabbing the shit from my head with the loose corner of her own headscarf, while juggling a now-screaming and flapping chicken and bashfully apologizing to the mute and paralyzed mask my face had become. Looking back, I think that chicken was the only living soul on that bus that literally gave a shit about my predicament.