On March 17th, 1996, Mom held me in her arms and flew me from Tehran to Isfahan. It was a quick, convenient and safe trip, suitable for a two-month-old baby as perfect as me because I slept the entire flight and did not poop.
A year later, on a similar day, I made a similar trip in mom’s arms, but this time, in the front seat of Uncle Jamal’s car. Uncle Jamal assured her that he drove faster than airplanes. He would get us to Isfahan in no time. He convinced Mom that by one year and two months old, my mushy baby skull was hardened enough to survive the dangers of the road. So, Mom graduated me from safe trips on airplanes and decided that having one-year-old babies in her arms in the front seat of Uncle Jamal’s car was a reasonable thing to do. In his words, she became braver.
At two years and two months old, I could turn my head around to discover that the jabbering of my older brother came from a magical place called the backseat. I stretched my hands out, blabbered my version of Brother’s name, and that was the last time I travelled in the front seat, hugged by Mom.
In the back, Brother and I played games half the time and slept through the rest. The games consisted of pointing at trucks and naming all the cities and countries in the world. Nagasaki, Riadh, Nicaragua, Portsmouth, we knew them all. For sleeping, we had come up with a system. My head rested on his knees while his spine curled over my back. We snuggled like kittens, which was very comfortable, except when we were thrown off the backseat onto the car floor. Our bellies arched over the lump in the middle of the floor, and pulling ourselves back on the seat was a struggle.
As I turned four years and two months old, Brother noticed that when Uncle Jamal switched from 3rd gear to 4th gear fast enough, a new gear was unlocked called the ‘flight gear.’ It was a unique feature of our 1978 Toyota Corona that no other car possessed. Over the years, I had adopted the habit of sitting stiff and clenching Toyota’s fuzzy seat covers. But when Brother whispered this into my ear on the heavy vehicle highway to Isfahan – it was called The Old Road and was particularly sloped – I loosened my grip to discover that I, too, could fly.
When we flew, something ticklish swam up our bellies like fish. It made us laugh. Sometimes we flew so high we banged our heads into the car ceiling. Those made us scream. Mom liked to scream with us too. Once she screamed so loud we thought she had flown out the window. But it was just a flask of boiling hot tea that had toppled over her feet. Uncle Jamal said it was fine. He was so sure he didn’t even have to look. Instead, he told us the secret to how he had never ever spilled a drop of tea in the car because he moved the cup up and down with every slope on the road.
‘It works like car suspension,’ he said. He said that he’d developed the technique because the Toyota was over twenty years old, and the suspension had worn off. Mom swallowed her second-degree burns, and the fish in our bellies swam with pride. It was a great learning moment for us all.
‘I love Toyota,’ I said, and I meant it. It was sweet, rusty, and old, and I decided that its four round headlights looked like a giant spider’s eyes. My eyes widened and sparkled, and my lips smiled.
‘Flight gear! Flight gear! Flight gear!’ Brother and I chanted. Uncle Jamal stepped on the gas pedal, switched from 3rd gear to 4th gear really fast, and Toyota flew over the next steep slope. I looked up at the ceiling where I bumped my head and saw that the leather that stretched across the ceiling had swollen with tiny bubbles. It’s alive! It’s allergic to something, so it broke out in hives! I thought and loved Toyota even more.
By the sixth year, we had hit the road enough times for me to see the pattern. On March 17th, just as the little buds, blooms, and sprouts appeared on trees, bushes, and shrubs, we got into the car and drove off to Isfahan. We might have taken detours here and there, but the destination was always the same. So was the occasion. Every year, we spent the Persian New Year, which we call Eid, at Auntie Badri’s house.
Auntie Badri is my grandmother. It took me years before I realized that there was something wrong with calling my grandmother auntie. I only started to notice it because people started to point it out between their little jests and jokes, and soon enough, I was caught by the embarrassment of my silly mistake. When we are embarrassed, we Iranians melt and seep into the ground. That’s what must have happened to me then. To resurface, I decided to transition smoothly from calling her Auntie Badri to Maman Badri, which was what the normal grandchildren called her. I tested the waters, called her Maman Badri once or twice, here and there, and when nobody mentioned anything, I did less of Auntie Badri and more of Maman Badri until one was fully replaced by the other.
We usually arrived at Maman Badri’s late at night. At the entrance, while we took off our shoes, Maman Badri opened the sliding door with its aluminum frame and patterned glass. She greeted us, singing her famous rhymes that were hard to make sense of. Crudely translated, they went something like this:
What comes of sacrificing myself for you?
A bitter orange on the shelf
Falling, tearing apart
Becoming a poor man’s share
She sang with bliss, and sometimes drummed on the door frame with her old knuckles. When she finished, we stepped one by one through the door in our socks into Maman Badri’s kisses and onto a floor covered with massive overlapping carpets with intricate arabesques and borders of infinitely repeating patterns. In the back of the main hall, next to the giant windows overlooking her small little garden, there were thin mattresses laid all over the carpets, ready for us to sleep on. At Maman Badri’s, everybody had their own set of mattresses and pillows embroidered by Maman Badri herself because she was a seamstress. By six years and two months old, I knew that the smallest mattress and the white pillow with lilac borders and an embroidered blue flower in the middle were mine. But before crawling into the cool freshness of my mattress, we had to drink what was served to us on silver trays Maman Badri laid on the floor. On those trays, three types of drinks awaited us. The two black teas in curvy crystal glasses with golden rims were for Mom and Uncle Jamal, Maman Badri’s trademark lemonade with grated cucumbers floating inside a blue-glazed pottery jar was for Brother and me, and the big bowl of water with a huge block of ice was for everybody to sip from. Maman Badri insisted that I swirl my little teaspoon in the lemonade enough times to dissolve all the sugar she had put in. I often tried to cheat by clinking the teaspoon against the middle of the glass so I wouldn’t disturb the big heap of sugar at the bottom. But despite my efforts, the sugar ended up burning in my brain and made me not want to sleep anymore. I very much preferred to sleep.
Throughout the night, everybody was on a mission to prevent me from wetting the mattress as I always did because it was obviously very embarrassing. Mom, Uncle Jamal, and sometimes his brothers, if they were present, took turns taking me to the bathroom up to three times a night. By the end of each visit to the bathroom, they splashed me with cold water and put me back to sleep. But somehow, between episodes of sleeping and waking and emptying my bladder where I was supposed to, I ended up wetting the mattress anyway. Every time.
Isfahan mornings at Maman Badri’s started with a dawn chorus that I had come to know like the back of my hand. I could recognize the cooing of pigeons. I could also recognize the pigeons speaking the coo-dialect specific to Maman Badri’s neighborhood. Every year those pigeons lay eggs between two fluorescent lamps installed on the back porch wall, and every year, their eggs slipped and fell. Then one year, one egg didn’t fall, but the fledgling hatched from it did, and I found it dead. These parent pigeons are saying very, very dumb things was what I thought as I lay listening. Why did they keep their children in a place where they fell?
As shadows were lifted from the garden, which I – lying on my mattress – watched, the sliding door at the entrance opened and closed behind me. That would be Agha Jan, Maman Badri’s husband, who took two empty pots from the kitchen and sneaked out at 5 am to stand in the long queue of a local restaurant and fill the empty pots with food. When he returned with pots full of warm breakfast, a steaming smell rose to counter the desert night’s cold, dusty grittiness. In my clean set of spare pajamas, I, too, rose from the dry edge of my mattress and sleepily waddled to the kitchen to peek under the lids of those two pots – one big and one small – which were kept warm over a gas heater. The big one was filled with Haleem (a luxurious porridge with shredded meat of a mysterious kind), and the small one was filled with Ades (a thick reddish-brown black peppery lentil soup). The combination made up a signature Isfahani breakfast. It was a treat.
Proper Isfahani people like Uncle Jamal and Maman Badri mixed a bit of Ades with a lot of Haleem and sprinkled a lot of salt on top. Brother, a half-breed, only ate Haleem for reasons I will never know, and I, also a half-breed, only ate Haleem too, but just because Brother did so. I was a little monkey like that.
Mom, who was not Isfahani but married to one, started her meal with a lot of Haleem, but towards the end of her meal – to show her brave side – she mixed a tiny bit of Ades with her remaining Haleem and ate a spoon or two of the concoction. Then, she made a squeaky remark about how interesting the taste was.
When we were done with breakfast, I quickly folded my mattress in three and wrapped it tightly in a yellow swaddle. All swaddled mattresses were then piled into a mountain in a corner of Maman Badri’s room, the room with the sewing machines. Soon after, my four Uncles and one Auntie showed up at the door and brought with them a lot of cousins. Some were the same age as Brother, while others were around the same age as me. Us little ones played games all day. Sometimes we begged the old ones to join us too, but they rarely ever did. In Isfahan, Brother was too grown up to play with me.
If we were to play outside in the garden, our options were endless, and it was fun no matter what. If we were lucky and the four uncles and one auntie allowed it, we would fill the tiny pool in the middle of the garden with water, take our clothes off and dive in. The tiny pool was a one-meter by two-meter cement box which could fit up to five of us, along with my favorite doll, whose name translates as Cleany, and who always accompanied me in showers, bathtubs, and tiny pools. My doll Cleany, my cousins, and I did not go into the pool just to splash water at each other. We also swam the length because we were tiny, tiny things too.
If we were to stay in the house, my cousins and I would hang out on the mountain of mattresses. The mountain was cozy, high, soft, and dangerous all at the same time, which made it very enjoyable to climb up on and jump down from. The uncles and auntie warned us a million times not to play on the mountaintop. But we were naughty kids who did not listen and Uncle Jamal, being the most interesting uncle in the world, took our side. He said it was fine, and eventually – like Mom – the four uncles and one auntie became braver too. Uncle Jamal liked to take credit for everybody’s fearlessness.
Next to the mountain was a window that opened to another room. That room was where Agha Jan worked for the first seven years of my life. In the corner, he had a blue metal table that looked like a box and was very low. In his white undershirt, Agha Jan knelt on the floor behind the table, slouched over the little people on his papers, dipping his delicate brushes into paint-filled enamel dishes and putting little dots and stripes on their small dresses. Uncle Jamal had told me that when spring came, and kittens were born, Agha Jan would grab the kittens by the neck and snip their fur to make brushes out of. And every time I saw his collection of brushes with tiny bristles stacked at one end, I imagined Agha Jan with a pair of scissors around snuggling kittens, and the fish in my belly raced up my spine and swam the length of my shoulders. It made my shoulders shudder.
When Agha Jan worked, the cousins and I loved to distract him by hanging down the window like little monkeys, making silly faces. Sometimes Agha Jan scolded us, sometimes ignored us, and other times watched us. But when he died, he became a television, and from the mattress mountaintop, we watched the TV.
When night approached, the four uncles and one auntie took my cousins and left. Those nights, I was left alone with the carpets and their shapes that turned into rivers that I crossed and mountains that I climbed and fish that looked at me from under my feet and birds that were stuck on the seabed, always about to drown, always about to be rescued by me. I walked on the carpets until my feet hurt. And when my feet hurt, I walked until I felt dizzy and threw myself on the laid-out mattress again, and the plastered ceiling spun round and round my head, and I fell asleep. Such was March 18th, and March 19th was March 18th on repeat.
On March 20th, the Persian New Year, Eid, Nowruz, Sal e No, the spring equinox, the four uncles and one auntie brought cousins back to Maman Badri’s again. Sometimes in the middle of the night, sometimes in the morning, sometimes late afternoon. It depended on when the sun would cross the celestial equinox that year. It was a one-of-a-kind and special day. Yet after I turned seven and two months old, just like the trees, bushes, and shrubs that blossomed every year, I made every March 20th the same as the one before.
Early in the morning, I got up to repaint the tiny pool in Maman Badri’s garden blue. Then I washed the white tiles on her porch until they shined until everything looked clean and new. I also liked to color eggs to put on the Haft-sin Table because I was a kid, and for some reason, kids love these kinds of things. My Uncle Rahmat would tell me that coloring eggs were not an authentic Eid tradition. He said it was an impurity leaked into our ancient customs from the west. But I did not care for his authentic Proto-Indo-Aryan values. I still very much liked to color eggs, but also never ever had any coloring tools at Maman Badri’s even though Agha Jan – when alive – was a miniaturist. Whatever happened to his kitten fur brushes, I asked myself. The enamel dishes he filled with paint were hung on the wall behind the television. But where did the paint go? It was a mystery, and I looked for them in Maman Badri’s drawers and closets. The desk on which she had put two sewing machines had two drawers. A couple of thimbles rolled around at the bottom of the left one, and the right one held a small plastic comb and an old blow dryer that was held together by a green rubber band. Her closet held no more than four sets of clothes. Next to them were four shelves filled with prayer books and knickknacks she had brought from her trips to the holy land, Mecca.
I never found Agha Jan’s paint colors and brushes. So, I tagged along with Uncle Kazem, who went out running errands before the turn of the year, hoping to buy something I could color eggs with. We bought goldfish, a pot of hyacinth, and whatever else was missing from our Haft-sin Table that year. Then, we looked for stationery stores to buy watercolors from. They were almost always closed because Eid was a national holiday. When we could not find watercolors, we bought markers from photocopy shops. And if we could not find that either, we returned to the hollow egg that I had – one year – drawn a cow on with a pencil I found at the bottom of Mom’s purse.
When we returned to Maman Badri’s with our last-minute purchase, everybody was showering, getting dressed, and ready for the turn of the year. Wearing new dresses was one of the known traditions, and it was dreadful. In Maman Badri’s room which was filled with the one auntie, all the girl cousins, and the four uncle’s wives, Mom pulled my new dress out of a plastic cover, and I wore it in the darkest corner because as the uncle’s wives loved to insist, I was very awfully shy. I hated them because they were bullies who sprayed themselves with perfume which, as I imagined, killed all the friendly creatures living in my lungs like bug spray. Within that smelly hustle and bustle, I would find a five-minute window where I could disappear into the garden without anyone realizing. There, from my new pocket, I would take out a secret list of wishes and prayers I had scribbled on a piece of paper – and later, in the notes on my phone. In my mind, I would hear myself reading the list to God – and later to an unknown entity that I insisted was not God – who listened and granted me the wishes for the upcoming year if those wishes were pure. Not everybody did this because it was not one of the known traditions like the apples on Haft-sin Table. I had come up with it on my own.
When the 5-minute window was closed, the garden door opened. I saw panic settle in the house and knew that I was being summoned. We all gathered around the Haft-sin Table, and I recited an Arabic prayer from memory because I had learned it in kindergarten. Arabic things pleased Maman Badri because she was religious, but they did not please Uncle Jamal because he was religiously not religious.
‘… ela Ahsan el-haal,’ I mumbled, and then we heard the bang of a cannon coming out of Maman Badri’s old red radio, which meant the year was new again. With that bang, everybody rejoiced and hoorayed and hugged one another, and I had to circle around the room to be kissed by them.
Some people kissed me twice, once on each side of the face, while some came back for a third kiss on the side they had kissed first. I did not know how many times I was supposed to lean forward and offer my face to each kisser. Some two-time kissers were very open-minded and tried to convert three-time kissers to being two-time kissers because three was the number of kisses that mullahs gave one another, and that was not a good thing. Some three-time kissers were also very open-minded because three was the number of kisses that Europeans gave each other, and that was a good thing. I, on the other hand, was not so open-minded, and all the kissing confused my brain. Some of my uncle’s wives bumped their cheeks to mine and made a mts sound in the air next to my ears. They said they did not want to smear their lipsticks on my cheeks. Some other wives left lipstick marks on my face and thought that wiping their lipstick off my face was a very adorable thing to do. But if I wiped their gross saliva off my face with my sleeve, it was a very rude thing to do. Some of them complained that I bumped their cheeks too hard, which hurt their delicate cheekbones, and some of them got offended when I did not return the same kissing noises. I never learned to become a good kisser who anticipated people’s kiss count, smooch intensity, and angle preferences, and even though I was not allowed to, I still wrinkled my face with disgust.
The kissing ritual was embedded in the following Eid tradition as well. For that, my many cousins and I queued in front of Maman Badri and gave her kisses in exchange for new unfolded bills fresh out of a bank’s money printing machine. After dodging Maman Badri’s kisses – she aimed for our lips, and we didn’t like it – we gave our kisses to the four uncles for money. The one Auntie never gave anyone money, but her husband, Uncle Faraz, did so on her behalf. Uncle Jamal gave us money for kisses too. He gave us the most money because he was an odd Uncle who lived in Tehran. He was not stingy like other Isfahani people. He loved everybody so much.
‘Come here to Uncle Jamal, everybody! Ahahahaha!’ was one of Uncle Jamal’s most famous catchphrases, and he did not just say it to his nieces and nephews. He is the whole world’s, Uncle Jamal. Yours too.
These were all true until eight years ago when I could not make all March 20ths the same as the one before. Then, Brother flew to America, and nobody gathered at Maman Badri’s for Eid because she had become harmless with Alzheimer’s disease, and her children did not fear her anymore. She could not rage at my four uncles and one auntie for not spending Eid at her house. She was quiet and did not even know where she was half the time. By then, Uncle Jamal, being the rebellious son he was, had succeeded in making alcohol a staple in the family. He took pride in this reformation because, with alcohol, he had fixed his four very religiously dogmatic brothers and one very oppressed sister. He generously put alcohol in unsuspecting water bottles and wrapped them in suspicious-looking black plastic bags where water bottles wouldn’t normally be. ‘This is a decoy. Search my contents,’ the black plastic bag seemed to shout to the hypothetical police officer who hypothetically caught us on the road. It was all very dumb. Yet Uncle Jamal put those black bags in the new car’s trunk. When we hit the road – this time with no Brother and no Toyota – the fish in my belly swished together with the alcohol in the water bottles, and instead of making me laugh, it made me horridly resentful.
Those years, we drove straight into Uncle Hamid’s parking lot in Isfahan, where we unloaded the car trunk and where everybody spent Eid drinking, dancing, and partying. Well, everybody except Uncle Kazem. He was the outcast of the family who did not even drink black tea because he did not like how caffeine brings dependency. Once I told him I did not want Eid to be like this and I wanted to go back and paint Maman Badri’s little pool blue, and he agreed, but that changed nothing. Then, I cried, and that did not change anything either.
At two years and two months old, I could turn my head around to discover that the jabbering of my older brother came from a magical place called the backseat. I stretched my hands out, blabbered my version of Brother’s name, and that was the last time I travelled in the front seat, hugged by Mom.
In the back, Brother and I played games half the time and slept through the rest. The games consisted of pointing at trucks and naming all the cities and countries in the world. Nagasaki, Riadh, Nicaragua, Portsmouth, we knew them all. For sleeping, we had come up with a system. My head rested on his knees while his spine curled over my back. We snuggled like kittens, which was very comfortable, except when we were thrown off the backseat onto the car floor. Our bellies arched over the lump in the middle of the floor, and pulling ourselves back on the seat was a struggle.
As I turned four years and two months old, Brother noticed that when Uncle Jamal switched from 3rd gear to 4th gear fast enough, a new gear was unlocked called the ‘flight gear.’ It was a unique feature of our 1978 Toyota Corona that no other car possessed. Over the years, I had adopted the habit of sitting stiff and clenching Toyota’s fuzzy seat covers. But when Brother whispered this into my ear on the heavy vehicle highway to Isfahan – it was called The Old Road and was particularly sloped – I loosened my grip to discover that I, too, could fly.
When we flew, something ticklish swam up our bellies like fish. It made us laugh. Sometimes we flew so high we banged our heads into the car ceiling. Those made us scream. Mom liked to scream with us too. Once she screamed so loud we thought she had flown out the window. But it was just a flask of boiling hot tea that had toppled over her feet. Uncle Jamal said it was fine. He was so sure he didn’t even have to look. Instead, he told us the secret to how he had never ever spilled a drop of tea in the car because he moved the cup up and down with every slope on the road.
‘It works like car suspension,’ he said. He said that he’d developed the technique because the Toyota was over twenty years old, and the suspension had worn off. Mom swallowed her second-degree burns, and the fish in our bellies swam with pride. It was a great learning moment for us all.
‘I love Toyota,’ I said, and I meant it. It was sweet, rusty, and old, and I decided that its four round headlights looked like a giant spider’s eyes. My eyes widened and sparkled, and my lips smiled.
‘Flight gear! Flight gear! Flight gear!’ Brother and I chanted. Uncle Jamal stepped on the gas pedal, switched from 3rd gear to 4th gear really fast, and Toyota flew over the next steep slope. I looked up at the ceiling where I bumped my head and saw that the leather that stretched across the ceiling had swollen with tiny bubbles. It’s alive! It’s allergic to something, so it broke out in hives! I thought and loved Toyota even more.
By the sixth year, we had hit the road enough times for me to see the pattern. On March 17th, just as the little buds, blooms, and sprouts appeared on trees, bushes, and shrubs, we got into the car and drove off to Isfahan. We might have taken detours here and there, but the destination was always the same. So was the occasion. Every year, we spent the Persian New Year, which we call Eid, at Auntie Badri’s house.
Auntie Badri is my grandmother. It took me years before I realized that there was something wrong with calling my grandmother auntie. I only started to notice it because people started to point it out between their little jests and jokes, and soon enough, I was caught by the embarrassment of my silly mistake. When we are embarrassed, we Iranians melt and seep into the ground. That’s what must have happened to me then. To resurface, I decided to transition smoothly from calling her Auntie Badri to Maman Badri, which was what the normal grandchildren called her. I tested the waters, called her Maman Badri once or twice, here and there, and when nobody mentioned anything, I did less of Auntie Badri and more of Maman Badri until one was fully replaced by the other.
We usually arrived at Maman Badri’s late at night. At the entrance, while we took off our shoes, Maman Badri opened the sliding door with its aluminum frame and patterned glass. She greeted us, singing her famous rhymes that were hard to make sense of. Crudely translated, they went something like this:
What comes of sacrificing myself for you?
A bitter orange on the shelf
Falling, tearing apart
Becoming a poor man’s share
She sang with bliss, and sometimes drummed on the door frame with her old knuckles. When she finished, we stepped one by one through the door in our socks into Maman Badri’s kisses and onto a floor covered with massive overlapping carpets with intricate arabesques and borders of infinitely repeating patterns. In the back of the main hall, next to the giant windows overlooking her small little garden, there were thin mattresses laid all over the carpets, ready for us to sleep on. At Maman Badri’s, everybody had their own set of mattresses and pillows embroidered by Maman Badri herself because she was a seamstress. By six years and two months old, I knew that the smallest mattress and the white pillow with lilac borders and an embroidered blue flower in the middle were mine. But before crawling into the cool freshness of my mattress, we had to drink what was served to us on silver trays Maman Badri laid on the floor. On those trays, three types of drinks awaited us. The two black teas in curvy crystal glasses with golden rims were for Mom and Uncle Jamal, Maman Badri’s trademark lemonade with grated cucumbers floating inside a blue-glazed pottery jar was for Brother and me, and the big bowl of water with a huge block of ice was for everybody to sip from. Maman Badri insisted that I swirl my little teaspoon in the lemonade enough times to dissolve all the sugar she had put in. I often tried to cheat by clinking the teaspoon against the middle of the glass so I wouldn’t disturb the big heap of sugar at the bottom. But despite my efforts, the sugar ended up burning in my brain and made me not want to sleep anymore. I very much preferred to sleep.
Throughout the night, everybody was on a mission to prevent me from wetting the mattress as I always did because it was obviously very embarrassing. Mom, Uncle Jamal, and sometimes his brothers, if they were present, took turns taking me to the bathroom up to three times a night. By the end of each visit to the bathroom, they splashed me with cold water and put me back to sleep. But somehow, between episodes of sleeping and waking and emptying my bladder where I was supposed to, I ended up wetting the mattress anyway. Every time.
Isfahan mornings at Maman Badri’s started with a dawn chorus that I had come to know like the back of my hand. I could recognize the cooing of pigeons. I could also recognize the pigeons speaking the coo-dialect specific to Maman Badri’s neighborhood. Every year those pigeons lay eggs between two fluorescent lamps installed on the back porch wall, and every year, their eggs slipped and fell. Then one year, one egg didn’t fall, but the fledgling hatched from it did, and I found it dead. These parent pigeons are saying very, very dumb things was what I thought as I lay listening. Why did they keep their children in a place where they fell?
As shadows were lifted from the garden, which I – lying on my mattress – watched, the sliding door at the entrance opened and closed behind me. That would be Agha Jan, Maman Badri’s husband, who took two empty pots from the kitchen and sneaked out at 5 am to stand in the long queue of a local restaurant and fill the empty pots with food. When he returned with pots full of warm breakfast, a steaming smell rose to counter the desert night’s cold, dusty grittiness. In my clean set of spare pajamas, I, too, rose from the dry edge of my mattress and sleepily waddled to the kitchen to peek under the lids of those two pots – one big and one small – which were kept warm over a gas heater. The big one was filled with Haleem (a luxurious porridge with shredded meat of a mysterious kind), and the small one was filled with Ades (a thick reddish-brown black peppery lentil soup). The combination made up a signature Isfahani breakfast. It was a treat.
Proper Isfahani people like Uncle Jamal and Maman Badri mixed a bit of Ades with a lot of Haleem and sprinkled a lot of salt on top. Brother, a half-breed, only ate Haleem for reasons I will never know, and I, also a half-breed, only ate Haleem too, but just because Brother did so. I was a little monkey like that.
Mom, who was not Isfahani but married to one, started her meal with a lot of Haleem, but towards the end of her meal – to show her brave side – she mixed a tiny bit of Ades with her remaining Haleem and ate a spoon or two of the concoction. Then, she made a squeaky remark about how interesting the taste was.
When we were done with breakfast, I quickly folded my mattress in three and wrapped it tightly in a yellow swaddle. All swaddled mattresses were then piled into a mountain in a corner of Maman Badri’s room, the room with the sewing machines. Soon after, my four Uncles and one Auntie showed up at the door and brought with them a lot of cousins. Some were the same age as Brother, while others were around the same age as me. Us little ones played games all day. Sometimes we begged the old ones to join us too, but they rarely ever did. In Isfahan, Brother was too grown up to play with me.
If we were to play outside in the garden, our options were endless, and it was fun no matter what. If we were lucky and the four uncles and one auntie allowed it, we would fill the tiny pool in the middle of the garden with water, take our clothes off and dive in. The tiny pool was a one-meter by two-meter cement box which could fit up to five of us, along with my favorite doll, whose name translates as Cleany, and who always accompanied me in showers, bathtubs, and tiny pools. My doll Cleany, my cousins, and I did not go into the pool just to splash water at each other. We also swam the length because we were tiny, tiny things too.
If we were to stay in the house, my cousins and I would hang out on the mountain of mattresses. The mountain was cozy, high, soft, and dangerous all at the same time, which made it very enjoyable to climb up on and jump down from. The uncles and auntie warned us a million times not to play on the mountaintop. But we were naughty kids who did not listen and Uncle Jamal, being the most interesting uncle in the world, took our side. He said it was fine, and eventually – like Mom – the four uncles and one auntie became braver too. Uncle Jamal liked to take credit for everybody’s fearlessness.
Next to the mountain was a window that opened to another room. That room was where Agha Jan worked for the first seven years of my life. In the corner, he had a blue metal table that looked like a box and was very low. In his white undershirt, Agha Jan knelt on the floor behind the table, slouched over the little people on his papers, dipping his delicate brushes into paint-filled enamel dishes and putting little dots and stripes on their small dresses. Uncle Jamal had told me that when spring came, and kittens were born, Agha Jan would grab the kittens by the neck and snip their fur to make brushes out of. And every time I saw his collection of brushes with tiny bristles stacked at one end, I imagined Agha Jan with a pair of scissors around snuggling kittens, and the fish in my belly raced up my spine and swam the length of my shoulders. It made my shoulders shudder.
When Agha Jan worked, the cousins and I loved to distract him by hanging down the window like little monkeys, making silly faces. Sometimes Agha Jan scolded us, sometimes ignored us, and other times watched us. But when he died, he became a television, and from the mattress mountaintop, we watched the TV.
When night approached, the four uncles and one auntie took my cousins and left. Those nights, I was left alone with the carpets and their shapes that turned into rivers that I crossed and mountains that I climbed and fish that looked at me from under my feet and birds that were stuck on the seabed, always about to drown, always about to be rescued by me. I walked on the carpets until my feet hurt. And when my feet hurt, I walked until I felt dizzy and threw myself on the laid-out mattress again, and the plastered ceiling spun round and round my head, and I fell asleep. Such was March 18th, and March 19th was March 18th on repeat.
On March 20th, the Persian New Year, Eid, Nowruz, Sal e No, the spring equinox, the four uncles and one auntie brought cousins back to Maman Badri’s again. Sometimes in the middle of the night, sometimes in the morning, sometimes late afternoon. It depended on when the sun would cross the celestial equinox that year. It was a one-of-a-kind and special day. Yet after I turned seven and two months old, just like the trees, bushes, and shrubs that blossomed every year, I made every March 20th the same as the one before.
Early in the morning, I got up to repaint the tiny pool in Maman Badri’s garden blue. Then I washed the white tiles on her porch until they shined until everything looked clean and new. I also liked to color eggs to put on the Haft-sin Table because I was a kid, and for some reason, kids love these kinds of things. My Uncle Rahmat would tell me that coloring eggs were not an authentic Eid tradition. He said it was an impurity leaked into our ancient customs from the west. But I did not care for his authentic Proto-Indo-Aryan values. I still very much liked to color eggs, but also never ever had any coloring tools at Maman Badri’s even though Agha Jan – when alive – was a miniaturist. Whatever happened to his kitten fur brushes, I asked myself. The enamel dishes he filled with paint were hung on the wall behind the television. But where did the paint go? It was a mystery, and I looked for them in Maman Badri’s drawers and closets. The desk on which she had put two sewing machines had two drawers. A couple of thimbles rolled around at the bottom of the left one, and the right one held a small plastic comb and an old blow dryer that was held together by a green rubber band. Her closet held no more than four sets of clothes. Next to them were four shelves filled with prayer books and knickknacks she had brought from her trips to the holy land, Mecca.
I never found Agha Jan’s paint colors and brushes. So, I tagged along with Uncle Kazem, who went out running errands before the turn of the year, hoping to buy something I could color eggs with. We bought goldfish, a pot of hyacinth, and whatever else was missing from our Haft-sin Table that year. Then, we looked for stationery stores to buy watercolors from. They were almost always closed because Eid was a national holiday. When we could not find watercolors, we bought markers from photocopy shops. And if we could not find that either, we returned to the hollow egg that I had – one year – drawn a cow on with a pencil I found at the bottom of Mom’s purse.
When we returned to Maman Badri’s with our last-minute purchase, everybody was showering, getting dressed, and ready for the turn of the year. Wearing new dresses was one of the known traditions, and it was dreadful. In Maman Badri’s room which was filled with the one auntie, all the girl cousins, and the four uncle’s wives, Mom pulled my new dress out of a plastic cover, and I wore it in the darkest corner because as the uncle’s wives loved to insist, I was very awfully shy. I hated them because they were bullies who sprayed themselves with perfume which, as I imagined, killed all the friendly creatures living in my lungs like bug spray. Within that smelly hustle and bustle, I would find a five-minute window where I could disappear into the garden without anyone realizing. There, from my new pocket, I would take out a secret list of wishes and prayers I had scribbled on a piece of paper – and later, in the notes on my phone. In my mind, I would hear myself reading the list to God – and later to an unknown entity that I insisted was not God – who listened and granted me the wishes for the upcoming year if those wishes were pure. Not everybody did this because it was not one of the known traditions like the apples on Haft-sin Table. I had come up with it on my own.
When the 5-minute window was closed, the garden door opened. I saw panic settle in the house and knew that I was being summoned. We all gathered around the Haft-sin Table, and I recited an Arabic prayer from memory because I had learned it in kindergarten. Arabic things pleased Maman Badri because she was religious, but they did not please Uncle Jamal because he was religiously not religious.
‘… ela Ahsan el-haal,’ I mumbled, and then we heard the bang of a cannon coming out of Maman Badri’s old red radio, which meant the year was new again. With that bang, everybody rejoiced and hoorayed and hugged one another, and I had to circle around the room to be kissed by them.
Some people kissed me twice, once on each side of the face, while some came back for a third kiss on the side they had kissed first. I did not know how many times I was supposed to lean forward and offer my face to each kisser. Some two-time kissers were very open-minded and tried to convert three-time kissers to being two-time kissers because three was the number of kisses that mullahs gave one another, and that was not a good thing. Some three-time kissers were also very open-minded because three was the number of kisses that Europeans gave each other, and that was a good thing. I, on the other hand, was not so open-minded, and all the kissing confused my brain. Some of my uncle’s wives bumped their cheeks to mine and made a mts sound in the air next to my ears. They said they did not want to smear their lipsticks on my cheeks. Some other wives left lipstick marks on my face and thought that wiping their lipstick off my face was a very adorable thing to do. But if I wiped their gross saliva off my face with my sleeve, it was a very rude thing to do. Some of them complained that I bumped their cheeks too hard, which hurt their delicate cheekbones, and some of them got offended when I did not return the same kissing noises. I never learned to become a good kisser who anticipated people’s kiss count, smooch intensity, and angle preferences, and even though I was not allowed to, I still wrinkled my face with disgust.
The kissing ritual was embedded in the following Eid tradition as well. For that, my many cousins and I queued in front of Maman Badri and gave her kisses in exchange for new unfolded bills fresh out of a bank’s money printing machine. After dodging Maman Badri’s kisses – she aimed for our lips, and we didn’t like it – we gave our kisses to the four uncles for money. The one Auntie never gave anyone money, but her husband, Uncle Faraz, did so on her behalf. Uncle Jamal gave us money for kisses too. He gave us the most money because he was an odd Uncle who lived in Tehran. He was not stingy like other Isfahani people. He loved everybody so much.
‘Come here to Uncle Jamal, everybody! Ahahahaha!’ was one of Uncle Jamal’s most famous catchphrases, and he did not just say it to his nieces and nephews. He is the whole world’s, Uncle Jamal. Yours too.
These were all true until eight years ago when I could not make all March 20ths the same as the one before. Then, Brother flew to America, and nobody gathered at Maman Badri’s for Eid because she had become harmless with Alzheimer’s disease, and her children did not fear her anymore. She could not rage at my four uncles and one auntie for not spending Eid at her house. She was quiet and did not even know where she was half the time. By then, Uncle Jamal, being the rebellious son he was, had succeeded in making alcohol a staple in the family. He took pride in this reformation because, with alcohol, he had fixed his four very religiously dogmatic brothers and one very oppressed sister. He generously put alcohol in unsuspecting water bottles and wrapped them in suspicious-looking black plastic bags where water bottles wouldn’t normally be. ‘This is a decoy. Search my contents,’ the black plastic bag seemed to shout to the hypothetical police officer who hypothetically caught us on the road. It was all very dumb. Yet Uncle Jamal put those black bags in the new car’s trunk. When we hit the road – this time with no Brother and no Toyota – the fish in my belly swished together with the alcohol in the water bottles, and instead of making me laugh, it made me horridly resentful.
Those years, we drove straight into Uncle Hamid’s parking lot in Isfahan, where we unloaded the car trunk and where everybody spent Eid drinking, dancing, and partying. Well, everybody except Uncle Kazem. He was the outcast of the family who did not even drink black tea because he did not like how caffeine brings dependency. Once I told him I did not want Eid to be like this and I wanted to go back and paint Maman Badri’s little pool blue, and he agreed, but that changed nothing. Then, I cried, and that did not change anything either.
⸎ ⸎ ⸎
THIS MORNING, ALSO a March 20th, I was neither in Tehran nor Isfahan. I was in Dublin and had walked through the green countryside. It was lovely, and it smelled like slurry and sheep. I did not see any sheep, but I saw two horses grazing in an open field that overlooked a town I did not know. Then I walked along a road with no sidewalks, and tall hedgerows stretched along both sides. Through the hedgerows, I saw a rabbit that was quite obviously enjoying being its rabbit self. It was a brown thing amongst the green, and the sun shone on its white whiskers. When I saw it, I squealed because it was cute. To the rabbit, my squeal sounded scary, and it made it hop away. Its bunny butt was white like the whiskers, and I could see it bounce on and off the grass, on again, then off, and finally into a bush. I did not mind the rabbit running away because that was how a smart and alert rabbit should have reacted to a gigantic wild thing screeching at it the way I did. I was happy that though I meant no harm, the rabbit was smart enough to keep safe, unlike the robin I met at Marlay Park, which was also cute but careless enough to eat seeds off my palm. It turned into a good memory for me, but I worried about the robin because I could have easily been a fox. When I fed the robin, I knew that foxes roam around Dublin because I had seen one gazing at me somewhere on Leinster Road.
Then I walked into Citywest and followed a road where I saw fewer living things, and the air stopped smelling like sheep. Citywest was dead and empty for a long distance until I saw people. A lot of them. They were alive and waiting in a queue, but they were not lively. I joined them at the back of the line and read a book. When the queue shortened in the front and lengthened in the back, I found myself in a big hall. A middle-aged lady was playing songs on a digital piano which was unexpected. The songs were those that you hear in elevators which were expected because it was only meant to alleviate the awkwardness that creeps into waiting crowds. Her tunes were muffled by fancy-looking carpets on which not-so-fancy-looking shoes stood. It was not meant to reach the ears because what reached the ears was the buzz that was exchanged between mouths. Somewhere between the shoes and the mouths were hands which, instead of glasses of champagne, held brochures, and the brochures held information about the Covid-19 vaccine those people were about to get.
Soon, I was the first person in the queue, and I walked to a registration booth where the brochures were stacked. I handed over my Irish Residence Permit and explained how I do not have a PPS number yet, which the registration lady was fine with. Then I read her the batch number of the two doses of vaccines I had gotten in Iran, and she told me that those letters and numbers were not what a batch number starts with. I explained how that is what has been written on my vaccination card, so it must be a real batch number, and eventually, she was fine with that as well.
The brochure she gave me asked me to read it thoroughly before getting the vaccine. I tried but failed because I could not concentrate. People were buzzing, and the lady was still banging her fingers on the piano. I could not read. No. Instead, I thought about how Uncle Jamal would have loved it here. He loved absolutely everybody, and the vaccination hall was filled with everybody. Uncle Jamal loved those who so openly and selflessly shared the magic of sounds with everybody even more. And well, the big hall was filled with the sound of elevator music, which qualified as a magical sound to Uncle Jamal. This place could be a favorite, I thought. But he would also hate it here because the people he so adored were wearing masks. To him, wearing masks was a cheap and limiting thing to do. I know that because he made a cheap remark six months ago, back in Tehran, when I wore a mask in front of his much-loved people.
‘Go muzzle up some more and be back,’ he told me in front of the big personalities who always gathered at Uncle Jamal’s because he gave them a lot of alcohol for free. The famous artist who smoked weed, the art gallery owners who were husband and wife and boring, the eccentric yogi who cleansed everybody with somersaults and voodoo, the billionaire travertine mine owners who adored dollar bills above all things, the guy who sold Uncle Jamal high-quality olive oil, the pizza delivery guy, and Uncle Hamid, who all looked at me with their maskless faces expecting me to –just like them – wear more muzzles before rejoining them. I apologized to the important personalities, carefree souls, and beautiful spirits cradled in Uncle Jamal’s nest and said: ‘I will just leave.’ I went back to my room and tried to sleep.
Uncle Jamal did not like that. First, he waited for everybody to leave. Everybody except for Uncle Hamid because Uncle Hamid was Uncle Jamal’s brother and had come to visit us from Isfahan. Then, he chugged the leftover vodka he had served everybody, which was not real vodka but something we Iranians call the doggy booze. And so, he prepared himself to appear at my bedroom door.
Before him was Mom, who had secretly squeezed past my door in anticipation as she knew something was about to go wrong. I had prepared myself too. I was already defensively pretending to be asleep. I did that every night because nights were the culmination of Uncle Jamal’s alcoholic rage. That night, however, extra-blushed with doggy booze, he had become a wild boar. His eyes were fixed on his target, which would be me, and he charged forward as if Mom, who was standing vigil in front of my bed, did not exist. He knocked Mom with his boar tusks like she was just an obstacle, a shrub. She tumbled onto the bed, onto my legs. I woke from my make-believe sleep and cried, ‘She didn’t do anything. Leave her alone.’ Uncle Jamal snorted and sniffed and spoke the language of boars. When he charged at me again, Uncle Hamid was there to stop him. They wrestled and grunted, and Uncle Hamid said things to turn Uncle Jamal human. When Uncle Jamal had stopped being a boar and could speak as a human again, he said things like, ‘The bitch has scabies. She has scabies, I’m telling you.’
Then he turned to me.
‘Who do you think you are, you filthy bitch?’ he screamed. ‘You’re more dangerous than Covid. You’ll get us all killed with your scabies.’
I became hysterical and cried like a baby. There was a lot of snot, and my face was puffy red as if it was about to explode. Uncle Hamid told Uncle Jamal how he did not expect him to behave like that. He was the cool uncle, the role model of all brothers. He should not talk about uncool things like scabies, he said. Uncle Hamid also said that Uncle Jamal, and he should go out for a walk.
But Uncle Jamal did not listen. He said he would not let me go to Ireland because it was his civic responsibility not to send a filthy animal abroad. He said that as a human, he cared about Irish people and did not want them to get scabies from me. He said that he would fix me before sending me anywhere, that he had the legal right to ban me from travelling, and that he was a responsible human being concerned about the wellbeing of all humans, Irish, Afghan, you name it. He asked me who I thought I was and said that no Irish person would accept a diseased piece of meat who hid under her blanket. He said that I would never be successful unless I learned to love all humans as he did. He said that if he made a movie about my ugly face that was sick with scabies, he would get famous, successful, and rich. He said he would bring his camera to start filming me immediately, but he didn’t. Then he asked if I needed a mirror to look at my ugly face and see what he was talking about. He asked that again and charged forward to take me to a mirror. Uncle Hamid stopped him.
‘I just threw everybody out.’ Uncle Jamal yelled at the top of his lungs, ‘They’re all gone now. Do you know why? Because of you. You’re the one who should be leaving this house, really. If you do, I’ll be able to invite everybody. Absolutely. I’ll not have to be sitting alone, ashamed of having this ugly girl with scabies in the bedroom. Everything will get better. Yeah. Because I’ll not have to look at your face. Everything will change. This entire place. Pretty girls will come to Uncle Jamal, and they’ll sing to me.’ He pointed at his chest, ‘They’ll play songs on their instruments. They’ll share their beauty with my guests, with the whole world. That’s right. They’ll do everything a good girl’s supposed to do. But naturally, I’m not going to invite them while you’re here, sitting like a lump of meat. You’re ruining my peace. You’re killing me with your scabies. Naturally, I want you gone. But I can’t throw you out just yet. Not yet. Because I have a responsibility. Yeah. I’m responsible for the Irish. For society. I’m not having you infecting everybody with your filthy disease. Look what you’ve done to me.’
The talk about scabies, wrestling, meddling, and crying took about an hour until Uncle Jamal finally agreed to go out for a walk with Uncle Hamid.
When they left, I cried some more, and Mom tried to soothe me by telling me a story that was supposed to give me perspective. She wanted me to see the unseen and accept the circumstances by knowing what had led up to it.
When he was in his 20s, before meeting my mom, Uncle Jamal was locked up in prison because he had hung out with people from some political party he wasn’t even involved with. They grassed on him and so he was caught. He was there for 4 years. Mom said that Uncle Jamal felt like I was imprisoning myself in my bedroom because of Covid. Scabies was a common disease among the prisoners in his cell.
I told Mom that I would try to understand why Uncle Jamal did what he did. But when Mom left the bedroom, my entire body itched with make-believe scabies, and I scratched myself all night. In the morning, my skin was sore, and there were little marks and bruises all over it. I wondered if it would have been easier had Uncle Hamid not been there to meddle and had Uncle Jamal given me the bruises with his own hands. I also wondered if it would have been better had Mom not enlightened me. That morning, I felt terribly ill and did not get out of bed until I found myself a cure. I did not want Uncle Jamal to be my father anymore.
Then I walked into Citywest and followed a road where I saw fewer living things, and the air stopped smelling like sheep. Citywest was dead and empty for a long distance until I saw people. A lot of them. They were alive and waiting in a queue, but they were not lively. I joined them at the back of the line and read a book. When the queue shortened in the front and lengthened in the back, I found myself in a big hall. A middle-aged lady was playing songs on a digital piano which was unexpected. The songs were those that you hear in elevators which were expected because it was only meant to alleviate the awkwardness that creeps into waiting crowds. Her tunes were muffled by fancy-looking carpets on which not-so-fancy-looking shoes stood. It was not meant to reach the ears because what reached the ears was the buzz that was exchanged between mouths. Somewhere between the shoes and the mouths were hands which, instead of glasses of champagne, held brochures, and the brochures held information about the Covid-19 vaccine those people were about to get.
Soon, I was the first person in the queue, and I walked to a registration booth where the brochures were stacked. I handed over my Irish Residence Permit and explained how I do not have a PPS number yet, which the registration lady was fine with. Then I read her the batch number of the two doses of vaccines I had gotten in Iran, and she told me that those letters and numbers were not what a batch number starts with. I explained how that is what has been written on my vaccination card, so it must be a real batch number, and eventually, she was fine with that as well.
The brochure she gave me asked me to read it thoroughly before getting the vaccine. I tried but failed because I could not concentrate. People were buzzing, and the lady was still banging her fingers on the piano. I could not read. No. Instead, I thought about how Uncle Jamal would have loved it here. He loved absolutely everybody, and the vaccination hall was filled with everybody. Uncle Jamal loved those who so openly and selflessly shared the magic of sounds with everybody even more. And well, the big hall was filled with the sound of elevator music, which qualified as a magical sound to Uncle Jamal. This place could be a favorite, I thought. But he would also hate it here because the people he so adored were wearing masks. To him, wearing masks was a cheap and limiting thing to do. I know that because he made a cheap remark six months ago, back in Tehran, when I wore a mask in front of his much-loved people.
‘Go muzzle up some more and be back,’ he told me in front of the big personalities who always gathered at Uncle Jamal’s because he gave them a lot of alcohol for free. The famous artist who smoked weed, the art gallery owners who were husband and wife and boring, the eccentric yogi who cleansed everybody with somersaults and voodoo, the billionaire travertine mine owners who adored dollar bills above all things, the guy who sold Uncle Jamal high-quality olive oil, the pizza delivery guy, and Uncle Hamid, who all looked at me with their maskless faces expecting me to –just like them – wear more muzzles before rejoining them. I apologized to the important personalities, carefree souls, and beautiful spirits cradled in Uncle Jamal’s nest and said: ‘I will just leave.’ I went back to my room and tried to sleep.
Uncle Jamal did not like that. First, he waited for everybody to leave. Everybody except for Uncle Hamid because Uncle Hamid was Uncle Jamal’s brother and had come to visit us from Isfahan. Then, he chugged the leftover vodka he had served everybody, which was not real vodka but something we Iranians call the doggy booze. And so, he prepared himself to appear at my bedroom door.
Before him was Mom, who had secretly squeezed past my door in anticipation as she knew something was about to go wrong. I had prepared myself too. I was already defensively pretending to be asleep. I did that every night because nights were the culmination of Uncle Jamal’s alcoholic rage. That night, however, extra-blushed with doggy booze, he had become a wild boar. His eyes were fixed on his target, which would be me, and he charged forward as if Mom, who was standing vigil in front of my bed, did not exist. He knocked Mom with his boar tusks like she was just an obstacle, a shrub. She tumbled onto the bed, onto my legs. I woke from my make-believe sleep and cried, ‘She didn’t do anything. Leave her alone.’ Uncle Jamal snorted and sniffed and spoke the language of boars. When he charged at me again, Uncle Hamid was there to stop him. They wrestled and grunted, and Uncle Hamid said things to turn Uncle Jamal human. When Uncle Jamal had stopped being a boar and could speak as a human again, he said things like, ‘The bitch has scabies. She has scabies, I’m telling you.’
Then he turned to me.
‘Who do you think you are, you filthy bitch?’ he screamed. ‘You’re more dangerous than Covid. You’ll get us all killed with your scabies.’
I became hysterical and cried like a baby. There was a lot of snot, and my face was puffy red as if it was about to explode. Uncle Hamid told Uncle Jamal how he did not expect him to behave like that. He was the cool uncle, the role model of all brothers. He should not talk about uncool things like scabies, he said. Uncle Hamid also said that Uncle Jamal, and he should go out for a walk.
But Uncle Jamal did not listen. He said he would not let me go to Ireland because it was his civic responsibility not to send a filthy animal abroad. He said that as a human, he cared about Irish people and did not want them to get scabies from me. He said that he would fix me before sending me anywhere, that he had the legal right to ban me from travelling, and that he was a responsible human being concerned about the wellbeing of all humans, Irish, Afghan, you name it. He asked me who I thought I was and said that no Irish person would accept a diseased piece of meat who hid under her blanket. He said that I would never be successful unless I learned to love all humans as he did. He said that if he made a movie about my ugly face that was sick with scabies, he would get famous, successful, and rich. He said he would bring his camera to start filming me immediately, but he didn’t. Then he asked if I needed a mirror to look at my ugly face and see what he was talking about. He asked that again and charged forward to take me to a mirror. Uncle Hamid stopped him.
‘I just threw everybody out.’ Uncle Jamal yelled at the top of his lungs, ‘They’re all gone now. Do you know why? Because of you. You’re the one who should be leaving this house, really. If you do, I’ll be able to invite everybody. Absolutely. I’ll not have to be sitting alone, ashamed of having this ugly girl with scabies in the bedroom. Everything will get better. Yeah. Because I’ll not have to look at your face. Everything will change. This entire place. Pretty girls will come to Uncle Jamal, and they’ll sing to me.’ He pointed at his chest, ‘They’ll play songs on their instruments. They’ll share their beauty with my guests, with the whole world. That’s right. They’ll do everything a good girl’s supposed to do. But naturally, I’m not going to invite them while you’re here, sitting like a lump of meat. You’re ruining my peace. You’re killing me with your scabies. Naturally, I want you gone. But I can’t throw you out just yet. Not yet. Because I have a responsibility. Yeah. I’m responsible for the Irish. For society. I’m not having you infecting everybody with your filthy disease. Look what you’ve done to me.’
The talk about scabies, wrestling, meddling, and crying took about an hour until Uncle Jamal finally agreed to go out for a walk with Uncle Hamid.
When they left, I cried some more, and Mom tried to soothe me by telling me a story that was supposed to give me perspective. She wanted me to see the unseen and accept the circumstances by knowing what had led up to it.
When he was in his 20s, before meeting my mom, Uncle Jamal was locked up in prison because he had hung out with people from some political party he wasn’t even involved with. They grassed on him and so he was caught. He was there for 4 years. Mom said that Uncle Jamal felt like I was imprisoning myself in my bedroom because of Covid. Scabies was a common disease among the prisoners in his cell.
I told Mom that I would try to understand why Uncle Jamal did what he did. But when Mom left the bedroom, my entire body itched with make-believe scabies, and I scratched myself all night. In the morning, my skin was sore, and there were little marks and bruises all over it. I wondered if it would have been easier had Uncle Hamid not been there to meddle and had Uncle Jamal given me the bruises with his own hands. I also wondered if it would have been better had Mom not enlightened me. That morning, I felt terribly ill and did not get out of bed until I found myself a cure. I did not want Uncle Jamal to be my father anymore.
⸎ ⸎ ⸎
IN THE CITYWEST vaccination center, waiting for a nurse to call me in, I decided that Uncle Jamal would have hated the crowd there. It was filled with filthy muzzled-up prisoners like me. But I did not care. I was happy.
I got the shot and took the bus back home. When I arrived, it was 1 pm, and I knew that the New Year was going to be in roughly two hours. I lay in my Dublin bed, which, unlike my Iran bed which faced the west, faced the east and had never seen me cry. I picked up the book I had been reading in the vaccination queue. But I could not read. Instead, I was filled with dread. Because soon, everybody would call to say Happy New Year. I would have to see them all. Uncle Jamal would be there too. So, I lay in bed, waited for them to call, and wondered if I had missed them. Maybe I wanted them to call.
Then, my phone rang. It was a WhatsApp call from a number I had not saved on my phone, but it had enough 6s and 7s for me to recognize it as my cousin’s. We were on good terms, although I did not see it lasting for long. I did not answer, and that was a clear sign. I was reluctant to keep the relationship going. Or maybe, I wondered, I wanted to talk to my parents first. I wondered why they had not called.
Then Brother called, and I did answer the phone. He was somewhere in Europe: over the eight years he had spent outside of Iran, he had hoarded a collection of science degrees. He was wearing a white button-up shirt with long sleeves. It must have been new, and it caught my eye. As we talked, he rotated his selfie camera to proudly show me his Haft-Sin Table. I knew why he was so excited to show it to me because eight years ago when he had been a confused new student somewhere in the United States, I had asked him if he was going to make a Haft-sin Table for Eid. No, he answered, because while he did have Seeb (which means apple) and Sekkeh (the Farsi equivalent to coin), and Serkeh (which is the same thing as vinegar), he had no idea where to find Somaaq (Sumac), Sonbol (Hyacinth), Samanu (a dish made of wheat, with the look and consistency of diarrhea), Senjed (which I looked up in Wikipedia and is commonly called a lot of things in English, but Silver Berry sounds the coolest) and Sabzeh (seeds sprouted one month in advance). Where would he get these seven specific items that start with S and are nowhere to be seen at any Costco or Walmart? He whined, and I advised him to get creative. He did. That year, he found a football that had Seven Stars on it.
This year, Brother again subscribed to the ‘Jumble up anything that starts with S’ tradition that his sister had founded and put Salad (Farsi in consensus with English), Stone (the Farsi word is something entirely different, but starts with S for no reason) and Saffron on the table even though the Farsi name for Saffron starts with a Z.
Afterward, he asked to see if I wanted to say happy new year to his European girlfriend. It was a surprising request from a brother who was known to hide from me not just his relationships but his thoughts and feelings and all things that make humans human too. I made an awkward face, and the silence that followed was in a global language. It meant, ‘No, but I am considerate enough not to say the word.’ Despite the silence, his girlfriend appeared on the phone screen. Her hair was long, beautiful, and as thick as her accent when she adorably mumbled, ‘Sal e no Mobarak.’ She was like a little girl learning her first words, and in spite of myself, my reaction was that of a mother-to-be, the way my brain is wired to like all things that resemble cute little babies that make me squeal.
When we were done with the small talk, Brother explained how he was planning a reunion. Me, him, Mom, and Uncle Jamal.
‘I hope they get a visa. We can travel around Europe. Dad will love that,’ he said.
I did not say or think anything.
‘Have you talked to them today yet?’
‘No,’ I said and laughed because I was uncomfortable.
‘Call them,’ he said, ‘It will make them happy.’
I will not call them because I do not want our relationship to thrive, I thought. They should be calling me if they wish, and I will answer reluctantly, I told myself. But to Brother, I said: ‘Alright.’
We said our goodbyes and hung up.
Some minutes later, when no one called and I was filled with dread again because, of course, they were not calling me on purpose to test me, to scold me for not caring enough to call, I called Mom.
‘Why didn’t you call?’ was the first thing I asked her. She said that everybody was so busy calling each other that she did not get around to calling me. I could see from her background that they were not spending Eid in Isfahan this year. They were spending it with Mom’s side of the family. Soon, Grandma Goli, who is Mom’s mother, sneaked into the screen and asked Mom to show me her Haft-sin Table. On the table was a large picture of her husband, Grandpa Parsa, who had died two months ago, just before I moved to Dublin. Next to Grandpa Parsa’s picture was another picture frame with all of Grandma Goli’s grandchildren who were not in Iran anymore. I could see that Grandma Goli had cut out my face from another picture and pasted it onto the grandchildren’s hall of fame. I was a recent addition. Then, Mom turned the camera around to show me to everybody. They all took turns speaking to me.
Great Uncle Mani, who was loathed by everybody for his lies, was the first person to see me. He barely had enough screen time to say, ‘My princess, my princess,’ before the camera swooshed across the room.
The swoosh continued, and somewhere between the television room and the kitchen, the camera landed on Uncle Mojtaba. He told me that I looked more beautiful now that I was in Dublin. I said I knew, and he laughed.
Then, Mom took her phone to the kitchen by a window where Uncle Jamal and Auntie Sara smoked. Uncle Jamal loved that Auntie Sara was a smoker because women who smoked and did not wear a hijab were rebellious like he was. He boasted about having a smoker sister-in-law to my non-smoking Isfahani uncles and one auntie. Over the years, one by one, my Isfahani uncles’ wives and one auntie stopped wearing a hijab, and I spotted two of them smoking too. Uncle Jamal was proud because he had fixed everybody.
‘Give me that thing.’ Auntie Sara told Mom and snatched the phone away. She was very kind and asked if I had gotten a new dress for Eid.
‘Show me what you’re wearing,’ she demanded eagerly.
‘Just this old thing,’ I pulled on the collar of the new white sweater I was wearing. Mom cut the conversation short.
‘Here. Speak to your dad too.’
Mom handed Uncle Jamal the phone, and instead of saying hello, we nodded.
‘What’s up?’ he asked. This was another one of Uncle Jamal’s favorite catchphrases.
‘Got my vaccine today,’ I answered bluntly. With him, I had become short-spoken and cold. Rude.
‘Alright, alright. Time’s up,’ Mom said as she took the phone away from Uncle Jamal. She laughed and tried to make it sound cute.
‘You must be very busy. We won’t bother you now. Take care, and happy new year!’ she said courteously. She did not know if I was busy. She did not know where I worked, what I studied, and in which part of Dublin I lived because I had not shared. We were strangers. Me and Mom and all the uncles and aunties.
I hung up, and for a brief moment, my Dublin bedroom turned into my Iran bedroom. Congested and crippling. Messy. Dirty. Ugly. I smacked my face with my palms and pushed my nails into my forehead. Just like I did in my Iran bedroom every night.
When I stopped clenching my forehead, I opened Brother’s messages on my phone. Our last message was from months ago. I had asked him to build a durable material for solar sails now that he was a scientist. Why do you want a material for solar sails, he had asked, and I had said for space travel, of course.
My visa application for Ireland was still pending when we had this conversation. Sailing to the moon was my plan B.
I typed in a new message.
I don’t wanna see him if he gets a visa for real. It’s serious. Don’t come to Ireland with Jamal. I’m at peace here. Don’t want it ruined.
Thirty minutes passed, and I got a reply.
I got the shot and took the bus back home. When I arrived, it was 1 pm, and I knew that the New Year was going to be in roughly two hours. I lay in my Dublin bed, which, unlike my Iran bed which faced the west, faced the east and had never seen me cry. I picked up the book I had been reading in the vaccination queue. But I could not read. Instead, I was filled with dread. Because soon, everybody would call to say Happy New Year. I would have to see them all. Uncle Jamal would be there too. So, I lay in bed, waited for them to call, and wondered if I had missed them. Maybe I wanted them to call.
Then, my phone rang. It was a WhatsApp call from a number I had not saved on my phone, but it had enough 6s and 7s for me to recognize it as my cousin’s. We were on good terms, although I did not see it lasting for long. I did not answer, and that was a clear sign. I was reluctant to keep the relationship going. Or maybe, I wondered, I wanted to talk to my parents first. I wondered why they had not called.
Then Brother called, and I did answer the phone. He was somewhere in Europe: over the eight years he had spent outside of Iran, he had hoarded a collection of science degrees. He was wearing a white button-up shirt with long sleeves. It must have been new, and it caught my eye. As we talked, he rotated his selfie camera to proudly show me his Haft-Sin Table. I knew why he was so excited to show it to me because eight years ago when he had been a confused new student somewhere in the United States, I had asked him if he was going to make a Haft-sin Table for Eid. No, he answered, because while he did have Seeb (which means apple) and Sekkeh (the Farsi equivalent to coin), and Serkeh (which is the same thing as vinegar), he had no idea where to find Somaaq (Sumac), Sonbol (Hyacinth), Samanu (a dish made of wheat, with the look and consistency of diarrhea), Senjed (which I looked up in Wikipedia and is commonly called a lot of things in English, but Silver Berry sounds the coolest) and Sabzeh (seeds sprouted one month in advance). Where would he get these seven specific items that start with S and are nowhere to be seen at any Costco or Walmart? He whined, and I advised him to get creative. He did. That year, he found a football that had Seven Stars on it.
This year, Brother again subscribed to the ‘Jumble up anything that starts with S’ tradition that his sister had founded and put Salad (Farsi in consensus with English), Stone (the Farsi word is something entirely different, but starts with S for no reason) and Saffron on the table even though the Farsi name for Saffron starts with a Z.
Afterward, he asked to see if I wanted to say happy new year to his European girlfriend. It was a surprising request from a brother who was known to hide from me not just his relationships but his thoughts and feelings and all things that make humans human too. I made an awkward face, and the silence that followed was in a global language. It meant, ‘No, but I am considerate enough not to say the word.’ Despite the silence, his girlfriend appeared on the phone screen. Her hair was long, beautiful, and as thick as her accent when she adorably mumbled, ‘Sal e no Mobarak.’ She was like a little girl learning her first words, and in spite of myself, my reaction was that of a mother-to-be, the way my brain is wired to like all things that resemble cute little babies that make me squeal.
When we were done with the small talk, Brother explained how he was planning a reunion. Me, him, Mom, and Uncle Jamal.
‘I hope they get a visa. We can travel around Europe. Dad will love that,’ he said.
I did not say or think anything.
‘Have you talked to them today yet?’
‘No,’ I said and laughed because I was uncomfortable.
‘Call them,’ he said, ‘It will make them happy.’
I will not call them because I do not want our relationship to thrive, I thought. They should be calling me if they wish, and I will answer reluctantly, I told myself. But to Brother, I said: ‘Alright.’
We said our goodbyes and hung up.
Some minutes later, when no one called and I was filled with dread again because, of course, they were not calling me on purpose to test me, to scold me for not caring enough to call, I called Mom.
‘Why didn’t you call?’ was the first thing I asked her. She said that everybody was so busy calling each other that she did not get around to calling me. I could see from her background that they were not spending Eid in Isfahan this year. They were spending it with Mom’s side of the family. Soon, Grandma Goli, who is Mom’s mother, sneaked into the screen and asked Mom to show me her Haft-sin Table. On the table was a large picture of her husband, Grandpa Parsa, who had died two months ago, just before I moved to Dublin. Next to Grandpa Parsa’s picture was another picture frame with all of Grandma Goli’s grandchildren who were not in Iran anymore. I could see that Grandma Goli had cut out my face from another picture and pasted it onto the grandchildren’s hall of fame. I was a recent addition. Then, Mom turned the camera around to show me to everybody. They all took turns speaking to me.
Great Uncle Mani, who was loathed by everybody for his lies, was the first person to see me. He barely had enough screen time to say, ‘My princess, my princess,’ before the camera swooshed across the room.
The swoosh continued, and somewhere between the television room and the kitchen, the camera landed on Uncle Mojtaba. He told me that I looked more beautiful now that I was in Dublin. I said I knew, and he laughed.
Then, Mom took her phone to the kitchen by a window where Uncle Jamal and Auntie Sara smoked. Uncle Jamal loved that Auntie Sara was a smoker because women who smoked and did not wear a hijab were rebellious like he was. He boasted about having a smoker sister-in-law to my non-smoking Isfahani uncles and one auntie. Over the years, one by one, my Isfahani uncles’ wives and one auntie stopped wearing a hijab, and I spotted two of them smoking too. Uncle Jamal was proud because he had fixed everybody.
‘Give me that thing.’ Auntie Sara told Mom and snatched the phone away. She was very kind and asked if I had gotten a new dress for Eid.
‘Show me what you’re wearing,’ she demanded eagerly.
‘Just this old thing,’ I pulled on the collar of the new white sweater I was wearing. Mom cut the conversation short.
‘Here. Speak to your dad too.’
Mom handed Uncle Jamal the phone, and instead of saying hello, we nodded.
‘What’s up?’ he asked. This was another one of Uncle Jamal’s favorite catchphrases.
‘Got my vaccine today,’ I answered bluntly. With him, I had become short-spoken and cold. Rude.
‘Alright, alright. Time’s up,’ Mom said as she took the phone away from Uncle Jamal. She laughed and tried to make it sound cute.
‘You must be very busy. We won’t bother you now. Take care, and happy new year!’ she said courteously. She did not know if I was busy. She did not know where I worked, what I studied, and in which part of Dublin I lived because I had not shared. We were strangers. Me and Mom and all the uncles and aunties.
I hung up, and for a brief moment, my Dublin bedroom turned into my Iran bedroom. Congested and crippling. Messy. Dirty. Ugly. I smacked my face with my palms and pushed my nails into my forehead. Just like I did in my Iran bedroom every night.
When I stopped clenching my forehead, I opened Brother’s messages on my phone. Our last message was from months ago. I had asked him to build a durable material for solar sails now that he was a scientist. Why do you want a material for solar sails, he had asked, and I had said for space travel, of course.
My visa application for Ireland was still pending when we had this conversation. Sailing to the moon was my plan B.
I typed in a new message.
I don’t wanna see him if he gets a visa for real. It’s serious. Don’t come to Ireland with Jamal. I’m at peace here. Don’t want it ruined.
Thirty minutes passed, and I got a reply.
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I haven’t sent them the invitation letter yet. But yeah, I was thinking of having them here in June. I looked at flights to Ireland, and it was a bit difficult to plan it anyways because we have to go through England to get to Ireland, which requires a transit visa. I didn’t know how that would work because I’m pretty sure they’d have to go to England’s embassy in Turkey or some neighboring country since it’s closed in Iran. Ireland is out, really. So, I wanted to suggest you come to us.
… If you want, of course. |
I sighed with relief and imagined what everyone would be saying to Uncle Jamal. How come you went to Europe and didn’t visit your own daughter, his important guests would wonder. Why didn’t she join you in Italy? The aunties and uncles would ask him. I should have been ashamed of thinking this. But I wasn’t. I didn’t care. I typed in God bless the queen and hit send.
The fish in my belly settled.
The fish in my belly settled.
Behind the closed doors of her room in Tehran, Iran, L. Amani wrote things nobody ever read. Then in January 2022, she put her life in a suitcase and moved to Ireland to start a creative writing course. Uncle Jamal is her first published story.
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