SCATTERED PEARLS by Sohila Zanjani and David Brewster

SCATTERED PEARLSFirst published in Australia in 2016 by Simon & Schuster (Australia) Pty LimitedSuite 19A, Level 1, 450 Miller Street, Cammeray, NSW 2062

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© Sohila Zanjani and David Brewster 2016

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior permission of the publisher.

National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication entryCreator: Zanjani, Sohila, author.Title: Scattered pearls/Sohila Zanjani and David Brewster.ISBN: 9781925030969 (paperback) 9781925030976 (ebook)Subjects: Zanjani, Sohila. Zanjani, Sohila – Family. Women – Iran – Biography. Women immigrants – Australia – biography. Self-realisation in women – Australia. Iran – Politics and government – 1979-1997. Iran – History – 20th century.Other Creators/Contributors: Brewster, David, author.Dewey Number: 955.0542092

Cover design: Christabella DesignsCover photograph © Sohila ZanjaniCover illustration © Marta Jonina/ShutterstockTypeset by Midland Typesetters, Australia Printed and bound in Australia by Griffi n Press

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Every effort has been made to acknowledge and contact the copyright holders for permission to reproduce material contained in this book. Copyright holders should contact the publisher and credits will be included in subsequent editions.

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The house in Takht–e Tavoos

My mother, Shahin, was 15 years old when she married Asghar, Laya’s eldest son, in 1946. She fell pregnant fi ve months after they married – the fi rst of what

would be 14 pregnancies, with as few as 40 days between some of them, over the next 25 years.

Shahin’s fi rst child, a girl named Malihe, died of pneu-monia when she was 14 months old. My mother always believed that this was because she had taken her baby outside in the middle of a very cold winter, with much snow all around; it was only for a few minutes but long enough for the child to catch a bad cold from which she never recovered. Her next child was a boy named Mehrdad, born less than a year later. He died after only seven days due to complications of jaundice. She then lost her next child, another son, the same way. After each death Shahin would cry and cry, but Asghar showed no empathy. ‘When you are dead you are dead,’ he would say.

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S c a t t e r e d Pe a r l s

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In these times – the 1940s and ’50s – healthcare in Iran, at least for less well-off families like ours, was very basic. Condi-tions like neonatal jaundice, which rarely if ever lead to death in modern times, often caused infant mortality. Superstition, rather than medicine, tended to guide parenting behaviour.

After the third death, Laya and Shahin travelled with Aboo, Laya’s third husband, and two neighbours to Mashhad, an ancient and spiritual city in the far north-east of Iran. It is the location of the enormous Imam Reza Shrine, a temple popular with those who have problems to solve. People come from far and wide, donating as much money and gold as they can (or often cannot) afford, then pray for miracles for every-thing from medical challenges to family disputes. However, Laya did not turn to God for guidance. Instead she found a fortune teller at the bazaar and invited him to come to their inn to help Shahin.

When he heard Shahin’s story, the fortune teller said the babies were dying because of ‘extraterrestrials’. It would cost 50 toman – a lot of money at the time – for him to correct matters. However, he agreed to take 20 toman immediately and the rest when the family returned to Mashhad with the good news. The fortune teller asked Shahin to sit on a ‘magic’ bowl. He sat opposite her, then asked Laya and her friend to sit on either side, the four of them forming a diamond. He placed a bowl of water on the fl oor in the centre of this diamond, then laid a square cloth between the four of them, a corner in each person’s lap. He asked them all to stare at the cloth. All of a sudden there was a chirping noise and the centre of the cloth appeared to rise by itself. Shahin screamed and threw away the cloth.


T h e h o u s e i n Ta k h t – e Ta v o o s

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‘Don’t be scared,’ said the fortune teller. ‘That was your angel. I have to bring your angel three times.’

But Shahin would have nothing more to do with it. At the end the fortune teller said that he had sworn at her angel not to harm Shahin’s babies again. She became pregnant again shortly after, gave birth to a son and then lost that son to jaundice after only three days.

The next advice offered to Shahin came from a neighbour, who declared that her wedding to Asghar had not taken place at a ‘good’ hour. Shahin and her husband needed to divorce and remarry. The man, a mullah wearing a turban, offered to recite the divorce phrase for 10 toman. Once again, Laya handed over the money. Asghar stayed away for 24 hours and by the time he returned home the deed had been done, with little or no obvious change.

Then a number of women from nearby said that Shahin’s problem was that she ate too many ‘hot’ foods – she needed a better balance of ‘cool’ foods. These terms didn’t relate to the temperature of the foods but to their type. It was a ‘yin-yang’ type of thing. So Laya started sourcing these so-called ‘cool’ foods. From the gardens of the hospital where she worked, she collected khorfeh (purslane), a slippery, tasteless, wild vegetable. This she crushed, extracting the juice. She bought a herb called kasni (chicory) from a vegetable seller and used it to make a bitter juice. As there was no refrigeration, both drinks were stored in bowls outside in the cold air. Shahin drank khorfeh juice one morning and kasni juice the next, alternating between them for three months. Other than that she ate mainly plain bread, avoiding hot foods. When, during Norooz (the Persian new year in March), the local women



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gathered together to share pastries and cakes, Shahin (who always loved pastries very much) asked for yoghurt.

Shahin’s fi fth child was a girl. She was named Zari and was the most beautiful baby with perfect, pale white skin. She became a little yellow the next day but did not develop a fever. Nevertheless, Shahin would often sit up all night rocking her daughter in her cot, crying the whole time as she waited for Zari to die. Neighbours would pass and call out, ‘Our heart is burning for you, Shahin. God protects you, the tree, and your children are branches’. And this child didn’t die. Zari soon grew into a chatty toddler who became every-one’s favourite.

It wasn’t long after Zari was born that my parents moved to a new house that they shared with Laya and Aboo and Laya’s middle son Ahmad and his family. The house was close to central Tehran, near the main road of Takht-e Tavoos. My father was a sheet metal worker and had a shop not far away. He also leased and ran a bicycle shop that was also only about one kilometre away.

Soon after they moved into this house, in April 1955, I was born. I also became jaundiced and quite ill, but somehow I survived.

~

The house in Takht-e Tavoos was in a nice area, with many middle class families – people in the south of Tehran would call it ballay-e-shahr, meaning ‘upper side of the city’. Most of our neighbours had good cars and tastefully furnished homes. They were mostly professional people.



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In contrast, our house was very plain. The building had been designed and built by my father and was jointly owned by him and Ahmad. Middle class Iranian architecture can be quite restrained, largely because heavy concrete bricks are used as the main building material. This, combined with my father’s utilitarian tendencies, meant our house was exceed-ingly austere. It was a simple brown brick rectangle of two storeys: a basement and a ground fl oor. Rendered inside in white, both levels were divided down the middle, from front to back, by wide, tiled hallways. My family lived on the basement level which also contained the kitchen. It could be accessed from street level down a fl ight of eleven green and white granite stairs. I remember it was eleven for two reasons: fi rst, I have always had – and still have – a habit of counting things like this; and second, because those stairs would become my companion every time I left the house for the outside world.

At the back of the house was a concrete yard. It was lower than the street and could be accessed via fi ve steps up from the basement or six steps down from a small balcony at the end of the ground fl oor hallway. The balcony and those six stairs had a railing with a distinctive, repeated ‘wave’ design. Later my brother Hossein was always climbing on this railing, risking a fall onto the pavement below. The yard was bare except for a plain cement, rectangular hoze (pond) about one metre deep at its centre.

My parents had moved into the Takht-e Tavoos house before it was completely fi nished. There was no electricity connected and no water storage. All water had to be collected from an open concrete aqueduct running alongside the road outside the house, between the footpath and the road itself.



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My mother would carry what water we needed in a bucket from the canal into the house. After washing clothes, she would carry the wet clothes 300 metres to rinse them in the aqueduct of a nearby street because she felt ashamed to do this outside her own house.

After the house was complete it had a large underground abb anbar – a water tank – that was fi lled once every month by diverting water from the canal in the street. When it was our turn the man who managed this, called the mir abb, would knock at the door at any hour, even two in the morning, and my father would say, ‘Shahin, wake up. Divert the water.’ Then my mother would have to go outside and place a wooden barrier into a slot that would redirect the water. Once the tank was full, about two hours later, she would remove the barrier. Drinking water for the house was then brought up from the abb anbar by a hand pump beside the pond in the yard. This pump was also used to fi ll the pond, from which water could be drawn by the bucket for washing. The pump and the pond served this practical purpose for many years before we were fi nally connected to mains water.

The pond was also a source of tragedy.In the middle of the second summer at Takht-e Tavoos,

the house was a buzz of activity. Shahin’s brother Abdollah and his wife, Pooran, were staying. They had been married for a few months and, because Abdollah was working for the Iranian Navy, they lived in Abadan near the Persian Gulf, a very hot place at this time of year. Asghar was at work in his bicycle shop and Abdollah had gone down the street to post a letter. Otherwise everyone else was at home. Aboo was having tea at the back of the house; Ahmad and



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Nemat, Laya’s third son, were talking; Pooran was reading a newspaper; Shahin was frying eggplant; Laya was busy doing other housework; and I was asleep in my cot. Zari, now two-and-a-half, came down the stairs from the back yard into the kitchen and said, ‘I want cantaloupe.’

When Laya said that they didn’t have any cantaloupe, Zari told her that she heard a man in the street calling out that he had sweet cantaloupe. Laya said okay, she would go out and buy some. She went up the stairs towards the front of the house, Zari following behind her.

A few minutes later there was a knock on the door. It was the next door neighbour who said that they had noticed from their balcony that something was fl oating in the pond. My mother shrieked and, taking the stairs in a single stride, ran up to the yard. She reached the pond as Ahmad was pulling an unconscious Zari out of the water. Shahin screamed and screamed, hitting herself on the head, while Ahmad quickly took Zari to his car and raced straight to the hospital. In the confusion Shahin was left behind; she ran all the way to the hospital, about one kilometre away, almost collapsing when she got there. But it was too late. Zari could not be revived. When Asghar arrived at the hospital a few minutes later – it was across the road from his shop – he cried too. It was the only time he was ever known to cry for one of his children.

This tragedy weighed heavily on the whole family, with everyone blaming themselves for not knowing where Zari was. It seemed that after following her grandmother up the stairs towards the front door, Zari had not gone outside with her but had doubled back along the ground fl oor hallway, down the stairs and out to the yard. She had a small hand kerchief



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in her hand and must have reached down to the water to dampen it, lost her balance and fallen in.

Every time Shahin told me this story, right up until the end of her life, it would cause her to cry. She told me that afterwards she did not eat for 20 days, so deep was her grief. She remembered walking around the house in the mornings looking for Zari.

After Zari’s accident my father placed an iron grate over the pond and later, after the mains water had been connected, the pond was fi lled with old bricks and dirt. A decorative white concrete pond in the shape of a shell was placed on top.

~

Not long after the loss of Zari, Aboo decided that he and Laya should adopt a child from an orphanage in west Tehran. He and Laya had no children of their own, and he thought that a slightly older child might be able to look after me and make sure I did not drown like Zari. When Laya asked who would look after the child, Aboo said he would.

They went to the orphanage, where all the children had shaved heads and identical jackets. The manager brought a few girls to meet them and they chose a two-year-old called Soosan who was about 18 months older than me. Despite Aboo having retired and Laya nearing retirement age, the adoption process was straightforward and Soosan soon joined our household. With that Shahin’s workload increased. Notwithstanding Aboo’s promises, and though he cared for his adopted daughter, it was my mother and Laya who took on most of the work of looking after this tiny child who was



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not yet toilet trained, was painfully shy and had clearly been neglected. Soosan constantly wet the bed, which meant my mother was washing sheets most days. Laya’s response to this was to smack Soosan and shout at her, which – knowing what we know today – would only have made the problem worse. On one occasion in the middle of winter, Laya broke a layer of ice that had formed on the pond in the back yard and dunked Soosan in the water up to her waist in order to wash her.

Eventually Soosan did stop wetting herself but she contin-ued to be treated poorly at times, not only by Laya but also by my father and my uncle Nemat. She lived in constant fear of something happening to me because protecting me was her ‘job’. ‘If anything happens to Sohila I will kill you,’ Laya used to say.

Soosan would stay in our household for seven years before my uncle Ahmad grew tired of the abuse that she was suffer-ing and decided she should return to an orphanage. At least there, he pointed out, she would go to school – something that Laya and Aboo had not afforded her even after I started school. After she had returned to the orphanage Aboo and Laya, and sometimes Shahin, Asghar and Ahmad, continued to visit her every two weeks, taking fruits, pastry and money.

Many years later, when I was about twenty and there was no longer regular contact, I decided to fi nd Soosan. After numerous enquiries to orphanages and government depart-ments I discovered where she was and drove to see her. She was shy but very happy to see me, a wide smile on her bony face. After all these years there was a strong bond between us, as if we deeply understood each other. I kissed her and held her so tight, thinking of her suffering because of me.



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I was wearing four gold bangles on my wrist that day and left two of them with her; even today I see and feel Soosan every time I wear those bangles. She later married and I believe she had a son.

~

With the death of Zari I was Shahin’s only surviving child until my brother Hossein was born (healthy) two years later. But that was not the end of her pain.

Her next child was a girl, Soraya, and she too became jaundiced.

‘God, don’t take Soraya,’ she would say repeatedly. ‘It doesn’t matter that she is yellow. I will look after her and make her well.’

After seven days the jaundice faded. However, Soraya became very ill. Eventually, though she could not really afford the cost, my mother took her baby to see a doctor. He identifi ed a fi rm anterior fontanelle (soft spot), but he had no solution. ‘She may get better in time, or she may not,’ was all the advice he gave.

My mother swore that she would keep this child. She would wrap the baby fi rmly, then sit on the fl oor, her legs closed together straight out in front of her and a pillow over her feet. The baby’s head was placed on the pillow, her body lying along the groove between my mother’s legs. Shahin would then rock Soraya gently left and right for hours so she would sleep.

There was no sympathy – or help – from my father. ‘Damn kid, why doesn’t she die so we get some relief!’ he would say. ‘We should suffocate this puppy.’



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My father certainly never, ever offered to assist with Soraya, or any of my mother’s other children, in any way.

Soraya didn’t improve. Without telling Asghar, my mother fi nally decided to take her to the doctor again. Though there was a general practitioner nearby, she travelled an hour by bus with her baby in order to save money on the fees. The doctor immediately wanted to admit Soraya to hospital, but Shahin insisted that she stay with her child.

‘It is not possible,’ the doctor said. ‘Only children can stay there.’

‘I will not leave my child alone,’ said my mother. ‘She must be with me.’

‘Then you must take your child and go,’ said the doctor.My mother caught the bus home with her baby. The

next day, four months after Soraya had become sick and my mother had fi rst taken her to see a doctor, Soraya died.

Almost immediately, my mother became pregnant again. When the next child was born, a boy named Mansoor, he also became jaundiced straight after birth. This time my mother went to a doctor immediately, crying in despair.

‘Why do my children always become yellow?’ she asked.The doctor did not give Shahin a proper explanation –

at least not one that she understood. He gave her some tablets and advised her that she must not breastfeed the child herself. ‘You must give him milk formula [which was just becoming fashionable] or a neighbour’s milk.’ Around this time, in the early 1960s, a genetic connection to severe neonatal, or ‘malignant’ jaundice was being recognised, so perhaps the doctor had this in mind, though my mother was not given any tests to confi rm this.



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There was a woman two doors down the street, called Azar, who was breastfeeding at the time, so Shahin went to her and asked her to feed Mansoor also, which she agreed to do. She fed my brother for 40 days while my mother expressed her own milk and threw it away. It worked. Mansoor survived. My mother resumed breastfeeding him herself after those eight weeks and he remained healthy.

My mother gave birth to two more daughters after that, Fariba and Frooshad, both of whom I believe were breastfed. Both survived. In 1967, however – in between Fariba and Frooshad – Shahin had become pregnant again.

‘Why do you get pregnant all the time?’ my father asked.I don’t believe he had any concept that his forcing himself

on my mother every night was leading to pregnancy after pregnancy. Years later my mother told me that she felt like a toilet into which Asghar would empty himself. But by now Shahin had had enough herself. Four months into her term, she decided to abort the pregnancy, remembering that Laya had told her once that she could use ‘date grass’ – a tough, dark green grass with wood-like blades about 15 centimetres long – if ever she wanted to do this.

Laya had gone to see my uncle Ahmad and his family. Ahmad was a paramedic and captain in the army and had been transferred to a base in the city of Kermanshah for a few years. My brother Hossein and I were at school – I was ten or eleven at this time – and our younger siblings were playing outside. Shahin went to her bedroom, lay down on the bed and inserted a blade of date grass into her vagina. The next day she saw a blood clot and two or three days later, after some pain, the male foetus came out. Shahin buried it



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in the yard. Satisfi ed, she got back to her work around the house. All wasn’t well, though. Over the next day or so, she got increasingly strong pains in her stomach – eventually to the point that she had to stop working and lie down (some-thing almost unheard of for my mother). That evening when Asghar arrived home he said, ‘Where are you? This is not the time to sleep. Come on, give us tea. What do we have to eat? Come on . . . move!’

All of this was interspersed with so much swearing I had to cover my ears.

‘I dropped the child,’ said Shahin.‘Good. One bread eater less,’ said Asghar. ‘We are free of

the noise.’That evening I gave my father his food. He did not think

to take my mother to the doctor, but this was not unusual. She had an incredibly high pain threshold and whenever she was sick, would press through it for two or three days until she was back to normal. This time, however, my mother woke up in the middle of the night and found her blankets and bedding soaked in blood. It was much more than she would expect from a normal period. She covered herself with a clean cloth and, in the morning, soaked the bedding in water. This pattern continued for two more days before Asghar noticed that Shahin was so pale she looked like a corpse. He sought the advice of Farangis, a family friend who was renting Ahmad’s rooms, who told him that Shahin was dying and must go to hospital. He and Farangis put her in the car and drove to the hospital, honking the horn all the way as though they were an ambulance. There she was operated on for complications with her uterus and



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the placenta following her abortion, and she was given a blood transfusion.

In the meantime we children had been left at home. I remember being very anxious and playing a game like that fl ower petal game: ‘She gets better . . . she doesn’t . . . she gets better . . . she doesn’t. . .’ When our father came home he said, ‘Your mother has died. This is no laughing matter.’

He seemed to think that we didn’t look worried enough, but even so I’ve never been sure why he said that. Perhaps he actually did think she would die because when he went to the hospital the next day to see her his fi rst comment was, ‘A dead person becomes alive again’.

Despite this near miss, Shahin aborted two more pregnan-cies the same way after my youngest sister, Frooshad, was born when I was about thirteen.

~

For the fi rst 12 years of my life my parents and I lived in a long double room in the basement of the Takht-e Tavoos house, joined over time by my three younger siblings. During the day this room was a living area. Natural light was provided at the back by a large highlight window at yard level and at the front by a high, shallow window at street level. Now, whenever I see one of those windows on a footpath it brings back memories of watching shoes passing to and fro at the front of our house. At night the front half of this double room became my parents’ bedroom while we children slept in the back. With no partition, not even a curtain between the two halves of the room, there was no privacy. I still remember the



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sounds of my father climbing onto my mother. ‘You did it last night,’ she might whisper. To which he would reply, ‘So what?’

It was strange to hear my father speaking softly as he always spoke at a high volume during the day, usually with swear words laced through every sentence. I would put my fi ngers in my ears and my head under the blanket so I couldn’t hear the panting or see the movement of the blanket in the dim light. From my mother there was never a sound, and certainly no hint of enjoyment or satisfaction out of this process.

Our furniture, if you could call it that, was mainly in-expensive Persian rugs on the fl oor, cotton-fi lled mattresses and a few motakah – cylindrical pillows, or bolsters. The motakah were decorated with embroidery, but to make cleaning easier they were usually covered in plain, sheet-like material. Occasionally all the bedding would be taken to a man called a panbeh zan, or ‘cotton beater’, for refreshing and cleaning; when they came back they felt soft and smelt lovely and clean. If this man was short of work he would walk the streets shouting ‘panbeh zanim!’, meaning ‘cotton beating’. Other furniture included a clothes hanger with fi ve hooks from which my father would hang his pants, with the belt still through the loops, every night. There was only ever one picture hanging from our walls: a framed photograph of my father in a suit and tie. The only other thing on the wall would be a free calendar that my father was given each year, probably by a supplier.

All of this plainness contrasted with my uncle Ahmad’s rooms upstairs at ground level, and with every other house I ever visited. Uncle Ahmad, his wife Mahin and two of their sons had the same amount of space as we did, but a wall had



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been built, dividing it into two separate rooms. The front was a sitting room with large windows looking out onto the street. It had side tables and a dining table and chairs, and was nicely decorated with vases and fresh fl owers and pictures on the wall. It always felt warm in there. Another room on this level, at the back of the house overlooking the yard, was occupied for a time by my father’s youngest brother Nemat and his wife Ehteram, but mostly it was my grandmother Laya who lived there. It was one of my favourite places to be. The fl oor was covered in a nice, thick Persian carpet – dark red, with lots of fl owers and birds in the design. She had two wardrobes full of things she had collected over the years, especially linen. She always had sweets too: cashews and pistachios, almonds, candy and, best of all, the best baghlava in the world! This Qazvin baghlava is made with almonds and pistachios and is much drier and less oily than Turkish or Afghan baklavas.

My other favourite place to be was on the roof of our house.

The man in the house across the street was a pilot. He drove a beautiful, light yellow Chevrolet. Through the windows of his house we could see chandeliers. His wife Froozan was stunningly beautiful. Whenever she would leave her home, my mother, grandmother, aunties and I would gather at the front window in Ahmad’s living room, peering through the lace curtains to watch her walk. She wore the most elegant, à la mode clothing, reminiscent of Sophia Loren or Audrey Hepburn. Occasionally she wore a hat and walked in an especially graceful way, holding one hand extended in front of her as if someone were about to kiss it! My mother was so



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fascinated by this lady’s beauty that she gave her last daughter a similar name: Frooshad. I was just as taken by Froozan’s daughter as I was by her. She would have been around my age – about ten at the time – and had curly, light brown hair tied up with white ribbons. Her name was Fariba, which my mother later named one of my sisters.

I had a special view of Froozan and her world which I kept secret. Our house had a fl at roof that we could access. We used it as a play area – we even slept up there in summer when it was hot. Sometimes I would go up to the roof on my own to play with a life-size doll my uncle Abdollah had brought from the USA. From this roof I was able to crouch down and look across the road into Froozan’s house. It must have been her bedroom I could see so clearly into, because once I saw her standing in front of a full length mirror, rubbing cream onto her naked body and massaging her arms and legs. I was awestruck. Seeing this fl awless, statuesque woman caring for herself was quite surreal; it felt like I was watching someone on another planet.

In contrast to Froozan’s glamour, I’m sure people saw us as working class, old-fashioned and uneducated. During this period, throughout the 1960s and ’70s under the Shah’s reign, there were no rules about clothing, and middle and upper class women in Iran, like Froozan, dressed in fashionable Western clothes. My mother, on the other hand, almost always wore a plain skirt and top – she was always utilitar-ian, never trendy. Sometimes she wore the chador, a large wrap of cotton which covers the head and cloaks the whole body, though if she did so it was out of convenience rather than for any traditional or religious reason. My grandmother



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and aunts also only very rarely wore the chador and usually only in specifi c circumstances, such as attending a funeral, going to a mosque or taking the pilgrimage to Mecca. For the same reason my mother wore the chador for a period after my father returned from a trip to Mecca. The truth is my mother didn’t dress plainly because of her status in society: it was simply that she was an introvert who preferred to blend with the crowd, and because she preferred to spend any money she had on essentials or on her children. Later in life she would wear the chador more often because of her age; it was a quick way of preparing to go out without having to do her hair or worry about her clothes. She did appreciate smart dressing in others though, whether that was Froozan or her own daughters.

~

Across the hall from my family in the basement of the Takht-e Tavoos were two rooms: the space was identical in propor-tion to ours but a wall divided it into two separate rooms. At the front was the kitchen, in which food was prepared for the whole house. It was quite a basic space, not a modern kitchen in any sense, and it was quite dark. Natural light came from another high window onto the street, while a single, bare lightbulb hung from the ceiling. I think design-ing an underground kitchen for the house really refl ected my father’s complete lack of awareness of the practicalities of running a household.

There were stone ‘caves’ in the kitchen for the storage of pots and pans, fi rewood and coal, oil, buckets and various



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other utensils. Thin curtains, hanging from lengths of elastic, covered these chambers. Another chamber with a chimney above it was used for cooking. We didn’t have an electric or gas stove – cooking was done over a manghal, which is like a barbecue tray in which a fi re would burn. You sometimes see a gas-fi red manghal today in middle-eastern kabob restaur-ants; it has holes or slots in which long skewers sit, allowing meat to be turned constantly, or a grill over the top. In the corner of the kitchen was a Swedish masonry furnace which acted as an oven and also made the room very warm. Ori-ginally, water came only from the pond out the back; later, a single cold water tap was installed which drew from the town supply. There was also a long bench for food preparation, along which all the women of the household would work, discussing the day’s news and gossip. They never discussed politics or social issues. In fact, I don’t remember my family ever talking about such things. We were consumed by our own small domestic world.

Although Shahin was very restricted in what she was able to spend on food – my father gave her only a small allowance – there were many tastes and smells which came out of this kitchen. We did eat a lot of dizi, a lamb dish with chickpeas, potatoes, white beans and tomatoes. This was a relatively cheap meal, known as the food of the working class. (These days it is quite trendy with young people in Iran.) But there was also fried eggplant, with such a rich smell when it was cooking, smoked fi sh and, of course, saffron rice. My mother was always careful not to waste the precious saffron. There were jojeh kabob (chicken) and chelo kabob (lamb and rice), stuffed capsicum and dolmeh barg – stuffi ng wrapped in



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vine leaves – and, of course, hot Persian breads bought fresh every day. There were a number of bakeries nearby, each specialising in one of the four staple breads of our diet. Laya and my mother would sometimes debate whether nan-e barbari or nan-e lavash was the best bread to accompany the day’s meal. Occasionally, as a luxury, we would have milk, delivered by the milkman driving a three-wheeled car with large urns on the back.

Mostly the families in our house ate on their own – Ahmad and his family at their table upstairs, and my family on the fl oor in our basement room, sitting around a sofreh, or cloth. One of my main memories of eating in these times were a few beautiful crystal dishes that my mother owned, given to her by a rich aunt. They were some of the very few decora-tive items that we owned. In summer, we all ate breakfast together outside in the back yard. A thin carpet was laid on the ground with a sofreh on top of that. Someone would bring out a large samavar, a Middle Eastern urn, from which tea could be made.

The annual routine of the lives of women like Shahin and Laya revolved around food. In summer the women would make torshi, a sour preserve of vegetables, pickles, onions, pepper, garlic and herbs. This would be put away for winter, stored outside in a large ceramic pot about half a metre high. One year the torshi was ruined by my brother Hossein, probably about three years old at the time, when he removed the lid from the pot and urinated into it! The women also made tomato puree from fi ve or six wooden crates of tomatoes which were mushed up by hand. These tomatoes had such a rich red colour. The pulp would be



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pushed through colanders, leaving a smooth paste, and that paste was poured into countless large jugs for storage.

~

In about 1960, after selling out of both his metal shop and the bicycle shop, my father started a business in which he owned and operated taxis. It was a dubious business in an industry almost devoid of regulation. The general calm of the street was always being broken by my father’s banging and swearing as he worked on his cars in the street or garage, and by the foul-mouthed chatter of him and his drivers at all hours. My father, like many Iranian men, loved cars – he used to call a new car arroos, meaning ‘bride’. However his cars did not seem to love him back. He was constantly cursing when a car wouldn’t start or because a spanner would not do what he wished it to do or because a tyre dared to get a puncture. Even more noise was generated by a heavy roller door on the garage which was always getting stuck. Whenever my father came home, he would honk his horn repeatedly as he arrived, then keep honking until one of us children, or my mother or Laya, rushed out to force open that door so that he didn’t have to get out of his car. There was a metal tool – perhaps a crowbar – that we used to pull the door back down again, adding to the clamour. Then late at night, other drivers would return their taxis, banging on the door and talking loudly.

The garage had once been a very nice room across the hall from Ahmad’s sitting room. It was well proportioned, with a big window overlooking the street. For a few years it was



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rented to a single lady called Mrs Tooba. I must have been young then as I don’t remember her at all; my mother says she sold fabrics. When Mrs Tooba moved out for some reason, my father and Ahmad decided that this room had another benefi t: easy access from street level. So they knocked down the wall and window and replaced them with that large roller door. All at once the best room in the house became a garage for the repair and maintenance of cars, complete with tools, oil, rags, chains, screwdrivers, hammers, spare wheels and so on. The neighbours were not impressed but I guess this was in the age before you had to ask permission to do these sorts of things.

One evening when I was about eight years old, my father and uncle Ahmad were working in the garage, doing some-thing to a car. I could hear my father swearing, as usual, cursing a hammer for not doing what he wanted it to do. My mother brought tea for the men, retreating quickly with her hands over her ears to escape the language. My father’s swearing was not only incessant but it was also extremely foul. One of his favourite phrases was khar-kosteh, which loosely translates to ‘fucking bitch sister’. It shames me just to write it, but he used it in any company without any shame at all. It was always strange to me that my mother never told Asghar to watch his language, especially when, as in this instance, my six-year-old brother Hossein was in the garage with the men.

It was Ramazan (the Persian equivalent of the Arab ‘Ramadan’), and my mother and Mahin were preparing to break their fast (they were the only people in the house who fasted). They had made tea, placed cheese and bread on a



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cloth, and had just sat down to eat when frantic shouting could be heard coming from the garage.

My mother jumped up and ran. ‘Hossein!’ she yelled. Her fi rst thought was that my brother had trapped his hand beneath the car, or been hurt in some other way.

Then the shouting became clearer. ‘Fire, fi re, fi re!’ Everyone ran towards the garage, despite the heat and

fumes coming from the door. There was a lot of smoke, and Ahmad and my father were jumping here and there but not really doing anything useful. Flames could be seen in the corner, near the roller door, reaching right up to the ceiling. Hossein ran out of the garage into the hall and my grand-mother immediately pulled him and me out of the way.

‘Has someone called the fi re brigade?’ asked Laya. Ahmad shouted, ‘Shahin, Mahin. Go and bring water!’ The two women ran out the back of the house to the pond.

They fi lled buckets with water, and ran back up to the garage. The men threw the water, then the women ran back to refi ll their containers.

The shouting continued. One of the men turned off the power at the switchboard, drenching the scene in almost total darkness. Perhaps because of this, they decided to open the roller door, but of course the fresh air only made the fl ames worse. Smoke and fi re seemed to be everywhere, against the backdrop of a murky dusk. For over an hour, Shahin and Mahin – both of whom had been fasting all day – ferried water from the back yard to the garage, negotiating the six steps down to the garden and back up over and over again. All the time, the two men stayed at the garage. No one ever did call the fi re brigade but eventually, somehow, the fl ames were doused.



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Thanks to the solid construction of our home, the fi re didn’t have any effect beyond the garage. However, the garage was completely blackened by smoke, and some parts of the render came loose. Amazingly, there was not a lot of heat damage as, for all the noise and acrid smoke, the fi re itself had mainly been contained to the bench where it had started. As we learnt later, my uncle had been rinsing a shirt in petrol to clean oil out of it, and drops of the fuel had spattered onto the fl ame of a lamp. The bowl of petrol had been the source of most of the fi re and smoke.

There was a vocal gathering on the street afterwards as a large group of locals paused to take in this new eyesore on their genteel street and gossip about their crude neighbours.

Later a painter came to repair the garage. He had a ladder and stuck two sheets of paint swatches high on the wall. My cousin Nazi and I were watching him, fascinated by similar swatches spread around the fl oor. He asked us if we wanted to see the colours on the wall. He guided me up the ladder, holding me from behind so that I didn’t fall. However this ‘holding’ was very close – too close – and not nice. Afterwards he did the same thing with Nazi. This memory only returned to me many years later. Lucky for him none of my family came into the garage to check on what he was doing.


SCATTERED PEARLS by Sohila Zanjani and David Brewster

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Transcript of SCATTERED PEARLS by Sohila Zanjani and David Brewster