In 1972, just six years before a revolution would change the country forever, my family and I spent the summer in Iran.
Since we were living in Bahrain at the time, the trip was not a major haul. It was a short flight over the body of water that people of the Arab side called the Arabian Gulf, and people on the Iranian side (and the rest of the world, I would eventually discover) called the Persian Gulf.
We spent about five weeks in Shiraz – the home of the grape famous for its use in wines – and three weeks in the capital, Teheran.
I was twelve years old that summer, and not terribly excited initially about spending the entire summer away from all my friends. That quickly changed, because Iran quickly began intriguing me.
My mother, an assistant manager at Gulf Air at the time, had acquaintances who arranged for the places where would stay. In both places, we rented the apartments of people who were on vacation themselves.
Among the changes introduced by the Shah of Iran under the then nine-year-old White Revolution, I would learn from a woman in Tehran, was the seizing of properties from wealthy landowners; those properties were then divided up into apartments for those with more modest incomes. Both places we stayed at were apartments of this nature. Since they had once been part of a larger whole, neither place was entirely self contained. In Shiraz, we shared a kitchen and a bathroom with three other families; in Tehran, we shared a bathroom with two others.
The dynamic of these residences forced an interaction between neighbours that I remember being the first time I stepped out of my childhood world.
In Bahrain, I was well aware that I lived in an Arab Muslim country, but my world, from school to social life to home, was almost entirely English-speaking and South Asian Catholic, even if not everyone was Catholic and even if some of the nuns and priests were Caucasian. In Pakistan, where I had been at a boarding school for four years and where I had close Muslim and Parsi friends, the context of my world was the same despite it being an Urdu-speaking, Muslim country. In other places I had been to in Pakistan and in India, I hadn't ventured outside my extended family.
On that vacation in Iran, however, even though my parents and my siblings were there, I immediately noticed that the cushion of community was no longer around me; it was the first place I recognized the dominant culture.
The original property in the Shiraz space was the entire floor of a highrise; each of its four humungous bedrooms had become an individual apartment. The doors of the four apartments as well as those of the kitchen and bathroom opened onto a central common area – what must originally have been a living/dining area – which was empty of furniture. Breakfast every morning was an almost furtive event when women from each household, usually separately from those from other households, would duck into the kitchen to prepare their respective family's breakfasts. Each wore a thin cotton cloth, usually with a flower print, draped over her head that hung to her feet and sometimes fastened under her chin, but did not hide her clothes. Once their husbands left for work and the older children for school, on the days when my dad went shopping or visiting sites by himself or with one or more of my siblings, were the loveliest times in that space. The women would shed their cloth coverings and congregate in the kitchen in a communal cooking session that included my mother. She spoke no Farsi and they spoke no English, but a smiling, stumbling conversation took place nevertheless, one that involved much pointing and elaborate hand signals. In the common area, the smaller children played, along with my youngest siblings. There was a constant movement of women between the kitchen and the common area.
In the world I grew up in, children were well taken care of when it came to food and clothing and education. We were well-disciplined by the adults in our life, sometimes cuddled and often criticized. Affection was taken for granted, but affectionate language usually stopped once we stopped being toddlers and from then on was only offered up in moments of fear, anxiety, sadness or physical pain. What most struck me about the women in the Shiraz space was how gentle they were with their children and how tightly they wove a cocoon of love around them through a constant babbling of verbal affection.
During the six weeks we were there, I don't remember once hearing a conflict between the families over the use of the kitchen or the bathroom.
In Tehran, we had the bottom floor of a three-story house in which we shared a bathroom with two other families, each family having one floor. The bathroom, which held just a bath tub and a sink, was on a landing by itself between the first and second floors. The toilet was on a landing by itself between the second and third floors. We did not use this room; the first floor apartment had it own toilet in an outhouse-type structure, but with plumbing, at the edge of the small garden behind the house. Here, unlike Shiraz, the women dressed much as Western women did, and none of the women in the building wore even the minimal additional covering the women in Shiraz had worn. Here, also unlike the Shiraz space, there was constant, vociferous bickering between the families who lived on the second and third floors over the two rooms that they shared.
In order to take my daily bath, I would sneak up the stairs to the landing with the bathroom at a time I had noticed was particularly quiet – the afternoon lull right after lunch – and pray that I wouldn't run into the owners of any of the screaming voices I heard regularly.
One afternoon, I ran into a woman exiting the bathroom at a time I had assumed no one else would be there. She had short hair, well-plucked eyebrows and the frank look of someone whose confidence is based in their intelligence.
“Hello,” she said in English. She scanned me. The towel slung over my arm and the bar of soap in my hand made my reason for being there obvious. “Who are you?”
“My family's visiting.” I pointed downstairs.
“Oh, yes. From Bahrain.” She told me that the family who lived there had told her we'd be there for a few weeks. She smiled broadly and winked. “So do you call it the Arabian Gulf or the Persian Gulf?”
I burst out laughing. In post cards I had sent to my friends I had refrained from calling it either, I explained. If I called it the Arabian Gulf, the postcard wouldn't leave Iran, If I called it the Persian Gulf, it wouldn't enter Bahrain.
After over six weeks, it was exciting to speak English with someone who wasn't a member of my iamily.
“Sit down.”
I sat down on the top step with my back to the wall, She sat down on one a couple of steps below with her back to the railing. What she did next was eventually explained when I learned she was a professor at the one of the universities in Tehran. Why she did what she did remains a mystery to me to this day. My best analysis, in retrospect, is that she had been silenced by someone else in her world that day, and I was an innocuous person who came along accidentally and provided her with a silent audience.
She gave me a private lecture on the politics of Iran. As she talked, I watched the bar of soap begin to melt in the sweat of my palm and tiny bubbles form in the white foam. I didn't dare set down the soap for fear that she would stop talking.
She told me first about the White Revolution and then sneered at the Shah's hypocrisy. It was only the properties of his detractors that he seized to set up the inconvenient living arrangements such as the one we were in. It was a way to keep the population content enough to not rebel, but not content enough to aspire beyond the mediocre expectations of their lives, mired as they were in constant battling over shared space. Meanwhile, none of the properties of his friends, his family's or his own had been seized to house the ordinary populations such as herself. She told me about the secret police and about innocent people in jails
I didn't understand everything she said – I was only twelve, after all - and sometimes she lapsed into Farsi and I didn't understand her at all. I was a kid, however, who read fiction voraciously, and all that Literature had deposited in the innards of my soul an awareness of right and wrong as aspects of an essential humanity, something that was beyond the circumstances of individual societies or the agendas of organized religion. What she told me resonated in that place.
I was also a kid born into a family that lived in Diaspora. People who live in Diasporic communities are typically not openly critical of the governments of the places where they live, though they well might mumble a private disgruntlement. They are always hoping that this is the place they don't have to leave, that this the place they get to quietly build their nests, raise their children and settle into a dream of security. Someone in their family raising his or her voice in protest might have gotten them kicked out of another place, and might get them kicked out of this one. The norms with which I was raised in terms of interacting with the dominant society around me were simple: Be quiet. Don't cause trouble. Just behave yourself.
I had never before heard someone openly and articulately criticize the government. She mesmerized me.
I ran into her on the stairs two days later. She greeted me awkwardly, as if we had shared an embarrassing moment. I was hurt. I never learned the reason for the change in her attitude towards me. And I nver saw her again.
There were a lot of other firsts for me during those two months. It was the first time I ate fresh figs, and I still can't bite through the green skin into the pink centre of one without flashing on a memory from Iran. Rosewater reminds me that everything sweet I ate there was flavoured and scented with it – from ice cream to cake to faluda. It was the first place I rode on an escalator and the first place walked through the delightful manicured greenness of a public park. There I saw the American flag printed on t-shirts, shorts and mini skirts that were sold everywhere from department stores to bazaar stalls. I experienced my first 'sound and light' show at the ruins of Persepolis; it was a theatrical re-enactment of the Alexander the Great's conquest of that city. Although I was no stranger to American music, I returned from Iran with a tidy stash of something entirely new to me: counterfeit LP's that introduced me to the music of the likes of Otis Redding and Smokey Robinson.
What I most brought back from that trip, however, was the lesson that people outside my community were not necessarily bizarre or bad or in any other way negative because they were different from what I was being raised to be and believe. What I learned from the women in Shiraz is that they could be much kinder and much more loving than the people in my community, and what I learned from the woman in Tehran is that they could be downright fascinating.
*JG
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