 As you wish
Excerpts
March 25, 2005
iranian.com
From Nasser Shojania's, "A
Persian Letter: To a Pious Mother from an Agnostic Son",
a literary non-fiction book, based on cross-culteral
matters that involves mainly the Iranian culture and some Canadian
culture. Dr. Shojania is a pathologist who came to Canada
in 1965. This book is a letter to his late
mother in Iran -- an autopsy on through her letters to reavel
some noble Iranian characteristics.
Chapter 24, page 1
Going home
Remember, the day your father passed
away I had nine children, from three to thirteen.
-- From a letter by my mother
I DO REMEMBER THE DAY MY MOTHER IS TALKING
ABOUT. It was a snowy day. It might
have been
a sorrowful day for her, but for me it was one of the best days of my life. I
am always happy
when it snows. Sometimes so happy as if granular sugar is dissolving over my
solar plexus.
My only worry was to reach home before the day was over so that I could throw
snowball
with my younger brother, Hamid.
I was six, in grade one, going home with my sister
from the Namoos Elementary School for girls. She was twelve, in
grade five, carrying my single book with her books in one hand,
holding my hand with the other, letting my left arm swing in the air at will.
There was
already a thick layer of snow on the ground, up to my knees, and it was still
falling. Falling
with large parallel particles that turned into turbulent eddies behind the
passing cars like
feathers exploding from ruptured pillows in a friendly pillow fight. The snow
on the ground
had muffled the metallic sound of the horses’ hooves, while accentuating
the nagging sound
of their wobbly wheels. It was still daytime, but the streetlights were on,
giving off not
much light, but shortening the already short winter evening. It would be night,
I thought, by
the time we reached home. Hamid was probably getting bored at home, waiting
for me.
“Monir jun,” I asked my sister, “do
you know why the lights have come
on so early
today?”
“Because today Tehran is celebrating.”
“What is the occasion?” “Today is the second anniversary of the unveiling
of women in Iran.”
****
Chapter 25, page 1
As-You-Wish Street
SOON AFTER OUR FATHER PASSED AWAY
we moved from the nameless cul-de-sac in Sanguelaj
District to an open ended, well-known street in Tehran, named Koucheh-ye
Del-Bekhah,
meaning As-You-Wish Street. It was located near the southern limits
of Tehran, just before
the intersection of Amirieh Avenue with Mokhtari Avenue. It connected
the prestigious
Amirieh Avenue to its dusty parallel, See-metree Avenue. The Mokhtari
Avenue was named
after the brutal chief of police during the time of Reza Shah,
who was tried and sentenced to
a few years in prison after Reza Shah was replaced by his son during
the Second World War.
For those who were familiar with words, like Captain
Vokhshur, the word Mokhtari was an Arabic word derived from Ekhtiar,
meaning “to have a choice” or “to
have an option,” which is not much different
from having a wish. And Vokhshur would make use of this
similarity to make the bus stop where he wanted.
Apart from its funny name, As-You-Wish Street was
like any other residential street in Tehran: encased by two parallel
walls, narrow enough to prevent any car to go in, but wide enough
to be longitudinally bisected
by a dry groove, decorated by a few arr-arr trees to attract donkeys.
No one knew why those
die-hard trees were named by the same name as the braying of a
donkey. I thought it was due
to the fact the donkeys of the men who brought ice or watermelon
to that street, chewed
on their bark while the donkey man was talking to a housewife.
Its grumpy residents, however,
believed that it was due to the fact that whenever
they wanted to have a short sleep in the hot summer afternoons,
their sleep was
interrupted by a few arr-arru, or crying children who climbed the
branches of those trees.
Regardless of the origin of the name of
those trees, it was refreshing to have a capricious
name like As-You-Wish Street in a city where the name of its main
avenues and important
streets were borrowed from the names of its royal family or its
high ranking military officers.
It generated a visible smile across the lips of anybody who mentioned
that name, or
heard it.
****
Chapter 29, page 1
Cheated to undergo circumcision
TO UNDERGO CIRCUMCISION IS EMBARRASSING,
but to be cheated into it is painful. This is why I still remember
it. It was not our mother who cheated us into it.
It was Captain Vokhshur. And he did it through the play of words.
He had a peculiar affinity for words. Maybe because he was the
only one in As-You-Wish Street who subscribed to the daily newspaper
and did its crossword puzzle every day.
Vokhshur knew -- and
we knew -- that the word khat in Farsi
meant a line. So he made use of our partial knowledge and related
the word Khatneh, which means circumcision, to Khat and subjected
four of the boys of As-You-Wish
Street, namely, Shambool, Hamid, Nasser and Holaaku, to circumcision.
The
summer before, he had told us that Khatneh is performed in two
stages, a year apart. “The first year they draw a line around
the prepuce or the tip of the penis, and
the next year, if the tip does not fall off by itself, they might
cut it with a small knife.” In
short, it was not going to be a painful or bloody procedure. With
this false reassurance, the next summer, when I was playing in
the yard, minding my own business, Modar-jun came out of the children’s
room and asked our Masdar to take me to the grocery store at the
corner of our street, “And buy him whatever he wants.”
Armed
with this blank cheque and followed by our obedient servant, I
ran out of the house, pulling the obedient but reluctant Masdar
after me. I don’t
know if I was moving too fast or he was unusually slow on that
day. It was not very often that our mother was so generous towards
me, but our Masdar did not seem to share my enthusiasm. He was
walking at least ten metres behind me and slowly like a wounded
soldier in retreat.
When he finally reached the store he had a hard
time finding his money in one of his numerous pockets. And when
I finally chose the things I wanted, he was reluctant to pay the
owner of the store, whom we called Moussio because of his European
look. “I thought Modar-jun told you to pay for whatever
I wanted,” I reminded
our Masdar.
 Chapter 42, page 1
Five Persian characteristics
SOON AFTER I BEGAN MY FRIENDSHIP WITH FRED KASRAVI
-- a Canadian man of Iranian origin -- this Persian proverb came
to my mind, “Either avoid friendship
with the elephant-men or
build a house to accommodate an elephant.”
Like always, I
met Fred without looking for him. Mitra was becoming active in
politics and was throwing a fund-raising party in our house for
the Liberal Party and rheumatology, when the phone rang and a woman
from Toronto was asking why the famous friend of the Liberals,
Fred Kasravi, who has recently moved from Toronto to Victoria,
was not
invited. The name sounded half-Persian, so my wife, as she covered
the mouth piece of the receiver, asked me if I knew an Iranian
by that name.
I said I knew an Ahmad Kasravi in Iran when I was
about fifteen years old. He was assassinated by one of the members
of Moslem Brotherhood in Tehran while he was defending himself
in the courthouse. He was a judge himself, but the day he was assassinated
he was a defendant. He was being tried for his negative books and
comments regarding the Arabic language, religions, and old Persian
poets, particularly Hafez. His books and speeches were so blasphemous
that even though it was during the secular times of the Shah, he
was put on trial to explain.
As Mitra was listening, with one ear
stuck to the phone and the other to my irrelevant comments, she
pointed with her chin to the computer in the kitchen and said in
a whispering voice, “He has a web site that explains everything
about him.”
Luckily, Anna, the “head-hunter” wife
of our first son, Kamran, who is used to seeing the applications
of the high power CEOs who want to go to bigger
firms, was there and quickly went to Mitra’s computer and
brought up the page. “Wow, how
impressive!” she exclaimed when she saw his picture standing
beside gigantic officials, and repeated the same exclamatory remark
after she read the summary of his elephantine achievements.
The
rest was easy. Mitra phoned and invited him and I met him in the
luxurious hotel where the party was taking place and Allen Rock,
the health minister, was speaking about the importance of medicine,
particularly rheumatology.
****
Chapter 44, page 1
Going to a green graveyard in a yellow Cadillac
I CAN’T RECALL IF IT WAS A YEAR BEFORE OR
AFTER THE LAST EARTHQUAKE when I went to a pathology conference
in San Francisco as part of my continuing
medical education. While I was there I broke the rule of not mixing
business with pleasure and went to see several of my cousins on
my father’s side -- those whose male names
have the suffix Mirza -- in San Francisco, and the only cousin
on my mother side, Sohrab, who lives alone in Oakland, not too
far from San Francisco.
The cousins who were in San Francisco included
Amir and Rezvan Teymourtash, and Khosrow Mirza who had come from
Mashad to see his two sons, Vahid and Hamed. Vahid is the brainy
one and lives in San Francisco. Hamed is the body-builder and lives
in Phoenix, Arizona. Vahid is responsible for the computer system
that runs the water for the entire city of San Francisco. He was
chosen among the five hundred or more who had applied for the job.
There were 150 Iranians among the applicants. Their number was
proportionally so high that the one who was interviewing them
asked Vahid
if all Iranians
were specializing incomputer sciences. Hamed, in addition to body-building,
builds
big, white houses in Phoenix for himself and for sale. He is also
employed in the municipality of Phoenix to supervise the construction
of smaller houses on the cactus-studded lands at the periphery
of the city where mainly the American Indians live.
I spent my first
free day and night with Sohrab because his last wife, the fourth,
had
recently died. Also present there was Farhad Mirza, the youngest
bother of Khosrow Mirza
and the older brother of Rezvan, who had come from Vancouver to
see his oldest brother.
No, I am wrong again. Vahid, too, was living in Oakland on that
year. It was during my
previous trip to San Francisco that Vahid was in San Francisco.
His apartment was in front
of Amir and Rezvan’s, and he was in a bad mood because he
had some trouble with the real
estate agent who had sold him the apartment. He was angry mainly
because the agent had
brought up the ugly matter of American hostages in Tehran...
Purchase this book here:
"A
Persian Letter: To a Pious Mother from an Agnostic Son"
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