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Father

Bald angel
My father was the one crying like a baby at the airport every time I was leaving Iran after a short visit


Azarin Sadegh
June 17, 2007
iranian.com

Ever since my father passed away, my father in law has taken his place. I call him "Pedar". In Farsi it means "Father". I never called my own father this way. I called him "Baba". That means "Dad" in English. For me, Baba sounds warmer and more intimate.

But I love Pedar a lot. He is intelligent, logical and witty. Besides, I can talk to him and he knows how to listen. Sometimes during our conversations, I envy my husband for having such a great father. Maybe because my father was not as funny and as understanding as Pedar. But today I know very well how much he loved me and what he did was the best he could, and this is why sometimes I just miss him so much.

Pedar never gets angry and his children have never been afraid of talking or discussing different subjects with him, unlike Baba. Baba was a teacher and later he became a high school principal and still kept teaching the mathematics as long as I remember. Plus, he had a strong body and a strong voice and he had kept this special habit of talking loud because he had remained a Math teacher for a very long time. This loud voice always scared me and all my childhood I always felt he was mad at me or mad at the world, even if it was just his natural way of speaking. Maybe that's why later, after he got older, he kept quiet most of the times.

But once I left home, my father was the one crying like a baby at the airport every time I was leaving Iran after a short visit. And he would start crying every time he saw my plane landing. He used to cry watching sad movies or during funerals. My father was popular and had tons of friends and ex-students. There wasn't a place we would go and somebody wouldn't come to us saying hi and telling one of his old childhood memories, mostly about my father being tough and at the same time nice to him.

My father always seemed so excited and his eyes shiny after their departure, and liked to keep talking about his old glorious times when he was a great teacher. Most of his students seemed even older than him! My father never looked old to me. I never noticed that his hair was slowly turning whiter and thinner and his forehead longer. He was going bald but I didn't see any change. For me he always looked the same. It is funny that his hair -- the last time I saw him - looked almost similar to Pedar's hair today.

I never learned Baba's real age. He kept it as a family secret and we always joked about it. Since he has passed away, every time people ask me about his age when he died I just come up with a random answer and keep the secret going.

Today I read on internet about the encounter of an Art professor with one of his students about a bald angel at university of Tehran. The professor had asked everyone to draw an angel. One of students had drawn an angel without hair. It was told that the class discussed the link between the beauty and one's hair. Until a girl in full hejab said: "Beauty and hair are not related." From this point on, I stopped reading the news, overwhelmed by the mixed images of Baba and Pedar with their thin graying hair floating in the air, with their silences, with their shining eyes.

Remembering my own empty childhood, remembering the sadness of my father, remembering the loneliness and the silence that defined my old memories, remembering the warmth of Pedar's eyes watching his son, still remembering the last time I saw Baba, deep down in my soul - somehow still lost even today - at the crossing point of my own impossible contradictions, falling into this deep endless fall to the bottom of the human agony, not being able to forget Baba or to forgive myself, not being relieved from the truth of being a simple mortal human, I wonder if -- assuming or hoping that god exists and heaven is a place beyond any imagination or pain -- maybe this time, only for once, the covered girl is right and angels after all, can go bald. Comment

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