BOOK

From Tales From The Zirzameen (www.zirzameen.com), by Brian Appleton.

Chapter 6
How many mansions hath the kingdom of heaven! Sometimes I marveled at how many secret alleys and bi-ways and worlds within worlds, like a labyrinth Tehran was…I could and did spend days wandering around the bazaar, or around Vanak…hidden gardens, hidden orchards, hidden museums, hidden mosques…hidden palaces, hidden clubs like the French Club right off of Mehdune Ferdowsi, kuche’s(alleys) with strange names like Kuche Bou Ali in Desashib….or beautiful names of streets like Behesht (heaven) and Bahar (spring) or Golemohammadi…(rose).

And always the clear water running in the jubes (open gutters) on each side of the street from the top of the city off the snow melt of the mountains to the bottom of the city, there to finally disappear out into the desert’s quenchless sand, flushing the city clean all day and all night long, with a gentle sound of trickling water always in the background when you stopped what you were doing or saying for a moment to listen for it…. This entire great city is built on a long gentle slope. It was possible at one end of town to take a cable car from a parking lot at the northern city limits right up to a ski resort or conversely walk right out into the desert at the other end.

The economic classes followed suit with the shiny contemporary marble palaces of the newly wealthy in the North, the baroque old smoldering palaces of the old aristocracy hidden near the bazaar in midtown and the poorest residents at the bottom of town to the south where it also got the hottest. In a desert environment, water takes on a sacred quality, hence the pool of water in the courtyard of every mosque for the pilgrims to bathe in, the Hose (reflecting pool) in every walled garden, the water pitcher next to every toilet and the public bathes and pre-occupation with bathing in general that Persians have. I remember my surprise the first time I saw a man blowing his nose in the sink in the running water in the men’s room of a disco, which turned out to be common practice. Water is associated with cleanliness not Kleenex or T.P.

There was even a Café on Takht-e-Jamshid called the Havarti Café, I believe, which had a fern grotto and waterfall inside it. You could step in out of the heat, the hustle and the bustle of traffic and noise and there inside was this quiet secret little world. There were other magical restaurants like this as well such as Xanadu and Serena. The latter had a big buffet set up indoors and then you carried your plate out into a fairyland of a garden with landscape lighting softly up lighting the bushes and trees and fountains quietly making it dreamlike in the moonlight…. with the tables and chairs sprinkled about on the grass.

In spring I can remember seeing crocuses and wild irises pushing up through the snow…. or the rare treat of an early morning visit from dark brown wooly two humped Bactrian camels sporting their winter coats, loaded with produce down from the mountains with their merchants as opposed to the usual sandy colored, one humped dromedaries one would see roving in wild herds in the desert. In autumn I was blessed in the afternoons by a visit from a flock of itinerant jade green Indian Ring Neck parrots making their rounds about the neighborhood. Arriving on the pine tree level with my patio at about the same time every day, they would raucously ransack the pinecones pulling out the pine nuts with their long beaks and crack them open for the meat inside.

Often I would spend all day just wandering about on foot exploring, coming across strange things like the Consulate of the Vatican City or the carpet museum….the Archeological Museum, with it’s Lurestan Bronze figurines, the Crown Jewels and the Peacock Thrown with capes made completely of seed pearls or the Kooh-e-Nur (mountain of light)and Darya-e-Nur (sea of light) diamonds, truly amazing diamonds with fitting names. I must have spent an hour looking into “The Sea of Light.”

Another time I found the Zur Khaneh (“power house”) in south Tehran and I had a go at the medicine clubs myself. On my first visit at age 16, in 1966, my friend Touss had introduced me to Ilti, who was the light weight boxing champion of Iran. Ilti had learned to box because he had grown tired of Touss picking on him when they were kids together. I worked out that summer with Ilti at his gym and he started teaching me how to box. After the lesson, we use to walk down the street and flirt with girls right in front of their boy friends without consequence because they all knew who Ilti was.

Now that I was living in Tehran in 1974, I started studying Kung Fu and Tai Kwan Do with an Iranian Air Force Lieutenant, Ali Akbar, whose avocation was martial arts. His little house in an obscure part of town was mysterious. From the moment you stepped inside, you were in China. A little birdcage with rice finches softly tweeting caught your attention first and Chinese music quietly played in the background somewhere and there was Ali doing Tai Chi out in his little courtyard in a black Chinese suit of clothes with red frogging. It was so unexpected. As my eyes adjusted to this shadow world I could see Chinese wall hangings with their characteristic tall hills and peaks and mist dwarfing the tiny huts and tiny mule team in the foreground trying to put man in his proper place in the scheme of nature and the universe.

FROM THE AUTHOR

Dear readers,

For several years now you have been asking me to write a book so I have finally succumbed to your wishes.

As some of you know every year since I left Iran in 1979, I throw a Norooz Party which has gotten bigger and bigger each New Year. Last year 2007, it was the best one ever. We had 150 guests including men, women and children. Rashid Safarzadeh sang for us and his band played and Janette danced Bandari. We had a magnificent Haft Sin table with ten Sin. We had Bahman from Café Zest cater the food, plus I brought 3 1/2 pounds of Xaviar and enough vodka to drown a herd of elephants and not the saagi kind either...we had Moslem, Christian, Jewish, Zoroastrian and Bahai faiths represented as well as a few Sufis and atheists and ethnicities including Persians, Assyrians, Armenians, Stamboli Turks and Azeri Turks, Kurds, and a few Bakhtiaris and Afshars not to mention Slovakians, Czechs, a Russian, several Arabs, an Afghan and a lot of Anglo Americans enjoying this event

Every year I say a toast that goes to the effect that since Iranians showed me so much generosity and kindness during the five years I lived there, that this is my way of giving something back and of saying thanks.

I want you all to know that I have tried for many years to find a commercial publisher and after much work I have discovered that in today’s competitive market publishers have no reason to take a risk on a new author especially one who wants to write in a positive way about Iran.

So although it would take many lifetimes to return all the kindness that I received in Iran, I am asking all of you for one more favor: Please pre-order or buy a copy of my book when it comes out and tell your friends and relatives about it as I have decided that the biggest debt I have towards Iran, which is to help wage peace between our two countries, must be paid for by me. If I don’t believe in that cause enough to pay for my own publishing than why should anyone else?

So with a wish for your peace, love and happiness I say may God Bless You,

Brian H. Appleton
iranianb@sbcglobal.net
Aka
Rasool Aryadust