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When I was a few
months old my mother was unable to breast-feed me and had to entrust me to a
nurse who was the wife of my father's cousin, Izzat. Izzat and his wife
Humai used to live in our basement and whenever I was hungry and crying my
father used to carry me downstairs, even at midnight, and ask Humai to feed
me. Humai had a baby daughter called Fatima who was younger than me.
I was about three years of age when Izzat and Humai left the basement of my
parents' house and bought a very small house in the outskirts of Tabriz,
next to the North Gate. It was the last house on the border between the
farmlands and the city. There one wouldn't imagine that one was in a city at
all; it was rather like a village house, since most of it overlooked
farmland covered by wheat and oats. The house was very pleasant and full of
breezes and freshness. Besides it; locality there was a world of difference
between my nurse's home and ours. Our house was covered with soft and
beautiful Persian carpets, whereas Humai's, both in the basement of my
father's house and in her own house, had coverings of canvas and blanket.
There was only an old, small kileem at the corner of her room and the rest
was bare, consisting of bricks which would hurt my feet when I walked on
them. (A kileem is another, cheaper kind of carpet where, instead of knots,
the material is more akin to woven cloth. In fact some kileems can be
extremely beautiful, and each tribe of those engaged in making them has
their own specific design - among them the Bakhtiyari, the Qashqai and the
Shahsevans. The most beautiful ones, such as those made by these three
tribes, were much too expensive for Izzat and Humai to afford, whereas rich
people used to give them as gifts.) We used to sit on the floor on cushions
but whenever I fell on the floor while walking I hurt my knees and ankles.
My ankles would hit the corner of a stone or brick, and the agony comes back
to me very clearly even now.
My nurse's room in the basement at home was about one and a half metres
below the level of the garden and I had to climb down - or when I was very
small, roll down - the steps, which was actually very frightening; but I
preferred to go to visit them in their new house where there were only two
steps to descend. The basement in my parents' house was to be used in the
Second World War as a hiding-place, with all the windows covered during
German air-raids. When my nurse lived there, I always wanted to climb
through the window of the basement to get into the garden and catch the
light, but the window was so high and near the ceiling that I could never
manage it. When we first visited my nurse's new house I was delighted to
find that I could climb out of the only window onto the yard, which was
hardly more than 12 square metres; the window was small, one metre by one
metre, and divided into small panes, some of which were covered by
newspapers and cheap paper instead of glass. The wind used always to make
them shake and rattle. Our house had several bedrooms, large sitting-rooms
and living-rooms and a huge kitchen which occupied two floors on the other
side of the building, whereas Izzat's and Humai's only room was used as both
a bedroom and a sitting-room. In the evening they used to put mattresses and
bedding on the floor, and we used to sleep on them, all in one room.
Separated from the rest of the room by a curtain, there was a place to pile
the bedding at the side of the wall. In fact it became a good hiding place
for Fatima and I when we wanted to play hide-and-seek.
There were hollowed-out alcoves within the wall in the lower and upper parts
of their new house. Humai used to put sweets and dried fruit and the things
we used to like on the top shelf out of our reach, but on the lower shelves
there was a samovar and cups and glasses, and small boxes full of old keys
and necklaces. It fascinated me most of all to open one of these boxes. I
used to play for hours with the keys or ornaments. Fatima did not have any
other dolls than those her mother made for her; I, too, used to play with
them. Although my parents' house was full of expensive articles, I always
preferred to play in Humai's house. There the world seemed under my feet and
more under my control than in our own house. I was in fact free to handle
everything without any obvious objections. I was even fond of trying Izzat's
hat on my head, even though it covered my eyes and nose too, and this made
him laugh.
I don't really remember when Izzat's family moved house. I was surprised
when I visited them for the first time. It was a new world. The houses,
streets, people and shops were very different from our environment. The
distance between our house and Humai's was about one kilometre, but
travelling on foot and at my pace it seemed much longer, as if I were
travelling to another part of the country. However, I was excited and looked
forward to reaching them. Sometimes my father used to take me by doroshka, a
two-horse carriage. Town boys used to like to climb up behind the doroshka
and hold on by the metal bar as it drove, keeping their heads down under the
perimeter so that if the driver turned back he would not see them, or even
if he did could not easily reach them with his horse-goad. A stick with
leather thongs was used to make the horses go faster, and this could prove
very painful on the head or face; but if the boys were sufficiently
concealed the thongs only descended on their back. Once I remember that I
climbed on the back of somebody else's doroshka but had not gone far before,
to my disappointment, my father's partner Haji Ali saw me and told me off by
gently twisting my right ear. After that I never tried it again. The point
was of course that having reached a certain economic and social status my
parents and their colleagues could not let their children be seen behaving
in public in the same manner as the children of the poor.
Humai's house was the northernmost house in Tabriz. It was situated next to
the main road leading to the North Gate. In summer and winter there was a
continuous traffic of mules, camels, donkeys, and flocks of sheep and cows,
and (rarely) motor-vehicles. They used to arrive at early dawn and the bells
on the camels' necks created a rhythm and melody all along the road and
echoed as far as the horizon. Especially in the summer, we would all sleep
on the roof of the house and I was usually wakened by the sound of
camel-bells and the procession of the caravans. The sound of the bells, the
sound of animals' feet and people's conversations, used to mingle with the
pleasant morning breeze and lull me back to sleep until the sun shone on my
bed and I would hear Humai calling me affectionately, "The sun is on your
bed, Gholam-Reza. If you don't get up it will make you feel tired and give
you a headache." We used to climb to the roof by a ladder which was about
seven or eight steps. Humai did not allow me to climb the ladder alone. She
used to say, smilingly, "If anything happens to you I cannot escape from
your father's hand." Whenever she said that, I used to feel inside myself,
"I do not belong to my father, I belong to you". When I was between the ages
of three and six, I used to stay with Humai three or four days at a time or
even for a week. I always returned home whenever I was bitten by insects,
which caused my body to swell up here and there. It was never my wish to go
back, but Humai was afraid that I would become ill and she would be blamed
by my parents.
When we came downstairs from the roof the samovar would be boiling and the
tea would be ready. We used to sit around the samovar as Humai served the
tea. We had sangak - bread about a metre long and some 20 centimetres wide
and much thicker than lavash. The samovar was similar to the one in my
parents' house, but much smaller, and the taste of the tea was quite
different: I did not realise that the difference was caused by the cheapness
of the tea, though I did not find it any less pleasant. In my parents' house
we would have cheese, eggs, fruit and fresh bread for breakfast, whereas at
Humai's the bread was dry and stale and there was very little cheese. Where
in rich houses we put sugar lumps in our mouths and drank the tea through
them, my nurse's family used raisins for the same purpose. During the Second
World War, when the price of sugar rose spectacularly, this practice became
commonplace. Children used to sing songs in the streets:
Oh, Mother, oh, Mother,
The tanks are coming,
My heart is filled with thirst, Drinking so much tea with raisins Has
brought pain to my teeth.
In fact, I preferred raisins to the sugar lumps, and I drank more tea in
order to eat more raisins. Humai knew this, but did not say anything. She
was a loving and affectionate person, who always had a sweet smile on her
face. Whenever I was trying food which I had not known at home she used to
say, "My dear, you are not used to these kinds of food", and then laugh
while cuddling me.
I remember once she was cleaning a sheep's stomach in the yard, and I had
not seen such a thing before. I sat next to her and asked her questions. |