Back in Tehran. I think it was
Marshall McLuhan who defined art as
“anything you can get away with.” By
that definition, Iranian driving
is an art form of the most sublime
order. Just as well alcohol is
illegal in this country.
Actually, Tehran is relatively quiet
at the moment because a lot of
Tehranis have gone on vacation for No
Ruz, the new year celebration
that kicked off on the spring equinox
and lasts for two weeks. But
“quiet” by Tehran standards is still
a fairly bustling city. Just not
bumper-to-bumper chaos the way it was
when I first arrived.
In the end, my concern about being
stuck in Esfahan worked out for the
best in all possible worlds. Sareh
and Mohsen agreed that it would be
a lot easier for me to find a bus out
of Esfahan after No Ruz had
passed—the official moment for the
start of the new year is the moment
the sun passes the celestial equator
and varies from year to year, but
this year was around 2:30 pm (Iranian
time) on 20 March—and so Sareh
invited me (and Mohsen, whose family
is in Tehran) to join her family
for No Ruz.
I’m kind of surprised I’d never heard
of No Ruz before I started
planning my trip to Iran. It’s a huge
deal here—at least as big as
Chinese New Year (although I suppose
there are more Chinese people in
Vancouver and other places I’ve lived
than there are Iranians)—and a
really nice holiday, which dates back
at least 2500 years. There are
all sorts of preparations leading up
to the new year, ranging from the
bonfire jumping I attended the
previous night, to people tidying their
homes and getting everything in order
for the new year. People also
set up a nice arrangement of Haft
Seen—literally, the seven S’s—sort
of the way many Western families set
up a Christmas tree around
Christmas. The seven S’s are sabzi
(green sprouts), samanu (wheat
pudding), seer (garlic), sumac, sib
(apple), senjed (dried fruit), and
sonbol (hyacinth), although they also
often have sekeh (a gold coin),
serkeh (vinegar), candles, a mirror,
a Qur’an, and a bowl with a
couple goldfish. Each thing
symbolizes something: the sabzi are
rebirth and fertility, for instance,
and the gold coin symbolizes
adequate income. On the day of No
Ruz, and for the two weeks that
follow, families travel to see one
another.
Two things from that paragraph I
should remark on a bit more. The
first is the tidying of homes. Sort
of like the Japanese, I suppose,
Iranians have a much higher standard
of cleanliness and order than we
do in the West. Well, at least in the
home—the streets can be a bit
chaotic and filthy. But every home
I’ve been in has been obsessively
tidy, with furniture and carpets all
symmetrically aligned. During the
three days I stayed with Mohsen, I
think the place was vacuumed twice
(the second time by Sareh even though
she doesn’t live there and isn’t
Mohsen’s girlfriend or anything—even
in very liberal families, it’s
generally assumed that women will do
most of the cooking and
cleaning), and surfaces were sprayed
and wiped down on multiple
occasions. Even on the cheap buses
I’ve taken to and from Esfahan, the
bus attendant passed up and down the
aisle spraying the bus with air
freshener. And everyone wears perfume
or cologne, making me feel
generally rather smelly and grubby.
The second thing is the importance of
families in Iran. Young people
generally live with their parents for
longer, and extended families
maintain close contact with one
another. You find this reflected even
in the language: there are
different words for aunts on the mother’s
and father’s side, for instance, and
when Sareh was trying to explain
who the different family members were
she asked me “What’s the English
word for the husband of your cousin?”
There were maybe a dozen of us at
Sareh’s mother’s home for No Ruz.
Mohsen and I were the only non-family
members, but then there was an
array of sisters, aunts, cousins (and
cousins’ husbands) that I wasn’t
entirely able to keep track of. Sareh
herself is very liberal—to the
extent that she was wearing a
miniskirt and a sleeveless top at the
Chahar Shanbe-soori festivities of
the previous night—but her family
is more religious, and her younger
sister and mother were both very
conservatively dressed (and Sareh
also wears the hejab in her mother’s
home, although far more loosely than
her mother does).
After tea and sweets and various
family members arriving, the moment
of No Ruz arrived. We all gathered in
a circle around the Haft Seen
arranged on the floor in the middle
of the room, kneeled together and
held hands, the senior male said a
prayer, and after the moment passed
we all exchanged greetings and
congratulations (three kisses on the
cheek between men, but obviously no
touching women). The moment of No
Ruz was broadcast on television, and
was followed by new year’s
messages from Khamenei and
Ahmadinejad (the previous evening I’d seen
Barack Obama send new year’s
greetings to Iranians around the world on
BBC Farsi, which Mohsen gets via
satellite).
The whole occasion was almost
heartbreakingly lovely. Everyone was so
happy to see one another, and also so
happy to have me and Mohsen to
join them. I was especially warmly
welcomed as a foreigner in their
midst, and the fact that most of them
spoke no more English than I
speak Farsi (luckily I do know how to
say “happy new year”—saal e no
mobaarak) hardly mattered
at all. I came away with the feeling that I
would be welcome in any one of a half
dozen homes in Esfahan for as
long as I’d like. Actually leaving
was a huge undertaking, as it
involved near-tearful farewells with
a number of people I hadn’t met
more than two hours earlier.
But leave we did, with Mohsen and
Sareh driving me to the bus terminal
and finding a Tehran-bound bus almost
immediately. So I got back to
Tehran that night and had my Esfahani
No Ruz celebration as well.
And that was only the first of my No
Ruz experiences. A former student
of my father’s called Mahboubeh (I’ll
use her real name since she’s in
Vancouver and might be reading this
blog anyway) put me in touch with
her nieces in Tehran, Shirin and
Fatimah (not their real names, even
though Shirin thought this blog
practice was entirely unnecessary when
I told her about it), who took me out
yesterday. Shirin works for a
biomedical engineering company, and
studied and worked in the UK
before being recently transferred to
the Boston area, and her younger
sister Fatimah teaches English to
schoolchildren in Tehran.
Our first stop was the National
Carpet Museum, where we ogled
magnificent specimens of one of
Iran’s most famous hallmarks. Most of
the carpets were less than a hundred
years old just because carpets
don’t age well, but there was at
least one that dated back four or
more centuries. I don’t know my
carpets well enough to talk
authoritatively about the different
styles, but each carpet came with
a place of origin as well as a knot
count (the higher the better), and
some of the patterns were dizzyingly
complex. Most were abstract, or
with birds and leafy arabesques, but
a few were more pictorial, with
pictures from the Shahnamah (Ferdosi’s 10th century epic,
occupying a
place in Persian literature not
unlike Homer’s in the West), the four
seasons, or the zodiac. One assembled
the world’s great sages and
statesmen, with the top row occupied
by Moses, Solomon, Jesus, and,
yes, Mohammed. Quick, someone contact
the editor of the
Jyllands-Posten, or better yet,
the people who want to kill him.
After that, Shirin and Fatimah drove
me out to the north of Tehran,
where we visited the Sa’d Abad Museum
Complex, formerly the summer
residence of the Pahlavi shahs, who
governed Iran until 1979. Like the
Golestan Palace of the Qajars, the
Pahlavis had more opulence than
good taste, but the complex is set
amid white-barked trees (not
birches, I don’t think, but I don’t
know my trees well enough to say
what) and a burbling brook, which
made the whole outing very peaceful
indeed. North Tehran is younger and
much more affluent than the south,
and you can see the city change as
you drive north. My hotel is
flanked by small auto parts shops, and
as I head north the shops get
larger and start selling clothing and
leather goods. Further north,
the apartment blocks get larger and
trees provide more shade and
greenery. Like in Vancouver, it’s
very easy to tell north from south
in Tehran, since the city comes to a
stop at the foothills of the
Alborz Mountains, which dominate the
northern skyline. Except, unlike
Vancouver, Tehran is already at about
1000m above sea level and the
mountains to its north reach over
5000m (at 5671m, Mount Damavand is
the tallest in the Middle East), so
there’s even more dreamlike snow
on the Alborz Mountains than you
would see on the north shore of
Vancouver at this time of year.
I was then invited to join Shirin and
Fatimah’s parents (well, okay, I
sort of invited myself, and I hope I
wasn’t too much of an
imposition!) for dinner. Shirin and
Fatimah’s parents live in an
apartment in north Tehran, but
describing it as an apartment risks
understating how grand and spacious
it was. They take tasteful
decoration and tidiness to a whole
new level, and I was in awe of the
luxury of it all. But they were also
supremely warm and friendly (I’m
starting to notice a trend in Iran),
and were gracious hosts despite
the language barrier.
After supper, a couple families came
by for a round of New Year’s
greetings (I might be getting this
wrong, but I think they’re the
brothers of Shirin's and Fatimah’s
father). The whole thing was a
cacophony of good-will: in and out
within an hour, with lots of
protestations of love and fondness,
and a quick exchange of gifts.
Having spent a number of days being
on the business end of some
energetic hosting, I was very happy
to take it easier yesterday. I
wandered up to have a look at the US
Den of Espionage (aka the former
US Embassy), which is remarkable
mostly for the murals on the walls,
where one sees the Statue of Liberty
with a skull for a head and the
US Congress topped with an Israeli
flag. And then a short stroll over
to the Artists Park, which houses a
couple contemporary art museums
(almost all the museums in Tehran are
closed during No Ruz,
unfortunately) and one of Tehran’s
two main theatres (I might get to
see a Farsi production of The Cherry Orchard when I come back in
April!). There I ran into Mishka and
Adi, a Philipino-British girl and
her Iranian-German boyfriend, who
were the first backpackers I hung
out with. We had a nice lunch at an
all-vegetarian restaurant in the
park (oh, those artists!), and if I
go to Berlin next year (still no
word from either Berlin or Chicago,
except notification that no news
isn’t yet bad news) I might get a
chance to see them again, as they’re
hoping to spend a few months in
Leipzig this autumn.
And then, after a few errands, I
found myself in the lovely, leafy
Park-e Shahr near my hotel in South
Tehran, where, just off Khayyam
Street, I read the Ruba’iyat of Omar
Khayyam:
Ah, fill the Cup: -- what boots it to
repeat
How time is slipping underneath our
Feet:
Unborn TOMORROW, and dead YESTERDAY,
Why fret about them if TODAY be
sweet!
Now I’m going to head to the bus
terminal and see if I can get a bus
to Qazvin, which is the gateway to
the evocatively-named Valley of the
Assassins. And hopefully you won’t
hear from me for a few days because
I’ll be away from the Internet and
hiking, hiking.
But one last thought before I go. As
you might imagine, Khomeini’s
image is all over the place in Iran,
although in fairness, he’s
probably not as ubiquitous as Ataturk
is in Turkey. I’ve noticed that
in many of these portraits we see him
in quarter-profile, looking
slyly out of the corner of his eye at
something to his right. And it
occurs to me that I’ve also seen Pope
(emeritus) Benedict depicted in
a similar manner. What is it about
theologico-political leaders that
their wisdom and prudence finds its
best expression in their ability
to notice things off to their right,
but to be too canny to simply
turn their heads and look to see what it is?
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