AIAW Featured Writer: MANIJEH NASRABADI

Manijeh Nasrabadi - Writer

In the years before I go to Iran, my father and I meet in Manhattan cafes from time to time. I sit opposite him and listen to his immigrant worries.

"I don’t know what’s going to happen," my father sighs without looking up from his pocket-sized sketchpad. The staccato dance of his fountain pen leaves a trail of black ink in the shape of a woman’s face.

"With what?" I ask, though I’d rather not. It’s always something with him, some intractable problem I can’t possibly solve.

"The village," he says. "The young people have all gone to the cities. Nobody left but old ones like me. The last time I was there, sand covered the schoolyard. It went halfway up the sides of the houses. You’d have to see it to believe it." He glances up at me without pausing his pen and I try to look concerned.

"When I was young," he continues, turning over a clean sheet of paper, "after the sandstorms would come, we would carry the sand away from the walls of the houses and dump it in a pile at the edge of the village. It made a big hill we used to play in. But we had to watch out because sometimes, you know, as a joke, some kid would hide a brick under the sand and you could break your bones." He laughs and looks at me like I too am being warned.

I think that sounds awful, not like a joke at all. Luckily my father doesn’t need any encouragement from me to go on.

"The sandstorms come in the summer, we call them black winds," he says, his pen scratching away, a woman's hair, a neck, lips emerging in its wake. "The wind lifts the sand into the sky and it goes everywhere, in your eyes and up your nose." His touches the end of his nose for emphasis. "I would get so scared, I would run and hide under the blankets. I was just a kid, you know." His pen hovers in space, forlorn for a moment, before he goes back to his drawing.

I can’t picture my father small or afraid of anything.

"The sky goes black in the middle of the day," he says, deepening his voice for dramatic effect, like he wants to scare me too. "The sun disappears. It looks like the end of the world."

"Wow," I say but I can’t help wondering if he’s exaggerating.

"It was a lot of work to put the sand back in the desert." He shakes his head like he can still recall the weight of the sand he carried on his small brown back. "But now it’s only the old ones left, like me. What use are we? It’s up to your generation now or someday all those villages will be buried, as if they never existed. Can you imagine?"

We sip green tea and share a pastry on one of his visits up from Washington, DC. His wild, graying eyebrows bend towards each other. His eyes fix on the sharp, quick lines of his dancing pen, but his mind is in Iran. I think he draws out of habit, to ease his nerves, without really seeing the female figures he creates. A portrait of disconnection. Even his words seem like those of the professor he once was, addressed to a larger audience of which I am only one small part.

When he says it’s up to my generation, I don’t know what he’s talking about. Of Americans? Of Iranians? I’ve never even been to Iran and now I’m supposed to save the villages? I don’t know why he has so much faith in me. It’s been years since my mother, sister and I told him he had to leave our house in New Jersey, and I went off to college. I only saw him a couple of times before I graduated and moved to Brooklyn. Now we have these visits, though he always stays with a friend.

Still, it’s getting harder to dismiss his worries like I used to. I look at him doodling next to his teacup, an immigrant who left home almost fifty years ago, growing old in a house without a family. This can’t be how he thought things would end. So he longs for the village of his youth and hopes that his children may do something to stop the future from erasing the past. He always fights on the losing side, it seems.

On days like that, in the neutral space of a café, I would listen to him talk because he was getting old, because it was the least I could do. As a child, I listened eagerly at first, but his stories about life in his village usually ended in accusation. You spoiled, lazy American. Just like your mother, he would say. You have it so easy, you ungrateful child. Trying to filter out his criticisms, I ended up ignoring most of what he said. As I got older, I did my best to avoid situations where I would have to listen to him at all.

After I return from Iran, we meet in the same cafes but more often at my apartment. Now his stories sound old and new at the same time. My ears seize upon every detail, like hands collecting the broken pieces of a precious clay jar. Each fragment is one he’s shown me before, though I might not really have seen it. Listening to him now, I gather bits of my childhood as much as his.

***

When my father was a teenager, the mountain water that flowed underneath his and other nearby villages, that made pomegranate orchards and sugar cane fields grow in the desert, was diverted to the mud-brick town of Yazd. This was called progress. With its ancient bazaar and towering cypress trees, Yazd sprouted into a city and absorbed the young able-bodied men and women from the surrounding villages into its factories and shops. The fields dried up along with the old ways of living. Some of the villages were abandoned altogether, their sun-baked clay walls slipping further beneath the sand each year. A slow burial for a society that held nature in a mutual embrace, neglected by a jealous modernity, covered over by the same earth from which it was made.

Until a few weeks before he boarded the plane, my father had no intention of coming to America. In 1936, he became the youngest of his young mother’s four children. He was born a sickly child and when my grandmother, Mama Bozorg, feared he might die she made a deal with God. She promised that if He made her son healthy and strong she would not flaunt her good fortune and would show her thanks and humility by dressing him as a girl for his first year of life. My father learned to walk in a dress handed down from his older sister.

In those days, Zoroastrians were not allowed to own businesses in Iran. India was more welcoming, or was too distracted by it’s own problems to notice a few peasants from the Iranian countryside, so my grandfather went to work in the little shop in Puna that his brother had opened after settling there with his family. Britannia they called their store of conveniences. They were a modern day version of their Parsee ancestors who fled east from the great Arab-Muslim invasion of the 7th century. By the time my grandfather arrived in Puna, Zoroastrians had spent 1,300 years longing for the days when their religion had ruled an empire.

But the light of the eternal flame erases the marks of time from their faces. These followers of the prophet Zoroaster have whispered from the holy Avesta and prayed to Ahura Mazda, God Almighty, for thousands of years. To their detractors they are heathen fire worshippers. But they will tell you they are called upon to live by a divine prescription: good thoughts, good words and good deeds. Though he has long shed his belief in God and thinks only of how to make heaven here on earth, my father cannot steal, cheat or tell a lie, even when it would be to the detriment of his sworn enemies. "It has nothing to do with religion," he insists. "It’s our tradition. My mother taught me never to take what I didn’t earn."

His father couldn’t have had time to teach him very much. My grandfather worked in India and came home once every two years to his wife and children. Back then the family had goats and chickens. The children played raucous games in the narrow kuchés after lunch while the rest of the village was sinking into full-stomached slumber. It was just a matter of time before the angry face of a grown up appeared from behind a walled-in courtyard to send them scattering off down the winding alleyways.

Until one year, when my grandfather came home and he was dying. Too weak to play with his seven-year-old son. Too weak to strike him for disobeying his elders. "That’s how I knew he was really sick, poor man," says the son who has grown decades older than his father ever would. Tuberculosis took my father’s father from this earth and there would be no more money coming from India. The shame of poverty blanketed the family¾ they didn't talk about it and the neighbors were kind enough to act as if nothing had changed.

With my grandfather gone, Mama Bozorg took in sewing and knitted sweaters to feed her four children. The two boys cut sugar cane, picked fruit in the landlord’s orchards and did odd jobs. My seven-year-old father could make a few pennies for every hundred mud bricks in those days, sculpted with his small hands from special patches of earth. But it wasn’t enough.

One evening there was nothing left to eat. Mama Bozorg didn’t have to explain; the children already knew begging for food was out of the question. Pride can nurture the spirit for some time even while the body goes without. But what about food for the chickens, my father thought. Surely there was no harm in asking around for the neighbors’ leftovers if he said they were for bird feed. So he went knocking on the large wooden doors up and down the kuchés until he’d gathered enough scraps. Then he carried them home and assembled miniature sandwiches for his family’s supper.

At night, after the children had rolled their mats out onto the clay floor, after their tired bodies had succumbed to the sweet numbing power of sleep, Mama Bozorg worked with her needles and yarns by candle light until her eyes stung and were washed with tears. She looked at her skinny, sleeping children in the dim light and imagined them growing thinner day by day. If she couldn’t feed them, couldn’t she at least spare them a slow, painful death? The swift and desperate act of her own hands would be merciful by comparison. But she was too tired to think straight and when she woke up and saw her children rolling up their mats to the rooster’s cry, she whispered a prayer of thanks that they were still alive.

That’s when she knew she had to send at least half of them away. My father and his older brother were salvaged at the charitable behest of the Zoroastrian boarding school in the city of Yazd, the historic center of their faith. There they were to thank God they were allowed to live and suffer under the punishing dictatorship of the priests and the stinging taunts of their classmates who knew they were not paying their way. Village donkeys, the city kids called the poor boys from the countryside.

***

After I come back from Iran, my father and I sit in my living room drinking the Iranian tea I brew and serve in small glasses on a silver tray. He tells bits and pieces of his life while I listen and ask questions, wanting as much detail as possible to fill in the sketches he makes. I assemble a picture of the first seven years of his life. Of course I had it easy next to that. And a part of him was, I’m sure, happy to see my younger sister Azita and I growing up without the same kind of suffering. But I believe another part of him saw his American daughters through the eyes of a small boy who watches other kids play and eat while he works on an empty stomach. Brimming with resentment, he made my life harder than it needed to be.

"The village," he sighs and I see this old man, who used to terrify me so with his flights of rage, as a boy of seven, still young enough to show his fear when the sand rises from the ground like a black curtain falling up to the sky. He’s skinny, brown and barefoot and when he runs for cover I run after him, catching flashes of his calloused feet in the swirling dust. I enter the courtyard through the open wooden door and check from room to room until I find him with his head under a blanket, the rest of him sprawled out on the cool, clay floor. He won’t come out but I sit with him and rub his back so he knows I’m there. "It’s OK," I tell him. "I promise the world won’t end today."

Manijeh Nasrabadi

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