‘The game is over,’ she said.
But the game wasn’t over yet. It would not be over until I had my children back with me and Reza was out of my life.
12
Laya’s story
Among the tension of the first weeks of 1988 there were moments of lightheaded relief. And then reflection. With my mother by my side so much, we found ourselves talking about the past, about the difficulties each of us had faced. We also talked a lot about Laya, sharing the stories that my beloved grandmother had told us about her life.
Laya had finally escaped the pain of this life in September 1987, just a short time before I escaped Reza. She had been bedridden for over seven years. She had lived on for more than six years after I had said goodbye to her before coming to Australia.
Laya was my father’s mother, but she was so close to both Shahin and me that she might as well have been Shahin’s mother. Her life was both ordinary for its time and place, and extraordinary for the difficulties she had experienced and the resilience she had shown.
Laya was born in 1905 in the regional city of Qazvin, 150 kilometres north-west of Tehran. The surrounding district has a rich agricultural heritage and is particularly known for its grapes, while the historic city has many elegant buildings and a reputation for some of the best baghlava in the world. We know very little about Laya’s parents other than that her father was a gardener named Sadegh Alijani and her mother, a competent housewife and cook, was called Jayran.
This was a working class – even underclass – family who eked out a quite basic living. They were all illiterate: formal education was a luxury in early 20th century Iran. Laya had four brothers. The eldest, Mehdi, ran a tea house in Qazvin while the others made their living selling lamb liver and other offal. Lamb liver remains a widely used meat in kabob cooked over charcoal-fired barbecues (mangal) in all Persian countries; street vendors can be seen selling this dish right through winter, even when snow covers everything else around, the smoke forming billowing clouds in the cold air. Two of Laya’s brothers, Ramezan and Heydar, sold the cooked meat while a third, Haji, sold raw meat from two metal iceboxes carried on the back of his motorbike. Despite the wealth of the land in this area, there was little industry or work and these three men all ended up in Tehran. Although the family were poor, they were still generous and proud. In the Persian culture being poor does not mean you are looked down upon, and in fact Haji ended up marrying the sister of a wealthy Qazvin businessman with that man’s blessing.
I have scant memories of Laya’s brothers. The youngest, Heydar, was a tall man with a deep voice that made an impression on me as a young child. He wore a long grey coat, with the collar turned up, and a woollen shawl – he would have looked at home in an Alfred Hitchcock movie. Mostly I remember Haji and his wife, whom Laya would take me to visit from time to time as they had a daughter my age, Khadijeh. She and I used to go to the local store to buy imported Nestlé condensed milk, which we’d eat straight from the can. We also used to go to the cinema and then, back at her house, relive the final scene of the movie when the main characters kissed and lived happily ever after. We even innocently imitated the final long kiss. We played doctors and nurses too, and felt a bit of guilt about that, as I recall – not that anyone ever checked on two young girls playing in their room.
Unfortunately Ramezan and Heydar, as well as Heydar’s wife, had addictions to opium smoking which led to them being largely estranged from the rest of the family. Ramezan’s wife, whom I called Mrs Hadigheh, was a tall lady with a bony face but she spoke with a lovely calming voice. She was a kind lady who raised her four children under very trying circumstances due to her husband’s drug addiction and macho personality. As the Iranian saying goes, she ‘kept her cheeks rosy by slapping’: she had a hard life financially and emotionally but never allowed her face or appearance to reveal that. There have been millions of women like this in Iran – they are the backbone of Iranian society, ‘burning’ inside yet successfully bringing up their children and keeping the family safe. One of Khadijeh’s brothers, Reza, also became a heroin addict; in my idealistic days as an Enfagh volunteer, when I was going to solve all the world’s problems, I naively tried to convince him that he should stop. He didn’t.
My mother and I know nothing of Laya’s childhood except that it was short. At the age of 15 she was married off to an older man called Hassan. She and her husband lived with his mother in their family home in Qazvin. The mother, a dominating and unkind woman, didn’t like her new daughter- in-law and it wasn’t long into the marriage that she was accusing Laya of theft. One day, Hassan’s mother had made abgosht for lunch while Hassan was at work. After putting it on the sofreh on the floor she told Laya that there was a potato missing. ‘Did you eat that?’ she snapped.
Laya denied the accusation, but her mother-in-law had decided that it must have been her. When Hassan arrived home, his mother told him that Laya had touched the dish without permission. ‘This wife is not good for you,’ she said.
Soon afterwards Hassan divorced Laya and she returned to her father’s house in Qazvin.
A little while later a young man called Hedayat stopped at Mehdi’s tea house. He was taking a break after travelling by bus from his home town of Zanjan, another 180 kilometres north-west of Tehran.
My mother and I once tried to reconstruct what we imagined was the conversation between Mehdi and Hedayat:
‘Sir, bring us tea,’ said Hedayat as he sat down.
‘Yes. Where have you come from?’ said Mehdi.
‘I am from Zanjan, but I am heading to Tehran to find work.’
‘What work do you do?’
‘I am a gardener. I direct water to the gardens.’
‘Do you have any income?’ asked Mehdi.
‘A little.’
‘Do you have a wife?’
‘No. I have an older sister who lives in Zanjan. She is my only family.’
At this point Mehdi decided that Hedayat would be a good match for his sister and a meeting was arranged; soon afterwards Hedayat and Laya were married and moved to Tehran. Laya took with her, as her entire belongings: a set of bedding, a samovar, a kettle, a teapot, a set of six tea glasses, a korsi, a kerosene lamp that could also be used for cooking or heating water, a carpet and a small charcoal stove. Hedayat contributed a few copper pitchers and large copper trays, some pastry dishes, a set of plates, a blanket, a quilt for the korsi, another carpet and some bars of olive oil soap.
In Tehran Hedayat soon found work watering trees and gardens for the city council on a minimal salary of seven toman per month. As a result of his employment with the council, the couple were given a three by four metre room in a place called Ghal-e Yusef Abad.
~
Ghal-e Yusef Abad – the ‘castle of Yusef Abad’, and called just ‘Ghal-e’ by the local people – was an ancient walled fortress in an area that is now a middle class suburb of Tehran. It was not far from our second house, near the water reservoir. The castle dated back to around 500 BC, well before Iran became an Islamic country. Early in the 20th century, Iran had a well-respected prime minister by the name of Mostowfi ol-Mamalek. He owned Ghal-e (which was also sometimes called Mostowfi ol-Mamalek) at the time and used it to house his peasants, before later gifting it to a welfare organisation called Oghaf. The surrounding area of Yusef Abad was named after ol-Mamalek’s son Yusef; today it remains a prominent suburb of Tehran.
Ghal-e was almost cartoon-like in its external structure: a large walled rectangle of four hectares with circular towers on each corner, about 30 centimetres higher than the wall, and two smaller towers in the middle of each long side. The eight metre high walls were of clay and tapered from the ground up – they measured about one metre deep at the base and 30 centimetres deep at the top. Straw had been placed on top of the walls to prevent rain from eroding them away. There was also a large underground space in which ol-Mamalek’s peasants kept the sheep at night to prevent them being attacked by wolves.
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br /> Inside, Ghal-e was a gated community – the two ancient gates to the fortress, four or five metres high, were closed at night. However, this was not a gated community like those of today. This was anything but luxurious. There was no electricity and the only ‘running’ water came from qanat, an underground watering system fed from the mountains above the city. Around 150 families, mostly illiterate people, lived on the land bounded by the walls. Their housing comprised adjoining single-room mud huts, each holding a family of sometimes six or more. The floors were clay and the windows had open wooden grates over them; the flat roofs were of mud and straw and had to be maintained every year to keep them from leaking. There was a small, walled courtyard in front. Groups of seven or eight huts shared a common wall and gate, a yard and a single pit toilet. In summer there would be hundreds of flies buzzing around the toilet, while in winter you would need to carry a lamp to use it. The winters were very cold, with snow piling up so that residents had to force their doors open from the inside; there was always a wooden shovel, a paroo, on hand to remove snow from the roof and courtyard. There was no heating. Azrael, the angel of death, was always present as the people were so poor they could afford little or no health care. Children would commonly die of diarrhoea, lung infections, diphtheria, chicken pox, jaundice and measles.
Within the walls were a bakery, a fruit shop, a tea house, a tiny mosque and a cemetery. Outside was a large pond – a dam really, probably 40 metres square and three metres deep – fed by the qanat. Ghal-e was surrounded by various gardens which flourished due to the efforts of a very competent farmer called Arbob Rostam. There were apples, berries, figs, pomegranates, wheat, blackberries, eggplants, tomatoes and watermelon. As children, my father sometimes took us to one of these gardens where mulberry trees grew in two rows alongside a narrow creek. We’d take a large cloth with us and hold it beneath a tree while my dad climbed to the top. When he shook the tree all the ripe berries would fall onto the cloth with a sound like pouring rain. There were so many mulberries that we could easily fill a large bucket and there were plenty to share with our neighbours. The big white mulberries (toot) were sweet and delicious. These gardens were so important to the people of Ghal-e that they would later name their mosque after the farmer: Arbob’s mosque.
Of the residents of Ghal-e, most of those who worked did so in the adjacent army hospital – the No. 1 Army Hospital. Others, like Hedayat, worked for Tehran council or in one of the various stores inside Ghal-e.
Despite the poverty there was a strong sense of community within the walls of Ghal-e. The women would work together cooking and making dresses. On various occasions during the year they would come together to prepare traditional dishes. One of these was ashe, a heavy Persian soup of chickpeas, beans, mutton and vegetables. Families would pool together to buy a sheep for the occasion. Another tradition was the cooking of samanoo at the new year. Samanoo is a sweet paste used as a condiment and made from germinated wheat grains and wheat flour. The process of preparing it would take a number of days. The men would dig a large hole that they would fill with wood – this would become the cooking fire. In the meantime the women would sit in a large circle and clean the wheat. (Each family would contribute a quantity of flour and wheat grains, the total amounting to over 100 kilograms.) The grains would be rinsed and washed day after day until they started to germinate. Then they would be crushed with water and strained, the extracted liquid being the main ingredient of the samanoo and the waste being fed to the animals. Surrounding all this preparation was a buzz akin to a social event. The women would talk and pray and sing, sharing dates and pastries, nuts and berries, and copious quantities of tea. Finally four men would lift a huge copper pot onto the fireplace; the flour and extracted liquid was added and the fire lit. It was now the job of the men to toast the mixture, stirring it all the time to ensure it did not burn, until it eventually thickened. The finished product was a dense paste, naturally sweetened by the wheatgerm. Finally, soaked almonds and macadamia nuts were stirred through. At the end of the cooking the samanoo was divided and distributed to all the families in Ghal-e. Those who had been unable to contribute flour or wheat would, if they could, contribute pastries or other treats back to those who had prepared the dish. One batch of samanoo would last a whole year.
Another ritual was a twice-annual performance of the Taziyeh passion play at the base of a large oak tree in the centre of Ghal-e. People would pay between five rial and one toman to watch, and all the women would wail uncontrollably as the story unfolded. That tree was the scene of a different type of tragedy one time when a man came and performed a show for a willing audience. He promised that if they provided him with household belongings like plates, bowls, fabrics and foodstuffs, he would return in a month and every family would, from that point, have their own self-contained building. No longer would they need to share a courtyard and toilet. He left with a healthy number of donations . . . and never returned.
~
Laya’s first child, my father Asghar, was born in Ghal-e in 1924. She would have two more sons: Ahmad, in 1926, and Nemat 11 years later. Before Nemat she lost an infant daughter, Mahlagha, due to what she said was nazar zadan – ‘bad eye’ or ‘evil eye’. This was superstitiously believed to be a fatal illness imposed on a child when someone enviously commented on his or her extreme beauty. Laya also had at least one abortion using date grass.
When Nemat was only three months old, Laya’s life changed dramatically. Since she and Hedayat had arrived in Tehran he had continued to work for the local government watering trees and gardens. One day he took a break from his work, sitting down beneath a tree. There, he dozed off into a nap. His boss, Mansor ol-Mamalek, the manager of the city council, happened to pass by after inspecting the gardens. Without waking Hedayat he kicked him, hard, in the stomach with a heavy boot. Initially, apart from being in obvious pain, there didn’t seem to be anything wrong with Hedayat, but he gradually became ill over the coming days and weeks. One month after he was kicked, Hedayat died. There was no autopsy or investigation, but with hindsight it seems likely that his liver or another vital organ was badly damaged, leading to his slow death.
Laya had lost her second husband, a kind, quiet man whose only flaw was the occasional smoking of opium. She was left alone with three boys under twelve. And no income.
Not long afterwards there was very nearly another tragedy. When Nemat was seven months old, he became very ill with chickenpox. The spots covered him from head to toe, and were even in his eyes. With no doctors to consult, Laya had to rely on traditional remedies to try to cure her son. The first involved lighting a fire to create smoke from khak-e-shir (‘teff’), the tiny seeds of a herb known as London rocket in the West. The seeds look like small sesame seeds and are still used today as the basis of a refreshing drink. When this smoke didn’t work, Laya was advised to try the smoke from the smouldering droppings of a female donkey. There were no donkeys within Ghal-e so some neighbours went to a nearby field and brought back a supply of the necessary ‘medicine’. Again Nemat was left in a room full of smoke, but this time the smoke had a dreadful smell! Three days later, Nemat was miraculously better, though the physical scars of his illness would stay with him for his whole life. Despite this success, I don’t think female donkey droppings have ever caught on as a popular cure for chickenpox.
With the death of her husband, and despite the young ages of her boys, Laya needed to find some work. Her friend Ozra and her husband both worked in the army hospital – the husband as a purchasing officer and Ozra doing ironing in the laundry – so Laya asked if they might be able to find her something. The two older boys would need to look after themselves while another neighbour, who also had an infant, would look after Nemat – including breastfeeding him. Ozra returned soon afterwards with the good news that there was a vacancy in the hospital laundry.
‘Will I need to wash the soiled pants and sheets?’ Laya asked.
Another of Laya’s neighbours in Ghal-e had b
ecome almost blind. For years she had had the job of cleaning contaminated linen and clothing at the hospital, washing away the faeces and blood and boiling the sheets. Many thought that this was the cause of her loss of sight.
‘No,’ said Ozra. ‘You will only wash the “clean” linen and clothing and hang it on the line to dry.’
It was a strange twist that as a result of Hedayat having been a government worker, and Laya now working for a government organisation, she was given the same pay that her husband had received. She was also guaranteed a ‘better’ job, which is why she avoided being given the filthy job her neighbour had done.
Laya would leave at six in the morning and walk for 30 minutes with Ozra to the hospital. About once a week she would leave even earlier to take her turn at lighting the hot water furnace for the laundry. I never witnessed this, but I have an image of this short, plump lady striding towards the hospital at dawn, her light skin and pale brown eyes glowing in the early light. She would have been wrapped in a brown coat, but as she strode along there would have been the occasional flash of red from the bright lining of her Czech-made black rubber galesh, or flat shoes. Her scarf-wrapped hair would have been deep brown – she used henna to keep it that way as she aged. And in her pocket would have been a good handful of chahar maghez (four seeds) – a mixture of crushed pistachios, almonds, walnuts and macadamias – which she always said was necessary to be able to do her work.
At the hospital, Laya stood on a concrete slab, her knees resting against a deep tub, also concrete, that had hot and cold running water. She scrubbed the sheets by hand using a special laundry soap which was either local or came from Russia (called ‘Russi’ soap). After rinsing the sheets she would hang them out to dry, before folding them and passing them on to the ironing ladies. Later in her life Laya would often complain of sore feet, which could have resulted from the 20 years she spent standing on this concrete slab. The rheumatism that ultimately crippled her could also have been related to this.
Scattered Pearls Page 20