by Azadeh Amirsadri
In the poem Tavalodi Digar (Another Birth), by the brave Iranian poet Foroogh Farrokhzad, she writes:
There is an alley
which my heart has stolen
from the streets of my childhood.
There is a village which my heart has stolen from the summers of my childhood. Every summer, my grandparents went there to escape the heat of Tehran and check on their land and property. The village is in the desert between two major ancient cities known for their hand-knit carpets and handcrafted metalwork. The village was home to five landowners who came in the summer, and about ten or so local families who lived there year-round and worked on the land, and cared for their animals, mainly sheep and goats. Surrounded by mountains, this tiny dot of green in the dusty and dry landscape of the desert is where I went every summer of my childhood and stayed for the whole time until my parents came to pick me and my sisters up before school started. The village was without running water or electricity and had the most fantastic night sky where you could see the Milky Way.
The village owners were all siblings and second cousins of my grandmother, who had received the land and house as a dowry from her father. The primary agriculture was almond trees, wheat, walnuts, and fruit. After the harvest, the owners took their share of the crop every year, and the rest was distributed among the workers who toiled on the land. This was a feudal system where the crop was not distributed equally, although my grandmother always did. Because water was scarce, an underground water system emptied into a large pool area, which was the source of many water ownership fights between the workers and indirectly between the land owners. Each day, whoever’s turn it was to water their land, had to allow the water to flow to their batch of land by creating small damns around the path. Sometimes, someone would ‘accidentally’ siphon some water into their fruit or vegetable patch and hope no one would notice.
The children there each had their work to do. Most boys went to school in nearby towns, and most girls were required to weave carpets to be sold in the bazaars of Isfahan or Naeen. I could hang out with the girls as long as I wouldn’t stay too long and mess up their job. They taught me how to knit, pound, and cut the individual knots of carpeting and laughed at my slowness. It was fun for me as I could come and go as I pleased, and it was a break for them from their daily exhausting work until their mother or an older person would tell them to focus and work. Wholly unaware and clueless about the concept of child labor and the rural economy of poverty, I sensed the unfairness of the girls having to work all day during the week. In contrast, my sisters and I could play as much as we wanted. My grandmother’s older sister, an opium smoker who told good stories, would remind me of my place in that tiny society as the daughter of property owners and their place as daughters of peasants and laborers, warning me not to mix with them. I did anyway because no one else was to play with unless my sisters were there.
In this dusty village, there were three teenage boys whose grandmother was also a proprietor, and they would show up at times with their father, a retired general in the army who lived in Tehran. Their arrival was a source of curiosity and excitement for me, as they were the only people I knew in my family whose parents were divorced. They had a stepmother, a much younger woman who wore too much makeup, and they disliked her. The boys were the epitome of coolness, with their jean jackets and black leather bracelets, and I couldn’t decide which one I had a crush on. Because of their 1970s style of haircuts and bad boy image, whatever bad thing happened in the village after their arrival, it would be blamed on them. They would climb walls, go on the roof of the sun-baked mud houses, and jump from one roof to another, pranking the residents. Or, they would fight other boys in the village to show their physical prowess and establish rank superiority.
One day, my grandmother’s farm worker came in upset, telling her someone had destroyed some crops and it must have been the visiting boys. I went with her to check the damage and saw that someone had cut open a few watermelons still attached to the stems. They were cut open and half-eaten, along with carrots pulled from the earth, bitten, and thrown on the ground. There were also random designs carved in trees and on walls, plus apples eaten from a low branch in an orchard that belonged to my great uncle. The news of this rampage had everyone talking and speculating on the perpetrators, the bad boys, making them even more remarkable. I wasn’t allowed to hang out with them anyway, but now I wanted to be like them more than ever and prove my badassness to them.
I knew they had pocket knives that they flashed occasionally. They must have brought them from Tehran since the village had no store to buy anything. Once a week, a produce truck would come with fruits and a few vegetables to sell, and about once a month, the car would have basic supplies like oil, salt, soap, and, like any good salesman, unbreakable plates and bowls. Our food was made by getting milk from the animals, butchering them after a certain age, and baking bread. Every household had some chickens, and eggs were always available. Everything was butchered or produced in the village, and nothing was ever wasted.
One person had a motorcycle, the only mode of wheeled transportation, and he would go once in a while to the next village that had electricity, a post office, and a general store to buy whatever was needed. A few weeks after the watermelon incident, I asked my grandmother if she could ask him to get me a pocket knife. She was horrified and said absolutely not, that I was a respectable and proper young girl and not someone who should even think about carrying a knife like a criminal. She kept shaking her head as she repeated and grumbled at my brazen request. So, I had to find another way to get myself a knife and show the boys that I was as tough as they were. One afternoon, when my grandmother was napping, I went to the kitchen and got a small paring knife with a wooden handle. Then I went to the orchard area and tried to figure out how to do some damage without bringing any attention to myself, so I, too, cut a watermelon and left it there, open, red and exposed. Since it wasn’t easy to do more damage with my small knife, and I felt terrible about destroying anyone’s food, especially knowing how hard things were for the people living off the land, I decided to limit my misbehavior. So I went to every large tree I encountered and carved my initials and the date. After the carving took too long and hurt my hand, I decided to get another way to stamp my existence in the village that summer, so I took a pencil and wrote my full name and date on the white walls of the hallway, the nooks in the walls, and the wooden front door in our house. My dad’s cousin came one day to visit and teased me about my name all over the house. I just smiled, and when he talked about another cut watermelon in the field, I was secretly happy that my watermelon-destroying activity was blamed on the boys again. My grandmother shook her head and looked at me but said nothing.
Last month, while visiting my sister Kimi in Geneva, we talked about returning to our village where we spent so many summers. She said she had a friend who wanted to see it, and we both agreed that we only wanted to go with someone we absolutely love, like each other and who had the same experience of living there in the summers over fifty years ago.