by Azadeh Amirsadri
As a child, I was lucky to have grown up with two grandmothers: one living with our family and the other visiting from her house in the same city, and staying with us for a few days at a time. Both grandmothers were very kind, and my sisters and I spent a lot of time with them, each of us having a special relationship with them. Mamabozorg was my paternal grandmother, who raised me from the age of one to five, and who, along with my grandfather, became my primary attachment figures. Her name was Zahra, and she lived to be 104, or so we think, since I don’t believe we have an official birth certificate for her, just the usual traditional writing of birth and death dates on the first page of the family koran. A devout religious person, she prayed five times every day of her life as required by Islam. When she was too old to stand, she would sit in bed and pray, ending with her prayer beads. One of my favorite things as a child was to put my head on her knees, as she was sitting cross-legged on her prayer rug, after her last prayers, saying the name of the Prophet and his first successor as a form of meditation. I felt warm and safe with her, and the world was predictable as it should be for every child. As a traditional Muslim woman, she wore the chador and always kept her headscarf on, even at home.
Mamajoon, Mariam, was my maternal grandmother, the modern grandma. She didn’t wear the chador, unless she was going to some religious event, which she rarely did, but she also wore the head scarf at all times. She was born and raised in Rasht, a city by the Caspian Sea, and, with her grayish-blue eyes, her round hips, and her long silver hair, she remained a beauty in her old age. She had become a widow at a young age and later lost her oldest son to heart disease. She endured having had land and a fortune, then losing it all, but stayed the life-loving person she was. She lived in the United States for some years while raising her young grandson and caring for her college-age son. She loved America and regaled us with stories of banana-split ice cream, cheeseburgers, huge supermarkets with laundromats, and people who followed rules, compared to our unruly ways. She would take us to a new place in Tehran that had donuts, and as my sisters and I were cutting them with our knives and forks, she told us that Americans eat them with their hands. When I visited her in California, we would go to Fashion Island in Newport Beach, where she’d claim a table at an outdoor cafe, order coffee for herself and whatever we wanted for us, smoke her cigarettes, and watch the world go by.
My parents met at a dance in the 1950’s. Before they got married, they needed their parents’ permission and approval. Each parent objected to their wedding because they did not know the other’s family. Traditionally, families arranged their children’s marriages with families they knew, usually from the same city and background. My parents declared their love for each other and decided to get married anyway, and on the day of the wedding, my father’s parents officially asked my grandmother for the hand of my mother, making sure all the traditional ceremonies were followed and respected.
My parents lived in Iran as newlyweds, in France during my father’s graduate studies, back in Iran again after my father completed his studies, and in France again after the Iranian Revolution of 1979. Their five daughters were dispersed throughout the world, some with them in Europe and some far away in America. Their parents stayed in Iran. I didn’t see my Mamabozorg until 1988, when I had a green card, travel papers, and enough money to travel to France, where she was visiting my parents. We were at my sister’s house in Paris, and I wanted to sleep with her at night, as I used to do as a child, but for some reason I did not, and to this day I wonder why I hesitated.
My grandmothers did the same trips back and forth, but Mamajoon added the United States to her stays, as my aunt lived in California, and Switzerland, where my uncle lived for a while. At times, the two grandmothers were together in France, staying with my parents and traveling together. They shared a bedroom, and my mom told us that sometimes she could hear them talk and laugh, but when she entered their room, both would fall silent and wait for her to leave before resuming their chatter. For two women who did not trust each other at the beginning when my parents’ joined lives, they became very close and even ended up living together in the same house in Iran in their old age, when they could still live independently. Zahra would cook the rice that Iranians eat at every meal every day for lunch, and Mariam made the meat or vegetables that went with it. Zahra was very sensitive to “hot” and “cold” foods, a balancing of different foods that complemented each other, as in some Asian cuisines. For example, she didn’t eat tomatoes because they made her cold (stomach issues), but Mariam loved them because they were heavily featured in the cuisine of her Northern native city. A few times a year, they’d have a disagreement, and we, her grandchildren, would find out about it when Mariam said that she had cooked a dish with tomatoes in it. My cousin called and asked her how she was one day, and Mariam said, “Good, I haven’t had to use any tomatoes in my cooking lately!”
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