Laughing Without an Accent

by Firoozeh Dumas

  By the time our new servants joined us, my family had moved into a larger house, with a mini house in the back for household help. Since all our homes had been designed by the British for the British, many had servants’ quarters, servants being one of the perks in colonialism.

  With the arrival of Naneh Pooran and Kal Ahmad’s family, my parents suddenly found themselves surrounded by children. My mother immediately went shopping. She bought dresses, shoes, and school bags. The joy of receiving new clothing is universal, and for all the years they lived with us, my mother shopped for Naneh Pooran and Kal Ahmad’s children. By just looking at the kids in our house, no one could ever tell whose were the maid’s and whose were the owners’. That is exactly what my parents wanted. My mother still says that had she known how much she would enjoy shopping for Pooran, Pari, Parvaneh, and Parviz, she would have hired servants with children much sooner.

  Our house was on an acre of land. This was not as luxurious as it sounds. Abadan, with its desert climate and ubiquitous oil refineries, is no Manhattan. We lived in a one-story house with three bedrooms, similar to what Americans call “ranch-style.” Our front yard was filled with flowers, and the backyard had a vegetable garden and chicken coop. Kal Ahmad was in charge of everything outside the house, and Naneh Pooran took care of everything inside. They were both seasoned servants, and our house ran smoothly with their help.

  A few months after Naneh Pooran and her family moved in with us, we received a letter from Ali and Zahra. They had returned to Arak, where various family members had swindled them of all their money and belongings, even Zahra’s sewing machine. They begged my parents to take them back. My parents couldn’t, but promised to help them find jobs. My father finally found a job for Ali has an elevator operator in a hospital in Tehran. It somehow seemed fitting that Ali, who spent his days going up and down trees, would now spend his days going up and down in an elevator.

  One day my father came home to find Kal Ahmad with his face in his hands, sobbing. Turns out someone had stolen his bicycle, his sole mode of transportation. Seeing people cry happens to be my father’s kryptonite. This weakness served me well as a child, leading to the acquisition of many toys.

  My father told Kal Ahmad to get in the car, and the two of them drove to the bicycle shop, where my father proceeded to buy Ahmad the nicest top-of-the-line bike he could find. He even bought him a bell.

  Kal Ahmad loved the bell. He rang it as he left the house. He rang it as soon as he turned into our driveway. He rang it whenever he saw someone he knew. He rang it just for fun. Every time we’d hear the familiar ding, ding, ding, my dad would say, “I should not have bought that bell.”

  Every evening, Naneh Pooran and Kal Ahmad invited my four-year-old brother Farshid to join them for dinner, and Farshid happily accepted. Naneh Pooran and her family ate their dinner sitting on the floor, which Farshid found more enjoyable than sitting at our dining room table. And more important, they always offered him the tadiq first. Tadiq is the crispy fried rice at the bottom of the pan, the most coveted part of a Persian meal. No matter how big the pot, there is only a limited amount of tadiq. This means that at any Persian meal, everyone grabs the tadiq first. It’s Lord of the Flies. For Naneh Pooran and her family to offer Farshid the tadiq first every night was the height of generosity. Their son, Parviz, and Farshid were playmates, but when it came time to eat, Farshid agha, or Mr. Farshid, as they called him, was treated like the boss’s son.

  When Farshid was ready to start school, my parents faced a huge dilemma. In Iran, like in most countries in the world, if your daddy’s a gardener, you’ll be a gardener, too. If you’re a complete idiot from a wealthy family, you will have access to all types of educational and job opportunities. My father always said that had Albert Einstein been born to a poor Iranian family, the world would have never benefited from his gifts because he would have been stuck plowing a field somewhere. My father also added that having met Albert Einstein, he felt personally strong about this issue. This casual name-dropping elicited awe every time, allowing my father to segue to his Fulbright Scholarship story, complete with “I did not think I was going to win” and “They put ice in tea, I swear.”

  When it was time for Farshid to attend school, my parents enrolled him in the school for employees of the National Iranian Oil Company. Parviz, on the other hand, had to attend the public school, where his sisters went. The problem was that the public school started at age six, while Farshid’s school started at age five. My parents did not want Parviz to have to watch my brother leave for school while he sat at home. My father was not an influential enough man to persuade the public school to bend the rule, but he had friends who were. He made a few phone calls, and Parviz was allowed to start school the same year as my brother.

  In the evenings, my father personally saw to it that Parviz did all his homework correctly. Whenever Parviz had a question, he came to my father, since his own father was illiterate.

  Naneh Pooran and Kal Ahmad lived with us until my father received a two-year assignment to come to America. They were devastated. Nobody cried harder at the news than they did. Even though my parents found them another family in Abadan, Naneh Pooran and Kal Ahmad insisted that they would never find another employer who treated them like family.

  My parents stayed in touch with Parviz. When he finished high school, my father enrolled him in a technical training program. When he graduated, my father arranged a job interview for him. He was hired as a technician at the National Iranian Oil Company, where he still works. He and his wife and kids live in a house in Abadan.

  Parviz did not grow up to be a gardener.

  And I grew up believing that one person can make a difference.

  Eight Days a Week

  When I met my first teacher in America, Mrs. Sandberg, I was so confused. She was so nice. Her classroom was unlike anything I had ever seen—colorful posters on the walls, children’s artwork hanging from the ceiling; it was like a party. Mrs. Sandberg never yelled, assigned homework, or even lost her temper, but she knew how to control the classroom. If someone misbehaved, she would say, “Jaimie, I need to speak to you,” in a stern but still-kind tone. Then she would speak to the student in question, in a logical way that assumed the existence of a higher self in even the worst of her students. If the student continued to misbehave, he would have to eat lunch in the classroom with Mrs. Sandberg instead of running around outside with his friends. The student in question would inevitably be sorry for whatever he had done. Mrs. Sandberg never hit anyone.

  Every day after lunch, she read a book to us while we put our heads on our desks. I can still hear her soothing voice introducing me to Charlotte, Wilbur, and the Boxcar children. When we finished our class assignments—which was the least we could do since we were, after all, students—she gave us stickers that read, “Nice Job!” or “You’re a star!” Every so often, there was a party for someone’s birthday or for some other reason, such as Arbor Day. These parties meant we received sweets and eraser heads. Not surprisingly, at the end of the year, I received an award for perfect attendance. I had not missed a single day of school, not because I was never sick but because I vehemently refused to stay home. Why would anyone miss a day of Mrs. Sandberg’s class?

  Mrs. Sandberg’s scope did not stop in the classroom. Shortly after I started school, she called my father at home and told him that she had noticed that I loved books and that he needed to take me to the Whittier Public Library. As far as my father is concerned, the eleventh commandment is “Obey your children’s teachers.” He immediately told my brother Farshid to take me to the library. I grabbed my purse and off we went.

  Even though my father’s employer in Abadan, the National Iranian Oil Company, provided a well-stocked library, complete with a children’s section, I had never been there because no one had ever taken me. My family was not much into reading for fun. They read what they had to in school, but beyond that, nada. In fact, I didn’t know what a library was until
Mrs. Sandberg’s fateful phone call.

  As we walked to the Whittier Public library, Farshid explained to me that a library is a place that lends books to people. I didn’t argue because I was seven and he was fourteen, but I thought he was full of hooey. I knew enough to know that there was no place that lent things to people. That’s why I had brought my purse.

  In Iran, I owned three books: Aesop’s Fables, The Little Prince, and the witty Tales of Mullah Nasrudin, all of which had been given to me by my uncle’s wife, Soraya, who lived in Tehran and wore sophisticated clothes, ate fancy foods such as artichokes, and loved books. Those same three books are still among my top twenty favorites, although the original copies were lost a long time ago, somewhere between our first and twelfth move.

  Perhaps it’s not entirely fair to say that my parents were not into reading for fun. They did buy one book in America during the two years our family lived here, the 1972 edition of the Guinness Book of World Records. That book I still have, thanks to my mother, who recently gave it to me, with the explanation “We don’t have room for this.”

  When Farshid and I arrived at the library, we went into a huge room filled with children’s books. I had never seen so many books just for children in one place. I picked the smallest book, assuming it would be the cheapest. When I went to pay for it, coin purse in hand, the librarian made my brother fill out a sheet of paper; then she handed me a card with my name, Firoozeh Jazayeri, correctly spelled but barely fitting on the line provided. She then handed me the book I had chosen—for free. I was stunned. She was lending it to me. I thought then and there that libraries were the most brilliant idea ever and wondered who had thought of them. From then on, I went to the library every chance I had and checked out the maximum number of books allowed, eight. No matter how many books I read, there were always more, which both exhilarated and frustrated me.

  Ever since we had arrived in the United States, my classmates kept asking me about magic carpets. “They don’t exist,” I always said. I was wrong. Magic carpets do exist, but they are called library cards.

  School in Iran had been a whole other experience. We attended school six days a week; Fridays were our only day off, but we received enough homework to keep us busy eight days a week.

  Starting from the first day of first grade, we had homework—hours of it. Our grading system was based on twenty points. Nineteens and twenties were very, very rare. Teachers were stern, feared, and respected. They very rarely complimented students; and when they did, you remembered it, and so did your parents and the other students.

  When teachers entered a room, all the students stood up, in silence, and we didn’t sit down again until the teacher said we could. Talking back was unheard of. Putting your feet up on the chair? Are you kidding? Chewing gum, eating, or chitchatting with a classmate? Never. We sat in rows in unadorned rooms, off unadorned hallways. And if I could send my children back in time to school in prerevolutionary Iran, I would.

  Our teachers did not try to be our friends or to be liked. They were there to teach us. There were no birthday celebrations. Why should there be? I will never understand why most schools in America celebrate Halloween, effectively losing an entire day of education to prepare kids for collecting candy.

  In Iran, we were graded on penmanship and neatness. Our pencils always had to be sharp. I still have a bump on my finger from doing endless writing exercises. We had math and science every day, hours in the classroom and more at home. When we studied plants, we had to draw various species, labeling each part. Our drawings had to be perfectly neat. We learned the difference between deciduous and evergreen, and what happens to plants during each season. We knew citrus fruit had eight sections. We knew the various kinds of seeds and pits. We knew the major cities in Iran, the capitals of other countries, the names of mountains and where to find them. If we didn’t do well and pass these subjects, we flunked and had to repeat the year. Nobody wanted that.

  And of course, we studied our heroes.

  If you ask someone in Iran to name three famous countrymen, you’ll probably hear Ferdowsi, Hafez, and Saadi. They were not military men, inventors, athletes, or rock stars, but poets.

  Ferdowsi was a tenth-century poet, best known for Shah-nameh, The Epic of Kings, which tells the story of old Persia before the Arab conquest. The poem is written entirely in Persian. Ferdowsi is credited with not only creating a masterpiece but helping preserve the Persian language by not using any words with Arabic roots. Some pages from an exquisite sixteenth-century Shah-nameh are on display at the Metropolitan Museum in New York. I visit those pages every time I am in New York and marvel at how one man could have written something that is as popular today as it was a thousand years ago. His awe-inspiring poems are reason enough for everyone to learn Persian.

  In prerevolutionary Iran, every student had to memorize at least one of the poems of the beloved Saadi, a poet from the thirteenth century. One of Saadi’s most famous poems, about shared humanity, is carved in the entrance of the Hall of Nations in the United Nations building in New York. When a poem from the strife-filled thirteenth century is equally relevant in the strife-filled twenty-first century, one wonders if we really are as gifted a species as we think we are. Sure, we’ve invented huge metal objects that can fly, or sit on runways for hours, and, yes, doctors can give one person’s still-beating heart to another, and we have endless products to make straight hair curly and curly hair straight, but we still don’t know how to get along. Perhaps Starbucks should start printing Saadi’s poem on its cups, thus spreading the concept, with every shot of espresso sold around the world, that our commonalities far outweigh our differences.

  Hafez, another prominent Iranian, was a fourteenth-century poet whose mystical poems are full of metaphors, lending themselves to all sorts of interpretations. Hafez’s simple yet inimitable writing style has enchanted Iranians for centuries. No one has ever been able to write like him, despite many attempts. In our house, whenever a decision was to be made, my father would grab the book of poems by Hafez, close his eyes, ask a question, open a page at random, read the poem on that page, and interpret it with much wonder and awe. He does the same thing with fortune cookies in Chinese restaurants. I am continually amazed at how much he can read into “He who travels sees much” and “Your lucky numbers are 23 14 9 32 1.”

  Using Hafez’s poems as some sort of divine guidance is common practice in many Iranian households, especially around potential suitors. Hafez has single-handedly encouraged many unions and prevented others. He is also often used as an excuse to reject a suitor, as opposed to “we’re holding out for a doctor.” I assume there are many Iranian men out there with grudges against Hafez.

  In a strange intersection between modernity and tradition, there is even a Hafez website, in Persian, which allows the user to select a poem by clicking on one of the question marks covering the screen, then reading and interpreting the corresponding poem. I don’t know how Hafez would have felt about the website, but its existence does prove that human beings are always looking for someone to provide answers to life’s endless questions. We have Hafez; you have Dr. Phil. It is to be noted, however, that Hafez has been popular for seven centuries and gained prominence without the help of Oprah Winfrey.

  In addition to Persian poets, the reading curriculum in prerevolutionary Iran covered a wide range of foreign authors and philosophers. Depending on the school, students read the works of Dickens, Twain, Dostoyevsky, Gogol, Chekhov, Gorky, Nietzsche, Borges, Arthur Koestler, Stefan Zweig, Sartre, de Beauvoir, and Camus, to name a few. Hemingway was added in later years. We also had weekly magazine supplements that serialized Alexandre Dumas’s novels Joseph Balsamo and The Count of Monte Cristo. These were very popular, proving that cliff-hangers succeed in every language.

  In Abadan, the children of almost all employees of the National Iranian Oil Company attended the same schools. Parvaneh for kindergarten, Roya coed grammar school for grades one through three, then Babak for
boys from grades four through six. Girls continued at Roya through high school; boys attended 25 Shahrivar.

  In 1971, when we transferred to Tehran for one year, the culture shock of moving from Abadan was every bit as jarring as moving to America would later be. In addition to getting used to Tehran traffic, which meant brushing up on both prayers and swear words, my father had to decide where to send us to school.

  In Tehran, the most prestigious school for boys was Alborz. Alborz was Iran’s Eton, famous for having top teachers, hardworking students destined for success, and science labs that rivaled those of major universities. The principal was a man named Dr. Mojtahedi.

  In 1968, as part of his job, Dr. Mojtahedi embarked on a tour of universities and refineries in Iran. At the time, my father worked for the National Iranian Oil Company and was assigned to host Dr. Mojtahedi during his visit. The two of them spent a couple of days together and got along splendidly. When it was time for him to return to Tehran, Dr. Mojtahedi told my father that if he ever came to Tehran, he should be sure to look him up. My father, displaying his usual social skills, said yes, and then proceeded to forget about Dr. Mojtahedi.

  Three years later, when we moved to Tehran, my father decided that the only logical school choice for Farshid was Alborz. When he called the school to enroll him, he was told that my brother would have to take an entrance exam. My father suddenly remembered Dr. Mojtahedi. “Don’t worry,” he told my brother. “I’ll take care of this.”

  The next day, my parents, Farshid, and I put on our finest clothes and went to Alborz. The school was empty and eerily quiet. My father asked the janitor where he could find Dr. Mojtahedi. The janitor pointed to a set of doors. The four of us, led by my intrepid father, opened the doors and walked into a huge room where hundreds of students sat hunched over desks, working feverishly, rapidly pushing pencils across stacks of paper. The silence was broken by the screams of a gray-haired man standing in the front of the room: “Who are you and why are you here?”