by at Home;Abroad Laughing Without an Accent: Adventures of an Iranian American
My husband vowed to find the culprit.
I took matters into my own hands and bought an orange fluorescent posterboard, which I attached to the large oak in front of our sidewalk. “Please clean up after your dog! It’s the law!” I wrote, making the exclamation points extra big to let everyone know I meant business.
My neighbors, too nice to tell me that my sign was probably bringing down real-estate prices, asked me how long I was planning to keep the sign up. “As long as I have to,” I announced.
“This is happening either late at night or very early in the morning,” my husband announced. “What we should do is keep our blinds open as late as possible and then wake up really early and open them.”
Around the same time as this doggie caper, I had purchased red fleece pajamas from a catalog in Maine that specializes in practical, comfortable, and somewhat ugly clothing. I had purchased the pajamas not for aesthetics, but for the simple reason that I turn into a cold-blooded reptile at night. Granted, they were not the most feminine items, more Margaret Thatcher than Sophia Loren, but then again my Victoria’s Secret catalog always seems to be missing the “Comfortable and Practical” section. My husband hated my pajamas and referred to them as “the Santa suit,” to which I always replied, “Ho, ho, ho.”
Every morning, I opened the blinds and surveyed the people walking outside. I noticed that in my neighborhood, there was an abundance of people walking their dogs in the mornings, but most people had either small breeds (or non-dogs, as they are known in our household) or large ones. There was a strange lack of medium-size dogs, which further increased the mystery.
In retrospect, I may have been a bit obsessive, but there is something about cleaning up somebody else’s doggie doo that brings out the worst in humanity, or at least in me. Despite my attempts to outsmart the dog, the canine culprit succeeded in leaving several more pyramids.
Finally, one morning, my vigilance paid off. I spotted a woman walking not one but two medium-size dogs. The dogs were unruly, the kind who would do their deed wherever they desired, regardless of whatever commands their owner might yell. These dogs looked guilty. I opened my front door, still wearing the Santa suit, put my hands on my hips, and glared at the owner. She looked at me and continued on her way.
The next morning, the same woman appeared, walking the same defiant medium-size dogs. The dogs looked guiltier than the day before. I once again opened the front door, walked outside, and glared at the woman.
This was the first time I had used the Look of Death Glaring Technique, ever. As a nonconfrontational type, I have to consciously practice not apologizing when someone bumps into me. This was a huge milestone for me. I could now effectively get a job in a Parisian café.
My husband thought I was taking this too far. “You have never witnessed these dogs even walking on our lawn. Maybe you should tone it down a bit.” It was too late. The power I felt in the red fleece suit, combined with the hands on the hips, had turned me into a suburban superhero, Super Bitch.
After a week of glaring at this woman, I noticed that when she got to my house, she actually crossed the street to avoid me. I could hear the trumpets playing my victory song.
About a month later, our local paper announced that the elementary school where my children attended had finally found a new principal. I looked at the picture of the new principal and knew that I had seen her somewhere but could not remember where.
The next morning I opened the blinds, and it suddenly hit me like a ton of bricks, or in this case, excrement. There was the new principal, walking her two medium-size dogs, which suddenly no longer looked guilty at all. In fact, they looked cute. I ran outside, in the Santa suit, hands no longer on my hips, and approached her as gently as I could, given the fact that I had spent the past week glaring at her.
“Hello! Are you the new principal?” I asked.
“Yes, I am,” she answered.
“Nice to meet you,” I said. “You see, we were having problems with a dog leaving stuff on our lawn but I know they weren’t your dogs.”
“Nice to meet you, too,” she said.
After that verbal exchange, I looked forward to many more years of awkward conversations with my children’s principal. I had no choice but to pretend none of it had ever happened. To aid my denial of the events, I got rid of the fleece pajamas. The Frenchman was delighted. I also had to forgive myself for my ugly behavior, which wasn’t quite as easy as getting rid of ugly sleepwear. I did, however, sign up to make cupcakes for the teachers’ lounge.
Mohammad, Kazem, Nematollah, and Bob
Retirement does funny things to people. Take my father and his two brothers. Now that the three of them are no longer burdened by the demands of their respective engineering and medical careers, they somehow have to fill up the time previously spent building oil refineries and healing the sick.
Every weekday morning, the three of them meet at my uncle Nematollah’s house at a quarter to ten. Why at Uncle Nematollah’s and not at Uncle Mohammad’s or my dad’s? Because Uncle Nematollah owns a coffeemaker.
The three of them grab their coffees. My father complains that the coffee is cheap. My uncle Nematollah tells him that he would never know the difference between expensive and cheap coffee, so why should he waste the money? Then the three of them head to a room in the back of the house. They shut the door. They turn on the TV.
It’s time.
It’s time for The Price Is Right.
I found out about this ritual the same way that penicillin or chocolate chip cookies were discovered, by accident.
Every time I fly to see my parents, I book the flight that arrives at 10:30 AM. I have always assumed that this is a convenient time for my eighty-year-old father to pick me up at the airport, a ten-minute drive from his house. My parents always seem genuinely happy to see me. I, do, however sense a palpable resentment from my uncle Nematollah, who regularly asks me, “Weren’t you just here?”
He finally let the Persian cat out of the bag one day. “Can’t you take a later flight?” he asked. “Why?” I wanted to know. He refused to tell me. I insisted. And that’s how I stumbled upon their little secret.
I agreed to come at a different time. “But first,” I said, “you must let me watch.” This was not met with enthusiasm.
The very next day I, too, was in the back room of my uncle Nematollah’s house. The three of them were talking at the same time, like they always do. Then the game show’s theme music started. The conversation immediately stopped.
The commentary started as soon as the first contestant was told to “come on down!”
“She’s going to be a screamer. She’d better not win.”
“You think he could wear something nicer than shorts on TV.”
“I’m rooting for him. Doesn’t he remind you of Hassani?”
The Price Is Right is based essentially on the ability to guess the price of a ceiling fan or a case of men’s hair color. For the average viewer, the show does not reveal much about the character of each contestant. But like the college students who somehow managed to turn The Bob Newhart Show into a drinking game, my father and his brothers have taken the show to a whole new level. They interpret every squeal, every jump, every guess as a window into the character of each contestant, thereby allowing them to decide who deserves to win and, more important, who doesn’t. For them, it’s not simply a show about people wearing T-shirts declaring “Happy Birthday to my sister Wanda!” on national television while jumping up and down at the prospect of winning a cumbersome bedroom set for which they have no room. It’s a show that allows the three brothers to act as God, while yielding no real power whatsoever.
“I don’t know why any of you cares who wins since it doesn’t affect any of you anyway,” I said.
There was no comment.
The first item for bid that day was a Jet Ski. None of the four people bidding looked like they had ever operated one. They looked like types who would hurt themselves on Je
t Skis. Nonetheless, they all jumped and squealed while the audience shouted out seemingly random numbers, since how many people have ever actually purchased a Jet Ski? Much to the horror of my father and uncles, the loudest contestant won. As she bunny-hopped to the stage to kiss Bob Barker, she kept looking back at the audience to her equally loud cheering section.
“Khoda be dod-e ma bereseh. God help us,” said my uncle Mohammad.
“The worst part,” I said, “is that they have to pay taxes on the prizes, so not only are they stuck with something they don’t need, but they have to partially pay for it. Nothing’s free,” I added, trying to add a layer of education to our activity.
“By the way, you’re not invited again,” my uncle Nematollah said.
“Why?” I asked.
“You talk too much.”
The final portion of the program, the Showcase Showdown, arrived. That’s when the prizes move beyond coffeemakers and a year’s supply of macaroni and cheese to cars and vacations. And that’s when the brothers all started shouting out numbers at the TV screen.
“Twenty-two thousand!” my father yelled, pointing his finger at Bob Barker, expecting a personal nod back.
“Forty-five thousand,” added my eighty-six-year-old uncle Mohammad.
“How much is an RV?” Nematollah asked.
The contestant who won bid one dollar. This devious tactic assumes that all the other contestants will overbid. It worked. The brothers were angry. They didn’t like the woman who won. She was The Screamer.
“No dignity,” they said, looking genuinely disappointed. “None at all.”
Last year, my uncle Nematollah had surgery. When he came home from the hospital, he was feeling weak and didn’t want any visitors. We were all worried about him. No one could remember a time when he didn’t want visitors.
A week later, he called his brothers and invited them to his house at 9:45 AM. “Don’t be late,” he said.
They weren’t.
Seyyed Abdullah Jazayeri
When my mother called to tell me that my uncle Abdullah had passed away, I wasn’t surprised. The last time I had seen him, he was a shadow of his former self, bedridden and dependent on others for all his needs. He had spent the last few months of his life in a rented hospital bed in the living room of his condominium in Southern California. Outside the window, he could see the fruit trees he and my aunt Sedigeh had planted to remind them of Iran. Their green thumbs had defied space limitations. In their tiny yard they had not only an enormous fig tree but also a sweet lemon tree (a naranj, which is a cross between an orange and a lemon), a pomegranate tree, and a row of cypresses that resembled the backdrops in Persian miniatures. Their fruit trees were famous for bearing more fruit than anybody else’s, undoubtedly to accommodate my aunt Sedigeh’s generous nature. During fig season, my father visited my uncle Abdullah and aunt Sedigeh every day.
While my uncle Abdullah lay on his bed, visitors streamed in all day. His sons, their wives, their children, and their children’s children all altered their schedules every day to be with him. Uncle Abdullah’s son Mehdi and his daughter-in-law Mary flew from Italy several times, their son Darius came from Rwanda, my cousin Ryan from New York. Others spent hours on the L.A. freeway to visit Uncle Abdullah, which for anyone familiar with L.A. freeways, is almost as impressive as coming from Rwanda.
My uncle died surrounded by his loved ones, his garden, his books, and more framed photos of his family than any decorator would allow in one room. For a man whose mother died soon after childbirth, permanently depriving him of a mother’s love, there could not have been a gentler, more embraced departure.
A few days after his passing, I received a phone call from my cousin Mahmood announcing that instead of the usual somber memorial, the family had decided to have a “celebration of life.” To my American sensibility, this seemed appropriate. My uncle had lived a very full life; his death was not unexpected. Not all deaths can be marked with a celebration of life, but if anyone’s could, it would be my uncle’s. I was, however, highly skeptical that my Iranian family would pull this off.
If there’s one thing that separates Middle Easterners from Westerners, it’s the way we mourn. We can out-mourn anyone. For many in the Middle East, a highly emotional funeral is proof that the deceased is missed. Jackie Kennedy’s stoicism after the death of her husband would not have translated well in the Middle East. In Iran, there is something called tabaki, which is the act of attending funerals and other religious ceremonies such as rozeh khooni to cry and encourage others to follow suit. It is considered a good deed to help others release their pain. One can also hire professional mourners, who recite prayers from the Koran and encourage everyone to cry. In Tabaki, a fascinating documentary about the world of professional mourners, Iranian filmmaker Bahman Kiarostami interviews many in the field, who discuss their unique calling and their previous jobs—one worked in airport security, another was a welder, but each had decided to take up this second profession. Living in an Islamic theocracy, there is a market for such services, sort of like people in America obtaining real-estate licenses to take advantage of hot real-estate markets.
In Iranian culture, we mourn the day a loved one passes, the day he is buried, three days after, seven days after, forty days after, and at the one-year mark. After that, we mourn every year the day of the passing. People often visit the grave site of a loved one at the end of every week.
In the United States, the ability to “move on” after a death is usually seen as a sign of inner strength and generally commended. A widow who starts dating is often called a survivor. In Middle Eastern culture, however, a widow who starts openly dating is looked upon with suspicion and disdain. A widow who mourns her husband for the rest of her life is viewed as devoted. Of course no one expects a widower to stay single his whole life, but that’s a whole other book.
An American friend of mine lost her father a month before her wedding. She told me that even though she considered canceling the wedding, her family urged her to go on, knowing that her father would have wanted it that way. In Iranian culture, that family would have been saying sayonara to their wedding deposits. The couple might go off and get married quietly, but there would certainly be no reception, music, or dancing. It would be unimaginable to have any celebration so close to the death of a parent.
When Mahmood told me about the intended “celebration of life” for his father, I realized how much my family had quietly changed by living in America. Unlike playing dodgeball, this was one part of American culture that I could wholeheartedly embrace.
To complicate matters, my cousin Mahmood asked me to speak at the “celebration.” I was not sure how honest my culture would allow me to be at such a traditional ceremony. To stay true to my uncle’s memory, I would have to share some of the stories about him that always made me laugh, but that just seemed too American for my family.
When I think of my uncle Abdullah, I think of a man whom I loved deeply. He was the first person I ever met who loved words and the only person in my family who had shelves and shelves of books. His attention to detail was legendary, as was his talent for giving really long answers to just about any question. This aspect of his personality was even evident in his verbose answering machine message in America: my uncle’s voice, enunciating every syllable, giving long, detailed instructions, in Persian, exactly how to respond to the “beep,” a word that he pronounced with a distinct Persian accent.
From the time I was a little girl in Abadan to the time I had my own children, Uncle Abdullah was always happy to see me, as I was to see him. And he always said that I was the one person he knew who had never changed. I thought the same thing about him. I always laughed at his jokes, even though they were usually at the expense of my father. My father laughed, too.
But I also remember my uncle as someone with a severe case of directional dyslexia. I think of a man who set out one day to drive one hour north to Los Angeles and instead drove two hours south to Mex
ico. This unexpected visit to our neighbor to the south happened while my cousin Fakhri, Uncle Abdullah’s hapless passenger, repeatedly said, “Uncle Abdullah, this doesn’t look right.” Not until they reached the Bienvenidos a Mexico! sign did my uncle acknowledge his mistake, at which point, he calmly turned around and drove the other way.
In Iranian culture, this is not the type of story one shares at a memorial service.
The service was held in the conference room of a local hotel. Enormous floral arrangements filled the room. The event started with my cousin Mahmood recounting his father’s personal and professional achievements. This is what we all expected. Six hundred people dressed in black listened quietly as my cousin recounted the life of his father from his humble beginnings in the south of Iran to his life in California. Some sobbed quietly. Then my cousin told the audience that his father, at age seventy, had decided to learn to play the flute. I assumed this story would highlight my uncle’s endless love of learning. Instead, my cousin told us that although his father lacked musical talent, he kept practicing. He practiced so much and so badly that the condominium association asked him to stop.
And that is when I heard something that I never thought I would hear at an Iranian memorial service: laughter, albeit tentative laughter.
My uncle’s grandson, Peter, né Farbod, got up to speak next. He and his American wife, Julie, née Julie, had put together a slide show of my uncle’s life, set to Beatles music: the stern wedding portrait showing him and my aunt far too young to be getting married; still baby-faced but now holding their own babies; images of trips to the Caspian Sea with their sons, all knobby knees and spindly arms; Mahmood on a wobbly tricycle; weddings with smiling daughters-in-law, the same ones who had held Uncle Abdullah’s hand for the past six months; grandchildren of all ages, each one of them knowing what it’s like to be loved; snapshots of everyone in Hawaii wearing leis, wrinkle-free faces not fully appreciated at the time; college graduations of those long-ago babies; more wrinkled faces; my aunt and uncle all dressed up in front of the Stardust in Las Vegas with smiles that said, “It’s a long way from Abadan!” my uncle wearing seventies sunglasses, long sideburns, and more wrinkles; and finally the photos taken during the last year, his body looking frail and tired, knowing the end is near but still smiling, testimony that where we begin does not determine where we end. Ninety years of my uncle’s life in fifteen minutes. Tears flowed as Paul McCartney’s voice filled the room.
