Laughing Without an Accent Read online

  This made Tavoos genuinely happy. She disappeared into the kitchen while I went into an adjoining room to play with my new toys. But for the first time in my life I was not all that interested in my new toys. Being in this gigantic house with a toothless woman who wanted to make me French fries was more exciting than anything, even the revolutionary concept of two new toys on the same day.

  Soon I heard sizzling noises as a heavenly smell wafted through the house. The stronger the smell, the more insignificant the stroller and doll became. By the time Tavoos walked in with a plate stacked high with French fries, I was ready to abandon my toys by the side of a road.

  Tavoos placed the plate in front of me, then proceeded to sprinkle salt on the mountain of potatoes. The salt clung to the steamy stack. I could barely contain myself, but the potatoes were too hot. This was like child torture.

  (I confess. I did manipulate my grandfather into buying me the life-size inflatable elf.)

  The potatoes were still hot. Tavoos picked up one of the pieces of fried perfection and started blowing on it. Then she handed it to me. At my house, when someone cooled down a food, they ate it themselves. I had stumbled upon a full-service paradise.

  I started to eat the French fries, which were not too greasy, perfectly crisp, and just salty enough. I must have been eating them with zeal, because as Tavoos sat staring at me with her toothless smile, she said, “Firoozeh joon, you must really like French fries.” I wasn’t sure why she was stating the obvious, so I nodded and kept eating.

  I ate them all. Tavoos smiled even more broadly and asked me if I wanted more.

  I had entered an alternate universe. Never had anyone offered to make French fries just for me, and now this woman was asking me the inconceivable.

  “Yes, please,” I said, hoping the second batch wouldn’t take as long.

  Tavoos adjusted her chador and went into the kitchen. Soon the sizzling noises began again and smells filled the house. I glanced at the stroller and doll, which looked even less interesting than before. Compared with a plate of French fries, the only way the doll would have had a chance with me would have been if she had started talking, or making French fries.

  After what seemed like an eternity, Tavoos walked in with a plate stacked high with freshly fried potatoes and sat across from me. She salted them, took a fry, and started blowing on it. This time, I knew it was for me. It’s amazing how quickly one adjusts to fine service.

  As I finished the second plate, Tavoos beamed and asked me if I wanted more. I didn’t know the phrase carpe diem back then, but I lived by it. And to me, seizing the day meant eating more French fries.

  Somehow, the smells weren’t as enticing the third time. When Tavoos brought the plate of fries, I waited for them to cool and started eating considerably more slowly than the other two times. Tavoos continued to smile.

  Halfway through the plate, I just couldn’t finish the stack. “What’s the matter?” Tavoos asked. “I feel sick,” I told her. She led me to an empty bedroom where I lay down, moaning and groaning. “Maybe you ate too many French fries,” she said.

  “I don’t think so,” I replied.

  I lay down for the rest of the afternoon. Tavoos repeatedly offered to make me various concoctions to make my stomach feel better.

  “Tea with nabat, crystallized sugar?” she suggested.

  “No thank you” I replied.

  “Sharbat-e ablimu ba naana?” Fresh lime-aid with mint?”

  “No, thank you.”

  “Sharbat-e albalu? Sour cherry syrup?”

  “No, thank you.”

  “Dugh? Carbonated yogurt drink?”

  “No, thank you.”

  “Seven-Up?”

  “No, thank you.”

  Tavoos sat next to me telling me stories and stroking my hair. I couldn’t listen to a word she was saying. My stomach felt as if I had swallowed the doll’s stroller.

  A few hours later, Farah returned home and was shocked to find me lying down. “Chi shodeh? What happened?” she asked.

  “Firoozeh joon ate three plates of French fries,” Tavoos said, making me sound like some kind of glutton.

  “Why did you let her eat so much?” Farah asked, clearly not grasping the gravitational pull of fried potatoes on this particular six-year-old.

  “She wanted them,” Tavoos replied, underestimating my total lack of common sense in selecting healthy portion sizes. It is the same glitch that compels otherwise sane Americans to proudly declare, “Supersize it.”

  Farah gathered up my new toys while Tavoos kissed me and told me how much she’d enjoyed spending the day with me. She hugged me tightly and told me repeatedly to make sure I visit her again, probably making a mental note to lock the pantry.

  On the drive home, Farah apologized for not having had more time to play with me. She told me that her final exams tomorrow were very important, and maybe we could play together another time.

  We arrived to a houseful of sad adults, all trying to conceal their sorrow from me. I showed everyone my stroller and doll, but left out the part about Khaleh Tavoos and the never-ending perfect French fries. It didn’t seem right to share that with this crowd. They needed to be sad. I knew that much.

  Maid in Iran:

  A Story in Three Parts

  PART ONE: ALI SITTING IN A TREE

  During the years my family lived in Abadan, like most middle-class Iranian families, we had full-time help. In Iran, servants were usually villagers who spent a few years living and working with families in the cities. They sometimes returned to their villages with their savings and raised their children surrounded by their extended families. Other times, servants stayed for life and became a part of the family.

  When my parents were married, the first two maids left after a few months, claiming the house was too boring. The real problem was that my parents were not very good with servants. My mother, having been brought up in a military home, had little experience with servants. During her childhood, the military supplied help for her house in the form of low-ranking personnel. But those servants knew what was expected of them; nobody needed to manage them.

  Since my father was at work most of the day, my mother was left to the task of dealing with the help. Having married at age seventeen, she had little life experience. She relied mainly on the subtle hint approach. This entailed such methods as leaving a heap of dirty dishes in the kitchen and hoping really hard that the maid would wash them. This method did not work.

  After the first two servants left, my parents hired a couple, Ali and Zahra, from the city of Arak in west central Iran. In the Persian culture, we often say that most things in life take three tries, and it was certainly true in this case. Zahra turned out to be a take-charge kind of person—reliable, competent, and smart. Her husband, Ali, was her counterpoint. Having married a strong and capable woman, he allowed himself the luxury of being neither. Ali’s only apparent talent was climbing trees, a skill that he practiced regularly. Whenever we couldn’t find him, which was often, we’d look up, and there he was, resting on a branch. It soon became evident to my parents that having Ali was the price they had to pay for having Zahra.

  When my mother became pregnant with my brother Farshid, she relied on Zahra even more. My mother always said that it was a cruel twist of fate that Zahra had been born poor, since she was a true lady and deserved much more in life than being a maid. My parents regarded Zahra as family, always inviting her and, by extension, Ali to eat at the dining room table with us. Zahra always accepted. Ali always declined.

  My parents lived a comfortable middle-class life but were never wealthy. The few valuables they once owned, namely silver from my mother’s family, they sold during the early years of their marriage, when money was scarce. The one and only valuable object they possessed was my father’s 1953 yearbook from Texas A&M. We treated this item like a biblical relic, showing it to guests while my father recounted, in excruciating detail, how he won a Fulbright scholarship even though
he was poor, how well he had been treated in America, how he had met Albert Einstein, how many colors of Jell-O there were in the cafeteria, and how, in America, people put ice in tea. The latter always caused incredulous outbursts. “Ice in tea?! Not possible,” our guests always said, shaking their heads in disbelief.

  Even though everyone had heard my father’s Fulbright story many, many times, no one ever tired of it. Each recounting was delivered with the same near-religious fervor. Had my father been a salesman making a pitch, he would have sold out of whatever he was selling. At certain parts in the tale, my father’s eyes would well up with tears. This was the time my mother would offer another round of tea to the guests, who usually did not appreciate the interruption. They, too, were swept away by my father’s story.

  At the end of the tale, my father would then show everyone the yearbook, which served as proof that at least the major part of his story was true. Unfortunately, there were no pictures of ice tea in his yearbook.

  One day, my father discovered that his yearbook was missing. He knew it could not have been stolen, since it held no value for others. He assumed it would show up somewhere. Catholics pray to St. Anthony for lost objects. We don’t have the equivalent in Islam, so my father just waited.

  A few months later, Ali and Zahra invited my parents to their room for tea and sweets to celebrate the Iranian New Year. Ali and Zahra’s room was separate from our house, in the back of the garden. My parents never went there.

  Gifts in hand, my parents walked in, ready to deliver the compliments that are second nature to us Middle Easterners. But before any niceties could spill from their mouths, though, they were rendered speechless. Staring at them, from all the four walls of Ali and Zahra’s room, were the women of Texas A&M. Individual head shots, club poses, photos of librarians—they were all there, each carefully cut out and taped to the wall. Granted, my father’s yearbook was no Playboy magazine. These were pictures of studious, smart women, trailblazers paving the way for equality. But they were from Amrika and therefore exotic. Little did these students, teachers, and librarians from 1953 know that somewhere on the other side of the world, in a room in the back of a house in Abadan, they were now wallpaper.

  My father knew there was not much to be done at this point. He couldn’t fire Ali since Zahra was the first helpful servant we had ever had. He decided, instead, to find Ali a job elsewhere.

  One of my father’s former students was the manager of the local clubhouse. The entire Middle East operates on the premise of who you know, so my father decided to pay his former student a visit, drink some tea, and remind him how he would have flunked his course had it not been for my father’s tutoring services. My father figured that the clubhouse, with its theater, pool, and restaurant, could certainly use a person with Ali’s tree-climbing skills.

  Once my father walked into his former student’s office, he skipped the tea and simply said, “I have a useless servant. Certainly your clubhouse needs someone.” Not along after, Ali was hired as a sort of Man Friday.

  It just so happened that this clubhouse manager had a habit of going into his office during his lunch hour, closing the door, turning on his radio, putting his feet on his desk, and eating the Cadbury chocolates he hid in his top drawer.

  Ali had been employed for one month when my father received an angry phone call from his friend. It turns out he had walked into his office to find Ali sitting in his chair, feet on the desk, listening to the radio, and eating Cadbury chocolates. Ali was fired.

  There was nothing my parents could do. They were too fond of Zahra to get rid of them both. By then, Zahra had become a regular at our dinner table. She was family. My mother had even bought her a sewing machine.

  One day, my brother Farid, who was a toddler, wandered into Ali and Zahra’s room and waddled back to the house holding a letter. Most people would simply have returned the unread letter to its owner and explained the situation, but Kazem and Nazireh are not most people. They read the letter, which was from Ali and Zahra’s relatives in Arak.

  Dear Ali and Zahra,

  You have so much money now. Come home and live the good life! Make sure to take the sewing machine.

  My parents were in a pickle.

  The next day, my parents told Zahra, “The sewing machine is a gift to you. You can keep it forever.” My parents were hoping that their oblique approach would lead to a conversation. It didn’t.

  Ali and Zahra continued receiving letters from their relatives. My parents were anxious to find out the contents of the letters. They encouraged Farid to wander in the yard, always pointing him toward Ali and Zahra’s room. Unfortunately my brother’s usefulness as a spy was a onetime affair.

  Eventually, Ali and Zahra told my parents that they had decided to return to Arak. My parents pleaded with them to stay, but Ali was convinced that with their savings, they would buy a house and live comfortably for the rest of their lives. My father tried to explain to him that it would be much harder to find a well-paying job in Arak and that their savings would not buy them as much as they thought. But it was useless. Much to my parents’ regret, Ali and Zahrah left, taking with them the sewing machine and the Women of Texas A&M wallpaper.

  PART II: REZA AND SAKINEH SITTING IN A TREE

  Once again, my parents went in search of a servant. This time, they hired a young woman, Sakineh, who had been introduced to them through a friend in Tehran. Unbeknownst to my parents, Sakineh was pregnant.

  Shortly after Sakineh moved in with us, my aunt Sedigeh needed to go to England for six months for medical treatment. She asked that we please employ her servant Reza during her absence, but told my parents repeatedly, however, “Don’t ruin him. I’ve had him for only a few months.”

  My aunt Sedigeh, who herself is highly disciplined, was quite adept at teaching her workers actually to work. She viewed servants as blank slates with endless possibilities. She spent hours teaching them the proper ways of cleaning and taking care of the garden and fixing things around the house. For the ones who showed more talent, she found teachers to instruct them on how to fix plumbing and bicycles and radios and anything else that might need repairing. She even taught them manners, especially how to greet people and the proper way to answer the phone. She was Abadan’s own Pygmalion.

  As soon as my aunt Sedigeh left for England, my parents asked Reza to come to our house to help with our vegetable garden. Reza quickly summed up my parents and realized that he was no longer at Sedigeh Academy. He spent hours in the garden with no visible proof of accomplishing anything. Every hour, he came in the house for a cup of tea, and every afternoon, when everyone else napped, he somehow disappeared. My parents didn’t like the fact that he wasn’t doing much, but as poster children for meek people everywhere, they decided to let my aunt deal with it when she returned.

  Between avoiding weeding the vegetable garden and neglecting to clean the chicken cages, Reza fell in love with Sakineh. My parents didn’t figure this out themselves; the information came courtesy of a neighbor. Apparently every evening, Reza and Sakineh went to the nearby port town of Khoramshahr, rented a balam, or rowboat, and spent the evening doing what one does on a date in a rowboat. It became obvious that in lieu of weeding, Reza had been wooing.

  By the time my parents found out about the Love Boat, Reza and Sakineh’s love, like the weeds in our garden, was in full bloom. To complicate matters, my parents had also noticed that Sakineh was pregnant, and it was obvious by how far along she was that Reza was not the only man who had rowed her boat.

  My aunt Sedigeh was scheduled to return from England shortly, and my parents were beside themselves. Aunt Sedigeh was my father’s beloved older sister, who had raised him after the death of their mother. He never wanted to upset her. For my mother, Aunt Sedigeh was the closest thing she had to a mother-in-law. No need to say more.

  In the weeks prior to my aunt’s return, my parents argued incessantly. My father blamed my mother for not keeping a watchful eye on the servants
, while my mother blamed my father for the same thing.

  When my aunt returned, my parents went to her house to welcome her back home, and my aunt asked how Reza had been. In the Persian culture, questions are rarely answered directly, so my parents hemmed and hawed and drank some tea, and then my father explained that Reza had been fine. In fact, he had been so fine that Sakineh had noticed his fineness.

  “You obviously didn’t give him enough work,” my aunt assessed.

  “Maybe,” my father continued, drinking more tea. “But now with the baby due any day, he will have much more work.”

  It’s not clear where the conversation went after that. There are several versions.

  The following week, my aunt, angry and practical at the same time, purchased a ring for Reza to give to Sakineh, and the two of them wed in my aunt’s garden in a five-minute ceremony. Once they were married, Sakineh moved into my aunt’s house and prepared to give birth.

  Reza’s family refused to come to the wedding once they found out that his fiancée was pregnant with another man’s child. They were certain that the eligible Reza had been hoodwinked by the she-devil herself. Sakineh’s family was not told about the wedding until afterward, since they would not have looked kindly upon their daughter’s baklava in the oven.

  My aunt kept telling us that she would have never believed that in a mere six months we could have so thoroughly ruined her servant. “Maybe I should have been more specific: ‘Make sure he does not fall in love with your already pregnant maid.’”

  “Next time,” my father promised, “this will not happen.”

  PART III: DING DING

  My parents’ search for servant number four brought us an entire family: Pooran, her husband Ahmad, their three daughters, Pooran, Pari, and Parvaneh, and their infant son, Parviz. Ahmad called himself Kal Ahmad, using the prefix earned by men after visiting Karbala, the holy city in Iraq where Imam Hussein was killed in the year 680. His wife, Pooran, was called Naneh Pooran; naneh is a term of endearment meaning nanny or housekeeper.