In 'The River of Wine'

Bring me a cup of wine that is dark red and smells like musk.
Don’t bring me that expensive brand that tastes like money
and smells like lust.

  

Rookie writers like me fumble around wondering how to even begin describing a large love. So many times in the past I have jumped in the ocean attempting to catch something big and magnificent and come back to the surface gasping for breath and with nothing but flotsam to show for my efforts.
I hope Dear reader you understand that this writing is like a small raft a lot like my fate and I am attempting here to cross the vast ocean of something as inky and wrenching as love that I was given for a country.

The day I finally landed in Iran I had already burned for many years just imagining how it would feel to be in that land. I had watched every film, read every memoir ever written. I can never clearly explain what caused me to fall in love with it. Watching Majidis films and reading memoirs of women writers of Iran are just a few things that fanned that fire. The seed for this great longing however is a mystery and I shall never know when or where did it get planted. Not much help to dig too deep either for we don’t understand the language of that world. The only thing I am sure about it wasn’t the urge to go on a holiday. Iran wasn’t an experience or a bucket list item on my capitalistic TO DO LIST.

Therefore when friends started suggesting that I must visit it I was taken aback initially. I mulled on it for years. Sat over the plan. Postponed it at every given excuse. It took me many years to grow a liver big enough that could actually digest a real visit to Iran.

In the Hostel that I stayed in Tehran that became like a home every evening the kindly Manager Ahmed would flower the wildly flowering roses morning and afternoon while my Australian backpacker friend Karen would quiz him every evening about why were these roses surviving in such heat.Roses are not meant for weather like this!  Ahmed who heard Karen exclaim every evening pretended that his lack of English was the reason he couldn’t answer this existential question. Why were there roses blooming in the raging heat? It didn’t bother me but I have to admit it was a valid question. And the roses were everywhere in the country. In the Palaces, in the ancient markets on the pavements next to the road. Near the metro station. There must have been some diverse scientific logic to them but I couldn’t be bothered. I just loved them. They fitted right in with my coffee table fantasies of Persian fairytales.. But these real roses were driving my Australian backpacker friend crazy. “How can there be roses here. She demanded to know with a benign arrogance. This is not the right weather for them. Do you know why are they flowering here?” Karen's question still echoes in my head.

Sipping the free cups of tea on the hostel Verandah was a motley mix of backpackers. Malaysians, Australians, , French, Japanese and Morrocan and English and even a few solo travelers thrown in from Croatia and Singapore. It didn’t seem half as cut off from the rest of the world as I had imagined ..that was a bit disappointing but it was also comforting to have English speaking company in the initial part of my journey. 

In the evenings as I fumbled with my Indian watch wondering how much longer the day would be, the distant Alborz mountains would twinkle. In the middle of that din of travelers was a strange comfort and pride I felt as an Indian; to have finally found myself in a space free of any Islamophobes. It was half a victory for sailing over my own fears and another half for following my dreams.

What are the uses of loving a distant land?

I am off to a long work schedule leaving the warm comfort of home and my desk. I will be in Goa and Bombay for a long time till the seasons change. It is nice pink of winter here in Delhi as I leave.

This project is what I wanted to materialise for a long time and yet right now I feel rather sullen to leave Delhi at such short notice. Its the kind of disorientation anyone would feel I suppose if they had just woken from a languorous sleep were pushed to run in the cold.(At least thats how it feel right now)All the friends I could have stayed with(making the unfamiliar Bombay a little more familiar) are traveling. So what do I do?

I download all my favorite Iranian Music onto my phone

Iranian Jazz Night / Conservatorio di Milano - Documentary

This is a documentary on the jazz band that I adore. I am in love with their vocalist Golnar Sharyar. You have to see her singing in the video to see how much energy charm and warmth any woman can pack in her presence.

Fayez Khani • Jazz & Music From South Of Iran
This is spaced out track with sufi/jazz/iranian influence. It takes me to a place of peace and into the time when I would be sitting in Iran on a quite day and having a moment right there.

I fill my bag with the recent books on Iran that have arrived as part of my book gifting challenge. I struggle with how many books I can pack. I feel I would want to read both Shirin Ebadi's -Iran Awakening( I am afraid it will finish beofore my trip)

and David Ardalan's -My name is Iran- too- Just to be on the safe side.

I dont know how the sounds and smells of a farway land bring me comfort but they do. So I hoard Iran in all ways possible. Even when I have a small bag to stuff.

PS-Going to all the Parsi cafe's in Bombay is in my list too!

Things I cannot keep silent about

For the past few years I have turned to Iranian memoirs for comfort, meaning and inspiration. These are some of the most relevant pieces of writing for me. The times I have spent reading them have been the most illuminating times I have ever experienced reading. Here are a few that I absolutely recommend because they connected a chord in me and made me whole in a way that I wasn't before reading them.

Things I have been silent about- Azar Nafisi

Azhar Nafisi as a young girl with her mother

This one is the real and precious book that comes across once in a lifetime. Even though this book came after the much celebrated 'Reading Lolita in Tehran' I believe this is by far the best book Nafisi has written. Its also the best memoir I've ever read. Azar Nafisi takes one through the journey of growing older and discovering the deceptions of one's parents and also the helplessness of watching them loose to life and circumstances.

Its a big hearted work. I dont think any writer of weaker mettle could have done this. The book also captures small details and vignettes of life lost in Iran. The tea parties of her mother..the bedroom where her children slept even as the revolution raged on. Her first marriage and the hopelessly beautiful photos and the life of her parents together and apart.
I have memories of reading this book on train journeys and feeling I have surpassed time and entered into Nafisi's Iran. This book is not nostalgic or sentimental but it leaves you with a searing pain of all that life swallows up leaving us broken hearted and mettlesome.

Funny in Farsi- Firoozeh Dumas
Firoozeh Dumas writes with such warmth, humour and clarity about her childhood that she reminds me of Roald Dahl. Except Dahl wasn't a woman or an immigrant or an Iranian. This is a woman with her foot in America and her memory and roots deep in Iran and her iranian family. One of my most favorite part of the book is when her dad comes to stay at her house and installs unwanted fixtures in her bathroom despite her husband and her asking him not too. Or when an uncle who couldnt get married in Iran comes and stays with them indefinitely grows fat eating the American junk food.

Jasmine and Stars- reading more than Lolita in Tehran- Fatemeh Keshavarz
This book starts with a scene from childhood of Fatemeh Keshavarz and takes one into small alleys of Shiraz and with the mystics and fakirs and how living in Iran was as much about living with these magical everyday occurrences as much as disruptions of revolutions. Kesharvarz who is a Persian language and Rumi scholar brings into focus the often missed magic of persian feminism. She digs at Azar Nafisi for her portrayal of women and men in 'Reading Lolita in Tehran.
I will forever remember this book for introducing me to old women writers of Iran like Sharnaz Parsipour. Of revealing the grace and strength of these women who had a voice of their own even when Western Feminism or English language wasnt their saviour!

City of Lies- Ramita Navai
This is Iranian Christiane Amanpour reporting to American audience from Tehran Underground. Her stories are crisp though and the work has merits. She takes a few characters on the edge with the political powers of Iran and gives them the worst trajectories they could have had in their skirmishes with the law.
The characters themselves are very interesting. Iranian Porn Actresses, Drug Dealers, Rich bored housewives, Socialists and Revolutionaries and even a religious dumped wife who divorces her husband eventually.
Worth a read if you like Noir memoir

Dreaming of Iran

A still from Majid Majidis 'A color of Paradise'

Friends, lovers, strangers have often chuckled at my obsession with Iran. It pops out of me quite shamelessly even when I don't intent it to. Its the place I read about, its the country I love, its on all my bucket lists, if there was a way of gene pool transfer I would turn myself into an Iranian for sure.
I have been asked Why Iran by amused people a million times! I don't suppose there can ever be an explanation to obsessions. Except that they seem to point towards where there is maximum juice for anyone. Isnt it? Think about what you think about the whole day and you will know how it fills your life with meaning.

I discovered Iran in Old Studio in AJKMCRC during my Film appreciation lectures. The landscape the stories were divine but it was the emotions that those films played with that brought the affinity that has lasted me now some ten years.

I still remember that scene from Majid Majidis 'A color of paradise' where the ageing old father abandons his blind son to die in the river and then goes back like a mad man feeling pangs of guilt and fatherly love. In that film there was a grey that all these years no other cinema has been able to match and yet this comes from a country which ninety percent of the world sees in black and white. Besides this was just one film. I dont think I have yet seen an iranian film I havent loved.

The next big wave of love came after reading the extraordinary expat memoirs of women from Iran. Things I have been silent about by Azar Nafisi opened a vein that is still bleeding in me even as the list of all that I eat up in books grows fatter everyday. (Will put together a list for all of you who want to read this)

A screenshot from 'The Things I have been Silent about by Azar Nafisi

After reading a bit about the Political history of the country I grew deeper in love with this rogue country that put the USA in its place good and proper- in culture and in foreign policy. The wars, the revolutions and the one hundred mutinies.

I still dont know if that is all. This is of course what I know above the surface. Who knows what lies at the root of this obsession/love/longing/belonging.