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Perched Above Trouble

During the summer of 1998, my mother and father, along with me and my two younger brothers moved back to West side of Tehran into a modest, two-bedroom apartment, the usual housing for a middle-class family such as ours. Tehran, the largest city of Iran, the city of my birth in 1981, hosted a population of almost 15 million people. At the age of 10, I did not mind when our family moved to the northern part of Iran, close to Caspian Sea.

Three things from my childhood, growing up in Iran clearly stand out in my mind:

Eating that juicy red apple at the top of one of the tallest trees in the heart of Iran

the death of my grandfather, and

when Iran's soccer team advanced to the World Cup in 1988

In the back of our apartment in Tehran, our family grew a small garden. Of all the things we grew, I love the few apple trees the most. Every day during apple season, I climbed up one of our apple trees, picked one giant, juicy delicious apple from its hold on the branch and wiped it clean with the inside of my semi-clean shirt. As I sat amidst the tree branches between heaven and the ground, I slowly savored each and every morsel.

Now as then, my favorite fruit is an apple. Today, when I crunch into a red, juicy delicious apple, bittersweet memories of my times, perched high in our apple tree as a child come to mind. From eating the apples, I gained a sense of joy, not only from their taste and smell, but also from the sound of my teeth crunching off a bite…from the freedom I felt as I perched above the trouble in Tehran that loomed below.

For a while after those days, following my childhood moments of freedom perched in my family's apple trees, my memories were not so sweet. In fact, so many other experiences I lived during my childhood tried to bury the sense of freedom I treasured in m memory. Instead of feelings of freedom, those times in my childhood frightened me. I lived some of those most frightening times during the midst of the Iran-Iraq war.

I remember waking up shaking, hiding myself farther and farther under my flimsy, flannel gray cover. The scream of the airplanes bombing Tehran night after night dug a horrible pit inside my mind. Many days and nights, the attacks by the enemy's planes caused not only our family, but the entire neighborhood to lose electrical power for hours at a time.

Just as it dug the deep, dark pit inside me, the Iran-Iraq war cast a dark shadow of fear in our Tehran and the surrounding cities. Sometimes, I still ate apples from our family's garden. During the time of the war, food was not so plentiful. In fact, in many areas food was scarce. Many children and adults frequently went to bed at night with their stomachs' empty. Due to the war-induced shortage of food, along with the gnawing hunger too many Iranians felt, we had high levels of malnutrition in our country. Some days, I still ate apples from the trees in our backyard. The taste of the apples during this time, even though I knew it made my mother and father feel good that they could provide me and my brothers a nutritious snack, was not the same as before.

Later, after the war, the Iranian government, along with 159 other countries, participated in an international conference on nutrition. During that time, Iran formally committed to preparing and presenting an executive nutrition plan by the end of 1994. The plan, according to reports, would, in time improve the dire food and nutrition situation. In time, according to the Iranian government's plan would help annihilate the hunger that made the too empty stomachs of too many of our country's citizens growl. The plan would decrease nutrition, raise the supply and security of nutritious food for households. Instead of bombs disrupting electrical service, maiming and killing children and adults who huddled in darkness, not knowing what to expect, according to the plan, things would, in time, improve (Jazayeri, p.1).

Some things, did in fact, seem to go "according to the plan." When the war ended in 1988, life regained a semblance of normalcy. Some night, however, even though the bombing planes were gone, one would invade my dreams and I would wake up shaking, hiding my head beneath my gray flannel cover.

Two years after the war ended, something I did not plan for happened that left another hole in my heart, when for first time I felt the pain of losing a loved one. My grandfather died. Muslims adhere to specific plans regarding their burial sites. Adherents of different faiths are buried in separate places, while non-Muslims are not buried alongside those of other faiths. My family, though not active in the Muslim religion, participated in the religious reituals following the death of a family member ("Rituals of Death…," p.1).

When my grandfather died, the gravediggers dug him a separate grave for him to be buried separately. The practice of burying one person per grave has changed for some families since that time, however, as recently in Iran, due to increase in the costs of grave lots, to reduce costs, often members of the same family are buried on top of one another. During the burial ceremony, the person's body is taken out of the coffin and placed on the ground. It is then lifted up three times and put back down again. From my grandfather's burial, I remember the following, ongoing traditions observed during the he religious burial:

[the person's body is] placed in the grave. A gravedigger or a member of the family normally is stationed in the pit to position the dead properly according to religious prescriptions. The deceased is placed on his right side facing Mecca. Under his head will be placed a brick and a raw mosaic (khesht e kham). The face will be exposed and part of the kafan covering the face will be placed under head over the brick. Till recently brick walls on each side supported the grave and once the dead was placed in the grave a brick cover would be added on top of the sidewalls to completely cover the dead. Then everything would be covered with soil.

From my grandfather's burial, I remember that the time seemed never ending. I remember wondering about death. I wondered why all the ceremony when my grandfather did not even seem to know or care about what was going on. Today, although the expenses of some of the religious activities prohibit many people from observing former traditions, those who can afford them, continue to adhere to the ceremonies begun centuries ago in our country's past.