Or, WHY YOU SHOULDN’T MAKE FRIENDS WITH THE PARENTS OF YOUR CHILDREN”S FRIENDS

Even when an adult friendship is well-established beforehand, it tends to dissolve after the two adults have children, if they are of the same age. Or if not actually dissolve, re-negotiate the boundaries, as the academia jargon calls it. Because, as any parent knows, but cannot say outright, there is nothing more pernicious, dangerous, loathsome, and generally more evil in this world than Your Children’s Friends. And since you have to blame every unpleasant action of your children on those friends, it is a good idea not to become friendly with their parents, even if you see them constantly. Because you are sworn enemies.

The Friends are in fact nothing other than a gang of evil aliens in the guise of ordinary kids put in your child’s school / daycare with the express purpose of corrupting your darling innocent baby. I heard my mother express – no, howl and scream this sentiment ten thousand times as I and my siblings were growing up, now I am feeling it with my own flesh and blood. And the awful thing is, you actually have to pretend to like The Friends.

The Friends have taught the princess about playing games on the internet, about boys kissing girls and vice-versa, and other icky-yucky stuff. They have taught her say “none of your beeswax” when she wants the phone to call one of Them, and you ask why. Basically, they have taught her to challenge parents constantly. And I am pretty sure that The Friends have taught the golden boy his impressive vocabulary of Farsi swear words, even though there are no Iranian kids in his daycare. I mean, everyone knows that swear words are universal, so there is no reason why little Tom or Jack from the daycare should not know that mothers drinking coffee is in fact a terrible swear word in Farsi. Otherwise, why would the golden boy talk about mothers and coffee ten times a day, every day? (and in case you’re wondering, no, his father doesn’t swear in front of the children, either) 

Don’t ask me why. I didn’t even know mothers and coffee was awful well into my twenties (I’m not joking. Tell any Iranian man that his mother likes coffee and he will freak out and go bat-crazy, do you remember what the Zeinuddin Zeidan did to the Italian footballist? Something like that, only worse).

The worst thing is, the golden boy’s vocabulary has influenced mine, so I, such a language puritan, find myself talking of mothers/coffee constantly. The washing-machine isn’t working? God, his mother sure likes coffee. The laptop is hanging again. This mother-coffee-drinker is driving me crazy. And so on.

See you horrible Friends, what have you done? Your mothers are all coffee-drinkers.

So cried a devoted British wife to her beloved Iranian husband, upon hearing he intended to return to Iran to visit his family. It was a couple of years after the Iranian revolution, and lurid stories about Iran were circulating everywhere. However, my parents, close friends of this couple, found the hysterics of the lady to be particularly hilarious (no, my parents are not particuarly nice people. Interesting, but not nice), and her cry became a watchword for ill-informed Westerners who made superficial judgements about Iran based on what their media and government fed them. Shoot him in the airport indeed! Where do they think Iran is- Cambodia?

But, now, sitting on the fence myself, I feel sympathetic to the lady with the Iranian husband (who was never shot in any airport, and is now a happy grandfather.) I am going back to Iran for a family visit, just like Javad, and a sneaking part of me is afraid, well, not of being shot in airport, but of something unpleasant happening.

Take my passport. The first couple of pages bear a photo of me wearing strict Islamic hijab. then, several pages further on, you come across another photo of me, nestling in a Schengen visa, my hair frizzing about my shoulders in their wild natural state. No Hijab. Sorry, I forgot. Is that bad? Will airport officers notice? Will they make a fuss?

Take this blog. I have actually heard that one guy, who was the friend of somebody who was the brother of somebody, was arrested in the airport because of his blog. He was jailed and sentenced to execution. No- not that guy. Someone else, someone ordinary, not notorious or well-read or highly political or anything. Just an ordinary guy, with a blog reflecting his personal thoughts and stuff. A lot, probably, like mine.

 It’s paranoia, I know. I mean, how many Iranian travellors are there? How is it possible to keep tabs on them all? Why is it even necessary? When you have everything, why would a not-important blog or picture be threatening?

So we will go, we will have a wonderful time, we will bask in love and delight in the company of our most cherished people. And nothing bad will happen.

My creativity these days is severely impaired by the flu season. Any energy I have devoted to making different sick-foods. So here goes:

The secret to making good soup is stock. And the secret to making stock is to just make it.

This is our household soup-making routine these days

Day 1: In the morning, prepare stock. Stock is ready by evening.

Day 2: prepare soup with stock made yesterday and eat.

I make stock in small quantities as I don’t have the utensils or huge pots for large amounts. For stock, I put any chicken parts, plus any available vegetables (including tons and tons of garlic) in a pan, and cover with water. Bring to boil and let simmer for hours and hours and hours. From morning to night. At night, I strain the mixture, pressing some of the pulped solids through the sieve in to the stock, and refrigerate. In the morning, I have beautiful bowl of jelly-like stock,  ready for use.

Here are two recipes for the soups I made this week:

1-split pea and vegetable soup: This is a nice thick yellowy soup.

Wash split peas, cover with water, bring to boil and let simmer. Add a nice bowlful of stock. Chop and add available vegetables; but not too much or not too many different varieties. I had potato and celery, annd just one small carrot.  Don’t let cook for too long. at the very end, add some snipped parsely.

2-Mushroom and rice soup: This is a filling creamy soup.

Wash and chop mushrooms, melt butter, add mushrooms to butter. I also  added some celery, simply because I have some sitting in the fridge. After a while, add some flour. Keep stirring. Slowly add some milk, until you have a thick creamy paste swirling around the vegetables. Add a bowful of stock. Add a handful of washed rice. Bring to boil, and let simmer. Finally, add some snipped parsely. You can have this with grated cheese for a more savoury kick.

In any case, making soups isn’t particularly easy (think, preparing and chopping all those vegetables), the kids make a helluva fuss eating it, and nor has it succeeded in banishing the flu from the house. We are drowning in soup and flu. Nevertheless, I continue making a pot of soup every other day, following time-honoured tradition. There is something morally decadent about not having soup when  you’re sick.

However, tonight, I am hoping to have a chicken and mango pizza from the local delicatessen. Death to soup.

If I may say so, I think zereshk-polo-ba-morgh (chicken, rice and cranberry-like berries) is pretty much overrated. Yes, I know it is the standard fare of weddings and restaurants, and I know Iranians eat it while moaning with pleasure, if not actually bursting into tears of delight, but the greasy chicken in the orangey-red sauce, and the saffroned rice with the little shrivelled red zereshks  never did it for me.

My favourite chicken-and-rice dish is tah-chin, which can be more or less translated as `layered at the end` or something like that.  Here is how I make it, which can vary significantly from how other families do it:

Cook chicken (can also be made with pieces of meat, but I don’t like that so much) with onions, turmeric etc- you know the drill now. Let cool, de-bone, so you are left with a heap of white chicken meat.

Bring a pan of salted water to boil, add rice. After a short while, drain rice.

Peel and slice a potato.

Put several spoonfuls of yoghurt in a large bowl, and mix with salt and saffron until yoghurt is a deep golden-yellow colour. Do NOT add tomato paste to this mixture. Do NOT add eggs. Some people do, but we don’t know them.

Taking spoonfuls one-by-one, add about one-third of the parboiled rice to the saffron-yoghurt mixture, carefully stirring, until the rice is well-coated with the yoghurt.

Meanwhile, put some water in the bottom of a deep non-stick pan, add some salt and a good knob of butter, and put on heat until water is boiling and butter melted. Arrange the potatoe slices at the bottom of the pan. Let the potatoes fry a bit in the buttery-watery mixture in the bottom of the pan. Gently begin adding the rice-saffron-yoghurt mixture over the potatoes.

Once you have finished spooning the rice-saffron-yoghurt, smooth it, and arrange the pieces of chicken on the top of it.

Then, add the rest of the white rice, filling the pan up.

Put a tight lid, and turn the heat low. Let cook for about 15 minutes. Turn off the heat, and wait. Inside that pot is a raging inferno. Yes, I know you’re starving and the smell of melted butter and saffrony rice is driving you crazy, but believe me, you have to wait until the rice cools enough to be served without running the risk of second-degree burns.

Then, turn the pot upside-down  on a flat serving tray. If you are a grandmother, the pot of rice will fall out beautifully, like a round golden cake decorated on top with golden fried potatoes. If you are the rest of us, the white rice will crumble out, and you have to stab at the rest with a fork and scrape it out. In either case, the taste will be delicious, I promise you.

So I’m sick. I cough and my chest aches, I feel fuzzy, I have a sore throat. No, according to my doc, it’s not the you-know-what, it’s bronchitis.

And it’s great, because I get to stay at home in the afternoons and sleep.

I love the Canadian sick-leave culture. Back home, when people stayed home on sick leave, other colleagues raised their eyebrows and made snide comments. And any decision to stay at home due to sickness was accompanied by dread feelings of agonizing guilt, paranoia that something is going to wrong and they’ll blame me, and so much stress that I often ended getting up going to work by 10:00 am anyway.

Not that Iranians are workoholics -not that I know. It was just the place where fate had put me- it was one of those places with a very definite “corporate culture”, I believe the term is.

But here, oh love. Pure love. You have a sore throat? Stay at home, don’t come near. Coughing? Stand back, stand back or I’ll shoot you now. The managers and colleagues practically fall over themselves telling you to stay at home, grace a Mr. H1N1.  

And it’s nice. My bed catches the afternoon sun, the children are in school/daycare, the flat peaceful. I fall into deep warm afternoon slumbers tinged with a drug-induced haziness, I stagger awake and make myself some tea, drink several cups with chocolate and then get the kids, ready to face the evening rioting.

Honestly, I feel I am resting from a lifetime, not just this bronchitis. I often hear- how do working, studying mothers manage? When you are in the midst of it all, you don’t know how you’re managing, you just know that you are doing things one by one, as necesssary. It’s only when the machinery breaks down  that you realise how much you need these siestas.

Now, if only I could be sure none of us would die from the flu, I would be quite, quite relaxed…

Last week, flyers were peppering the city, informing us that this was the International Flamenco Music week in Halifax. One of the events of this Week was a horse, a mare, to be more precise, who would dance flamenco on the lawn in front of the public library in downtown Halifax, on Sunday October 25th, at 2:15 pm. Weather permitting.

Now, I have never been an animal person, and indeed horses are as remote from my sphere as little green elves. Despite this, I found myself looking forward to this event of the dancing mare with unusual intensity. After all, if you live in a city where they bring a mare to dance flamenco on the lawn of the public library, then it can’t all be bad. A dancing mare provides some justification for the emigration and the immigration and the chaos, don’t you think?

Nevertheless, as Sunday drew nearer, I felt that the justification would never be provided, and the mare would not not dance. The weather has been unusually bad, even for Halifax, with freezing rain and howling winds, the works. Imagine my pleasure then, when on Sunday noon, the clouds disappeared as if by magic, the sun burst out, and the temperature ran up to a miraculous seventeen degrees! As if specially prepared for the dancing mare!

So, we galloped to the public library, dressed in, would you believe it, t-shirts! Our coats bundled on the back seat! The sun warming our skin! Sorry about all the exclamation marks!

There wasn’t a huge crowd of people. If this sort of thing had been advertised in Tehran, you can imagine the kind of crowds who would have poured out, but the Haligonians were taking it calmly enough. It’s only a flamenco-dancing mare after all. Nothing to get in a tizzy about, you could hear them mumbling.  

No mare. There was a man on stilts, pulling balloons into funny shapes for children, but no dancing horse. A small dark girl wearing a flamenco-style skirt (long coloured frills) and worried eyes came out. I rushed up to her. “The horse?”

How typically Canadian. Too much rain has made the lawn slippery, and they are afraid the horse might slip and hurt herself. So, no dancing horse. There’s somebody singing flamenco in the basement of the library, though.

Well, I’m glad the horse has such careful owners, but what about me and my justification?  I needed to see that horse! Don’t they understand? I needed to see a mare dance flamenco on the lawn of the public library!

Half an hour later, I was sitting on the sand, looking at an incredibly beautiful ocean, the sun still warm on my bare arms. The princes had found a starfish. The golden boy was  digging holes. The trees were bright red, yellow and pink and orange.

Perhaps I didn’t need to see the dancing mare, after all.

It is a dull grey Saturday afternoon. We are all in fancy cafe by the Halifax Harbour, overlooking the steely grey water. We are sitting on big comfy sofas. There are thick white mugs of  cappuccino for the adults, hot chocolate for the golden boy and the princess (hers with extra whipped cream on the top) and a platter of cookies, big cookies with huge chocolate chips in fancy shapes: squares and swirls and things. Like I said, a fancy place.

The princess is picking out the chocolate chips with her nails. The golden boy is climbing on the top of the sofa and laughing. The father is mumbling something about this being the last time about coming with them in public. The rest of us are thinking yeah yeah yeah. The other patrons are sitting as far away as possible from us. I look with satisfaction at my pretty pretty children, and think how nice it is to be with them. I sip my foamy cappucino.

-Mummy, I need to go to the toilet. I need to poo.

With that short sentence, my smug self-satisfaction vanishes, leaving only a crazy desire to run shrieking through the cafe and hurl myself into the freezing waters outside. Every single time she does it. Every single time we’re out to eat, be it a humble cup of coffee at Tim Horton’s, or a majestic three-courser at The Bear, I end up spending an hour in the loo, while the princess poos. What is with this digestive system which relies on the ambience of a public eatery to work?  Why? Why can’t she poo at home? Why do all my cappuccinos, my fancy steaks and my pizzas have to be accompanied by the gentle aroma of child poo?  Is there no justice in the world? Don’t I work hard enough to enjoy a little break with my family now and then, eating something which someone else has prepared, without having to ask questions such as “are you done?” “did you use enough toilet paper?” “Did you wash your hands properly?” ?

Ok. This was it. This was totally the last time I ate with them in public.

Sometime ago, the princess remarked to me: “Mummy, why are your eyes always so anxious?”

Here are only some of the possible reasons, my dear daughter, which are concerned directly with you:

-You spend too much time with your friends.

-You don’t spend enough time with your friends, preferring to remain at home and rewatch “Narnia” a thousand times.

-”Narnia” will give you nightmares.

-You only like the wicked characters in stories and films, and so you’ll end up marrying one.

-I haven’t registered you in ballet class this term, and thus irrevocably damaged your career as the second Margot Fonteyn.

-Your friends are all recent immigrants and you don’t have any “real” Canadian friends.

-Your friends are all Canadian and you will grow up to be racist. 

-When I picked you up today, you were sitting by yourself, and so in fact you don’t have any friends.

-You don’t remember Iran.

-You are homesick for Iran.

-You don’t remember your grandparents.

-You miss your grandparents.

 -You will forget how to speak Farsi.

-You won’t learn fluent French.

-You’ll never learn to read chapter books.

-You’ll never learn to read farsi.

Will someone who understands Modern Art explain these wonderful pieces of art which grace the campus of Dalhousie University?

*And please do not tell me that the first one is titled “Sculpture of Split Woman with her Guts, Brains and Crap Spilling Out”, even though that is definitely what it looks like.

Sometime ago, I read this article about expensive make-up brands, like Lancome, and their claims that they include real precious metals and jewels in their make-up to produce the sparkly effect- real crushed diamonds, real gold etc. The article, while clutching its stomach and falling to the ground laughing at the intelligence of consumers who actually believed these claims (come on! Diamonds in a thirty dollar eye-shadow?) had taken a sample of Lancome eyeshadow and another cheap eye-shadow and set them to a lab for analysis. The result was that the Lancome eyeshadow contained such a tiny trace of a diamond complex as to be virtually negligble, and both eyeshadows relied on a very common cheap chemical compound (mica and bio-oxy-something else) to produce the sparkles. And the cheaper eye-shadow contained much more of the cheap-sparkles compound than Lancome.

Ha! Another Zionist plan for world domination lies writhing in the dust! Cheap make-up is just as good as expensive make-up, you stupid vain women with your ridiculous dreams of beauty- stop believing all the nonsense hyped at you, and don’t spend so much money on fripperies- haven’t you done enough damage already with your demonic desires to spend and shop?

So, when I recently conceived an urgent desire to lay my hands on some sparkly purple eye-shadow, mindful of the admonishments of the article, I went to the drugstore opposite my office. After an eternity looking at and comparing the different prices/colours/packaging of various cheap eyeshadows, I bought something called “L.A. Girl” in Prosperity, at $3.99.

It promised rich, intense colour and certainly the tester, in purple and gold, looked very  sparkly and pretty on my little finger.

I don’t wear make-up during the weekends (needing to answer too many questions from the children), and so I had to wait till Monday morning when I could finally apply a wash of goldy shadow up to my brows, and narrow strip of purple on my lids.

I looked at my eyes. Then, I pressed the brush harder on the shadow (causing it to crumble and fall to bits) and put some more shadow on. Then some more. Then some more.

Yes. You have guessed it. The eye-shadow had enough colour to turn my eyes into shimmery ghost-eyes. There is hardly any difference between the purple and the gold, and the overall effect is dismal- a pale moonish shine over my eyes which is definitely not flattering for a thirty-something woman who spent half the night listening to her child’s coughing.

So, Article On How Expensive Brands Are Deceiving Stupid Women, you are the stupid one. I don’t care what the lab told you. If the expensive brand eye-shadow says sparkles, then they deliver sparkles, and that is what counts. It is not because of the precious metals -we don’t really believe in those ads anyway- but the intangible, indefinable “potter’s breath”, as we say in farsi. We don’t buy those expensive eye-shadows becasue we can’t afford to buy real diamonds, and so compensate ourselves with the pictures of diamonds on the packages, as you so cleverly theorised. We buy them because they really sparkle.