Barely a day passes by when I don’t feel thankful that the golden boy, unlike the princess, chooses his utter his deepest thoughts and comments in his mother tongue.

I have already mentioned his fondness for swearing and rude words, which takes place in farsi. He as not yet been initiated into English swear words, which shows some tardiness in his daycare’s curriculum.

And these days we have an english-speaking house guest. The golden boy has noticed a stranger’s presence in the house, and he does not approve.

-”Why doesn’t your teacher go home, mummy?” he complained, at 9:00 pm last night. Fortunately in Farsi. Oh thank god for bilingualism. And come to think of it, it is a bit disturbing why he would think an English-speaking guest who stays the night is a teacher. I explained she was not my teacher, but a friend, and she was staying for a few days. 

The message didn’t get across. When he woke up on the morning, and saw “the teacher” still there, in queue for the bathroom, his vocal questioning increased. “Why is she here? Why is she here?” he cried, in a tone of increasing hysteria. Talk about possessiveness and personal space.

Although my houseguest is lacking in farsi language skills, there is no mistaking an angry four-year old who is displeased with you. Later on, after the golden boy departed for daycare, I tried to reassure her that we all love having her here, it is no trouble at all, and the kids love having a guest around. And it is true, the princess loves her, and loves any opportunity to talk about herself, her clothes, her friends etc. “But the golden boy is very good at hiding his love, I guess”, remarked my houseguest, somewhat sadly, as of course she is overwhelmed  by the golden boy’s sheer killing cuteness, and would like to make friends with him.

-”Don’t worry”, I said, “he is only shy.”

Only four more days to go.

Here is my propsal to the Canadian government: it should force all newcomer and first-generation immigrants to take a paid vacation from Canada every year to a normal popular warm tourist destination (Spain is lovely, but Cuba, Hawaii and Honduras are good options too).

You see, the problem is that immigrants do not take real vacations, like ordinary Canadians who visit Europe or Latin America for their vacations. They go home. And going home, what with seeing ten thousand family members and eating ten thousand special home dishes and shopping, is not a peaceful vacation.  In fact, most immigrants are known to count the final days they can escape the stifling, crowded noise of their native home town and flee back to their calm cool Canadian space, resting until the next time they can go home.

So, in fact immigrants become psychotic dual-polar  people, who can only think of Canada and their own country as the only places in the world, at home in both, happy in neither. They never get a chance to see other countries, to truly rest, to hear a language other than English and their own language, which is quite a refereshing experience.  In fact, the princess has already noticed that while her immigrant friends always go to Pakistan, or China, or India for the Christams holidays, her blond Canadian friends go to Cuba. Why? When can we go to Cuba, she asks?

Even though my current visit in Spain is not really a vacation, but for professional purposes, it has made me realise how necessary for the well-being and mental health of immigrants  to occasionally visit some other country for vacation. In fact, I am thinking of changing my current research project (I have talked about so many times in the last few day during our games of Research Kill(1) that I feel I have written my thesis and I just need to collect my degree when I get back) to a new subject: Ä Study On the Effect Of Vacation In a Third Warm Country On the Mental Health And Well-Being Of First-Generation Immigrants.

I am sure, given the interest the Canadian government in the health of immigrants, they will have no problem for funding this study.

(1) Research Kill is an amusing game played at academic conferences. Basically, two complete strangers who are participating the same conference make eye-contact and start talking to each other in a university setting. They start describing their specialized research interest. At some point, one of the two crashes to the floor, senseless with boredom and fatigue. The winner wipes the metaphoric blood from his or her lips, and moves on to the next round. If the two players are both ladies, the game is more vicious, but ends more quickly. If one is male and the other is female, there might be a slight frisson which makes the game last quite longer, sometimes an hour or more.

• There is the smell of perfume everywhere- apparantly noone suffers from the strange scent allergies which the afflict the Haligonian ladies. When I tell the ladies about the scent ban in Canada, they look at me as I am out my mind, first they think I am joking, then they are horrified.
• Noone really speaks English. Noone cares, either. In some countries, it is no big deal if you don´t speak English…
•  Paella isn´t such a wonderful dish. I prefer my prawns cleaned and degutted, as a long black trail of prawn crap across orange rice does not improve the appetite. Indeed, there is a good reason why pasta has become a global food and paella has not.
• Iranians should visit Valencia and then shut up about Shiraz and Isfahan.
• Spanish ladies wera a lot of kohl.
• Everyone wears jeans, everywhere. So depressing.
• I wish I knew Spanish.
• I wish Spain had an immigration program.

More later.

“Golden boy, I am going away on a short trip. I’ll be back next week, after your swiming lesson.”

Silence. Then, “And I will look with teary eyes.”

(va manam ba cheshmaye ashki nega mikonam).

The office where I work part-time has moved. You can now find the newcomer in a snazzy, environment-conscious(which means we aren’t allowed garbage bins in our rooms) suite of rooms located in the heart of the campus of one of the many smaller universities which are so numerous in this part of the world.

Everything is new and shiny, with lots of light-coloured faux wood. There are glass partitions, which I hate, for obvious reasons. Colleagues keep stopping by and congratulating us on our move, as we are no longer “isolated” on Spring Garden avenue, and have joined the mainstream university. I am grateful for their sentiments, but I am missing Spring Garden horribly.  

I don’t want to sound like a tourist brochure for downtown Halifax, but honestly, the food! the shopping! Just in the last week, I got a nice-sized fresh crab-cake with a generous portion of beet salad from Spring garden food court for 6 dollars. Turkish, Indian, Lebanese, Japanese, Italian, continental and country cuisine were all five minutes walk from the old office, and at reasonable prices. You want caramel and pecan pie? Just across the place where they do steak-and-kidney pud.

Here, the options are: the student cafeteria, the student union, and the staff lounge, which I am told has the most limited options. Considering that the cafeteria offers ONLY turkey BLT sandwiches, the staff lounge probably has only stale bread and coffee.

Oh, and did I mention that the turkey blt sandwich cost over 7 dollars?

Oh, the good old days…

Last week was a party for forn stars and frostitutes on cyberspace. First, I read about Dr. Brooke Magnanti, a PhD student in computer science living in London, worked for years as a frostitute to supplement her student income, and blogged about her seks-life, in a very successful and highly-read blog. Then, I hear than a famous American forn star has changed her name, stopped being a forn-star, and now has a book deal and generally received a lot of publicity about her memoirs, experiences etc etc. She too is blogging (under her new name)- her mum and dad read her blog and are so proud of her…

Their revelations has caused a fair amount of controversy, which does not really interest me- though the statement made in relation to the PhD student-frostitute made me laugh and firmed my resolve never to apply for PhD: ‘I did not know any girl who was not a PhD student at the brofel’. What is fascinating for me is the overwhelmingly positive feedback these ladies are receiving from  their society, as evidenced by their book deals, the comments on their blogs, their TV appearances, their media interviews.  They are not ashamed of their lives, they are proud of what they did, their mums and dads love them, they’re wonderful, independent, brilliant, strong, blah blah blah.

How different, how absolutely different from Iran.

Other Iranian bloggers have noted how, if a woman gets recorded having seks in a Western country, she shoots to popularity and fame (who had ever heard of Paris Hilton before her boyfriend did her a favour and put the recording he had made of their union on the internet?), but if the same happens in Iran, the woman has to flee, she is prosecuted, she is persecuted, she is rejected from society, she becomes a worthless piece of filth.  

The point I am trying to make here is that it is not just the Iranian regime who hate women who have seks outside marriage. Iranian society as a whole has a problem with -let’s call them unconventional women. And basically,  any woman who has a boyfriend is an unconventional woman. And she must hide her life from her family.

It doesn’t matter how well-educated or liberal a family is, how many years they have spent in European and American universities studying nuclear physics and neurosurgery, how much alcohol they consume at their elegant in-house secretive parties. Their daughters simply don’t have seks. That guy she’s talking with, holding hands with, laughing with- that guy over there? Oh- he is just a family friend, they plan on getting married, he is her university classmate. Our daughters don’t know what seks is if it came and hit them in the forehead.  

You want their technology. You want their freedoms. You want their movies and their books. You want their science.

Can you cope with your  girls talking about being frostitutes and form-stars? Will you be proud of them? Will you listen to their interviews, read their books and blogs, treat them with respect? It’s all part and parcel of the same package deal, you know.

Perhaps you think Canadian ladies don’t follow a rigid code for their appearance,  but you would be wrong. They have a code, and although it is unwritten and there are no semi-legal, paramilitary bullies to enforce them, the ladies obey it as rigidly as if there were.

The code is most tangible when it comes to hair. Here are several of the classifications you can find around academic environs:

-Lady professors and high-ranking lady managers: Always, always short hair, MAXIMUM to the shoulders. I have never seen a lady professor with hair below shoulders. Always natural colour, or a dyed colour AS CLOSE AS POSSIBLE to natural colour. I believe it is part of their contract: You Will Not Have Long, Dyed Hair While Employed By This University.

-Students: Only one hair colour allowed: Black. In high-schoolers, you see some blues and greens and pinks, but by university, the only hair-colour you see is black. Otherwise, natural blondey-brunette, often blow-dryed, longish, swinging by or below shoulders.

-Other Lady Staff: By which I mean all the other ladies who run the university on a day-to-day basis, the admin assistants, the co-ordinators, the secretaries, etc: long blonde hair. No natural colour, but a bright distinctive yellow, with long curled waves well below the shoulders, and long bangs just above the eyes. 

The reason for this is of course that they have the most boring and/or annoying jobs, and by virtue of their job, they look upon the other two groups (faculty and students) as major irritants. And they have discovered that there is nothing which disguises their annoyed expressions as well as a mane full of swirling long blond hair.

OK, Maryam Rana, you 21-year old student at Toronto University, you who have decided to wear a niqab which covers all your face,  I will rise to your bait. I will give you some more publicity, which you clearly crave, with your bright green Calvin Klein headscarf, your bright red shoes and your willingness to be photoed and displayed in newspapers to talk of your modesty. I read about you a few days ago, and saw your photo with the black cloth hanging from your scarf and covering your face, and I have been seething with rage ever since.

So you don’t think you are oppressed, huh? You think your decision to wear a niqab, followed by the subsequent decsion to appear in national newspapers and talk about yourself and your faith is a purely private, personal matter, and people should respect your decisions, and stop giving you dirty looks in the street?

No madam. If you really think that, then you clearly haven’t been paying attention to your university classes, or in fact to the world. The decision for a woman to cover her face as a sign of her “religion” in a country where gender equality is the law, and then publicly discuss her decsion in newspapers is definitely not just a purely private act. And it most certainly does not deserve respect.

Because madam, in case you don’t know, there are countries in the world where women are forced, under the pain of extreme corporal and humuliating punishment, to wear headgear as a sign of their supposed “modesty”. There are countries where  women who are forced to wear hijab are also forced to have a man take all their important life decisions for them. These include forcible marriage and denial of education, just to name two. By choosing to cover your face, you are signalling your solidarity with the oppressors of these woman. You are saying, yes, that is right. That is what the system should be. You are showing your covered face in the newspaper, and you are sending the message: this is what the ideal woman looks like. Like me.

Don’t give me that twaddle about respecting other people’s faith and religion is purely private blah blah blah. Of course you have to say that, in Canada! But you know in reality, that brand of religion which you subscribe to is no way near private and personal. It is a very public religion, and it demands that all humanity be incorporated into its community, the “ommat”. Have you never heard of the ommat? Did your religion-studies teacher never tell you? Do you see what is happening in the countries where this “religion” of yours has the power?

Will you allow your father to forcibly marry you to a man forty years older than you? Will you allow your husband to beat you because you don’t obey all his (seksual) wishes? If he tells you you must stay in the house, and not visit your parents, not go to school, will you obey, or will you scream for the (Canadian) police? Because you do know, don’t you, that is what your “religion” demands. You can’t just pick and choose the parts you like, and say, ok, these other parts are not for me. Religion is a whole, a whole way of life, and it literally means submission. You know that. And I have spent many years in the mandatory religious education classes of a theocratic regime, so I know that as well.

So just shut up, Maryam Rana. Shut up about your personal decision to wear a niqab, shut up about your red shoes and green designer headscarf. Wear a niqab, if that’s what you feel you must do to get some attention and feel all self-righteous and virtuous about yourself. But don’t blather on about your so-called personal decisions, and don’t put your picture in the newspapers, please, it just makes the women who came to Canada to escape all that feel sick.

People have been killed, others have been tortured, others have been exiled, and so on. Old news. Here is the list of restaurants I’m going to visit in Tehran during Christmas, in no particular order:

• The Blue Duck.

With its magnificent view of Tajrish square which mysteriously eliminates the traffic, situated at the top on one of Tehran’s most elegant and fun shopping malls, this restaurant offers an all-you-can-eat buffet-style menu with both continental and persian fare. A white-hatted chef prepares the plat-du-jour as you watch, and there is a wonderful salad bar.

• Farid.

Best known for its steaks, chateau-briands and beouf stroganoffs, and… the memories. Memories, memories, memories.  The last time I was there, just my luck, there was a memorial service for a dead father on the bottom floor, and I had to feast to the sound of wailing and the sing-song voice of the chief mourner. By the time the mourner began “and his son, overseas and alone, crying father, father…” I was hiccupping with sobs into my steak with mushroom sauce.

• Safa.

Dirty, crowded and noisy, Safa is in the heart of Tehran downtown, close to Tehran University and Enghelab square, and serves chelo-kabab straight from the pots of heaven.

• Suren.

A quiet old house off Hafez avenue, decorated with elegant dusty old chandeliars, heavy velvet curtains and a large old-fashioned garden with a stone pool. It is always almost empty, like a haunted house, and the old proprieter sits at the front, murmuring courtesies. The beef schnitzel, served with a fried egg, is the best.

• Small House

Off Fatemi avenue, if you arrive by eight in the evening you have sit on the pavement for an hour or so until your turn comes and you can get a seat. Never mind. The weird and wonderful stir-fries are worth the wait.

• Hafez Eatery

Filthy, yes. But the brain and tongue sandwiches are delectable, while the grilled trout, wrapped in foil, is to die for.

• Stewed sheep’s head somewhere close to Manouchehri

I actually can’t remember the name of the shop. It has a huge aquarium covering one wall with horrible monstrous huge fish swimming from side to side, fed on scraps from the pot. However, the stewed brain and eyes, spiced with cinnamon and fresh lemon juice (Seville oranges in season), are so delicious that even the sight of those hungry silent monsters do not dim our appetite.

• Liver kabab, anywhere south of Enghelab.

All are good. I love all of them.

So, if you come looking for the newcomer in Tehran during the Christmas season, you know where to look. There are people I suppose I should see, grandparents and old friends and such like. As far as I am concerned, they can babysit while I hit the pots.

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.