Читать книгу Bibi's Rainbow: Hilarious Ordeals of Assimilation - Majid Amini - Страница 3

Mehran “Mike” Yazdy is sleeping soundly in the velvet moonlit master bedroom next to his wife, Noshin. They both belong to a whole host of ill-fated Iranian self-exiles, uprooted by the 1979 revolution that had left them with only two options: to stay behind and perish in the lawlessness of Iran’s post-revolution, or migrate to other countries, lose their identities and become dislocated persons in more ways than one―a big lump of the sum total of nothing.

The nerve-racking noise of a child crying, sounding as if someone sadistically is torturing him, coming from two doors down the hall, abruptly wakes up Mike. With wide opened eyes, staring at the ceiling, his anxiety growing, he knows it is his five-year-old grandson, Che, who, for many convincing reasons, admittedly has a special place in his heart. Not having the presence of mind in that ungodly hour, he patiently listens for the familiar sound of the shuffling footsteps of good-old Bibi, their lifelong nanny, routinely on her way to tend the troubled child. It is only after he can retrieve some slight seepage of memories from the dark passageways of his sluggish mind that he realizes Bibi had returned to Iran several years ago, and they have not heard words from her since. The realization uncharacteristically saddens him right away. You didn’t appreciate that woman’s contribution to your family when she was here. Mike ridicules himself. We all took her for granted. He misses Bibi, the strong-willed and outspoken old woman. As an interventionist by nature (in a positive sense) she intuitively knew what correct course of action to take whenever any member of Yazdy’s family was struck by unpredictable and often irresolvable predicaments. He wonders what happened to make the dedicated and dependable Bibi suddenly leave the family. He has troubled himself many times with the same line of question without ever being able to come up with a convincing answer. Considering the very unwavering seemingly unbreakable bonds between her and his wife, and later with every one of his children and grandchildren, it is still hard for him to accept the reality of their nanny’s abrupt departure. Without any advance notice, she packed her few belongings and returned to Iran, seemingly vanishing forever. The way she left, she must have gotten fed up with all of us, didn’t she? Maybe she lost her senses as most folks do when they get old. He keeps thinking about her. But all of a sudden, as if she has joined the rest of trivialities in a dark corner of his mind, he blanks Bibi’s memories, at least, temporarily out of his consciousness.

Mike then waits awhile longer for his son, thirty-year-old Farhad, wishfully expecting him to wake up and care for his child Che. He keeps listening, but when he doesn’t hear any noise except Che’s wailing, he thinks maybe Shayan, his second son, or his wife Harriet might hear Che’s crying. Dismayed that nobody bothers to respond, he growls a dozen of swear words in his native language Farsi at nobody except his own luck as he slowly rises. He rubs his eyes and drags his sleep-starved body to the small bedroom that Che shares with his eight-year-old sister, Shirin.

The children’s mother, Lila, in an attempt to get cleaned up from drug addiction and alcoholism, is currently in a rehab center somewhere in South Bay area. The thirty-year-old slender African-American, garrulous and articulate, who seems to carry an invisible powerful microscope, hung around her neck, ready to peek through it and detect the minutest imperfection in American society; its cultural deformities, inequitable economic system, and its colonial-based foreign policy. Lila has passed on her brown glossy skin to her son Che and daughter Shirin; the kids look as if they have permanent suntans. Their light brown hair, even more abundantly curly than Lila’s makes them even more remarkable among the kids on the block. Everybody agrees that both kids have inherited the best attributes of their parents’ ethnicities. No one else in the family was more surprised than Grandpa Ferdous when Shirin and Che turned out to be so strikingly beautiful, mostly because Grandpa Ferdous had strongly predicted that offspring of an interracial marriage would definitely result in deformed kids, whom he calls Ajoj-Majoj. His belief has been that the Ajoj-Majoj, buffoon-looking creatures, looks even worse than harlequins but with considerable physical and behavioral commonalities, are the groups of weird inhabitants from a distance planet, who will be dispatched down to earth soon or later, with only one dreadful mission―to end human lives on earth as we know it. Why? Because, God has been getting sick and tired of the mess human beings have created on His beautiful pristine earth. When he saw the babies for the first time in the hospital, shocked by their incredible beauty, he could hardly concede that he was wrong as he could be in his prophecy, but only muttered a few words under his breath, “This is the biggest goof up God has ever made that I’ve ever seen!”

Fatigued and disappointed, wearing pajamas that have never seen iron, shoulders stooped, as if the ocean liner carrying his entire merchants has been sunk in the high seas, Mike, at a snail's pace enters the bedroom that is faintly illuminated with the miniature nightlight between his beloved grandchildren’s beds. Tiptoeing, he approaches crying Che.

“What’s wrong, sweetheart?” he asks, whispering, making sure he doesn’t wake Shirin.

“The spoiled brat thinks he has lost one of his testicles, Grandpa!” Shirin loudly announces her little brother’s predicament, registering her protest with a velvety, but at times strident, voice bequeathed from her mother.

“What?”

“He has been crying all night! He doesn’t let me sleep! I have to go to school tomorrow, Grandpa! I can’t stand it! I want my own room right now,” Shirin has found the most inappropriate time to repeat her recent demand.

“Don’t call your brother a brat. He just started crying two minutes ago, Shirin. I heard him myself. Maybe he had a bad dream. Go back to sleep. I’ll see what’s wrong with him,” Mike whispers, trying to calm Shirin down.

“What’s wrong, sweetheart?” Mike asks Che.

“I can’t find one of my balls, Grandpa,” Che manages to get words out between sobs.

Mike gasps. Up to that moment, he had always thought that he was familiar with the unpredictable curiosity of children. After all he had raised four of his own. But he wasn’t prepared to hear that sort of problem from a child. “What are you talking about?” Mikes inquires gently.

“It’s not there,” Che mumbles.

Mike sits on the bed. Che uncovers himself with one hand while the other one is inside his shorts, frantically searching for his presumably lost testicle.

“Look down here, Grandpa. I can’t find one of my balls,” Che pulls down his shorts exposing his genitals.

In that ungodly hour, even with his mind consumed by all the problems that he thinks American society has thrown nonstop at him and his family, Mike struggles to control himself from bursting out laughing. And then suddenly, for some strange reason a thought crosses his mind that urges him to express it in an animated way. He feels like putting his arms in the air toward heaven, addressing whoever is running his life from up there, expressing his grievances, I was a great man, a deputy minister of industry for heaven’s sake, and it was written in my destiny to even become the prime minister sooner or later, a more distinguished man, and now I have to find my grandson’s lost ball!? What the hell are you doing to me? I have had it! I don’t deserve this! Give me a break, God! He restrains himself. Instead, he picks up the small flashlight from the side table next to the bed and shines it on Che’s shorts, doing his painstaking best to locate his grandson’s lost ball.

“Now, let’s see where the heck your damn ball is that has interrupted the tranquility of this household and my sleep,” Mike says in a hushed voice.

Like a doctor who is examining a patient for a hernia, Mike begins searching for Che’s lost ball as he reminds the child, “Didn’t I tell you not to touch yourself, I mean down there?”

“Yes Grandpa. But look, one of them is gone. I don’t know where he is. I want my ball back,” With teary eyes, Che informs his grandpa of his serious problem.

“Sometimes, when you’re not covered with the blanket, you feel cold, they also feel cold, and they don’t like it. So, they go up your crotch,” Mike shares the treasure of his knowledge of human anatomy with his grandson while diligently searching for the lost ball.

“Why?” Che asks innocently.

“I don’t know. Maybe it’s warmer and cozier up there.”

“Oh look here, Grandpa! You’re right. I found my ball!” Che announces his amazing finding with a face beaming with joy, as gaily as perhaps Christopher Columbus expressed his emotion the moment he set foot on America’s pristine shore.

Pretending to be flabbergasted at his grandson’s discovery, Mike says, “Good for you, and I’m happy for you. Now go back to sleep, and don’t touch them.”

“Why not, Grandpa?”

Mike is at a loss for words for a moment or two. After a short pause, he comes up with the most logical reason he can think of and says, “They need to get some sleep, too.”

“Okay, Grandpa.”

Satisfied and to some extent happy that Che’s predicament is resolved to his full satisfaction, Mike covers him with the blanket, tucks him in, and lovingly kisses him goodnight. Before leaving the room, he makes sure Shirin is tucked in too. Then he holds her face between his palms and places a kiss on her forehead. She folds her arms around his neck and asks, “Why did my mom and dad name me Shirin?

“You know why. I’ve told you a hundred times, sweetheart. Now go back to sleep,” Mike responds impatiently.

“Can you tell me again, Grandpa? Please, pretty please,” Shirin pleads.

Mike grumbles as he sits on the bed’s edge reluctantly and starts explaining, “Well, they named you Shirin for two reasons.”

“Please tell me both of them, Grandpa.”

“See. Shirin means sweet in Farsi. Not exactly like sweet in English when you say, Shirin, you can almost feel that special Swiss chocolate sweetness in your mouth. Anyway, they had picked many other names for you before you were born.

“What were those names?”

“Well. If I remember correctly, there were Daneh, Negar, Neda and a few others that I don’t remember now.”

“What do those three names mean in Farsi?”

“They mean seed, lover, and message.”

“I like the first two.”

“Look Shirin. Grandpa is very dead tired and must get some sleep.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Okay. Where was I? Oh yes. But when the nurse handed you wrapped in a blanket to Lila, and your parents saw you for the first time, they tore up the list of their selected names, and called you Shirin, right there and then, without even thinking twice.”

“Why?”

“With your sweet face, how could they name you anything else?”

“Do I still look sweet, Grandpa?”

“Of course you do, my sweetheart. You’re even sweeter, sweetness of my life, noor-e [light] of my eyes.”

“What was the other reason?”

“As the story is told with the most beautiful verses by our poet Nezami―”

“What is verse?” Che asks.

“It means poetry, you dummy,” Shirin shares her literary knowledge with her brother.

“Don’t call your brother a dummy. … Once upon a time, there lived this young beautiful princess name Shirin. She lived in a big castle near mountains in ancient Persia, the country we all come from.”

“No Grandpa. I was born here. I’m an American,” Shirin corrects her grandpa with a tone of pride ringing in her voice.

“Me, too. I am an American, too” Che also identifies his nationality as proudly as any red-blooded redneck ultra-nationalist Texan would.

“Okay! You were both born here, but your grandparents on your father’s side were all born in Persia. That’s why they are called Persians.”

“Mommy’s great-grandpa and great-grandma were from Africa,” Shirin reminds Mike.

“Are we going to debate about who is from where, or do you guys want me to tell you the true story?”

“Shut the hell up, or I will do it for you, Che! Let Grandpa tell me the story,” Shirin shouts.

“Okay,” Che concedes.

“Don’t talk to your brother like that. … Where was I? Okay, I know. All right, as the Persian legend has it, one early morning when Shirin was gazing at the mountain through an open window of her castle, an ordinary but handsome young village shepherd name Farhad was taking his flock of sheep to the green pastures high in the mountain for grazing―”

“Farhad is my dad’s name,” Che interrupts.

“That’s right, Che,” Mike confirms and goes on. “Farhad took one look at Shirin and was amazed at her extraordinary beauty and grace.”

“How beautiful was she, Grandpa?” Shirin asks.

“She looked gorgeous, like a tall slender ballerina wrapped in white silky chiffon. Her face looked as beautiful as the full moon in a clear sky at night on the fourteenth of a month. Her face was so pretty that Farhad took leave of his senses and fell in love with her right there and then. His love was so strong and so huge that he knew his heart by itself didn’t have the strength to handle it, or even enough room to house it. He needed the strength and space of one hundred hearts together to manage the load of such a big love for a princess who looked like an angel.”

“What did he do?” Shirin asks impatiently.

“Well, he had to borrow the hearts of his friends. Shirin also took one look at Farhad and immediately fell in love with him.”

“What made Shirin fall in love with a simple shepherd?” Shirin asks.

“Because Farhad was very tall and good-looking, devilishly attractive, handsomer than any other young man Shirin had ever seen before.

“He looked exactly like my dad. Didn’t he, Grandpa?” Shirin asks.

“Yes, he did.” Mike confirms.

“That’s why Mom fell in love with Dad, Che,” Shirin makes sure her brother is aware of the reason for their parents’ union.

“Guys, I’m tired. If you don’t keep quiet, I’m not going to tell you the story.”

“Shut up, Che. Let Grandpa tells me the story.”

“Okay.”

“To prove his love for her, Farhad knew he had to do something big, something special and fantastic to impress the heck out of Shirin so that she would never again look at another man. What did he do? He went ahead and did the impossible. He decided to single-handedly carve a streambed among the rocks, all the way from the mountaintop down to the castle. As his flock of sheep grazed on tender wildflowers and juicy grasses that made their milk smell like sweet perfume, this fresh milk could flow to Shirin’s castle. So every morning Shirin could bathe in fresh cool milk that would keep her skin soft as satin. He told Shirin about his intention and she blew him a kiss of approval and sent him away full of hope, which he desperately needed for his impossible mission. His love for Shirin also gave him extraordinary energy. He started from the top, carving the rocks with his axe and chisel, day and night, all the time thinking about the most beautiful young woman, his true love, sweet Shirin. Love for Shirin was so strong that converted Farhad the shepherd to a very good stonecutter instantly.

His sheep stared at him, thinking he had lost his mind. The word got around about this unusual love affair; a simple young shepherd had stolen the heart of the most beautiful princess in the whole world, and if they got married, a disaster would happen; the future king would be a commoner. Poor Farhad was unaware that people with evil intentions inside the castle were dead set against his marriage to Princess Shirin, and they would do anything to stop it. The evil people got together and came up with a wicked plan. They sent a news bearer up the mountain and found Farhad, all alone busy carving. He told Farhad the biggest lie. He told him that Shirin had fallen in love with Khosro, a prince of the neighboring kingdom, married him for his kingly name, and left the castle. Poor Farhad’s heart broke. He threw his axe in the air and held his head under its sharp edge. It fell on his head, split it in half, and he died instantly. Carrying the tragic news, the news bearer came down the mountain and told the evil people in the castle what had happened. They told Shirin that Farhad had been working long hours under the hot sun. Heatstroke had turned him crazy and he had killed himself. When Shirin heard this about Farhad, her heart broke too. Barefoot, she ran all the way to the mountaintop, threw herself on Farhad’s body and killed herself right there and then with Farhad’s axes.”

“Oh, Grandpa. It’s so sad! It breaks my heart to pieces,” Shirin comments, in tears. “I bet they’re both in heaven now.”

“I’m sure they are. It shows their love for each other was a true love.”

“It’s like Romeo and Juliet,” Shirin says.

“It is a Persian Romeo and Juliet. We have several of them, all told in poetry.”

“I love my dad as much as Shirin loved Farhad,” Shirin says. “And if my dad dies I would kill myself, too.”

“Me too,” Che says.

“Hey guys, stop talking crazy now; otherwise I won’t tell you another story,” Mike warns.

“Grandpa, do you think my mom is as beautiful as Shirin was?” Shirin asks.

“You bet she is, sweetheart. Your mom is gorgeous. That’s why your dad fell in love with her.”

“Now go to sleep, my sweetheart. I love you,” Mike says.

“How about me, Grandpa?” Che demands.

“I love you too, honey.”

“Why is my name Che?”

“You know, sweetheart.”

“Tell me again, Grandpa.”

“Your mom and dad named you after Che Guevara, a South American freedom fighter.”

“Was he a good boy?”

“Your mom and dad thought so.”

“Grandpa, when is my mom coming home?” Shirin asks the same question she has been asking since the day Lila left for the rehab center. The question never loses its piercing pain for Mike.

“Soon, darling,” Mike gives his stock answer.

Out in the hall, Mike pokes his head into Farhad’s bedroom. He doesn’t know whether to be dismayed or glad when he discovers that Farhad’s bed is undisturbed. I suppose he can’t stand to be alone, Mike thinks. Shouldn’t he look for comfort in the company of his kids, now that he has lost his job and his wife is in rehab? Why does he have to go out every damn night and hang around with his buddies? Who are those people that he prefers their company to his own family? Mike furrows his brow and cannot come up with any convincing answers to these questions. He then throws his hands in the air as if he has given up understanding his son. He pauses in the hallway, listening, making sure everybody else is safe and sound, and that his troubles are temporarily at a safe distance from his household. I never wanted to be a man for all seasons. Mike thinks. I’m sick and tired to be the breadwinner, the husband, the father, the grandfather, the babysitter, and now, the storyteller. Mike keeps thinking.

He returns to his bed, hoping to have another hour or two of sleep, but his past comes charging back at him like a herd of wild beasts, overwhelming him as always. Unable to fall asleep, Mike uses a meditation technique he learned from a self-proclaimed guru who lived high above Katmandu in Nepal. He starts focusing with his mind’s eye on his forehead, moving down his body slowly, collecting all the residue of unpleasant thoughts, anxieties, bits and pieces of everything that are troubling him, condensing them into a container the size of a golf ball, which he pushes out from his toes. The technique gradually dilutes his disillusionment, and on the fifth try, his physical exhaustion dissolves into a sedative that helps him fall asleep.