Nowruz

2006

As I wait for the toilet, underwear getting gradually soaked in my own blood, having to listen to my family bitch about me and my sister and my mum, I blink away seething tears. They think that talking in a language they refuse to teach me means that I won’t know what they’re talking about. They stare at us, motion to our dad’s face, then nod disappointedly towards ours. No wonder my mum couldn’t tolerate this. The second I turn 16 next year, I’m so done with it. This will be my final Nowruz spent counting down the seconds until I feel the relief of the motorway rushing past the window. Maybe my last Nowruz ever.

Should that make me feel nostalgic? Except that everyone is looking at me like a trodden on puppy and the queue for the toilet is really exposing me to passers-by feeling the need to tell me how much everyone loves us and that our dad would die without us and that we are so lucky to have a dad like him and the dance moves are getting more and more tragic and the frigging goldfish won’t stop spinning in its bowl and if I have to pick another kidney bean out of my ghormeh sabzi I will cry.

The passive aggressive light of the corridor weighs on my eyelids as it bounces off the unnecessarily hefty maroon wallpaper. 

‘Azizaaaam!’ I hear bellowing towards me, and my gut responds with hopes and prayers that the sound isn’t coming from yet another uncle I’m not remotely related to and have never met before. But, of course, it is. My brain switches off as he talks to me about my baba’s poetry, what a shame it was that he had to give it up. 

I’ve always known that my dad’s dad was a well-respected poet in Iran in his youth. When I was little, I used to beg my dad to read me his poems, the ones he could remember off-by-heart, even though I could never understand them. As a child, I loved that they sounded like music, a lullaby to get me to sleep, but the older I’ve got, the angrier I am that I can’t understand them, that I was never taught how. My dad tried to translate them for me once, telling me that I didn’t need to speak Farsi to feel what they meant, but I know how much meaning lives in the deliberate language of a poem; how do you translate poetry that you didn’t write? 

I don’t have it in me to pander to them, acting like I know anything about who I am, where I come from. I just can’t be arsed with it. And the night trugs on in exactly this vein, avoiding questions I can’t answer from people I can’t be bothered to pretend to know, until I get to jump through the fire and pretend to cleanse myself of it all.

Silence floods the muggy car the following morning, rattling off the windows as we hurtle down the motorway. Reza turns sharply, his head barely twitches to the side as he moves lanes, a carelessness to his driving that’s probably always been there, no thought given to the safety of those he claims to hold most dear, subconsciously grasping onto our seatbelts from the moment we buckle in. Noor’s strapped into the seat beside me, head on my shoulder; it’s funny how we always fight for the front seat in mum’s car. Not here. She’s pretending to sleep, but I can feel the unease of her breathing. She doesn’t want to deal with being awake right now. I can’t blame her.

He doesn’t even put the radio on, kicking up his usual fuss when we beg for Radio 1 and he eventually settles on 4. Can he feel it too, the ending in the air? Or is he numb to it? In denial, or just unbothered. But I’m tired, I don’t think I care enough to fight anymore, and Noor obviously doesn’t either. She’s hurting though, my baby sister, I can feel her heart breaking, inches from my own, far too tired for someone who hasn’t even hit puberty yet. She doesn’t deserve this, this feeling of being unwanted, unloved, not enough.

We’re so used to it, that feeling of not-quite-ness, following us wherever we go. When we mispronounce the few words of Farsi we know and get an eye roll and a scoff from our aunt. On the few occasions our dad actually shows up for school events and the teachers’ mouths form a quickly wiped away but undeniable ‘o’ as they try to work out whether we’re adopted, or whether that sickly tinge to our skin is in fact sun-deprived olive.

I guess that won’t happen anymore. And, really, it’s been a long time since it has. I don’t think I feel sad; I don’t know if I feel relief. It’s just kind of this weight of everythingness and nothingness imprinted on my chest, pressed upon by the weight of my painfully awake sister, her head burrowing deeper into my barely-there boobs with every additional jolt of the car.

2018

I wanted to see it in tiny italics at the bottom of a calendar and think, in passing, I wonder what that means, as I continue to cross off the days as normal: Nowruz.

Nostalgia sticks to my tongue until I find myself choking on it. I wanted to forget it. No, more than that; I wanted to reject it. I wanted it to be nothing to do with me. It wasn’t like the other days, the birthdays, the anniversaries, the days that somehow, eventually, I found passing me by, unnoticed. Nowruz lingers, every year, marked by guilt, shame, a desperate need to justify myself. This year, I'm going to change that. This year, it will live up to its name: new beginnings.

I don’t remember ever having a Haft-Seen in our house, growing up. I only ever saw them at the big houses we’d go to for Nowruz, houses of cousins or cousins of cousins, or random Iranians my dad met in the 80s who became his family. This is the first time I’ve ever even considered having one, the first time it’s ever felt right. Noor and I managed to scramble together the 7 letter “s” things and most of the other bits and pieces. Naturally, however, ours is non-traditional. The book we’ve chosen to represent wisdom? Katie Price’s autobiography. Representative of ageing and patience? Some anti-wrinkle cream. There’s also a packet of Jelly Tots to represent something sweet for strength. Sumac we already have, a scrappy old packet we got from the big Asian corner shop down the road. We couldn’t find any senjed, aren’t actually sure what it is, but it’s something to do with love, so onto the table goes our She’s The Man DVD. We thought about doing garlic bread, for a laugh, but by the time we’d cooked it we managed to convince ourselves that the smell would be too irritating, so we ate it and popped the one remaining Terry’s Chocolate Orange segment for good health, beside the dry slice of Weetabix (in place of the rejuvenation-representative sabzeh that we didn’t have the ingredients for). Gold chocolate coins we had saved deliberately from Christmas, for prosperity. A red apple I’ll probably have to take for my lunch by the end of the week, so that’s getting replaced with some concealer, for beauty. Daffodils instead of hyacinths for spring, purely because they’re cheaper and the colour works really well beside the goldfish. We have kept the goldfish, though, a real one. Neither of us expressed why it felt important to keep that one authentic. All of this is now piled atop a large circular mirror with some scattered tealights and two Creme Eggs, the easiest things to find in our house at this time of year, and left on the kitchen table, because we don’t have enough space on any of our other limited surfaces.

Besides food and in-jokes with my sister surrounding the pronunciation of words like ‘roize’ (rice) and ‘cholderen’ (children), Nowruz feels like all I have left of my childhood, of that half of who I am. I hate myself for how desperate that sounds. Hate the mixed-other-liminal-identity-slam-poetry bullshit of it all, but there it is. A spectre of self-loathing, his as well as my own, stares back at me from above the bathroom sink as I dry my hands on my curls, water flicking at my neck as I scrunch. I remind myself that I’m using Nowruz as my second go at new year’s resolutions and smile at myself in the mirror. My eyes don’t move.

Since I left home, I’ve gotten pretty good at cooking. The legacy I leave behind with people is purely culinary. I had a friend who used to say ‘once you go Persian, there’s no better version’. He was talking about rice. Returning to the kitchen, I begin rectifying the damage the koobideh has done: chopping board, wooden spoon, finger nails, all marked by turmeric and saffron.

My sister’s face - the only one I could thoroughly describe, at any age, any of her faces, from memory - lights up my phone.

‘Ugh! I am sick of her,’ her voice booms through the speakerphone.

‘Again?’

‘I swear to god, she is out to get me. Every time I say anything, she has a problem with it. It’s not my fault her boyfriend fancies me. Like I’d ever be interested in that lanky streak of piss bore, anyway,’ she’s always been like this. Confident. Cool.

‘How do you know he fancies you? Don’t they live together?’

'Please. Anyway, the point is, she decided that I need to re-do the entire schedule for April, and apparently I need to do it yesterday. Obviously, I told her I’d already done that and it just hadn’t updated itself yet. And so now I have to stay late to do it, so she can’t come for me tomorrow. But it’s just like, get over yourself, just because you don’t want to have to go home to your ugly little rat boyfriend, doesn’t mean the rest of us don’t have lives!’

I “mhm” and “that’s so unfair” in all the right places as she continues to rant about her job that I could not describe if my life depended on it.

I take my chance when she finally pauses for breath, ‘Okay, well just let me know when you’re actually setting off and I’ll put the roize on. Oh and, by the way, you’ve run out of that baby pink nail polish. Just in case you’re passing Boots on the way.’

‘Are you taking the piss? I needed that for tomorrow!’

‘Well, if I hadn’t had to do all the cooking, then I wouldn’t have needed it, would I? Marinating stains your nails, honey. Not that you’d know.’

‘Right, like you’d ever let me try. Anyway, I need to get back to work, because some of us actually take our jobs seriously. I’ll text when I’m done,’ she pauses, ‘Oh, and can you put me a Coke in the fridge? Okay, thanks, bye!’

I don’t really remember life before she was born. I remember, or it could be a memory of what I’ve been told, that when she was born it was raining. It had rained for weeks and weeks on end. I had this yellow raincoat that I was obsessed with, had worn all the way home the day my mum let me pick it out in the shops. I wore it in the house, in the garden in the baking summer sun, I even wore it in the bath, wouldn’t be parted from it. Then, when the rain started, it felt like my big moment. Finally, I’d get to show it off at school, beaming with pride as I imagined pulling it off my peg at break time, running around the playground, visible for miles around in my sunshine jacket. But I didn’t make it to break time. I was called to reception before assembly; he was coming to get me, my baby sister waiting to meet me. I don’t know what happened to the yellow jacket. Instead, the following Monday, I brought a tiny polaroid photo of my baby sister to school, beaming with pride as I pulled it out of my breast pocket, telling everyone that her name means ‘light’, telling Ellie that I was sorry, but I had a new best friend now.

I think having a sister always made my friendships with other women more difficult. Because, truly, what could they offer me that she couldn’t double; trust, companionship, laughter, understanding. The girl born to be my best friend, my new beginning.