A Beginner's Guide to Acting English Read online

  I didn't know what she was worried about; Dayee was in complete control of the bike and I had been holding on very tight, there was no way I would have fallen off. Dayee helped me off the handlebars. 'You said you wanted to meet my family, so here we are. Shaparak, this is Jaleh, my friend. Jaleh Jaan, this is Shaparak, my very favourite niece.'

  I beamed.

  Jaleh was very very pretty. She had long dark hair, which was slightly wavy and looked really soft, smooth honey skin and amazing eyes. They weren't just one kind of brown, they were all different shades of brown, light and dark.

  Dayee took her hand and kissed it. 'How are you, azizam?'

  Jaleh pulled her hand away. 'In front of the child? She'll tell.'

  Dayee whispered some things in Jaleh's ear. Jaleh closed her eyes as his mouth moved near her ear and she looked for a second as if she might faint. If Peyvand was here he would definitely set me off on a giggling fit. I just looked away. Then she, Dayee and I went for a walk between the trees. They talked and I looked at the birds calling each other as the day grew brighter and brighter. In a part of the park where there were some bushes, Dayee kissed Jaleh on her forehead and cheek then ever so gently on her mouth, just once.

  'Do you promise? Do you promise?' Jaleh was saying.

  'I do, I do promise,' Dayee said to her and held her hand to his lips.

  Dayee was good at keeping promises. If he said he would buy you ice cream, he would definitely do it and never just said it to shut you up.

  They whispered for a while longer then Dayee hoisted me back up on to the handlebars.

  Jaleh came and kissed me on the head and said, 'I'll see you another time, I hope,' then she stood and waved and blew kisses as we rode off.

  We stopped off at the bakery and bought bread. The grocer was open, too, now and we bought chocolate milk for me and Peyvand.

  When we got back, everyone was still sleeping. I crept across to Peyvand's bed on the floor and pressed my nose against his as I always did to wake him up. He opened his eyes and I quickly drew the chocolate milk carton to his face. He sat up and rubbed his eyes; they widened when he saw the chocolate milk carton and he sat up quickly and grabbed it. 'Where did you get that?' he asked.

  'There is one each! Dayee Masood got them for us. He went out on his bike and got them for us while we were sleeping.'

  Dayee Masood looked at me and smiled and I saw in that smile that he loved me right through to the core of my heart, with all of his.

  'Maman Shamsi, when we come back to Iran, can we come and live here with you?' I was old enough now to sit outside the street with Maman Shamsi and her neighbours and listen to their chatter as they destalked mounds of parsley and coriander or prepared a mountain of garlic and vegetables for pickling.

  'Why do you want to come back to Iran? Don't you want to stay in London and learn all the new songs?'

  I shrugged. In England, no one could say my name right. They said Shap-er-rack. They didn't even know it meant butterfly. There was no pickled garlic in London either. Maman had made some but it was going to take a year before they were ready to eat. My mouth watered at the thought.

  'What happens if I eat the skins?' I asked Maman Shamsi.

  'Nothing, azizam, just your teeth will fall out.'

  I thought as much. If it wasn't for Maman Shamsi I'd be bald, with no teeth and with an apple tree growing in my stomach. Maman Shamsi had jars and jars of pickles in her larder. Nadia and I snuck in the kitchen sometimes when Tahereh wasn't around and stole our favourites from the pickle jars. Nadia loved the cauliflower, but I was only interested in the garlic. The cloves turned brown in the vinegar. I carefully peeled away the outside layer of skin. I caught the sharp, subtle, tangy smell, the juice of the clove running down my hand as I peeled away the outer shell. The inside was mushy. The older the jar, the mushier the pickle and the more delicious. I took it in my mouth and sucked on the fleshy clove. I used my tongue to squash it up against the roof of my mouth. I held it there and let it melt, the flavour trickling right down to my jaws.

  Maman Shamsi finished stemming her herbs and finished up her chatter for the day and we trotted back into the house. That evening, the herbs appeared again, in the form of kookoo sabzi and ghormeh sabzi.

  In London, we ate at tables, but Maman Shamsi still had her sofra.

  'Take the end and spread it out nice and neat.' I took the two ends of the cloth and pulled my end away from Maman Shamsi and together we spread it out neatly on the floor.

  The sofra was elaborately decorated. It had the typical swirls of paisley that appeared on, it seemed, all Iranian art and soft furnishing. Printed on the sofra were images of Darius the great warrior holding his spear. The samovar in the corner of the room which kept our hot sweet chai constant throughout the day had images of Cyrus. Cyrus the Great was the King of Persia and Maman told us all about him for our bedtime stories. He made the Persian Empire but said he 'would not reign over the people if they did not wish it'. Maman said Cyrus was good because he didn't force anyone to change their religion and was one of the first great rulers to say how important freedom was. I looked at his face on the little chai glasses and wondered if he would be nice or grumpy if I met him now. Every tray, bowl and plate was a constant reminder of the Persian Empire. 'The greatest empire in the world!' Baba Mokhtar was always saying. 'You descend from noble warriors so eat your meat, and you'll be as strong as Khashayar!' English people couldn't say 'kh' so they called Khashayar 'Xerxes'. Khashayar Shah was Darius's son and he married Cyrus's daughter Atoosa. When he was King, he wasn't as nice as Darius and Cyrus, but Iranians loved him anyway and printed his image on chai glasses and plates.

  'I helped with the food!' I announced as everyone arrived for dinner and sat cross-legged and barefoot around the sofra. I had helped lay the sofra with tonight's dinner. You could hardly see the paisley and other patterns now, it was covered with a massive tray of saffron rice, two different types of khoresh to put over the rice. There was a separate plate piled high with tadigh, the part of the rice that crisps up at the bottom of the pan in the hot oil and water and saffron and makes the most delicious part of the meal. Even the adults fought over the last bit of tadigh, not just me and Peyvand. The food was carried across the yard from the kitchen by Maman Shamsi and Tahereh. There was salad, bread from the bakery, still hot from the tanoor, yoghurt and pickles.

  My heart sank whenever someone reached for the jar of pickled garlic. 'They'll finish it all!' I complained. Maman Shamsi assured me she had plenty. There was no guarantee the other jars would be as delicious as this jar so Baba put it right next to me on the sofra and said, 'Someone get another jar of garlic pickle from the pantry. This one is Shaparak's and no one else is allowed to touch it.'

  We all ate in the big living room. There was a television in there but apart from me and Peyvand watching The Magic Roundabout (Zebedee spoke Farsi here!) no one ever turned it on. There were big cushions all around the room to sit on instead of a sofa and nobody ever came into the house with shoes on. There was a pile of house slippers at the door in every size imaginable for people to put on when they went to the toilet or the kitchen across the yard.

  Only rich people had bathrooms in their houses. Everyone else used the hammams, the local public baths. Maman Shamsi and Baba Mokhtar, however, were the only people in their whole street who had a bathroom. Baba Mokhtar had built a shower room in the basement of the outhouse, just below Tahereh's room. It was a small room with a stone floor and a giant plug hole. The shower head was huge and fixed high up to the wall so when it was turned on it was like an indoor rainstorm. Baba Mokhtar could build anything, anything at all.

  We still went on our weekly trips to the hammam with Maman Shamsi. 'It's my one day a week to get away from everyone, shower or not, we must go to the hammam.' It was where Maman Shamsi went to catch up with her friends, catch up with gossip. Hammams were where you discussed births, deaths and marriages.

  The hammam was a short walk from
Maman Shamsi's house. Trooping there with our towels under our arms we met other women and their children and the group got bigger as the neighbourhood women went off to have their bath.

  The main room was full of steam. There was a small pool in the middle where five or six women sat scrubbing each other's backs and talking. The water was very warm but no matter how much I wanted to, I couldn't pee in it. Maman Shamsi told me that the hammam workers always knew who peed in the water and they would come and get you and throw you out without your clothes on. I didn't doubt they would do this. The hammam workers never smiled. They were called dalaaks and wore black and for a few pennies scrubbed bathers with a keeseh, a rough, very coarse type of loofah. If you didn't see rolls of your skin coming off, they were not doing it properly. 'Aiiii! It hurts!'

  'Shhhh, Bacheha! Do you want to get clean or not!'

  I scowled at the old lady with a crooked nose as she rubbed my skin raw.

  The women in the hammam were all different sizes and shapes. There were old ones like Maman Shamsi with skin all saggy and wrinkly. There were young ones too, nice and slim with smooth skin.

  In the hammam, everyone had something to say about what someone else looked like. 'Vai! Mitra! What's happened to you, you've got so fat!' or 'Soosan, you are too skinny now! Are you ill? Are you depressed? What's the matter? You look terrible!' Soosan looked fine to me, but Iranian women were always saying you were fatter or thinner or saying things like 'Oh, please sort out your hair, azizam, it looks really bad.' They were the same in London.

  One day I saw Jaleh again in the hammam. She was with her mother Homa Khanoom and Jhila Khanoom, who the ladies said was the mother of a boy they were hoping to marry Jaleh off to. Marry Jaleh off. I didn't say a word, I kept Jaleh's secret. She looked at me and smiled and said, 'What a sweet little girl,' but she gave me a wink to say she remembered me.

  As the group went to the shower rooms to rinse off, Maman Shamsi and her friends discussed the event. 'It must be a serious proposal, if they are bringing her to the hammams,' said Batool Khanoom, one of Maman Shamsi's neighbours.

  Maman Shamsi tutted. 'Such a backward thing. Parading the poor girl around like she's prize oxen.'

  'Well,' Batool Khanoom said, 'a mother should see what her son is getting before he commits to marrying her. My cousin married a girl his family was led to believe was very religious because she always wore her hejab tight, even when she was only around the women. That first night together he discovered she was almost completely bald!'

  Mona Khanoom, another neighbour, shook her head in horror and declared, 'A man has a right to know what he is getting. He doesn't want to take his bride to bed on the wedding night and discover she's got a lot of ugly scars or something.'

  'So what if she has scars or not? In the end she'll end up old and saggy like us. What matters is her character, whether they are compatible.'

  'She'll never marry Jhila Khanoom's son anyway,' Glomar Khanoom, the baker's wife, spoke as she summoned a dalaak to scrub her back. With a twinkle in her eye she said, 'Everybody knows she's in love with Shamsi Khanoom's Masood!'

  Maman Shamsi tossed her head dismissively up in the air. 'All the girls in the neighbourhood are in love with our Masood. He can't have twenty wives! If they all wait for him they'll become torshideh.'

  The women nodded and agreed that it was better if they could persuade Jaleh to marry someone else as Masood was too young and was enjoying himself too much to settle down. Jaleh was sweet and beautiful and it would be a shame if she became overripe.

  In the hammam I was not a little girl, I was a woman, like Maman, Maman Shamsi and all the others who sat around the pool and shower rooms, bonding and talking, replenishing our souls before going back to the world of men.

  MARCOURT LAWNS

  No matter how many times Maman explained the difference between renting a flat and buying a flat, I still couldn't understand why we were moving from the Kensington flat to a new flat in a place called Ealing.

  'We are buying a flat so it's ours, this flat belongs to someone else.'

  'Then why don't they live here?'

  'Why don't you go and let your dolls know we're leaving?'

  I had already told them and they didn't mind where we lived so didn't say much. I knew Maman was just trying to get rid of me because she was packing so I went to talk to Baba instead.

  'What about Iran? Aren't we going home?'

  'Not yet,' Baba said. 'We are going to plant some roots in London,' he told us. We had two homes now, our smart new flat in Tehran, and one at 11 Marcourt Lawns, Ealing W5.

  Maman took us to Hyde Park to say goodbye. We said goodbye to the swings, the roundabout, the sandpit and the dogs. I kissed a daisy and told it we would be back to play there again one day. In our flat, we said goodbye to the saloon doors and the burned bit of carpet in the corner of the living room and moved to our new two-bedroom flat with a balcony.

  Buying a flat was a commitment to our new life in England. I had already committed by learning the alphabet and 'Jingle Bells' as well as all the nursery rhymes better than everyone else. I still couldn't understand what English people were saying most of the time though.

  Our flat was on the third floor, and had a balcony overlooking gardens we were to share with our neighbours. There was a big rose garden in the lawns. If you plucked a big thorn off, you could stick it on your nose like a horn and it would stay there for ages, as long as you didn't move around too much.

  'You leave them roses alone!' It was Mr Canning, the caretaker of our block. He was old and small with a tanned wrinkly face. He made us both jump out of our skins. We didn't think there would be someone guarding the bushes. I took the thorn off my nose and tried to stick it back on a rose. It fell to the ground.

  Mr Canning did not like kids. 'You're a bleeding nuisance, that's what,' he told us. When Mr Canning went to our flat to complain to Baba about us 'bleeding kids' he ended up with lots of whisky inside him and a promise from Maman to make him some more kotlet and bring it down for him and his wife.

  'I ain't just an Englishman, Hadi, I'm the best kind: a cockney. When a cockney's your mate, you got a mate for life!'

  Mr Canning became a regular guest at our flat, drinking whisky with Baba and eating whatever Maman had cooked that day. He liked most of the food and each time had to be assured that it wasn't hot. 'I can't stand spicy food,' he impressed upon Maman and Baba each time. He had had Indian tenants once, he explained. 'I had a little triangle thing, my mouth caught fire!'

  Tucking in to Maman's lamb and aubergine dish he said, 'This is like Greek food!'

  Maman corrected him: 'Greek food is like our food!'

  Baba spoke cockney. If he saw Mr Canning from across the car park Baba would raise his arm and shout, 'Orraaat, mayte!' and make other nonsense sounds just using vowels. Mr Canning always waved and said, 'Alwight, mate' back.

  Mr Canning lived on the ground floor with his wife Betty, who was warm and wrinkly and never shouted at us.

  We were playing among the rose bushes in the garden, seeing who could get the most thorns on their nose, when Betty saw us from her kitchen window on the first floor and called out to us. 'I've got some biccies hot from the oven, come on in and have some.'

  I wasn't sure what 'biccies' were but they were bound to be something to eat and we had never been inside Mr Canning's flat before. It was exactly the same shape as our flat but different in every other way. All Iranian homes, including our own, were decorated with the standard miniature paintings, usually of a beautiful young woman with eyebrows that joined in the middle who was holding out an apple or a glass of wine to a handsome young man with a moustache and a helmet. There was always a samovar in view somewhere and Persian rugs and throws on the floor and walls. Iranian houses smelled of herbs and tea and you were brought fruit, plates of bakhlava and other sweets the moment you stepped through their door unannounced.

  Betty and Mr Canning's flat was the first time I had stepped into an En
glish person's actual home. Betty met us at the door with her apron that had flour all over it. 'Come in, come in, ooh you are sweet things, aren't you?' She put an arm around each of us and gave us a kiss on the head as we went in. It smelled lovely in there. The hallway was milky, like English people, but as we went further in we knew that 'biccies' were going to be the chocolatiest, most delicious things we had ever had. I wanted to lick the air. I peeped into the living room on the way to the kitchen. They didn't have any Persian rugs. They had a carpet with big green flowers all over it. Their sofa had a flowery print and so did their wallpaper, pink roses. The pictures on the wall were of bunches of flowers and there was a little bowl of dried rose petals on their table.

  Betty fussed over Peyvand like all grown-ups did; she stroked his creamy cheeks and said, 'My goodness! Haven't you got the most beautiful brown skin! You're like a piece of chocolate!' She said my hair was very shiny, but I could tell she liked Peyvand the best. Peyvand had perfect manners and didn't 'gawp' like people said I did. His eyes were bigger than mine too, and he didn't get as shy as I did so always said please and thank you and 'no thank you'.

  Betty wore big cloth gloves and took a tray out of the oven that looked as if it had been in there a million times. 'The oven's been off a while, but this is still quite hot so be careful.'

  The 'biccies' were big and round and brown and warm. I bit into one and immediately wanted another. The outside was crisp but the inside was moist and gooey. I had five and Betty said, 'My goodness, you do have a good appetite.' We sat eating the circles of sheer heaven at Betty's kitchen table, a foldaway one like ours, and she poured us each a glass of squash. I wanted to stay in her kitchen for ever and ever.

  'It's so nice to have children in my kitchen again,' Betty said and took my hand. She gave it a kiss then turned my palm upwards. Then, with her finger, she drew a circle around my palm and sang 'round and round the garden, like a teddy bear, one step, two steps, tickly under there!'