Mother of eggs

Usha Wadhwa

IT was my first morning in Tehran and I had no intention of breaking my bath-before-breakfast routine. But finding no trace of soap in my hotel bathroom, I rang the service bell and a tall young man appeared soon. In response to my request for soap, he uttered some words with no meaning. “Oh, the eternal language problem!” I decided on the other means of communication which knows no language boundaries. I rubbed my arm with my right hand. A signal clear enough. A light gleamed in his eyes as he dashed away, returning with a bottle of oil. 

I am standing in the middle of the room so he is not associating it with bath, I tried to analyse. I went and stood at the bathroom door and rubbed my head vigorously with my hands. My genie produced a shampoo this time. I sat down dejected, saying aloud, “Sabun, chahiye, sabun.” 

“Oh, sabun?” the boy echoed and added some words in Farsi which I could not understand, but the tone implied that “if it was only sabun you wanted, why all this fuss?” 

I learnt an important lesson. In Iran if you are not able to explain yourself in English, try your own commonly used words instead. You have a better chance of success. Farsi is the medium of instruction throughout, including professional courses. Only those who have learnt English by their own efforts can communicate in it and definitely it is not Queen’s English. 

Our Iranian friend invited us for lunch on a Friday, the weekly holiday. As we had no personal conveyance, he graciously offered to pick us up at “seven sharp”. Does the hostess expect us to go and cook our own lunch, I wondered. Apologetically, I asked him, “Can you make it a bit late, please? We may still be asleep at seven.”

“Oh, no!” he said. “I mean the night lunch. I will come at seven in the evening.”

After that, many a time we were invited to dinners in the morning, lunches at night. 

Once a man was collecting naans from the dustbin just outside our house. As the precooked naans are highly subsidised, they are sold very cheap and a lot of them are just thrown away. 

“What does this man intend to do with these naans?” I asked my landlady. She contemplated for a while, trying to form a sentence, and then said, “He breaks them into small pieces---”, pausing again, her eyes lit up with the joy of finding the correct word, “then he feeds them to the mother of eggs.” 

In my own version of Farsi, aided by hand gestures, I was ordering lunch at a restaurant and was trying to explain to the waiter that I wanted a vegetarian meal. The boy could not contain his curiosity, with the help of all the English words that he could summon at that moment, he asked in a questioning tone, “You are made in---?”

I looked up to see what object had suddenly caught his interest and met with his innocent direct glance. He was asking about me! 

Suppressing uncontrollable laughter, I said, “I am made in India.”