indahnya iran 2

wanita iran...

alam semulajadi iran

This is the front door

the car port

Here is the old former Sepehr residence, 30 years later.
It was here where I first stayed the summer of 1966 when I was 16 and under the dining room, here seen from outside, is the Zirzameen for which my book and this site are named.

So many parties there, so many siestas, so many dates, so many teas…it was in the bagh around the back where I first saw Shohreh Aghdashlou being filmed dipping her toes in the hose…it was here that the late Princess Nazak Pahlavi as a teenager, would elude her body guards and come to hide and hang out with us…and across the kuche was the Farshad residence…we all use to walk back and forth between our houses like they were connected…42 years later we are all still friends…Aryana Farshad continues to make award winning films and Massoumeh Price, who also was a frequent guest at this house continues to write books about Iran…

so many memories….

BA

Former Farshad residence

on the otherside of this old door, Kavous and I, in the garden would use it as a back stop while shooting his Beretta pistol for target practice.

This was/is Kuche Goharshad with the jube running down the middle and where Lolahozi the car washer lived.

directly across the street was/is Hotel Naderi

almost every evening I would walk from my apartment at Kuche Khaghani to Sepehrs’ house on Kuche Goharshad past Mehdun-e-Ferdowsi, where the French Club was.

This was my third apartment in Tehran on Kuche Khaghani. The third story window was my kitchen. From that window, I would toss scraps to a pack of stray dogs who napped in my alley and during the revolution, it was here that a half track with three soldiers and a tripod mounted machine gun were parked who opened up on the rally going on across the street at the teachers’ college.

It was later in Mashad and Herat that I learned who Princess Goharshad, that the alley was named after, was and who the poet Khaghani was that my alley was named for. So many Americans never learned a word of Farsi in all the years they lived in Iran let alone anything about their poets and their patrons of the arts and learning. Sometimes I feel like Americans are the 21st century Mongols…