Iran Book News Agency (IBNA) - I'm Not Janette

Reading a page of a book out of thousands and millions of pages is, for us, like looking through a window on brighter side of the world that is constantly calling us, tempting us to set on a journey with the frigate of a book for more and more adventures...

Birthday of Reza Deldare Nick

“We are poor momma,” I said. I remember I did not weep, the truth about poverty was as clear to me as sunshine. Mother took my coat off and peered at the cream spot Hamed Sanati had left on my back with his dirty fingers. “We are poor, momma,” my tone was not interrogatory; I had just informed her of a fact. “Who says we are poor?” mother asked. I said; it was my own idea and you cannot persist in your ideas when you are seven years old. “Reza’s courtyard is so big like the school yard.” Mother kept her finger under the cream spot on the coat, hugged the coat the way she hugged my little sister and went out of the room. I followed her saying, “And their toilet smells nice.”

Pointing to me with her finger still under the coat and pouring some bleach with the other hand in a melamine bowl, mother said: “Their house belongs to the organization, my son. But we own our house. We are richer.” Perhaps I would have accepted the idea of being richer, but sometimes when you are seven years old you like to disaccord with certain things, or take them the way you please. Hence, the criterion of wealth measurement for me is neither a house of one’s own property, nor monthly revenues or 64-inch-wide Home Theaters. For me, the most significant sign of richness is Trax deodorizer. So my mother had to look for Trax everywhere in Rasht markets of 1986 when we were all distressed with war, ate Bulgarian cheese, Polish butter and Brazilian frozen meet, played American ATARI and wore Chinese sneakers. There was no Trax deodorizer in the market and I concluded that we were poor.

“Besides, only one of them works, but both your dad and I work and make money,” she explained. But the number of working members of a family did not count when their bathroom had no Trax. Then my dad went to Tehran to find Trax for me. My father looked for a Trax deodorizer all over Tehran markets and health and beauty centers right in the time of bombardments – when everyone fled from Tehran to safer places. He went to buy wealth for me, to bring me a sense of richness but he did not find one and I grew up with a perpetual sense of poverty.