My maternal grandfather finally gave in to my grandmother’s request and they both went on a Haj pilgrimage. He had benefited from a huge heritage before. He was the son of a petty landowner and had estates of his own. He loved driving but he never got his driver’s license out of snobbery; he used to bribe the cops on a monthly basis so that they wouldn’t pull him over. In the prime of his life, he started working in the personal status registration office of the city just to pass the time. He had a neat handwriting and became a birth certificate writer; he traveled from city to city and from village to village to play his role in registering the early surnames of the inhabitants there. He was facetious and together with his colleagues he chose odd surnames for the illiterates due to ethnocentrism and the frictions between the dwellers of the city and of the village. The illiterates, not knowing anything, accepted the surnames. There are still many people around the city living with those surnames. Later he kind of knew everyone and because of this knowledge, whenever a close or distant relative came to him to ask for information about the girl or boy his son or daughter was going to marry, he used to puff up and ramble. The close or distant relative listened very carefully to his words and set the marriage in his mind since my grandfather always uttered favorable stuff and was pro-marriage. But once, his speech was stopped in the very first sentence. He said: “The great grandfather of that family had a tail”. That was all.
In his middle age he realized that his wealth had been spent on parties and drinking and only a little saving was left. He opened a store and became a businessman. However, he was not successful in it, so he decided to move his family to Tehran and start a new life. He invested what was left of his money in a factory, bought a house and abstained from partying and splurging.
It was exactly one year later that he accepted my grandmother’s request and they went on a Haj pilgrimage. In Mecca, many of the tents were burnt and a great number of Hajis were burnt and died. My grandparents survived this incident and it became a turning point in my grandfather’s life. He started throwing parties again, but this time in a religious form.
A couple of months ago, despite his weak heart and the strong advice of his doctor and children that he should avoid heavy sports, he picked up his Zurkhaneh1 meels out of childish pig-headedness to show that there’s life in the old dog yet. The next morning while he was sitting on the sofa and was holding his little grandchild, he had a peaceful heart attack and dropped dead.
- Traditional Iranian system of athletics, a combination of martial arts, calisthenics, strength training and music.↩