You know it's always a right of everything natural and by the law of the land that at one point in time, things just had to turn really mucky.
For instance, your hard-earned pocket money went to that much desired popsicle. Only to have that last precious bite not to be savoured but falling with a dreaded splat on the burning tarmac. Your sad reflection on that little puddle, now running like fast tears, looking back at your stupidity, your own bad luck.
Or the time when you were rushing off to a sunset drink date and locked yourself out for good from your apartment? Reaching your compassionate landlady didn't get things fixed quite fast enough to render your arriving fashionably late. Only to find out later that date was an idiot and not worth the effort after all.
That you had a hard week and Friday looked like a good hint of heading off at clock-off. Then that rabbit-toothed boss of yours smugly slammed down a pile of "URGENT" proposal papers to be eyed through for thoroughness and accuracy despite your team's total effort in thumbing through those hundreds of pages as many times as the black willy hairs floating out of the pores on her upper lip. She wanted them by eight sharp on Monday for submission and she's counting on you. Turning on her heels, she sang out a goodbye and signed off her security card.
You found out that she went on medical leave due to "women's condition" on Monday. And the submission date was postponed to mid-week.
Thus, today began as an utter blind alley.
In other words, it was dud.
Lemon. Washout.
We departed after breakfast that was more like scooping up the remaining giblets of cucumber, sloshy tomatoes, one (1) slice of melon laying motionless with its invisible eyes beckoning me to surrender its will to my digestion so that it could do away with the sorrow of being unfit for consumption.
Nevermind that the driver drove like bats in the belfry. I gave up caring a long time ago since I arrived in Iran. It wasn't that it was worse than what I had encountered in the good parts of India, China, or even Turkey. But it was just a futile dispensation of my concern for my life. And we passed by the Zoroastrian's Tower of Silence as quickly as it appeared in our view. It was nothing entrancing. Modern roads burnt through its surroundings without a nod of its existence. An oddity formed by the sand processing plant stood out with its silo-looking furnace hoods while wind tunnels, badgir, grazed around like nonchalant clay giraffes. For reasons of hygiene, remaining observers of the faith had to bury their corpses within cemented lanes as dictated by the city council. Probably all the vultures left as well for they smelled too the sense of death to multi-genre of religious practices.
Stretching along the polluted 70km extension of tarmac lanes, we passed half-enthused shops mish-mashing between mechanics, pizza restaurants, insurance, and mostly graffiti-adorned steel shutters. Around the 50km mark, we reached Maybod, an old tired town mirroring its 1,800 years and beyond in age. There, in front of abandoned determination and giant effort to repress my rising fatal sense of disenchantment, laid the Narein Castle. A shadow of its former Sassanian glory, it was holding on to its crumbling 5,000 year-old foundation tiredly through the straw and mud patches tiled on by the odd part-time worker to restore whatever was still standing within the moat. What I found more disturbing was the fact that for as little care the place received, it suffered tremendously from the amount of litter the city deemed fit to dispose of at its site.
There you go - historical destruction at its perfection.
Not too far away stood the once famous yakh dan, or ice house built during the Safavid period to store the blocks of ice cut out from the mountain water that was collected from the local qanat, as seen in the caravanserai opposite the building. The roof bore an air barrier 70cm thick to ensure that temperature was conducive to supply the wealthy of the city its demand for ice during the notorious hotter summer months. Today, the three-door entrance was reduce to just one. With a tired looking guard unlocking it for a glimpse inside what was, once upon a time, a great marvel of the city's ingenuity.
Last stop before we headed out, the pigeon tower. Besides being a guano tavern, the Persians believed that if a child was having difficulty learning how to speak, you went to buy some pigeon eggs to feed the poor fellow. So much that it worked fabulously that a traditional saying for anyone with an incessant need to chatter on will be termed as having "too much pigeon eggs". Charmed. But today, it was a special enough lone tower with hundreds of holes chipped neatly to provide what was once coo-ing beds for our winged friends. Except today, the government's effort to recreate a few stuffed models resulted in a disastrous depiction of the most Macabre kind. I stood listening to our guide next to one brown spotted mass of feather, with a massive exploded fluff of cotton bursting out of its chest and a missing head, judging from the rusty wire that was sticking out of its thoracic cavity.
Could this get any worse?
After our cowboy of a driver / guide honked us little travellers into his car, we were warned that there would be absolutely no provision for lunch and nothing to buy should we be so inclined to have a bite of the cream biscuit. Last stop was a dingy shop that sold from everything your plumber needed to mortar shells of sugar. Then we set off, into the wild dusty town of Chak Chak.
This was Iran's most revered Zoroastrian pilgrimage site. Its onyx inlaid of the holy temple attracted thousands during the annual festival happening around mid June. Other days around the year such as today, population was two fossils of caretakers that had skin like well-preserved prunes. Other than that, it was utter silence. And rubbish, dripping marks of rotten food, and burning plastic bottles littered the surrounding. Thus making it hard to fathom its privileged anointed destination for religious piety, instead a real nightmare of sacrilege taking place irrefuteable through the sights and smells.
At this point, I was decidedly scrapping the bottom of the pot for hope. We drove on to Kharanaq, reputed to be thousands of years in history, inhabited until roughly 60 years ago when the last dweller left for the modern trappings of flushing system, electricity, and Tehran's foul air. Today, only one small family remained and two goats named Billy and Nanny (of course I gave them those names!). The Qajar-inspired "shaking" minaret was perhaps more of a loose foundation, made looser due to every guide's intention to court the oohs and aahhs from amongst us that thought having a bit of fun with a degenerating building was something to think nothing of.
B.I.Z.A.R.R.E.
No kidding. The layers of mud drying on the exposed bricks and wood were peeling off like sunburned skin. The entire city laid above the plush emerald carpets of cultivation, walled by a granite row of rocky hills that was separated by a lone blue bulb formed by the tiny mosque's dome. I could only imagine the loop holes outside of every room or chamber, depending on its size, likely to have held the travelling horses that had rode against the desert ghosts. Oily, black walls would had emanated smells of burning bread, pipping stews, while lanes rang with the laughter of children hiding from busy adults, burdened by the daily rituals of chores and fixing required in a living town. Sad hornets buzzed above our heads, singing out as if they were bewildered to see visitors. The clear river running outside snaked around half of the old city's diameter without having a single hand dipping into it, with its current rushing on chasing time in an endless, futile, aimless race.
I posed under the shade of another caravanserai overlooking a lone rose garden tended by a middle-aged gardener that appeared uninterested in conversation. Ahead of me, an old man bowed over like a perfect comma, approached with a sickle in hand. Immaculately dressed in his humble shirt, vest and baggy trousers, the flaps of his torn hat flew about like a mad bird taking flight. The hump on his back was so pronounced, it made the old man looked like he had a tiny hill planted above his back permanently as if the gods had an ill sense of humour.
Coming closer, I could hear the scratchy sound his brown leather slippers made in contact with the armies of broken pebbles. Within earshot, he paused and greeted me with those wrinkled eyes that contained a wink of welcome and smile. Ones that your instinctive notion just knew that someone had taken the time to acknowledge you with goodness and graciousness. Fumbling in my extremely limited Farsi, I replied salam. He tipped his head and walked on towards the gardener. From a distance, I could hear him bellowing like all old people who had their hearing leaving them many years ago but not their desire to catch on the day's gossip and irresistible urge to impart knowledge through his many years of tending those budding stalks.
There and then, alone in the gentle afternoon wind, I felt for the first time that everything will be beautiful again.
