Our servants in Iran

vajidarhoozrezanazi
Originally uploaded by roya parsay.

In Iranian culture there is a class of people called servants(khedmatkar). Most families in Tehran had atleast one. In my life we changed about 20 of them . Here is their names: Zahra Soltan, Kobra,Safieh, Firoozeh, Shahnaz, Masoome, Abbas, Vaji, Ali, Reza, Abedin, Hasssan shohar firozeh. Enayat , ataah, Esmael, Mahmoud , ali bia bai.. esmael kachal, Fatemeh, Safar, Abbas. Naneh sakineh.

The first servant I remember is Naaneh Sakineh. She was MY nanny. I liked her a lot. In reality she looked ugly and tarakhom took all of her eyelashes away ,but to me I would say ghorboone booye pirhanet..(love the smell of your robe) . She used to make mattresses (lahaf doozi) with my grandma is what I remember of her. Nanaeh sakineh was a nanny rather than a servant but they were all called khedmatkar. Kolfat was a woman servant and nokar a male one. We changed soooo many kolfat nokar its amazing. I want to list then an a brief description of each cause they were part of our life inevitably. BTW Ahmadinejad the president of Iranian looks like that class of people usually illiterate, dirty looking too. The majority were clean, kind but unfortunate to be forced to take this role for free room and board and some salary.. The most beautiful one I saw was NANEH ARAGHI my aunt’s kolfat. She ran away from Iraq and had a tattoo and was beautiful.
Well here they are in no particular order:
I guess the last kolfat nokar we had were Vajieh and Ali. They were Turkish and usually the husband was way older than the wife. Ali was way older than Vaji too. They would throw Turkish phrases like ghaasmagh for tahdig(crispy rice) and soo for water, or ishhak for donkey! They had a son called Reza. He was always eating and eating .bread,rice and was still hungry, he would say man ghoshneyam…Once he fell into pool and passed out and my father said reza here is some kabab , he opened his eyes immediately and we were worry free that he is o.k. He was cute looking . Vaji would work way more than Ali.I learned some Turkish like samavari soo vardi? (Is there water in the samovar?) . They lived in a room at the end of hayat, it used to be a garage , dark and full of hens . before they move in there we used to go and collect warm eggs just laid by hens in that dark place. One day the roof collapsed and their room was built instead and became kolfat nokar’s room . Before that there was a room next to the kitchen .

One thing I should say here and that is the fact that these people were all illiterate and they would come to us and ask us to write a letter . I was young and once one of them came and asked me to write him a letter to send to his village. I was tired of always writing say hello to Hassan, say hello to hossain, say hello to ali… so I started writing I am a donkey and you are all a donkey and hassan is a donkey…. And so on and he mailed it to his village. What happens next is that a person in that village has this job (nameh khan-letter reader) and I was hoping that he would read those sentences as nice ones. To this day I feel guilty and never knew what happened. The picture is Vaji and her 2 children Nazi and Reza cleaning our pool. I tell of others in the next posting