Write these down!

This is how the idea of writing these biographical sketches started:

In many movies, parents are advised to have quality time with their children. I wonder what that is. Usually, in movies, a parent’s attempt to create quality time often leads to disaster! So, because I am a wise person (!?), I have tried to avoid any quality time with my children. However, I may have inadvertently had some quality time with them. This has happened with both Shams and Nikoo, but especially with Shams. This has not been because Shams is a boy/son and Nikoo a girl/daughter. I am indifferent to their gender. Nonetheless, our quality times, as incidental as those may have been, have happened more with Shams, simply because I have given more rides in my car to Shams¹ than Nikoo!

Of course, it is a funny story. We, for all reasons and purposes, Pari and I, decided to move from Uppsala. Both Shams and Nikoo were against the move. Our arguments for the necessity of the move from Uppsala to a place closer to Stockholm had, obviously, no effect on them. The only argument that they had was related to their friends. So, in order to make them happy I was forced to promise that I would give them a ride whenever they wanted to visit their friends, or give a ride to their friends whenever they wanted to visit Shams or Nikoo (it was only Shams’ friends that used this option). I was, in any case, commuting between Uppsala and Täby every weekday. So, it was no big deal for me. Well, I gave a lot of rides. The one who used the free travel between Uppsala and Täby more than others was Shams.

A typical journey would start with I asking what Shams/Nikoo is going to do, or what he/she has done, how the friends have been, and other such mundane questions and answers. Then, there would be some silence, the two us sinking in our thoughts. However, every now and then, not necessarily at every journey, Shams/Nikoo would ask a question, a seemingly very simple one, like how did the two of you (Pari and myself) meet? Or how could Khomeini mange to seize the power?

It was my habit to think for a few seconds and try to remember how it was. The most important point, perhaps, was not to re-construct the past, but to tell it as it was perceived then. It didn’t matter if the question was of personal, social, scientific or political nature. Usually my long answers would trigger yet another seemingly simple question. This would then continue until we got to the destination. On more than one occasion, when we were quite close to home, Shams/Nikoo in a tone of excitement/curiosity would ask “Why don’t you write these down?” Let me be true to the words. Shams/Nikoo would ask me “cheraa inhaa raa neminevisi?” You know better than me that what Shams/Nikoo really meant was to give me a command: “Inhaa raa benevis!”, well …, “Write these down!”.

Of course, more people have persuaded me to write down the stuff that I had told them. But Nikoo/Pari/Shams were the most persistent of all.

Now, I am writing.

¹ This was true at the time of writing (probably around 2002). But not anymore. Between 2015 and 2018/2019 (after we moved to countryside) I gave ride to Nikoo many times.