A Cemetery Visit

Saturday 8 March 2008

I still continue to have problems with signing in the blog and posting new entries. I’ve finally decided to write up the entries in Word and post them whenever I’m lucky enough to be able to sign in, so you may notice that the entry date and the posting date may be out of sync. As the Iranians say, forgive me in your kindness.

Yesterday Hossein, the children, my elder sister-in-law and her family and I went to visit our dead at the Behesht-e Zahra Cemetery. Aqa jun and maman-jun, my in-laws, are buried in a two-storey grave (don’t imagine a tall grave; both storeys are below ground) with a granite gravestone level with the ground. It was a triple occasion: a Friday, the anniversary of the Holy Prophet’s death and of the third Imam’s martyrdom, so the cemetery was full of people giving out pledges of thick potage (ash) and saffron rice dessert (shollehzard).

Hossein spread a rug on the next grave and sat square-legged to read the Ar-Rahman chapter from the Holy Quran. This is a chapter about the blessings that God has given the world. A little girl came round and offered us sweets in exchange for a prayer for the dead. A little boy with torn trousers scattered wheat seeds on aqa jun’s and maman-jun’s grave. My brother-in-law gave him some money: the good deed of feeding the birds gives comfort to the souls of the departed.

Beyond a few rows of graves, a young man bent down to a grave and kissed the gravestone. Than he sat square-legged and started crying his eyes out. I listened to Hossein’s reading for a bit, and looked at the young man. The weight of the whole world on his shoulders, he remained bent over the grave, one hand spread on the gravestone as if trying to reach out to those he’s lost.

Two women with faded, patched chadors came over and exchanged hellos with us. They had known aqa-jun when he used to come to visit maman-jun’s grave every Thursday. One of them, Zahra khanum, told him that she had no heating in her room. Aqa-jun promised to get her a small gas stove she could use for cooking and heating. (Aqa-jun was an informal but well-known charity worker: many gave money or things to charity through him, as he knew many needy people and helped out whenever he could.) A few days later he brought the stove in his decrepit pick-up truck (if you haven’t read this blog since the beginning, see entry 28 July 2007) and waited for her for almost two hours at the grave to give her the stove. He was a good man, she said. May God rest his soul and give health and prosperity to his children.