Just folks (in Iran)

This coming April will be the tenth anniversary of my two-week visit to Iran with a college alumni group.  The trip was educational and eye-opening in many ways, and especially in affording us contacts with ordinary Iranians at play and at work.  As I wrote on this blog at the time, I was impressed by how similar to average Americans they seemed, in their warmth and in their sense of humor.

Besides Tehran, we visited cities all over the country, from Mashad near the Afghan border, to Kerman and Yazd in the southern desert, to Shiraz and Isfahan in the west.  Yazd was impressive as a center of the Zoroastrian faith, the pre-Muslim faith of Persia, and the home of now-disused "Towers of Silence," (photo) where the dead were ceremonially commended to the attention of vultures, before burial of their bones.

I was reminded of this trip by my reading of a YA novel, Darius the Great Is Not Okay (2018), about a high school sophomore in Portland, Oregon, who, with his entire family, visits his mother's Zoroastrian relatives in Yazd.  The story had several themes, especially the fact that both the boy and his father suffered from -- and were routinely medicated for -- depression.  The boy (Darius) was mildly bullied -- he didn't feel it was "mildly" -- both because of his behavioral peculiarities linked to his depression and because of his half-Iranian ancestry.  

In Yazd, Darius meets a boy (Sohrab) his own age -- son of family friends -- who befriends Darius with warmth and acceptance.  Their friendship is helped by the fact that Darius had developed pretty good soccer skills back in Portland, although -- being depressed -- he considers himself a lousy player.

The story itself is interesting, but most interesting to me was the portrayal of the Iranian background.  Darius meets his grandparents for the first time, and discovers what warm, loving people they are.  He and Sohrab explore Yazd together.  With his family, Darius visits the Tower of Silence (the book oddly ignores the contributions of vultures to the burials), and makes the five-hour drive to the ruins at Persepolis.  We learn a lot of Farsi words, phrases, and greetings.  We learn a lot about Persian food.  And Darius brings from Portland his own obsession with varieties of tea.

We also learn not only about Zoroastrianism, but a bit about the Baháʼí faith, the religion to which Sohrab's family belongs.  Unlike the protected religions of Islam, Judaism, Christianity, and Zoroastrianism,  Baháʼí  believers are often persecuted under the Islamic Republic.

The author, Adib Khorram, is himself the son of Baháʼí parents who immigrated to Kansas City in the 1980s.  He has never visited Iran himself, but has pieced together an impressively detailed account of life in Yazd, relying on talks with family members, including those still in Iran, photographs, and research.  The book made me want to revisit Iran, a visit that probably is unlikely in the present political climate.  It also made me conscious of the difficulties faced by people of all ages who suffer from clinical depression.