Nowruz and Agha Bozorg’s New Year Gifts

At last Nowruz had arrived. The excitement of new clothes, seeing our relatives, and having a holiday filled every part of me. Agha Bozorg and Khanom Joon were elders of the family, so in the first few days we always had a stream of guests. It was wonderful. My father had borrowed the neighbors’ colored lights to decorate the courtyard. Khanom Joon had made nan-e panjereh pastries and ranginak. The whole house felt festive. All my uncles and aunts had come to be with Agha Bozorg and Khanom Joon at the moment the new year began, which was around eight in the morning that year. Afterward, the women started frying fish and cooking the rice with herbs. The men sat around Agha Bozorg in the courtyard, watching him play backgammon with Khan Amu. When the game ended, Agha Bozorg called the children over. He pulled a packet of balloons from his pocket and blew one up for each of us. We played for a bit. Then he brought out a marker, wrote each of our names on our balloons, and told us to follow him. We went into the inner part of the house. He tossed all the balloons into the room where the bedding was kept. “You have two minutes,” he said. “Go find your own balloon.” There were about twenty of us. We charged into the room, so flustered that we screamed, shouted, and climbed over one another. It was chaos. We spent the whole time getting in one another’s way. When the two minutes were up, not one of us had found our own balloon. “Let’s try again,” Agha Bozorg said. “This time, when you pick up a balloon, read the name on it, call out to its owner, and give it to them.” He gave us another two minutes. We went in laughing. One child called, “Sahar, here’s your balloon!” Another called for Mehdi. Someone found their own. In the blink of an eye, every balloon had found its owner. We came out, and Agha Bozorg laughed. “You still have a minute left! Well done!” Then he said, “Remember, life is like this. Everyone is looking for their own happiness and their own good name. But when you go after them alone, without paying attention to anyone else, they’re hard to find. “The truth is, our happiness and success depend on the happiness and success of others. Our lives are tied together. Once you learn to help other people find themselves and their joy, you’ll find yourself, too. And someone may find your joy for you.” If Agha Bozorg were here today, he would tell us to stand together and fight this darkness. We won’t reach freedom one by one, on our own. Long live Iran. Long live the Shah.