Off the Beaten Track: In Hot Water - From Japan to Morocco

Our guest this week is Edith Maxwell, whose mystery novels feature Quaker Linguistics professor, Lauren Rousseau. The first, SPEAKING OF MURDER, is in search of publication. Her short stories have appeared in THIN ICE and RIPTIDE by Level Best Books, the LARCOM REVIEW, and the NORTH SHORE WEEKLY, as well as the forthcoming FISH NETS. Edith holds a PhD in Linguistics and lives in historic Ipswich, Massachusetts, with her beau, four cats, and several fine specimens of garden statuary. She works as a technical writer when she's not writing fiction.She is a member of Sisters in Crime, and is on the board of the New England chapter. Edith blogs weekly on topics relating to SPEAKING OF MURDER at Speaking of Mystery. Look for her as Edith M. Maxwell on Facebook, and @edithmaxwell on Twitter.

I'm so pleased to be a guest here among this group of intrepid travelers/writers. I have also traveled widely, lived in disparate place like Brazil, Japan, and Mali for a year or two each, and am a mystery author.

I was thrilled to discover the sento, or public baths, when I lived in Japan for two years in the mid-1970s. They were widely used, because many homes did not include a bath.

The baths were segregated by gender. I was still learning to speak the language when I first ventured into the building, so I just followed what I saw others doing. Females from birth to 100 removed cotton pants, blouses, or kimonos in the common changing area and hung them on hooks without any evidence of embarrassment or self-consciousness. As the sole gaijin – foreigner – I was the self-conscious one. Women stole sideways glances and little girls stared at me and giggled.

I knew from reading that you wash first and then soak. A well-lit tiled room featured faucets every few feet along each wall and down the middle. You grabbed a blue plastic bin and a little wooden stool and picked a faucet. Lather up, rinse off, and repeat.

Women in the Kiyonaga Bathhouse

When I was clean, I followed a woman into a steamy room with two large bathing pools enclosed by low tile walls. I put a foot in and drew it out in a big hurry. It was HOT. I couldn't believe tender babies and elderly women sat soaking in that boiling pot. Someone pointed me to the other pool. It was marginally cooler, at least enough for me to lower myself in. It being Japan, people were shy about talking to foreigners, but I did eventually get some timid smiles.

After the bath session, people walked away even mid-winter wearing sandals with no socks. Your body was so heated it kept you warm all the way home. And I always slept like a baby that night.

When my son was in Morocco last year for a study abroad semester, he wrote his own blog post about visiting the public bath, the hammam, with his host father. We visited him for two weeks, and checking out the hammam with his host mother, Farida, was high on my list. I was sort of expecting a similar experience to the Japanese one. Boy, was I wrong!

Host Mother Farida

Bath doesn't exactly describe it. More like a willing deep slide into into all the senses, no holding back. I followed Farida like a lamb into a dark high-ceiling long room and then into to the next room, a less dimly lit copy of the first. It lined up in parallel with the first and another beyond, three long chambers that the passageway bisected. The stone walls were dark with moisture and centuries of steamed human skin cells.

We did wash first, just like in Japan. Then a woman named Baresha, a massage/scrubber Farida knew, started scrubbing me in a casual way that soon turned firm. She moved my body around in all dimensions. The treatment was both luxurious and painful. My head rested on Baresha's ample thigh as she sat splay legged. I closed my eyes and submit to having my chest, breasts, stomach scrubbed and massaged over and over. My legs were worked top to bottom and then my front torso again.

She turned me on my side to face her and scraped my pale skin up and down. A large pendulous breast was in my face. I closed my eyes again, loving it all. She turned me to the other side, extended my arm, scrubbing my armpit, side, hip. My neck, back, buttocks, and legs also got the full treatment.

Moroccan Hammam

When I was  finally brought back to sitting, Farida laughed and showed me the multitude of particles rolled into tiny dark fibers all over me that came from my skin. That WERE my skin.

All this time, women talked. Low voices, shrill voices. Greetings and negotiations. Children speaking to their mothers, friends catching up on neighborhood news. Not a word of it could I understand. The language echoed and merged. It washed over me as welcome as the bucket of warm water Baresha dumped over me, even as she still rubbed and cleaned.

In my year each in Mali and Burkina Faso, in West Africa, I never heard of a public bath.You can bet I would have been there in a flash.

Murder in the Bathhouse

Bagh-e Fin, Kashan

It’s never a good idea to insult your boss’s mother. Especially if your employer is the king. It’s even worse if the lady in question is also your mother-in-law. You could very well end up exiled to the provinces and eventually find yourself bleeding on the floor of a bathhouse with a knife in your heart.

Sounds like an intriguing mystery, doesn’t it? This one, however, happened in real life.

The king in our story was Nasser-ed-Din, the fourth Qajar shah, who ruled Persia from 1848 until his assassination in 1896. His mother, Mahd Ulya, considered it her duty to run his personal life with a firm hand, and she saw no reason why affairs of state should be beyond her sphere of influence. The third member of this unfortunate triangle was Nasser-ed-Din’s prime minister (also his tutor and mentor), Mirza Taghi Khan Amir-Nezim, also known by the far more manageable name of Amir Kabir.

Amir Kabir

Mahd Ulya launched her feud with Amir Kabir almost from the moment her husband died and her son ascended the throne. According to Qajar tribal custom, the Queen Mum expected to marry her son’s prime minister. But Amir rejected her in favor of her fourteen-year-old daughter, Malekzadeh Ezzatodoleh.

Nasser-ed-Din, who was only seventeen when he became shah, inherited a country on the verge of chaos. Mismanagement and two costly wars with Russia and England had left Persia in bad shape, and the young king relied on his prime minister for advice.

Always a reformist, Amir Kabir’s approach to solving the country’s problems included bolstering the army to defend the national borders, improving education (he founded the first modern university), and reorganizing the central government along more efficient and less despotic lines. The latter included cutting the lavish salaries that the royal family drew from the Treasury. The prime minister’s reforms did not sit well with Mahd Ulya, the new shah’s mother.

Mahd Ulya, the Queen Mum

Her battle with Amir Kabir came to a head when he accused her of promiscuity and convinced her son to banish her to Qom, one of Iran’s most conservative, religious cities.

Mahd Ulya fought back with a smear campaign of her own. She convinced the king that his prime minister was plotting to overthrow him. (According to one version of the story, Nasser-ed-Din was drunk at the time.) Amir Kabir’s own personality played right into her hands. His arrogance and disregard for royal protocol made it easy for the king to accept the truth of the accusation.

The young king, who was twenty by now, sent his prime minister into exile in Kashan, a desert town 150 miles south of Tehran. Amir Kabir spent his final months in the Bagh-e Fin, a garden palace that had been a royal vacation getaway for centuries.

Nasser-ed Din Shah

I can easily believe that any banishment from the center of power would be an intolerable hardship for a man like Amir Kabir, bordering on torture. Not for me, though. Bagh-e Fin is a green oasis in the unforgiving desert, filled with shady trees, bubbling streams, and quiet reflecting pools, all of it surrounded by high stone walls.

On one side is a hamam, or bathhouse, dug deep into the ground and fed by the same ancient spring that flows through the garden. The hamam features a series of subterranean chambers with blue-tiled pools for bathing, some filled with hot water, others with cold. Within the complex is a warm-up room with lockers for storing clothes and shoes, a sauna, and an area with shallow basins for scrubbing away the dirt of the day.

Site of Amir Kabir's Murder

Amir Kabir didn’t have long to enjoy such pampering—or to plot for release from his prison, as the case may be. Six weeks after arriving in Kashan, two assassins entered the hamam while the deposed prime minister was enjoying his bath. One held him down while the other slashed his wrists. They waited for him to bleed to death and then the deed was done: the Queen Mum won the war.

Ever since I visited Bagh-e Fin and its infamous hamam, the image of this great and powerful man in his bath, naked and helpless, his blood staining the marble floor, has fired my imagination. How would things have turned out had Amir Kabir accepted tradition and married Mahd Ulya after all?