Bonfires Of The Equinox

By Heidi Noroozy

Tomorrow morning, at precisely 8:44 a.m. Tehran time (or 10:14 p.m. tonight PST), Iranians, Tajiks, Afghans, and related cultures around the world will be ringing in the year 1391. The Persian New Year, or Eide-e Norooz (which I wrote about last year), coincides with the Spring Equinox and is celebrated at the same moment everywhere.

But the festivities really began last Tuesday with a fire festival called Chahar Shanbeh Souri, which translates as Red Wednesday, even though the celebrations begin at dusk on Tuesday night (and generally run into the wee hours of the morning). Like Norooz, Chahar Shanbeh Souri is celebrated throughout the world, wherever descendants of the ancient Persians can be found.

The Persians believed that the spirits of their ancestors, as well as guardian angels, returned to the world for a visit during the last ten days of the year. On the final Tuesday before the new year began, people built bonfires which were kept burning throughout the night, as a way to welcome these good spirit guests and to protect against evil forces. The idea was to keep a symbolic sun burning throughout the unluckiest night of the year.

Iranians today still build the bonfires much as their ancestors did, as I discovered on my first visit to Tehran a decade ago. That year, the fire festival coincided with the beginning of the holy Islamic month of Moharam, which commemorates the massacre of Imam Hossein and his Shia followers during the Battle of Karbala. Moharam is a time of sorrow and solemnity, not one of joy and celebration, so the authorities announced that Chahar Shanbeh Souri would be celebrated one week early.

This decision did not go over well with the citizens of Tehran, and many people simply celebrated the festival on the new (fake) date as well as the original (real) one, so I got to experience it twice in one year.

Shortly before dusk, I ventured out of the house with my sister-in-law and her husband. Our first stop was at a small shop, where we bought a matchbox-like packet of firecrackers – slender sticks that resembled cigarettes with an incendiary tip. You struck the firecracker against the box, just like a matchstick, and tossed the “cigarette” onto the street, where it exploded with a loud bang.

Not all the fireworks were so harmless, though. As we approached one street corner, my sister-in-law pointed to a man on the roof above our heads then shoved me into a doorway. Moments later, something dropped to the pavement with an earth-shaking boom, like a shot from a cannon at close range. The man had tossed a home-made explosive known colloquially as a “bomb” onto the street, fortunately not too close to us, since these fireworks are filled with pieces of broken glass. They are not only dangerous but also illegal.

Later, we made our way through the hillside neighborhood of Zafaranieh in North Tehran, where narrow streets climb steeply between tall, marble-fronted buildings. The fire festival was in full swing here, and apart from the women’s scarves and knee-length tunics (mateaus), there was little in the scene to remind me that we were still in the Islamic Republic. Western-style Persian music blared from open windows, where people stood shouting encouragement to the street below. A crowd had gathered there, with young men and women dancing to the wild rhythms, arms undulating in a grace that is uniquely Middle Eastern.

The searing odor of the fireworks gave way to the more familiar scent of wood smoke as revelers stoked bonfires built at intervals along the street, feeding crates, tree branches, and even bits of broken doors into the flames. At one end of the street, people lined up for their turn to leap over the fires, the women gathering up their long manteaus at the waist to save the fabric from wayward sparks. As they soared over the blaze, each person chanted the same phrase: zard-e man az to, sorkhi-e to az man (fire, take my sickly yellow color and give me your healthy red). It is an age-old ritual of cleansing by fire (without actually getting burned), a way to banish the illness and bad luck that has accumulated over the course of the year.

The festival has remained such a vivid memory over the years that I made it the opening scene of my as yet unpublished novel, Bad Hejab.

Very little of what I witnessed at the fire festival is strictly legal under Iran’s Islamic law. Not the Western-style music nor the bonfires and the pagan rituals associated with them. Most definitely not the mixed-gender dancing and singing in the street. But as my sister-in-law whispered in my ear, the authorities look the other way on this one night of the year. To ban the fire festival would be an exercise in futility – the prohibition would simply be ignored.

In the years since that first fire festival I visited in Tehran, I’ve celebrated Chahar Shanbeh Souri many times here in California. The fires are smaller and the women unveiled, the fireworks are absent and the prevailing scent in the air is kabab on the grill. But the music, dancing, and enthusiasm are exactly the same.

To give you a small taste of this entertaining festival, here is a short video clip I took last week in the parking lot of the Bazaar Norooz market in San Jose.

Fireworks Marriage

Tomorrow is chahar shanbeh souri, the fire festival that marks the start of the Persian New Year. Iranians around the world will be celebrating by building bonfires in the street (or a parking lot) and jumping over them in a cleansing ritual that goes back thousands of years. In Iran, the air will be crackling with fireworks, everything from simple sparklers to home-made cherry bombs.

Chahar Shanbeh Souri (Fireworks Wednesday) is also the title of a 2006 movie, written and directed by Iranian filmmaker Asghar Farhadi, which won a Golden Hugo award at the Chicago International Film Festival. Set in present-day Tehran, the film tells the tale of three marriages: one about to begin, a second recently ended, and a third on the verge of exploding as dramatically as the fireworks sparking in the night air.

The story opens with Rouhi flirting with her fiancé as they ride into town on his motorcycle. Rouhi has taken a job cleaning houses to help pay for their wedding, which is to take place two days later. But when Rouhi arrives for her current assignment in a middle-class Tehran neighborhood, she finds her employers, Mozhdeh and Morteza, embroiled in a bitter domestic dispute. Mozhdeh is convinced that her husband is having an affair with their next-door neighbor, Simine. Rouhi, whose head is filled with happy dreams of her own impending marital bliss, now gets caught up in a bewildering domestic maelstrom.

As the day drags on, Mozhdeh uses Rouhi to spy on Simine by posing as a customer in the suspected mistress’s beauty salon. At first, the maid is intrigued by her new assignment—spying is certainly a lot more fun than scrubbing floors, and she gets a brand new set of plucked eyebrows for her wedding as a bonus. But in her naïveté, Rouhi flounders in a confusing series of subterfuges, unable to keep all the lies and half-truths straight, until she ends up making a bad situation worse.

What makes this movie so appealing is the way it reaches past the political headlines and stereotypes of Iran’s conservative religious society and tells a compelling story of humans in conflict. Relationships are complicated, no less so in Tehran than anywhere else. And when they go wrong, everyone gets caught up in the conflagration: neighbors who put up with the couple’s constant fighting night after night; the relatives whose help and advice is rejected; and most heartbreakingly, the embattled couple’s young son, Amir Ali, who fears that his world is falling apart around his little ears.

The layers to this story make it impossible to take anything at face value. Are Mozhdeh’s fears real, or is she engaged in a personal meltdown of her own? When she tells Rouhi (a woman she’s known only for a few hours) to pick up Amir Ali from school while Mozhdeh takes a nap, I have to wonder if the mother is thinking clearly. But then Mozhdeh “borrows” Rouhi’s chador so she can spy on Morteza at work, believing the voluminous cloak is the perfect disguise. The ruse doesn’t work, and I begin to believe the suspected adultery is a figment of Mozhdeh’s troubled mind.

Morteza is no less three-dimensional. He seems to be the kind, long-suffering husband, entirely innocent of the adultery he’s being accused of. But when he unloads his troubles on his friend at work, complaining at how much he suffers under his wife’s irrational outbursts, he comes across as insincere and self-indulgent, and I start wondering if he really is cheating on his wife. So is the situation entirely of Mozhdeh’s making? I‘m filled with doubt, despite the fact that I’d reached the very same conclusion only moments earlier.

As for Simine, is she really the sweet divorcee whose husband left her for another woman? She gives Rouhi sisterly advice on the girl’s pending marriage then refuses to accept payment for the eyebrow trim. But when her ex drops their daughter off for a visit, he sits all night in the car, gazing with puppy-dog eyes at Simine’s lit window, and I wonder which of them is the injured party in this failed relationship.

Like many Iranian movies, Fireworks Wednesday does not have a firm resolution. The question of adultery is cleared up, but we never see what the characters do about it. Will Morteza and Mozhdeh resume their battle in the morning or will one of them have the courage to pack up and leave? Will Rouhi and her man live happily ever after, or will their marriage eventually dissolve into strife as Morteza’s and Mozhdeh’s did?

This lack of resolution doesn’t bother me, for ultimately this is not a story about happy endings—or tragic ones, either. It is about the choices that people make to either live in harmony or render each other’s lives a living hell.