Arash Zeini

After Hourmazd was born, I noticed something new about congratulations. There are three types of congratulations people offer which represent three distinct types of people. There are those feminist, Western females, all above their fourties, who paste stingy smiles on their faces and say: “Oh, he looks exactly like his dad. But you know that doesn’t mean anything, right? This is nature’s way of keeping the father around!” Then, there are those neutral types who see a similarity between mother or father and express it. I believe that these people actually never mean it. The last type are the traditional Iranians, who look at the baby and say: “Oh, he is so sweet. He looks exactly like his grandfather! Look at the eyes. Wow!”

Rostam is too sweet and sad of a hero to be de-constructed, so I apologise for this one in advance. The last type reminds me once more of the truth about Iranian society. Of course it is tragic that Rostam kills his son Sohrab, and he seems never to recover from this loss. Some think this myth illustrates the cultural roots of patriarchy, and that once we develop an epic in which it is possible for the son to kill the father, that will be the day we have finally left our patriarchal past behind. I think there is a point here.

If you are lucky, there may be a particularly nice person among the laudants, and he or she may say: “That’s only because the dad looks like the grandfather too!”.

Today Hourmazd stood by himself for the first time. He has been trying to stand for a few days now, but today he grabbed the bath tub, pulled himself up and stood there for a while. It is really hard to wash him now, as he wants to stand up all the time. He fell also once and hit his head against the bath tub. It was not easy to calm him down, but with few theatrical performances we managed to distract him from the pain. It is lovely to see him develop and change. He can sit now by himself, he can turn around sitting and can manage one or two moves resembling crawling.