Bibi's Rainbow: Hilarious Ordeals of Assimilation

Majid Amini

Description

Bibi's Rainbow is a delightfully narrated novel centered around a large Iranian immigrant family and their old, wise and faithful nanny, Bibi, a talented cook armed with inexhaustible secret recipes, who is resolutely determined to ease the transition of four generations of her "family" into American society. Using her wits and miraculous recipes as weapons, she ultimately manages to avert a "Clash of Civilizations" in their Beverly Hills neighborhood, winning over the hearts and souls of her extended family and their neighbors during the tumultuous period between 1979-2008. It is a tale of the long, sometimes tragic, often-hilarious, journey to assimilation.

Sujets

• Vie de famille
• Relations familiales
• Fiction

Informations

• Publié par: eBookIt.com
• Date de parution: 18 janvier 2014
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781877789007
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

“The Hilarious Ordeals of Assimilation”
 
 
A Novel
 
 
By
 
Majid Amini
 
 
Author of “The Greatest Meeting”

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and events either are the product of the author’s imagination
or are used fictionally, and any similarity, incidents,
or places are wholly coincidental.
 
Bibi’s Rainbow
“The Hilarious Ordeals of Assimilation”
 
All rights reserved
Copyright © 2010 by Majid Amini
 
Cover and Book designed by John Helmuth
 
No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronics or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage
and retrieval system, without permission in writing
from the author.
 
For information address:
760 Calle Plano
Camarillo, CA 93012
U.S.A
 
Library of Congress Cataloging-Publication Data
 
Majid Amini
 
Bibi’s Rainbow / Majid Amini
 
P. cm.
 
ISBN 978-1-877789-00-7
 
First Edition
Printed in the Unites States
by
McNaughton & Gunn, Inc.
Chapter One
A Man for all Seasons
M ehran “Mike” Yazdy is sleeping soundly in the velvet moonlit master bedroom next to his wife, Noshin. They both belong to a whole host of ill-fated Iranian self-exiles, uprooted by the 1979 revolution that had left them with only two options: to stay behind and perish in the lawlessness of Iran’s post-revolution, or migrate to other countries, lose their identities and become dislocated persons in more ways than one―a big lump of the sum total of nothing.
The nerve-racking noise of a child crying, sounding as if someone sadistically is torturing him, coming from two doors down the hall, abruptly wakes up Mike. With wide opened eyes, staring at the ceiling, his anxiety growing, he knows it is his five-year-old grandson, Che, who, for many convincing reasons, admittedly has a special place in his heart. Not having the presence of mind in that ungodly hour, he patiently listens for the familiar sound of the shuffling footsteps of good-old Bibi, their lifelong nanny, routinely on her way to tend the troubled child. It is only after he can retrieve some slight seepage of memories from the dark passageways of his sluggish mind that he realizes Bibi had returned to Iran several years ago, and they have not heard words from her since. The realization uncharacteristically saddens him right away. You didn’t appreciate that woman’s contribution to your family when she was here. Mike ridicules himself. We all took her for granted. He misses Bibi, the strong-willed and outspoken old woman. As an interventionist by nature (in a positive sense) she intuitively knew what correct course of action to take whenever any member of Yazdy’s family was struck by unpredictable and often irresolvable predicaments. He wonders what happened to make the dedicated and dependable Bibi suddenly leave the family. He has troubled himself many times with the same line of question without ever being able to come up with a convincing answer. Considering the very unwavering seemingly unbreakable bonds between her and his wife, and later with every one of his children and grandchildren, it is still hard for him to accept the reality of their nanny’s abrupt departure. Without any advance notice, she packed her few belongings and returned to Iran, seemingly vanishing forever. The way she left, she must have gotten fed up with all of us, didn’t she? Maybe she lost her senses as most folks do when they get old. He keeps thinking about her. But all of a sudden, as if she has joined the rest of trivialities in a dark corner of his mind, he blanks Bibi’s memories, at least, temporarily out of his consciousness.
Mike then waits awhile longer for his son, thirty-year-old Farhad, wishfully expecting him to wake up and care for his child Che. He keeps listening, but when he doesn’t hear any noise except Che’s wailing, he thinks maybe Shayan, his second son, or his wife Harriet might hear Che’s crying. Dismayed that nobody bothers to respond, he growls a dozen of swear words in his native language Farsi at nobody except his own luck as he slowly rises. He rubs his eyes and drags his sleep-starved body to the small bedroom that Che shares with his eight-year-old sister, Shirin.
The children’s mother, Lila, in an attempt to get cleaned up from drug addiction and alcoholism, is currently in a rehab center somewhere in South Bay area. The thirty-year-old slender African-American, garrulous and articulate, who seems to carry an invisible powerful microscope, hung around her neck, ready to peek through it and detect the minutest imperfection in American society; its cultural deformities , inequitable economic system , and its colonial-based foreign policy . Lila has passed on her brown glossy skin to her son Che and daughter Shirin; the kids look as if they have permanent suntans. Their light brown hair, even more abundantly curly than Lila’s makes them even more remarkable among the kids on the block. Everybody agrees that both kids have inherited the best attributes of their parents’ ethnicities. No one else in the family was more surprised than Grandpa Ferdous when Shirin and Che turned out to be so strikingly beautiful, mostly because Grandpa Ferdous had strongly predicted that offspring of an interracial marriage would definitely result in deformed kids, whom he calls Ajoj-Majoj . His belief has been that the Ajoj-Majoj , buffoon-looking creatures, looks even worse than harlequins but with considerable physical and behavioral commonalities, are the groups of weird inhabitants from a distance planet, who will be dispatched down to earth soon or later, with only one dreadful mission―to end human lives on earth as we know it. Why? Because, God has been getting sick and tired of the mess human beings have created on His beautiful pristine earth. When he saw the babies for the first time in the hospital, shocked by their incredible beauty, he could hardly concede that he was wrong as he could be in his prophecy, but only muttered a few words under his breath, “This is the biggest goof up God has ever made that I’ve ever seen!”
Fatigued and disappointed, wearing pajamas that have never seen iron, shoulders stooped, as if the ocean liner carrying his entire merchants has been sunk in the high seas, Mike, at a snail's pace ente r s the bedroom that is faintly illuminated with the miniature nightlight between his beloved grandchildren’s beds. Tiptoeing, he approaches crying Che.
“What’s wrong, sweetheart?” he asks, whispering, making sure he doesn’t wake Shirin.
“The spoiled brat thinks he has lost one of his testicles, Grandpa!” Shirin loudly announces her little brother’s predicament, registering her protest with a velvety, but at times strident, voice bequeathed from her mother.
“What?”
“He has been crying all night! He doesn’t let me sleep! I have to go to school tomorrow, Grandpa! I can’t stand it! I want my own room right now,” Shirin has found the most inappropriate time to repeat her recent demand.
“Don’t call your brother a brat. He just started crying two minutes ago, Shirin. I heard him myself. Maybe he had a bad dream. Go back to sleep. I’ll see what’s wrong with him,” Mike whispers, trying to calm Shirin down.
“What’s wrong, sweetheart?” Mike asks Che.
“I can’t find one of my balls, Grandpa,” Che manages to get words out between sobs.
Mike gasps. Up to that moment, he had always thought that he was familiar with the unpredictable curiosity of children. After all he had raised four of his own. But he wasn’t prepared to hear that sort of problem from a child. “What are you talking about?” Mikes inquires gently.
“It’s not there,” Che mumbles.
Mike sits on the bed. Che uncovers himself with one hand while the other one is inside his shorts, frantically searching for his presumably lost testicle.
“Look down here, Grandpa. I can’t find one of my balls,” Che pulls down his shorts exposing his genitals.
In that ungodly hour, even with his mind consumed by all the problems that he thinks American society has thrown nonstop at him and his family, Mike struggles to control himself from bursting out laughing. And then suddenly, for some strange reason a thought crosses his mind that urges him to express it in an animated way. He feels like putting his arms in the air toward heaven, addressing whoever is running his life from up there, expressing his grievances, I was a great man, a deputy minister of industry for heaven’s sake, and it was written in my destiny to even become the prime minister sooner or later, a more distinguished man, and now I have to find my grandson’s lost ball!? What the hell are you doing to me? I have had it! I don’t deserve this! Give me a break, God! He restrains himself. Instead, he picks up the small flashlight from the side table next to the bed and shines it on Che’s shorts, doing his painstaking best to locate his grandson’s lost ball.
“Now, let’s see where the heck your damn ball is that has interrupted the tranquility of this household and my sleep,” Mike says in a hushed voice.
Like a doctor who is examining a patient for a hernia, Mike begins searching for Che’s lost ball as he reminds the child, “Didn’t I tell you not to touch yourself, I mean down there?”
“Yes Grandpa. But look, one of them is gone. I don’t know where he is. I want my ball back,” With teary eyes, Che informs his grandpa of his serious problem.
“Sometimes, when you’re not covered with the blanket, you feel cold, they also feel cold, and they don’t like it. So, they go up your crotch,” Mike shares the treasure of his knowledge of human anatomy with his grandson while diligently searching for the lost ball.
“Why?” Che asks innocently.
“I don’t know. Maybe it’s warmer and cozier up there.”
“Oh look here, Grandpa! You’re right. I found my ball!” Che announces his amazing finding with a face beaming with joy, as gaily as perhaps Christopher Columbus expressed his emotion the moment he set f