It's funny how under the direst of circumstances you find ways to have fun. Although my year in Soroush Azadi was a signal of an end to many happy care free days, we still tried to make the most of it. I remember one day bringing in all my pastel crayons to school and with the rest of my classmates decorating the walls of our classroom with drawings and caricatures. I had this one caricature, of a slutty ditzy girl that was everyone's favorite. I used to draw her in different getups. Anyways the walls didn't stay decorated for long. We ended up having to paint over them ourselves as a punishment. I think our only concession was that we got to choose the colour. Other classes decided they wanted to do the same. This one class ended up painting their walls a lavendar colour. As it turned out, lavendar is not a good colour to live in. It makes you vomit literally. We found this fact out when we had to write an exam in this classroom. One by one students left complaining of nasea!! Painting classrooms became a theme in my life. Later when I went to Fadak public school we pulled the same stunt of drawing on the walls and again got punished. I was the head of class at the time (mobser) so I was held responsible. I spent a weekend with a couple of other girls painting the walls. It was weird afterwards walking the streets with our paint covered gowns. But I remember that day feeling really good because I thought we showed the school admin that we had the last laugh. They thought is was cruel punishment, instead it was really fun. Other pranks that I pulled while at Fadak included hiding the prayer rug. It was a long piece of carpet that was laid out around lunch for the noon prayer attended by all the islamist and of course the school admin. They ended up doing the prayers on the bare ground. Another time a watermelon truck was passing by our school. We bribed the school janitor to go outside and buy us a watermelon and some bread and cheese and then we went to this little room in the school yard and had a feast on the the prayer rug. Did I mention that Fadak was set up in the confiscated home of Farah( the Queen)'s uncle. It was a great home with a huge pool that remained empty. We used to play dodgeball in the pool. Since we couldn't leave the school grounds, we used to get pizza delivered to our classroom. The we'd close the doors and windows and have the pizza and later draw giutars on the back of the pizza boxes and jam on our air guitars. As I was always the class clown and had a nack for mimic everyone, I used to put on shows imitating the teachers and administrators. We were a very close knit bunch, my classmates and I. In Iran by 9th grade you more or less have made a determination of what you'll be studying in university by attending different highschools. Fadak was a Science highschool. In grade 10 there was another level of separation between those studying natural sciences and those studying applied science. I was in the latter group. Natural sciences was by far the most popular. There were 3 classrooms of natural science to the one small classroom of applied science. There were no more than 20 students so we all stayed together for the 4 years of highschool. Most of our teachers remained the same thru the years as well. So by the time we were in our senior year we had gotten to know them well. A favorite was our Physics teacher, Mrs Madarshahi. She was incredibly smart and funny at the same time. She had a way of making you want to do well in her class. One of the students lost a bet to her one time, can't remember over what. The result was that she had to cook soup (Ash) for everyone and bring it to school. The day of the soup, there was some kind of a celebration going on. I don't remember what, but school let out early but we all stayed behind and waited for the soup, which arrive in a giant pot. We invited a select few of our teachers to join us. Then my classmates had me get up in front of everyone and imitiate the very teachers that were present. My physics teacher was laughing so hard at my imitation of her that she kept slapping the English teacher knee and crying out, it' true, it's true. It was a really memorable day. I still have pictures of that day. Another favorite teacher was my math teacher, Ms Shahbakhti. Another very smart lady. She was unusual in that she never could keep her veil on her head. It would always slip off her head and she had these beautiful long fingernails. She was a single working girl which was unusual for those days. She didn't take any crap from the school principal, a born again islamist ( rumour had it that during the Shah's time she and her sister well known party girls, now she wore the strictest hejab with a heavy black chador and made her poor son stand in front of the school assembly every day and recite the Koran). I liked her for her guts. They couldn't touch her because she really was a fantastic teacher. In our final year, my school scored the highest grades in the entire district. We beat all the boys school who where supposed to have the best teachers, male of course. Go girl power!!
The best part of speaking english fluently, was that I got to skip all my english classes mainly because I was better at english than the teacher that taught it. I loved my free time. I used to spy on all the other class rooms with my friend Afrooz. She was also fluent in English. I had met her in Soroush Azadi. She used to attend the British school Rostamabadian. Afrooz and I would spend the time waking around the school and talking out loud to our hearts content in english about everything that bothered us, since no one was around to hear us. That was one of the biggest fears of being in a public school with all these islamists around. You never knew who was an islamist, so we had been warned by our parent never ever to say anything to incriminate ourselves. There were stories of children talking in school about their parents only to find revolutionary guards at their home the next day ready to arrest the parents. Me and four of my friends from Soroush azadi all ended up going to Fadak. For the longest time they were the only people that I trusted. It took a while to finally figure out who was who. At the end I met my best friends that I have to this day in Fadak.
Speaking of parents getting arrested it reminds me of the story of how my dad narrowly escaped arrest for making moonshine. I'll get to that soon ....
Oh and reminder to myself to tell the story of the school play with a gay character!!