I count seven Iranian films in this one picture. Iranian films, ones I have never heard of, are available everywhere in Bangladesh. This past winter in Iran, I searched in vain to find Iranian art films by Kiarostami, Makhmalbaaf and others in Tehran's movie stores. I found a great deal that was pirated and Hollywood, and an increasing number of Hindi movies. But it was impossible, literally impossible to find our Iranian films anywhere in Tehran. I bought a copy of "Secret Ballot", an Iranian comedie about our ridiculous elections and burgeoning democracy, and Matir Moina (The Clay Bird), a film about the social fissures that gave birth to modern Bangladesh.
I never, not in my wildest dreams, imagined that the first time I would vote in an Iranian election, I would be doing it in Dhaka. The Iranian community here is small, tight knit and eccentric to the last. One gentlemen had been here for the last 35 years, sneering at the place, railing against its every nook and cranny, but somehow so in love that he learned Urdu, Sanskrit, Hindi, and (as he claimed and I refused to believe) became the first Iranian to learn to read Bengali, which he again claimed no Bengali could write without making numerous spelling mistakes at every go.
Then there was the tea magnate who had lived here for fifty years, and the petro-man and the one who imported carpets and handicrafts to Bangladesh. We all sat around eating watermelons and imported kharboozeh, arguing intensely over whether khiaar was Arabic for cucumber, or whether it was really related to ikhtiyaar and hence never originally the name of a fruit. We then proceeded to find every last word (there are about 17,000) in common between Bengali and Persian, scratching our heads over why z's became j's and s's became sh's and finally, revealing that Mumtaz Mahal was actually an Iranian from Yazd.
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