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Your everything guide to Nowruz
Updated On: 15 March, 2020 07:50 AM IST | Mumbai | Tinaz Nooshian
An ancient celebration attached to the Northern Hemisphere`s vernal equinox plays out in Mumbai each year by the Parsi and Iranian Zoroastrian community. Before you sign up for that hoax Navroze lunch spread at a suburban resto-bar, read this
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Hassan Hajati has kept the tradition of Nowruz sweets alive in a city where the Iranian population is fast dwindling. Pics/Atul Kamble
My brother and I are more Parsi than Iranian, despite mixed but equal genes. But for one day every year, we`d switch gears, renewing our ties with the country our father left as a teenager to make a life in Mumbai. Our mother, a Parsi, was debilitated by language although high on enthusiasm. She gave up, I estimate, on Persian when she confused cherries ("gilas" in Farsi) with the English "glass", ending any hope of earning brownie points from her mother-in-law. She`d stand awkwardly but amiably as my father greeted guests around the sofreh, spraying them with rose water, and showing them their reflection in a table mirror—a way to reflect on the year gone by. A bite of baklava or a mouthful of walnut and ghesei (apricot) were followed by the double hug.
Nowruz ("new day") was centred at home around the sofreh, a table with an elaborate spread. It was a sort of thanksgiving punctum, stacked with everything that nature offers you, because the festival celebrates the onset of spring and the agricultural season after a long, trying winter. Although every home customises the "table" (ours veers towards dry fruit, wine, sweets and flowers), the spread must include seven items beginning with the Farsi letter for seen: Sabzeh (wheat or barley sprouts); sir (garlic); sib (apples); sumac (berries); serkeh (vinegar) samanu (wheat germ pudding) and senjed (dried fruit from lotus tree).
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