It’s a summer day. The marketplace in Urmia is busy and full of people.
Fruit sellers offer their goods loudly, their slogans filling the air: “Cucumbers give power, O cucumber flower!” Tomatoes, onions and potatoes are sold by peddlers pedaling through the bazaar on their quadricycles. Shopkeepers weigh their goods on a balance scale with stones for weights, trying to send people home with hands as full as possible. Beautiful women come and go, covering their faces with black chador. Occassionally, the chador shifts, and leaves men astonished at the beauty they glimpsed.
Extremely skilled at controlling their chador, the women hold it closed with one hand, holding a basket in the other. If they have a child with them they use their teeth to hold the chador closed, which increases their beauty. One of these women attracts the people’s attention: she came with her child and is now angry with him. The child cries loudly: “I want a candy rooster!” His mother, still calm, explains to him that they have no more money, and she cannot buy him a candy rooster, but in vain. The child is not convinced. He insists on getting a candy rooster! A tall middle-aged man passes by. He quietly puts a two-toman bill in the woman’s hand and says: “This is for your son. Buy him two candy roosters, and use the rest to buy whatever you need for your home.” And walks on.
At that time, two tomans is a considerable sum of money, and the woman is ecstatic. She shouts loudly after the man, who has already proceeded on his way: “May God repay you for your kindness, dear man, blessed be your hands, ishallah may God grant you all the boons you deserve!”
The man has already disappeared in the crowd… the whole marketplace knows this person. His name is Agha Aziz, and all the shopkeepers hold him in great respect. A kind man, of open heart and open hand, whose brother Mikhael has a gold shop in the market. Their family name is Khākshūri — “dust washing,” because they buy the dust from goldsmith shops and wash it in a thin mesh to find the gold inside it.
