Children of Persia

by Mrs. Napier Malcolm

So, unlike our streets, the Persian ones get their colour from the men and boys, while the women and girls supply the darker, duller element. Bright blue is the commonest colour for the men’s coats, and green is not uncommon, while, at the New Year, pink, yellow, lilac and other colours make the streets very gay indeed.

The children are dressed just like their fathers and mothers, and are little imitation men and women. The little tots look so funny sometimes; tiny boys toddling about in long trousers, frockcoats, and grown-up hats, and wee girls, who cannot yet speak distinctly, in the long trousers, short skirts and chādars of the women.

It seems to suggest that no great distinction is made between children and grown-ups, and really there is not as much difference as we find at home. The children are taught to take life very seriously and are treated as little men and women before their time, and so they have no time to grow up into proper men and women, and the result is that we find the children too grown-up and the grown-ups too childish.

You will find, roughly speaking, if you look at animals that the higher the animal, the longer its childhood lasts, because it has more growing up to do. Caterpillars and tadpoles look after themselves from the time of coming out of the egg, mice grow up in a few weeks, horses in a few years, and man takes longer to grow up than any animal.

Now Muhammad, the false prophet whom the Persians believe in and obey, had no such high standard to set before them, no such high ideal for them to grow up to, as our Lord Jesus Christ set before His followers and enables them to grow up to; and so his religion provides only a short time for growing up, and stunts instead of assisting the growth both of individual Muhammadans and of Muhammadan nations.

But we must get back to our Persian children and their clothes. Their day-clothes we have seen; what about their night-clothes? They have none. They just take off their outer garments and lie down in the rest, and in the morning they just get up and put on their outer garments again. Sometimes they do not put off anything.

“We are so tired,” said some ladies one New Year’s morning. “With all our new clothes on we could not lie down, we should have crushed them, so we sat up all night.”

You wonder why they were so foolish as to put them on on New Year’s Eve in that case, instead of on the morning of the New Year itself. The reason is simple. A Persian only puts on new clothes after a bath, and a bath in Persia is not a mere matter of half an hour; it takes half a day, and sometimes a whole one. Some of the richer people have baths in their own houses, but most people go to the public baths.

All Persian women and girls love a day at the bath, and will not shorten it if they can possibly help it. It is something like a Turkish bath, and there they meet their friends and sit about in steamy rooms, talking, laughing, gossiping. No wonder they look forward to it, for a Persian girl has a much more secluded and restricted life than girls in Europe and her intercourse with her friends is much less free. One girl of fifteen told me that except for her weekly visit to the bath she had only left her house once in a period of six months, and in her own house she received very few visitors, the calls of her English missionary friends being great events for the whole household.

At the bath they wash their hair, dye it with henna, and plait it up in a dozen or more long plaits which hang down their backs under the headkerchief and chādar, not to be undone again probably until the next visit to the bath. The henna is a reddish dye and though it does not show on black hair it turns fair or grey hair a carroty red. The newcomer to Persia wonders to see so much red hair, till he finds that this is the explanation. But the boys and girls nearly all have black hair.