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August 25, 2005

My Uncle Osman, Part I

Introduction: Needless to say, this is a small tribute to Roald Dahl’s “My Uncle Oswald” series of short stories. Much like the difference between Uncle Oswald and Uncle Osman, I stand at the other end of the spectrum from Roald Dahl as far as talent is concerned. Nonetheless, I hope these prove to be of some entertainment.

My Uncle Osman is old. He lives alone in a small apartment in central Tehran, in a middle class neighborhood. He has no particular source of income other than his retirement money, and he leads a quiet, uneventful, life. Unlike Roald Dahl’s Uncle Oswald, he has no talent for anything in particular, no wits to talk about, and is not known for any particular craft. He knows no foreign languages and has only traveled outside Iran once. He was always known, even since his teen years, for being particularly inactive as far as sexual matters were concerned. He has never married, and I doubt if he has ever lost his virginity. He is the least athletic person I know, although I have to be honest and say that he is rather thin, but that is mainly due to his lack of cooking ability.

Well, I can hear your exclamations. You might think that such an uneventful personality does not make for much of a literary character. You might also be cross at me for wasting your time with this story, which, I admit, sounds pointless. To that I will say: patience dear reader, patience! Adventure is a curious thing, and it tends to stick her (yes, it’s a she, crafty and unpredictable) head in when you least expect it.

You see, being an uninteresting person sometimes does lend itself into being a character for a story. My uncle Osman is a person of no colour, as I mentioned before, but that does not mean he cannot be interesting. Yes, in his own head, he is a hero, one of a thousand talents and many abilities, all of which, sadly, has been oppressed by unknown forces and jealous competitors.

Loneliness and going through life without being of any use to the people and the world around him has made my uncle Osman a “phantom” hero. He can tell you the stories of his adventures, quite remarkable ones, for hours, and believe you me, he has done that many times with me as his audience. He keeps on reminding you how important he could be. He also avoids people because he knows they want his talents and he delights himself by preventing them from having these talents.

Uncle Osman is a retiree of the ministry of agriculture. I should mention that his tenure in the ministry was only ten years and he retired himself out of sheer laziness. This however has never prevented him from claiming to know all branches of the government like the back of his own hand. I remember when I was a kid, he used to tell me of his missions to Europe and Subtropical Africa. I never wondered about why the Iranian Ministry of Agriculture might have any business in Europe or Africa. The stories were interesting, and although my mom used to eye her brother with a blaming look, I never had any doubts about his stories. I always interpreted my mom and dad’s reactions to Osman’s stories to be out of jealousy, the fact that they themselves had never been to Subtropical Africa, facing a whole tribe of cannibals with just a toothbrush at hand.

Well, now I know better, and although I am too ashamed to apologise to my parents, I still think the stories of my uncle Osman are interesting. I will tell you some of them, and to give you a view of the reality, I will also give you my mom’s version of what really happened, just for the record and for seeing how imaginative people can be!

Posted by Khodadad at August 25, 2005 01:35 PM

Comments

Posted by: David at August 25, 2005 08:24 PM

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Posted by: Donny at September 16, 2005 09:53 PM