The ferry made its way across a calm, pale blue sea. Container ships sitting nearby seemed to hang, suspended, as they waited to enter the Bosphorus.

It was my 55^th birthday and I was sitting on a white, double-decker transport boat with my husband, Sankar, whose employer had recently transferred us to Istanbul, Turkey. We were heading to the Princes’ Islands, a small archipelago in the Sea of Marmara where exiled royalty had lived during Byzantine times. Sankar’s new colleagues had recommended we spend a day visiting the largest island, Büyükada, known for its charming car-free streets, picturesque homes, and lovely vistas.

I wasn’t sure I was going to like Turkey. Sankar was busier than usual in his new job, supporting company business in the entire region, including Eastern Europe, Russia and South Africa. With our grown children thousands of miles away, I was already feeling lonely and underutilized. Still, I hoped we could make a good start.

A company driver had picked us up that morning and taken us to Istanbul’s Kabataş pier, accompanying us inside to help buy our ferry tickets. Watching him complete this simple task reminded me that, although I was in my mid-fifties, in terms of being able to get around Turkey, I was more like a child. I wondered if I would ever feel competent in this place.

We were among the first to board the boat, taking seats on wooden bench seats facing each other. Sankar pulled out his Blackberry to answer work emails, and a man came by selling little paper cups of hot tea. I sipped one and looked out the window, feeling a little resentful. Was Sankar going to look at his phone for the entire hour-and-a-half ride? Why hadn’t I thought to bring a book or magazine to read?

As the boat’s engines began to start up, the seats around us filled. A stocky middle-aged man with broad features and a stubbly beard sat down beside Sankar. A typical Turk, I thought. Several women wearing headscarves filled the seats alongside him.

The boat started to move and the man caught my eye. “Where are you from?” he asked, in English. We had been told that Turks routinely ask that question, even of other Turks, in order to know what ancestral town or village the person comes from. Important information in Turkey.

Sankar looked up, but I replied, and then asked the obligatory, “Where are you from?”

I was expecting to hear the name of some unfamiliar Turkish town, but instead he said, gesturing at the women and young child sitting next to him, “We’re from Iran.”

“Oh!” I exclaimed and Sankar put down his Blackberry. We were sitting by people from a place that my country considered an enemy. It was going to be an unusual ride!

I was aware of the U.S.’s fraught history with Iran. The 1979-1980 hostage crisis to be sure, but also a U.S.-sponsored coup in the fifties, ousting Iran’s only democratically-elected president. It was 2010, and few Americans had ever thought about the possibility of losing their democracy, but due to us, Iran had endured over a half century of dictatorship. A sheepish feeling came over me and to counter it, I started talking.

“Iran! Last night we were trying to use some Iranian saffron we bought at the Grand Bazaar! But we didn’t know how. So, we were just throwing strands of it into a pot of rice!”

“Saffron . . . saffron,” the women repeated, looking at me and then at each other, puzzled. Then, finally, one of them said, smiling, “Oh, you mean zafran!”

The man introduced himself as Farhad (I have changed some names and details due to the current political unrest in Iran). He was wearing a casual black jacket, a striped polo shirt and khakis, much like Sankar. His wife, who introduced herself as Fatemeh, had a red headscarf tied under her chin, a line of dark hair framing her face, and a black trench coat with matching slacks. The three younger women, two looking to be in their late teens and also head-scarfed, were their daughters.

If I had had more experience in Turkey, I would have known immediately that this family wasn’t Turkish. Turkey’s “covered women,” approximately half the female population, wear what appear to be bathing caps under their scarves to make sure no tendril of hair escapes. In contrast, the two Iranian daughters’ scarves covered just the backs of their heads. The littlest girl, who looked to be about 8, was bareheaded, wearing a pink shirt and blue jeans.

Farhad told us his family was on holiday here, and mentioned that Turkey allowed Iranians to enter without visas. I recalled reading Prime Minister Erdogan’s foreign policy motto, “Zero problems with neighbors.” That would pose a challenge in the coming years.

The two older girls were named Nasrin and Neda. The name Neda was familiar because just a year before, during an uprising against faulty election results, a young Iranian woman with that name had been shot dead while sitting in her car. She had become a cause celebre.

Nasrin told us she was studying medicine, and gestured at her father, who told us he was a doctor. Neda had just finished an engineering degree, and she said that just about everyone in her university graduating class was hoping to do further study in the U.S. She asked us about the difficulty of the GRE exam, and what American schools might be possibilities for her.

As Sankar has a graduate degree in engineering, we were happy to offer help. I took out the notebook I was using to record Turkish words, and we started making a list of possible schools. I then drew a rough U.S. map to show where they were located. For a moment I felt competent.

Conversation was flowing easily, and we complimented our new friends on their excellent English. They replied that they had learned by watching The Walking Dead and Grey’s Anatomy. I had imagined Iran as completely isolated from the West.

At some point, Sankar mentioned that it was my birthday. Hearing that, Fatemeh pulled from her bag a package of plump Iranian dates and offered us some. They were juicy and delicious.

We started discussing the recent hit movie, Avatar, which the family had seen. Fatemeh told us that her college major had been religious studies, and she and Sankar began talking about the use of avatars in Hinduism.

The previous year’s unrest in Iran came up, and both Neda and Nasrin became animated, proclaiming in dismayed tones that innocent people had been killed. Farhad and Fatemeh sat silently while their daughters spoke, but finally, Fatemeh commented, “When you mix religion and politics, the religion gets dirty.”

I have thought of that comment many times since. Not in the context of Iran, but in regard to my own country.

Over an hour had passed, and we were approaching the Prince’s Islands. We could see nineteenth-century buildings with red tile roofs, and behind them forested hills. Other boats, ferries and fishing craft, sat in the harbor.

My memory of our time on the Prince’s Islands pales in comparison to our conversation with the Iranian family. I do recall the crowd of men who met our boat as we disembarked, each holding a menu from his restaurant and pleading for us to dine there. I remember quiet streets, lovely wooden houses with balconies, and a tasty meal at a kebab restaurant. Then, since our tickets were for the same ferry, we had another hour-and-a-half ride back to Istanbul with our new friends.

During our years in Turkey, whenever the topic of Iran came up, Turkish friends told us, “Iranian people are exactly like us. They just have a bad government.” One story they recounted made me laugh. Apparently, the Iranian government tries to segregate men and women on the ski slopes. To counter that, young men have been known to don women’s jackets and caps so they can ski with their girlfriends. Clever!

Neda and I became Facebook friends, and for a couple of years she sent me birthday greetings. She completed graduate work at a Canadian university and lives there. Nasrin now works as a doctor in The Netherlands. On her Facebook page I recently read this:

Goodbye my dictator goodbye

Cause everybody’s sick and tired

We’ll all be dancing when you die

Goodbye my dictator goodbye

 

The youngest sister must be about twenty now. I wonder what she is doing and how she is reacting to the current unrest.

Birthdays are good times to take stock, and this one had been most surprising. If Sankar and I hadn’t met this friendly family, he would have spent most of that time looking at his Blackberry and working. We might have talked about mundane topics: the date our shipment of furniture would arrive from the U.S. and how to set up the apartment we’d rented. Instead, due to chance, I was able to glimpse the lives of people often deemed “the other”– and leave behind my own homesickness.

The ferry ride made me realize that I shouldn’t worry so much about living in Turkey. That often, all I would need to do is show up, and interesting things would happen. That birthday on the boat was the beginning of a fascinating and rewarding three years.

 

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