It takes three to four weeks for the thirty-two pink petals of the damask rose to open, and the closer it gets, the more its scent fills the air. The rose, however, has one day of splendor before the petals start to lighten and then loosen, to then be carried off by the desert wind. Its fragrance reaches its peak that same morning when dew drops still rest on its petals and before the sun rises to take some of that precious oil for itself.
This rose is called the Mohammadi Rose, and I would hold one such rose between my fingers. I would smell the warm, spicy, honeyed notes and then when I put a petal in my mouth, that velvety peppery taste would transport me away from Qamsar, a village in Iran’s central desert, back to my mother’s garden in southeastern Pennsylvania.
I read somewhere that taste stays with you more than sight and the same has been said of smell and touch. They cut through time and space.
I can attest to this as I was in the middle of a desert in Iran, and I was feeling my mother’s rounded fingertips resting on my mouth. My mother’s hands were a sculpturer’s hands accustomed to forming human shapes out of clay. The young me would turn the taste of that petal around on my tongue, surprised by the spicy, almost bitter taste, but then fascinated that one could eat those pretty flowers that lined the house and that they held a hint of apple in them, just as my mother said, even strawberry.
The rose petals my mother chose would be alternated with sage or thyme or whatever else was in easy reach in our garden, even if I was exempt from “this year they are really fiery” hot peppers as well as the odd little green broccoli worm that became an unfortunate pawn in my older brothers’ contest to see who possessed more daring.
Like many children of the ‘70s, I had read Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s The Little Prince, so I knew that roses were more than decorative. A little prince, for instance, could spend a lot of time worrying about one rose that was stuck on a tiny planet somewhere far away.
What child would not warm to Saint-Exupéry’s line: “Only the children know what they are looking for.”
For me, it was whether the rose petals smelled like fancy perfume when you mixed them with water and pebbles (they don’t). It was the climbing morning glory that told me and my little brother we were getting close to the creek, it was the honeysuckle bush with its hidden nectar that draped over the path we sought, it was the coolness under the tree canopy as we threw off our shoes and dug our toes into that magnificent streambed world of pebbles, silt, and tadpoles. It was the tall, dry grass on the other side of the creek and the noisy grasshoppers that sometimes landed on us as did the terrible stink bugs with their pointy, shield-like bottoms.
That was the era of Watergate, the oil price shock, the Iran hostage crisis, but my young life was occupied by the sights and sounds and tastes of our garden and neighborhood.
Many years later, I found myself in Iran in spring, just in time for the rose festival. Many said I shouldn’t go. Negotiations on Iran’s nuclear program had stalled, ISIS had taken control of territory in Iraq and Syria. It was not a place for a young(ish) woman, a mother of twin girls, traveling on her own.
I would go, and I would travel with my guide Azar in a little car out to Iran’s Central Desert, past wandering camels, a salt lake, to the sand dunes. The wind would pick up and we would trudge up one large dune to see other sand dunes as far as the eye could see.
I couldn’t count the number of novels that I had in my head at that moment, swirling around me like so much dust. Not just The Little Prince, but Michael Ondaatje’s English Patient and Le Clezio’s aptly named Desert, to name a few. I don’t remember what Azar and I spoke about on that dune, but I remember well her look of pride.
We half slid and ran down the dune and drove on a road that didn’t look like a road to an abandoned caravanserai. There we met a shepherd who lived alone with a few sheep and goats, and he would show us around, from the humble but tidy corner he had made for himself with one burner plate, a carpet, and a small shelf of personal items, up to the flat roof where the sand was as wide and expansive as the sky. He told us that he enjoyed being out in the desert and that he was not lonely.
We gave him some supplies and he thanked us even though he said he already had what he needed.
In one passage in The Little Prince, the prince and the aviator find a well in the desert. The aviator saw that the prince was thirsty and recounts the scene.
“I raised the bucket to his lips. He drank with his eyes closed. It was as sweet as a feast. That water was more than a drink. It was born of our walk beneath the stars, of the song of the pulley of the effort of my arms. . .”
The first time I truly understood that passage was when I was a teenager and was in the hospital after having fallen asleep in my car and driven into a tree. For a month, I had been hooked up to machines and drips in intensive care, but there came that day when I was well enough to be moved. The nurse had a treat for me: a sip of orange juice.
Maybe the shepherd wanted to live just so, where the sip of water or juice made you remember the stars.
In the Grand Bazaar in nearby Kashan with its intricately decorated vaulted ceilings, five men would surround Azar and me. I tried to read Azar to determine how worried I should be. Had my scarf slipped? Had I done something else to offend them? But her face was inscrutable.
The oldest finally murmured something to Azar. I asked her what the man said. The man, understanding my concern and in an apparent effort to bridge the language divide, stepped forward then, holding his hand over his heart. He bowed. He repeated what he had said earlier. Azar translated: “Have you been treated well by your hosts so far? Have you had a good experience in this country?” The other men with him also bowed their heads. They asked where I was from. I hesitated before I told them the truth: I was American.
I waited. There was a reason I had traveled to the country on my Swedish passport.
The old man spoke. “We like America even if it doesn’t like us much. We hope you continue to have a good visit and we would be very grateful if you would tell others when you return what kind of experience you had.”
We would have tea at a beautiful tea house. Azar didn’t much understand the United States, she admitted, and we didn’t get into the politics. We would instead wander through the bazaar, under the high dome with its light-giving oculus, down the copper alley to where a craftsman was putting wool yarn into a large kettle of rose-colored dye. Around him were seven men sitting on the floor, drinking tea.
A man dressed in black sitting on a pile of wool was the most talkative. He asked where I was from. I again thought of saying Sweden, but I told the truth: the United States. There were nods all around. He wanted to know what I thought of Iran, and everyone waited for my answer. “I was enjoying it,” I said. Smiles from everyone. We spoke about where I had been, and they liked those places. “Could you share your experience with people back home?” he asked. I said I would. “Americans don’t like us,” he added, and everyone agreed readily.
I had been in bazaars in Istanbul and Marrakech, so I knew what they were like: the smell of a tourist would bring twenty men out of their shops to score a purchase, but here was an ask of a different type.
Over a lunch of saffron rice, flatbread, eggplant stew, and fresh herbs Azar told me it took 2,000 petals to yield one drop of rose oil.
The next morning, we were up before 4:00 am. We were joining a family in Qamsar, who, like many in the area, still harvest the damask rose traditionally. As we walked the narrow dirt pathway under a fig tree and alongside a little stream, Azar told me that distillation must be completed within twenty-four hours of harvesting if you wanted the kind of quality Qamsar was famous for. They use a double-fired distillation process, which requires little water. Rose water is poured on top of the tossed petals instead of pure water before heating. The steam is channeled through pipes into a copper pitcher, which is then immersed in cold water. A thin layer of oil is separated from the rose water using a syringe.
The family we were meeting had already started to harvest the roses when we arrived. I could see the mountains that encircled Qamsar in the distance, and the sky was showing mere hints of the coming sunrise. The eldest daughter tried to show us how to pick the roses to avoid being scratched by the thorns. She filled the canvas bag wrapped around her with admirable nimbleness even if the father seemed to be filling his sac as soon as he emptied it.
We learned that the desert conditions in Qamsar give the rose oil a higher concentration of that sought-after essence.
There is a long history of rose production in Iran, going as far back as Cyrus the Great, who had a rose etched on his tomb. Avicenna, in the 10th century, would produce and use rose oil and water to heal such ailments as abdominal and chest pain.
Azar told me the benefits of the rose were not only physical but mental as well, including healing depression and grief. All Iranian households, she said, have a bottle of rosewater in their kitchen, and they were a favorite topic of the ancient Persian poets. Azar recited a line from Jalalod-Din Rumi: “Come out here where the roses have opened. Let the soul and the world meet.”
The sun had risen, and we were on our way to witness the distillation process. We opened an old blue wooden door and stepped into a true alchemist’s workshop, with copper pots and pipes filling the room and rose petals in different stages of production. The young man managing the process was full of smiles explaining each step required to create the magical essence.
“It's the time you spent on your rose that makes your rose so important,” the Little Prince said. According to the Little Prince, even a rock pile ceases to be a rock pile the moment a single man contemplates it, bearing within him the image of a cathedral. And here was a whole village leaning in and watching the damask’s gentle unfolding.
I thought of the way the rose has lost its meaning just by overuse, the way it is shipped in a refrigerated environment by plane across continents before it sits in supermarkets and boutiques, with a carbon footprint that might make it blush. I thought of the country I was visiting, the way the citizens here were pained by the reputation they have in the world at large, particularly in the United States. I thought even of my own mother, the way our relationship disintegrated at different points in my life before it was revived again, like a rose bush cut back in winter that blooms again in June.
There are moments that stand out in life, and the one thing those moments seem to have in common is a close connection between the observed and the observer.
It is easy to dismiss countries and people. We want it to be true that if a country, race, religion, or person has gotten in the headlines for the wrong reasons, that we know the story, the right and the wrong. We strip the complications and nuance off whatever it is, and we are able to create a story in black and white as we have the necessary distance.
But the world isn’t black and white. It is a world of color and scent and taste and touch. And who among us can doubt that a pink damask is grandest in the place where you least expect it, where perhaps the sand can be seen for many miles, where it has lived and will continue to live long past our own lives had faded with its own fiercely original yet still universal beauty.