Story of the salt-salesman (In Persian this salesman is known as Namaki) is one of those memories that are attached to a style of life back home in Iran. I am confident that many of us who were born and raised in Iran will remember this character due to his repetitive, loud, musical, and sometimes noisy voice.

Do we recall the voice of salt-salesman in those early summer days when we still were laying down in our cool beds or were giggling around with our siblings?

Do we recall how our mothers would jump and take all the uneatable bread to these men?

Many of us may remember the voice of salt-salesman who could be heard anywhere in the house. Salt-salesman was a multifunction man who was welcomed by our mothers and our women in every street. He asked for nothing but our old, uneatable, and mold bread. Some generous women would offer him a taste of the food that they had prepared or a piece of cookies they had saved in the kitchen, or just offer him a glass of icy water.

The numbers of interactions with these salt-salesmen or other salesmen were most dynamic around the Iranian New Year. Small amount of cash or some presents were being handed in to these men to take home to their families. People shared food, goodies, money, and most of all hope with salesmen who came to the door.

Namaki would come week after week and he would never forget yelling his name out loud: Namakie-Namakie. I guess he loved to call his own name and let people know about his presence. Our Namaki had an extra ordinary loud voice. He could shout throughout the entire quarter in order to announce his arrival.

His voice had a song, a tone, a pattern, a specific rhythm that was well known for women. I can still hear this voice in my mind and I am not crazy.

His voice would somehow encourage women to step out of their houses in order to hand in all the old bread that was indeed saved for him. That bread was from the day before or days before.

He would arrive in different times of the day and mostly in summer times. Namaki was usually an older man, a hard working one, who visited our quarters with a donkey carrying all his belonging.

This poor donkey carried two sacks, one filled with salt on one side and another one contained the old bread that was gathering in that day. I am not sure how long he would walk everyday, whether he had a type of agreement with other salt-salesmen and whether he had one or several streets to visit each day.

Perhaps these men knew each other and they would sell the old bread to same places.

Typical Namaki seemed to me at least being a man with a lower level of education or nothing at all. This man or men like him had most likely moved to a large city such as Tehran while leaving a farmer life behind. Namaki could also be a man who had no other opportunity for a better paying work. However, Namaki was a profession for itself and our individuals could carry that name once they filled in the “position”.

As a child we used to wonder what this man would do with all these bread. Would he eat them all? Would he make big dough and bake more bread? I believe these men would go and sell all those bread to the local farmers who had cows, lambs, chickens, roosters, and other animals.

If it happened that we had missed Namaki my mother would be upset wondering what to do with all the bread that we had not eaten during the week. Our mothers would also wonder what is making him for visiting our street.

Another characteristic of Namaki was that he could be used as a monster figure to scare children and make them to behave properly. This method would usually scare younger children and not those older ones.

I guess we were told that if we did not behave then these salt-salesmen would take us away. This was a threat that we had around us as children, at least in my family. This was an ugly bluff and we children would notice that soon, because in our minds, no mothers would give their children to a Namaki.

Anyhow, this was the story of Namaki. Poran Poregbal, Vancouver, B.C