Mr. Ghavami was our biology teacher. He was old and seemingly harmless and other than the fact that when calling a student to the board he would ask them to retell not some but all of the previous day’s lesson, no one had any issues with him. He would occasionally get angry and yell at us although he rarely beat anyone. Nima and I became the exception to this rule.

One day as we were sitting in class I brought Irene’s old biology book instead of mine. Most of the content was the same and the differences were mainly the pictures with hijabless woman removed and men or covered up women replacing them. As I leafed through my book I pointed out each picture to Nima and he showed me the one from his book as we compared notes. With Putra sitting in between us we had to either call out or make a hand gesture to get each other’s attention. After about 15 minutes of this Mr. Ghavami had had enough. He approached me, probably because I was at the near end of the bench and began smacking me at the back of my neck as he justified his actions, “You’ve been messing around since the beginning of the period. What is wrong with you?” After about three or four smacks accompanied by my profuse apologies he resumed teaching.

Nima later got it much worse. One day after lunch as were in class waiting for Mr. Ghavami to show up, Nima began singing, screaming and just making any kind of random noise. Unbeknownst to him Mr. Ghavami was coming up the staircase directly in front of our class door and was witness to all that Nima was doing. As soon as he came in he smacked Nima across the face and yelled, “What is wrong with you? Why are you yelling like a maniac?”

Nima attempted to cover up his actions. “I wasn’t yelling. I was telling everyone to get on their feet to show you respect”. This was in fact a common practice in all schools although certainly not what Nima was doing and Mr. Ghavami showed he wasn’t buying it.

“The hell you were!” he said as he continued smacking Nima. In between smacks Nima tried to get a word out only to be silenced with another smack. Eventually he realized that his attempts at rationalizing what he had done would only further fuel the fire. He understandably went quiet until Mr. Ghavami felt satisfied with the number of smacks that he had administered.