Wednesday’s Child: The Magus

There are stories that are obviously instructive, yet with a moral that quite eludes the reader – most Chinese fairytales, I find, are a good example – and I’m about to tell such a story. I’m writing this on Epiphany, which in Italy is bigger than Christmas, and the time of Eastern miracles is just right to call to mind Shams, the Persian restaurateur I knew in London. Besides, Iran like the rest of that troubled paradise is very much in the news, so a Persian miniature may be a nice addition to my gallery.

Let me start by saying that Patogh, Shams’s restaurant off the Edgware Road, is the only place I know in central London where, if you can get a table, you eat like a shah for about $30 a head. It’s a hole-in-the-wall kind of place, with about ten tables spread over two floors, the ground floor dominated by a clay tandoor where Shams makes the flat Persian bread. He also churns his own butter, grows the herbs, and pickles the peppers. I’d say he is in his late sixties. A Zoroastrian by religion, hailing from a tiny mountain village in Iran, he cannot read and does not know his own birthday.

This last oddity makes it hard for him to chat up girls, who, as is their wont, ask about birth signs, but more of that later. When Shams was a boy, it was discovered that he had a talent for making traditional Persian sweets. The village elders called a whip-round to buy the boy some proper clothes and send him to Teheran, where he was duly taken on as an apprentice in the palace kitchens. There, some years later, young Shams became a pastry chef renowned throughout the land and beyond. Suffice it to cite one commission, from the Queen Mother, a birthday cake for 300 guests depicting in vivid marzipan a favorite room of hers in Windsor Palace.

The renown made Shams and his family prosperous, so much so that they decided to dispatch him to London with an eye to buying a small hotel there. He went on the journey with a giant wad of sterling to cover expenses, and on his first evening in town somebody suggested he visit a nightclub. He arrived there – I imagine it was Tramp, agreeable Lorraine at the door already then, in 1979 – with the giant wad on his person. “I saw all those women,” he recounted, “and they were very nearly nude, and of course I liked it.” He ordered champagne for everyone in the room. By closing time the wad was all gone.

“The money didn’t matter, I had plenty more,” he recalled, “and of course I was determined to return to the club the following night. So I went to the bank in the morning to get myself another wad of cash, but they told me, I’m sorry, sir, there has been a revolution in Iran and all accounts are frozen.” Twenty-four hours later, Shams was working for minimum wage repairing tandoors in London’s numberless Indian restaurants. “I thought nothing of it. I was used to working.”

Repairing tandoors, and later building them, made Shams rich once more, rich enough, at any rate, to open Patogh. He has been working hard ever since, but of course the vision of all those nearly nude women in Tramp never left him. Young Russian blondes of dubious repute – I had met him through one – became his fixation in middle age, and time after time he was punished by the financial mayhem they caused. One evening, after a particularly painful episode, he closed the restaurant early to have a heart-to-heart with me.

“Shams, my dear man,” I told him, “what’s wrong with you? Why are you chasing these Slav phantoms like a young lover in a sentimental French novel? Why don’t you go back to your village in the mountains and find yourself a good wife of what age suits you? Dare I say it, a virgin bride? The spooky ghosts of prostitution that haunt this damn town will then be out of your life and you will breathe easily ever after!”

“You know,” replied Shams, “my brother did just that. He went to our village, chose a pretty girl to marry, and brought her back with him to London. A Zoroastrian like us. No English. A fortnight later, one winter morning, I found him on my doorstep in his bathrobe, hollering to be let in. What happened, I asked. Turns out his wife had locked him out of the house. It had taken her less than two weeks to become a Londoner.”