The Neighbour- A Short Story by Amirhossein Khorshidfar- Translated by Niloufar Talebi from Persian - 2019 - included in Book of Tehran: A City in Short Stories introduced by Orkideh Behrouzan

 

"The Neighbour" by Amirhossein Khorshidfar was first published in 2002, selected for Sadegh Hedayat literary award.

(Sadeq Hedayat Literary Awards was initiated in 2003 in honor of the 100th birthday of the great writer of The Bind Owl and since then it has been awarded to the Best Persian Short Stories.

The annual Sadeq Hedayat Literary Award is organized and sponsored by the Hedayat Office and the Sokhan Website. Jahangir Hedayat, the nephew of Sadeq Hedayat, as the head of the Hedayat Office in Tehran, has made an enormous contribution to promoting Sadeq Hedayat’s work, both inside and outside Iran. He has personally helped many scholars around the world, in person or via correspondence, with his great knowledge and library of Sadeq Hedayat’s literary works.

The competition for the award is now very well known and very well respected. The aim of this award is to encourage young writers to write and to have the chance to take part in a respected literary contest.

The competition is for all Persian-speaking people. So writers of Persian from other countries) from Parsagon - The Persian Literary Review)

http://www.parsagon.com/

The Neighbour, five pages, does have what you could call a plot line.  A woman in Tehran forgets to bring a key and when her husband went out he locked the door.  A neighbour invites her to wait in her apartment.

Here is a sample of the story:

"I didn’t bring a key,’ Sima laughed. She heard footsteps. Still smiling at the neighbour’s wife, she stood up and looked down the stairwell. An Afghan boy was climbing up them. As soon as he turned the corner on the landing, he greeted the neighbour’s wife, carrying a broom in one hand and a big bucket in the other.  ‘Come in. Come in and make yourself comfortable at mine,’ the neighbour’s wife said. ‘No,’ she said, ‘he’ll be home soon, I just don’t know where he’s gone.’ The Afghan boy was standing at the top of the stairs staring at them with a perplexed look. The neighbour’s wife said, ‘Come on in. I’m on my own as well. Assad needs to wash the stairway and is about to start running the tap.’ Assad grinned. He put the bucket down and scratched his neck. ‘Come in, let’s have some tea together,’ the neighbour’s wife insisted. ‘Let’s not do the ta’arof dance.’1 As Assad continued to scratch behind his ears, Sima picked up her shopping bag, swung her purse round her shoulder and walked into the neighbour’s apartment – a more expansive one than hers which, being on the other side from it, faced the sunlight with its pale grey walls that verged on blue."

Born in Tehran in 1981, Amirhossein Khorshidfar is an award-winning Iranian writer, journalist, translator and literary critic. While studying industrial design at University of Tehran he wrote four children’s book: The First Days on Earth, The Day the Sky Broke, The Son Who Had No Star and The Rain Story. His short story ‘Neighbour’ received the Sadegh Hedayat Literary Award Letter of Honor, and his debut short story collection, Life Goes on According to Your Will (2006), received the Golshiri, Mehregan and Rouzi-Rouzegari awards. His other works include the short story collection, Betting on a Race Horse, and a novel, Tehraniha. He was jury member of the Roozirozegar and Golshiri literary awards from 2008 to 2011, and has also worked as Editor at Ofoq Publications and as a journalist for progressive newspapers such as Bahar, Shargh, Etemad, and Roozegar from 2006 to 2015. In recent years he has led various creative writing courses in institutions such as Rokhdad Taze, Baharan, Maktab-e-Tehran and Tehran Universities.