4 ideas
Moradi Kermani was born in 1944 in Sirch, a village in Kerman province. His mother died when he was an infant and his father could not raise him, so his grandparents brought him up in poverty and frequent hunger. That household, especially the grandmother, later became the source for his fictional Majid and his grandmother Bibi, which makes his childhood a documented case of a writer's deprivation turned directly into his best-known fiction.
The memoir shows that hunger, loss and humiliation can be told without self-pity by recounting them through the child's own mischief and small defeats. Humor keeps the reader close enough to take in the hardship instead of turning away from it. The same painful episodes that could produce a lament produce a comedy, and the comedy carries the grief more effectively.
Events are narrated at the child's scale of perception: a meal, a teacher's word, or a village rumor looms larger than politics or economics. Keeping to this limited viewpoint lets the reader infer the adult reality of scarcity and precarity that the child only half understands. The distance between what the child notices and what the reader grasps becomes the book's emotional engine.
For an orphan, a grandparent's unglamorous daily care, including feeding, scolding, worrying and making do, becomes the child's whole model of love and duty. The grandmother's authority does not rest on abundance, because she has little to give. It rests on her constancy, and that constancy lets the child survive material scarcity without being emotionally destroyed.