A memory of my childhood that was always growing in me and finally got matured and has since saved me from sickness and death and hopefully it will save the world also from sickness and ignorance.

We had a relatively large house in Khoramshar, Iran that was made in the old customary style of its time which

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had a yard all around the house and had six large rooms in a way that the northern side had five entrance doors and before that was this high porch(Eivaan) and on the eastern and western sides it had three ‘Sardabs” or large basements that in the hot weather of Khoramshar we used to use it for get togethers and parties.

This house had an old fashioned traditional and amazing design.

It had a nice air conditioning and in the middle of the back yard there was this tall palm tree that used to give us a lot of dates and even now that tens of years has passed from those days I can still feel the taste of those dates in my mouth because for as much as I can remember I used to spend a lot of time on this tree when I was a child. It was a place that I could see all the surrounding areas.

In this large traditional house with lots of good memories my brother had lots of pigeons.

Apparently these pigeons were very special pigeons because they were so healthy and fit that they used to fly for long hours on the skies above our house and they used to fly so high at times that they would disappear and my brother along with his same age friends used to watch these pigeons from the roof of the house and he used to brag about their performance and he used to call each one of those pigeons by their special names.

Maybe I was 8-9 years old that one day we were sitting in the backyard with the rest of the family like a picnic and we were eating lunch and my bigger brother Bijan who was fourteen years old, before starting to eat his food he would take a large white bag that had wheat, grains, seeds or raw lintels that he had prepared for these pigeons and he would hold in his hands and then he would throw a handful of it on to the other side of the yard far enough so that the pigeons could feed themselves and at the same time he would keep them away from us so we could have our lunch.

This way he would then sit next to me so he could have his lunch.

It wasn’t long before the pigeons would finish all the raw seeds and they would come close to us again and in order for me to keep the pigeons away from us and give Bijan a little extra time to eat his lunch and so he wouldn’t have to get up and feed the pigeons again, I would throw a handful of my cooked rice for them.

I would throw a few spoonfuls of the rice that I was eating in the farthest part of the yard and in the beginning you would see that the pigeons would run towards the rice that I had thrown but without eating them quickly they would return and the rice would remain untouched.

This had caused my three brothers and two sisters to laugh at me and say “Hussein now you have to go and clean up all the rice you thrown there”.

This rejection of the pigeons from eating the rice that we humans eat had me really amazed and it was hard for me to believe.

I was asking myself if there were hidden secrets and reasons behind their actions that us humans are unaware of.

But quickly I remembered that there were plenty of chickens that I had seen that would eat the bread and the rice and I would answer myself that maybe that is the reason that these chickens, despite they have wings, they can’t fly like my brother’s pigeons.

They can’t fly at all not to mention flying in great heights. Because of my curiosity about this disliking of the rice by the pigeons, an idea came across my mind.

After my brother and the rest of my family returned to their rooms I returned to the backyard with the reason of cleaning up the rice that the pigeons didn’t eat and then with a quick attack I was able to catch two of the pigeons and take them to one of the basements in my house and there I found a large square metal pail which was about one meter by on meter and I used it as a cage and I imprisoned the pigeons inside this cage that I had found and I put the open end of this cage against the wall so that the pigeons could not run away and I put a little bit of water for them in this box that had now became a house for these two poor pigeons and I remember telling them that if you want to be stubborn (by rejecting the food I throw for you) I am more stubborn than you and I will keep you like this until you eat the rice like us humans do.

A few hours past by and I returned to the basement to check on the pigeons and from the few holes in the pail I noticed they were sitting in a corner of the box far away from the rice and they had not eaten anything.

Anyway after a few more times that I went down there to check on them I realized that those poor pigeons against their own will and because of their hunger they had broken their food strike and without any interest in the food they were still starting to eat some of the rice.

I repeated the same thing for about 14 days and I would put the same rice and water for them. Fortunately my brother after searching for these two pigeons which he knew them by name had come to the conclusion that they had flown far away and he would say that they would return after a few days the same way that it had happened many times in the past.

After a few weeks or 14 days at an occasion when Bijan was not in the house, I took out the two prisoners from this metal box to see what has changed with them.

The first thing that I noticed was that these pigeons had gotten extremely fat but the fatness was in a bad way. They looked really out of shape.

I saw that they had developed large breasts. I took them outside in the backyard and released them and noticed that just as a new chick that was just hatched, they would carry their chests very close to the ground and they couldn’t stand on their feet very well.

They couldn’t avoid dragging their breasts on the ground. I think they didn’t have any energy in their feet and generally they were shaking and looked very sickly.

As an experiment I took one of them and I wanted to make it fly but the poor thing was like a stone and without even shaking its wings fell down on the ground on his face.

This was a very strange incident.

What did this rice do to them? In the neighborhood there was this old couple that lived there and the kids in the neighborhood used to call them “Aa-baba and Bibi”or grand.pa and grand.ma, and they used to always call me to do something for them.

I compared them to these birds and thought because they ate a lot of rice now they have become so week and they have to walk with the cane and their eyes don’t see well.

This type of thinking from that time was working in my head. The thinking that in the rice and later on in the cooked food there are some decayed molecules or there must be some molecules that decay the human body that turns us humans to become disabled and diseased in the long term..