Story · Palm Tree and Gunpowder
Makineh · the water pump
English finding-aid title for the scanned Persian text; not a published English translation title.
The theft of a new water pump changes a palm-growing family’s future and draws a boy into his missing father’s responsibilities.
- Author
- Ghazi Rabihavi
- Publication
- Palm Tree and Gunpowder
- Source date
- Summer 1359 (Iranian calendar) · Damoon edition
- Published language
- Persian
- This page
- English publication guide
English editorial orientation to the inspected Persian scan. The complete literary text remains with the original publication.
Reading orientation
The narrator remembers the purchase of a motorised water pump for the family’s palm garden. Water that once required hard manual labour now flows through channels towards neighbours’ plots. His father plans a shelter for the machine, but a theft interrupts this moment of shared possibility. The investigation adds humiliation when a gendarme responds to the Arab family with racist accusations. Source 1
The father crosses the river in search of the pump and disappears. Two years later, the seventeen-year-old narrator still works the land and looks for him. The boy’s determination to preserve the garden meets the burdens of the adulthood his father had praised. The last pages return to footprints in the mud and the possibility of following them. The story does not establish the father’s death or resolve his absence. Source 1
The scanned appearance
Makineh appears in Palm Tree and Gunpowder, PDF and printed pages 5–42. Damoon’s colophon identifies first edition summer 1359. The first story closes with an Abadan 57 dateline; its footnote identifies makineh as a water pump. The date identifies the scanned volume, rather than an independently established composition date. The English title is a finding aid. Source 1
Sources & credits
- Makineh · the water pump · scanned Persian source
Makineh. Palm Tree and Gunpowder. Damoon’s colophon identifies first edition summer 1359. The first story closes with an Abadan 57 dateline; its footnote identifies makineh as a water pump. PDF and printed pages 5–42. The English paragraphs are original editorial reading orientations, not reproduced or translated literary passages.