Some time after those events, I started working at the Karaj sugar factory, earning five tomans a day. I was in the section they called the beet chopping; there was a machine that sliced the beets. I stayed there for about three or four months until the factory shut down; it operated seasonally, and when the beet season was over, the factory would close. It was late spring, so I went to Darvan and stayed until the end of autumn; then, in winter, I returned to Karaj and started working at the same factory again, this time in the sugar weighing section. In layman’s terms, I was a “weigher.” The ready sugar passed through a path known as the “furnace road” and then came out through a thick pipe; workers filled bags, placed them on a scale, and I weighed them by the hundred kilos; another worker would set the bags aside, and some others sewed the bags shut. That was all my job entailed. Since I was educated and knew someone in the factory, they had given me a respectable job. This time, I didn’t give my salary to my father; before that, I always gave it to him; I saved two hundred tomans.
After a while, I introduced one of our relatives, who was also a Narimani, to the factory in my place and didn’t go back. I took the two hundred tomans and went north for business. A person named Hassan Esfahani, who was originally from Esfahan and had gone bankrupt in Karaj and was left with nothing, said he would come with me. Together, we explored Lahijan, Langarud, Rasht, and Bandar Anzali, and on the other side, Noshahr, Amol, and Babol; we found Chalus to be more suitable than anywhere else; also because I wanted to keep my connection with Karaj.