Tehran's Daughters E-Book

May McGoldrick

• Herausgeber: Book Duo Creative
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2025

Beschreibung

Two women. Two revolutions. A lifetime of exile and longing. In 1978, seventeen-year-old Omid is forced to flee Iran on the eve of the Islamic Revolution, leaving behind a mother whose defiance against the regime has made her a marked woman. Arriving in America, Omid believes her stay will be temporary. But when her mother is declared a fugitive, her dreams of return collapse, and she is left to build a life in exile—one shaped by loss, resilience, and the echoes of a past she cannot escape. Three decades later, Omid is a mother raising her daughters in Connecticut, trying to bury the memories of the country she once called home. But when her eldest daughter, Sayeh, is arrested in Tehran amid a new wave of protests, Omid's past and present collide. As Sayeh disappears into the underground resistance, Omid is thrust into the same fear and defiance that once defined her own youth.   Spanning two generations of women bound by revolution and exile, Tehran's Daughters is a powerful story of resistance, identity, and the unbreakable ties between mothers and daughters. Echoes of Resistance The Price of Freedom Previously published as Omid's Shadow  

Leseprobe

TEHRAN’S DAUGHTERS

NIKOO KAFI

withMAY MCGOLDRICK

withJAN COFFEY

BOOK DUO CREATIVE

Thank you for choosing this book. In the event that you appreciate the novel, please consider sharing a good word (or two) in an online review.

Tehran’s Daughters. Copyright © 2009. Nik00 Kafi and James A. McGoldrick.

All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

Originally published as Omid’s Shadow.

CONTENTS

Book 1

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Book 2

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Chapter 30

Chapter 31

Chapter 32

Chapter 33

Chapter 34

Chapter 35

Chapter 36

Chapter 37

Chapter 38

Chapter 39

Chapter 40

Chapter 41

Chapter 42

Chapter 43

Chapter 44

Chapter 45

Chapter 46

Chapter 47

Chapter 48

Chapter 49

Chapter 50

Chapter 51

Chapter 52

Chapter 53

Chapter 54

Chapter 55

Author’s Note

About the Author

Also by May McGoldrick, Jan Coffey & Nik James

BOOK 1

We have not come here to take prisoners,

But to surrender ever more deeply

To freedom and joy.

We have not come into this exquisite world

To hold ourselves hostage from love.

Run my dear,

From anything

That may not strengthen

Your precious budding wings.

Run like hell my dear,

From anyone likely

To put a sharp knife

Into the sacred, tender vision

Of your beautiful heart….

For we have not come here to take prisoners

Or to confine our wondrous spirits,

But to experience ever and ever more deeply

Our divine courage, freedom, and Light!

—Hafiz

1

Tehran, Iran

December 1978

I was seventeen and I was breaking the law. Deliberately.

The single-pane glass in the tall windows of the old high school building rattled from the shrill sound of the dismissal bell. The metallic ringing raced through the empty hallways and disrupted the solemnity of the packed classrooms, creating a frenzy amongst the dozens of girls packed into each room.

Slamming my books shut, I quickly stuffed them into my bag. The pitch and volume of voices smothered the calls of our science teacher as she tried to relay last minute instructions on our lab reports. I grabbed my bag and jacket and searched for my three friends. They were already by the door.

“Omid,” our teacher called to me.

I saw her holding an article from an engineering journal that she’d promised to copy for me.

“Farda. Merci,” I called back. Tomorrow was soon enough. I couldn’t be distracted. Not now.

Even as I turned to go, my joints protested the movement. My body was trembling. I attributed it to excitement. We were breaking the law. The consequences, if we were caught, could be disastrous. It didn’t matter. We were fighting for the greater good.

My friends waited for me, and I sailed by them, the first one out into the second-floor hallway. As I did, the bell stopped abruptly. Before its echo could fade, though, the empty hallways began to fill with girls spilling out from their classrooms. The four of us exchanged nods before we dispersed.

We each had our stack of flyers. We’d rehearsed our routine. We knew how many other students were going to help us and at what designated place in the school they were going to meet us. We’d divided the sprawling skeleton of Marjan High School and its grounds between all those who were willing…and courageous enough…to work for freedom.

Students crowded the hall. Most of the girls from our classroom already had the flyers we were distributing. The others didn’t need much prodding to take one.

The two-sided leaflet was packed with information. Dates of demonstrations. Time and place to arrive. Shout-lines of who we were, what we stood for, and what to chant during the march. There were specifics about martial law, which had been imposed on the city of Tehran since September. What streets were safe to pass, starting at 5:00 a.m. The back of each page was covered with descriptions of the atrocities committed by the Shah’s regime. The crimes that the hated SAVAK—the Shah’s CIA-trained secret police—were committing in their hidden prisons. We spoke of why it was critical for us, the high school students, to join the others and make our voices heard.

A classroom door to my left opened, but before anyone could get out, the teacher pulled it closed. She was shouting instructions over the pandemonium inside.

Tomorrow’s march started at 7:00, before the morning commuter traffic began. Last week, there’d been a rally of 40,000 university students. This week, we were joining them for what was certain to be a much larger turnout. We would deadlock the city.

Another classroom door opened belatedly and students poured out. The first five students took flyers out of my hand without any encouragement. This second-story wing where I was standing held the twelfth-grade classes. The navy blue uniformed girls teemed into the hall like bugs leaving a nest beneath an overturned rock. The noise in the crowded corridor was now louder than the dismissal bell had been. I put my bag between my feet, fighting the onslaught of humanity.

I was a self-ordained member of the rebel group Fedayeen-e-Khalq, and the school leader by default. My three friends and I had started a chapter at the high school four months earlier, at the start of our senior year. We each had our own reasons and motivation for getting involved. But we all had one goal in mind.

I passed out three more flyers.

“Farda sobh.” Tomorrow morning, I told each girl. “Geloyeg madresseh.” In front of the school.

My friends and I wanted freedom of speech, freedom of expression, freedom to choose leaders who had the interests of the Iranian people at heart. We wanted to put an end to the blood-soaked dictatorship that ruled our country.

We wanted change.

My best friend Roya, sadly, had the most personal reason for wanting to bring about change. Her brother was a political prisoner. He had been locked up for the past six years at Evin Prison in the northwestern part of Tehran. We had heard so many stories about the place. Horror stories. Even if a person were lucky enough to get out of Evin Prison, they were never the same.

Our friend Neda had reason to hate the Shah, as well. She was the cousin of a famous leftist poet who’d disappeared from his house one day over a decade ago…never to be seen again. It was whispered that SAVAK was to blame for the disappearance. No one doubted it. Neda even had the same last name as the poet, and it was still a name that was synonymous with protest. Neda saw it as her calling—as her hereditary purpose—to take part in this fight.

And Maryam was involved because the rest of us were. Born into a wealthy family, she had enjoyed the perks that belonged to the inner circle of the privileged few. She knew no one who had suffered or had been imprisoned because of their intellectual views. Still she joined our fight, and she had the respect of us all because of it.

I was involved in all of this because I was raised with my eyes wide open. My mother would not allow me to lead a sheltered life. I was encouraged to listen to the arguments that Azar had with the other intellectuals and activists she brought home. Arguments about Shah, country, God. She had strong views on everything. Snuggled in her arms, I watched the bootlegged films that were forbidden to be shown legally in Iran. I heard the stories of the fugitives and the dispossessed.

And as a result, I become a renegade. I never conformed. I challenged life and rules that I believed were arbitrarily set by those in charge, men who had no other purpose than enriching themselves and protecting their own interests. I frequently questioned authority at school, and I got into trouble because of it. But I chose my moments. I wasn’t antagonistic all the time, and not with everyone. My mother always said that was my saving grace.

Disagreeing with the Pahlavi regime was as natural to me as the air I breathed and the water I drank. I’d traveled with my mother through the country, going south to Abadan and north to Mashhad. I’d seen starving children begging for food in the countless crumbling stone villages in between. I’d walked through the dirty streets in the south end of Tehran, through the city’s most impoverished neighborhoods. The smell of hashish and garbage hung in the air, and ragged children sat with old men in the shade of ruined buildings on dusty streets. These were places where the people no longer even dreamed of running water or a decent school.

And I’d also been to the sidewalk cafes in Shermoon, in the north of Tehran, where affluence hung in the air scented with Chanel and Givenchy and Gauloises. Here, wealth and comfort were defined by the glittering shops and the beautiful people who frequented them. And in the tree-lined streets and neighborhoods of northern Tehran, the houses of the rich sat behind high stone walls, built from stone and mortar and the blood of the masses.

My anger with the injustices around me had boiled over this past summer after a discovery my friend Roya made. My mother, Azar Parham, a University of Tehran history professor, had been a founding member of the Fedayeen-e-Khalq at the university eight years ago. This discovery brought my entire life into focus. In that one moment, dozens of questions that I could never find answers to evaporated into thin air.

I understood my life, and her life, and the respect that her students and the other faculty showed her. In the blink of an eye, I knew why she let me be as I was—opinionated and headstrong. It made sense to me now why Azar continued to hold her classes outside of the striking university and why all of her students continued to attend them. There was an adoring quality to the way they treated her, absolutely unlike the way I felt about any of my teachers.

I’d always known she was smart, even brilliant. She’d been among one of the first women to be awarded a PhD by the University of Tehran. And there was an authority that went along with that designation. But the attention she attracted was at a different level, and I couldn’t understand it until now.

I also better understood the reason behind the estrangement that existed between my mother and my grandparents. She was a single mother and a free thinker. They were Muslims, so devout they had made a Hajj pilgrimage to Mecca. They stared at each other across some yawning abyss.

I knew we had family; Azar was the youngest of three sisters. Everyone else in our family lived in Esfahan, and yet we never went there. We were never invited to weddings. We didn’t go to funerals. Norooz, the Persian New Year, was celebrated by only the two of us. My mother exchanged news of family by talking occasionally to her sisters on the phone.

Azar believed the Islamic clerics had become increasingly reactionary in her lifetime. They used Islam, not as it was intended, but in a way that was a throwback to the Middle Ages, and as a means of controlling the believers. She had been raised by traditional Islamic parents, and yet she always spoke her own mind.

Growing up in the 1950s, she had known the delicate balance wrought by Reza Shah, the present king’s father, between the forces of westernization and the Islamic traditions that had originally been forced on the Iranian people after the Arab invasions some fourteen hundred years ago. Azar accepted this balance, knowing that an individual could choose the lifestyle that suited them. What she wanted now was democracy to replace the corruption that seemed to permeate the monarchy like the rotted timbers of an ancient house. She wanted a revolution for the Iranian people.

When I learned these things, my opinion of her skyrocketed. She didn’t know I knew. She had no clue that, since that summer day, I’d researched and found many of the articles she had written. I’d found transcripts of the numerous public speeches she’d given. There were files buried within files in our own house. She was a teacher. Boxes overflowing with papers and shelves stuffed with books were a part of her existence…part of our existence. I pored over her work and searched out the hidden gems of knowledge. I found revolution between the lines. I discovered the roots of her beliefs, and somehow knew I was a living branch. Reading her words helped me formulate my own.

And it was comical that, as all of this was going on, with all her intelligence, Azar had no idea why I now looked up to her with wide-eyed admiration after years of rebellion and constant arguing.

She also didn’t know that, instead of attending the daily Konkoor class after school to get ready for the national university exam, I was distributing anti-Shah flyers and holding meetings and working on the layout for our next publication. I was an organizer, a leader in my own circle, hungry to help bring about change…as she was working to bring about change.

“Farda sobh.” Tomorrow morning. Many girls took the proffered paper. But there were a few who pressed their shoulder against the opposite wall to try to avoid me. They made no eye contact.

They were the lowest of the low. Most of them were students who were escorted by their fathers or brothers to school. Hypocrites. They wore the hajab while they were with those men, but once inside the walls of the school, they ran to the lavatory and removed their head covering and applied the thickest layers of make-up. Some of them would even take off at noon and spend the afternoon with their boyfriends. I would see them slip back into the crowd of students at dismissal, their faces scrubbed clean and their hair covered so properly. They pretended to be so docile and dutiful and decent in front of the men in their families.

There wasn’t a week that went by, however, that the news of one of them having a ‘miscarriage’ in the bathroom didn’t reverberate through the building.

I’d heard those girls say that our thoughts smelled like gormeh sabzi, the pungent green stew served in every Persian household. They meant that there was no hiding our thoughts or our actions. It didn’t matter what we said or did. To them, we were dangerous because of our way of thinking. We were openly critical of authority. Even worse, I suppose, they saw us as communists. The changes we were seeking, they thought, would take away everything what they valued. Money, boys, and their Muslim faith. At least, Islam the way they liked to practice it.

I forgave them for their ignorance. I believed they’d be herded like sheep to our way of thinking once we were able to win our battle. They were not leaders, but followers. And I welcomed the challenge of someday teaching these women the value of independent thought. The power of freedom. I longed for the day when these same people would recognize and value their equality with men in society.

Another flyer. “Geloye madresseh.” In front of school.

I was happy to see that the number of students who took the flyers had increased substantially over this past month. Change was in the air; it was contagious. Any fear of getting caught was overwhelmed by the adrenaline coursing through our bodies. We were all being carried along on the electric currents of change.

I pulled out another stack of flyers from my backpack as Maryam motioned to me from the next hallway intersection that she was running low. Our science teacher left the class and locked the door behind her.

“Khanoom Habadi,” I called out, waving a leaflet in her direction. She rolled her eyes and shook her head, touching her swelling stomach. We all knew that her first baby was due before the Persian New Year in March. She was one of the good ones, as far as we were concerned. Although she didn’t join our fight, she never condemned it, either. And we understood that she was a lot more vulnerable than any of us.

Personally, I had a soft spot in my heart for her. Because of her continuous encouragement, I had doubled up the number of science classes I’d taken. She wanted me to pursue a career in engineering—something that I’d started to think about more and more.

Only a few students remained in the halls. I saw Maryam walking empty handed toward me. Behind her, Neda appeared from the stairwell. The panic in her face froze both of us.

“They’re here,” she yelled out.

The statement put an end to my peaceful daydreaming about babies and engineering. The papers slid through my fingers and spread out at my feet. I immediately crouched down to collect them. She and Maryam reached me in an instant. Together, we scooped up the loose flyers as Neda filled us in.

“An army truck is at the back gate of the school, and another is in front. A dozen soldiers have spread out along the street. They’re armed and they’ve set up check points at the gates. Everyone is being questioned before leaving.” She lowered her voice. “SAVAK agents are here, too.”

The mention of the Shah’s secret police on the campus meant disaster. I found my hands were shaking as I stood up with the papers bunched in my arms. I stuffed the flyers into my backpack with the few hundred others already there.

“What do we do?” Maryam asked. Her face was ashen.

I led the others to the window overlooking the front gates. Students were backed up trying to get out. The soldiers were opening some schoolbags, and I could see the flyers we’d just passed out littering the schoolyard where the girls had dropped them. The buses were waiting, and traffic was at a standstill on the street beyond. I looked into the faces of two soldiers, armed with rifles and standing by the first bus. They could not have been more than a year older than we were.

The information that I’d typed on the back of the flyers was suddenly a reality. Students were arrested every day. They simply disappeared. There was no judge and jury, no trial for those picked up. No laws protected the accused. Families received no news. The people arrested were sent to Evin Prison, where women and men were tortured to confess or to come up with the names of others who could be arrested.

Cold spikes of fear pierced my spine. I felt Maryam’s hands clutching my arm. We were all shaking.

“You girls,” Khanoom Habadi said sharply from behind us. “Come with me.”

The science teacher was looking out the window from behind us. Until that moment, I hadn’t realized that the young teacher had returned. With anxious glances at each other, we followed her back to the classroom, where she unlocked the door and let us all in.

The large classroom doubled as a chemistry and physics lab. She led us to an oversized sink at the side of the room and told us to put all the flyers we had left into it. We did as we were told. She helped me go through my backpack, making sure none were left. Even those stuffed into the textbooks were pulled out and added to the others.

When we had them all, she lit a torch to the paper.

I looked in horror at the smoke, but Khanoom Habadi calmly switched on the fans for the exhaust vents over the nearby line of burners.

“Open the windows half way,” she ordered.

I hurried to do as I was told. The acrid smell of the smoke burned my nostrils, but the cold air pouring in was a slap of reality of the danger we were in. With this woman’s effort to help us, the possible consequences of our actions became even sharper. Our recklessness was endangering both her and her baby. I looked over my shoulder. There was still smoke in the room, but the young teacher appeared calm as she poked the sheaves of paper and then told Neda to turn the exhaust fans to the highest level.

“You were staying late and finishing up a chemistry experiment with me,” Mrs. Habadi told all of us.

I looked around, realizing that Roya wasn’t with us. She’d been passing out flyers downstairs.

“Roya,” I whispered her name aloud.

She couldn’t get caught. Last Friday, we’d gone to her house for lunch. Her mother was younger than mine, but the weight of the grief she carried for her imprisoned son had made her so frail that she looked twice Azar’s age. Her family had suffered so much already. With Roya’s last name and her brother’s record, that would be enough for them to find her guilty.

I ran for the door. The science teacher called after me. I only turned to them at the door. My two friends were standing with her, their eyes open wide and fixed on me.

“I’ll be right back,” I lied.

2

The halls were empty, and the stairwell had the echo of a mausoleum as I went down two steps at a time. At the bottom, I pushed my way through the doors leading to the hallway where I knew Roya was supposed to be. The heavy door bounced against its spring with a loud bang and came back at me.

This corridor led to the main entrance of the school. In addition to the double rows of glass doors leading outside, three separate hallways, two sets of stairwells, and a line of administrator’s offices all opened onto the spacious lobby.

Two people stood by the main office door. Mrs. Elahi, the principal, was speaking to a middle-aged man dressed in dark gray suit and tie. He had nothing distinctive about him except for a hair-lip and a gaze that focused on me from the moment I entered the lobby. At the sound of the banging door, Mrs. Elahi also glanced in my direction. The man continued to stare. I slowed my steps and tried to look calm, as if nothing were wrong. My heart was pounding in my chest, however, and I could feel fear spread like ice water through my body.

Two teachers were standing by the glass doors leading out of the building. I could make out some of the military uniforms and the crowd of students still inching toward the gates.

Roya might have blended in with the other students and tried to get out. I hoped so badly that she’d done just that. With a nod to Mrs. Elahi, I approached the two teachers. Both of them knew me, and one of them had been my math teacher the year before.

“What’s wrong?” I asked them quietly as I joined them. “Why are the police here?”

“Not the police,” one of them said under her breath, gesturing toward the gray suit with Mrs. Elahi. “SAVAK.”

My heart sank. It was true. I knew enough about SAVAK to equate their presence to the ultimate demise of everything we were trying to do. SAVAK knew everything, sooner or later.

“What do they want?” I managed to ask.

“I believe they already have…uh, the person they were after,” the other teacher whispered. “That’s why they are finally letting the students leave.”

“Roya…” I whispered in dismay. The two looked at me.

They had picked up Roya. I didn’t do it consciously, but I found myself moving toward the main office. Like a robot, I mechanically moved one foot and then the other. My mind was racing as I tried to think of scenarios I could use that would not involve my mother in any of this. She would be in danger, too, of course. But I couldn’t stop myself. The agents would search our house. If I was able to find the evidence of her activism, so would they.

But then, there was Roya. My best friend since first grade. She couldn’t bear the responsibility of our actions alone. She was a follower where I had led. I had provided the rushes that had fueled the flames of her rebellion. I had been the wind that spread the fire. I could not let her walk this road alone. I would give myself up, tell them that she was just doing a favor for me.

My body continued of its own accord toward the SAVAK agent and the principal.

Mrs. Elahi’s gaze was fixed on the man, but I knew she was watching me approach. The SAVAK agent now had his back to me and he was looking into the office as he spoke to the principal.

There’d been times during my years at this high school when I had been terrified of this woman. She didn’t have to use an iron fist to keep discipline. Her disapproving glare was enough to instill fear in every one of the girls who attended her school. I saw her face grow pale as I approached. She was the one who looked afraid.

“You have the wrong person,” I said as I reached them.

He whirled and looked straight into my eyes. As he did, I felt my blood freeze in my veins. His dark gaze held within it nightmares, fears beyond anything that I could have ever imagined or written down on any of our flyers. It was the look of the dead. I felt my chin begin to quiver. My tongue was swelling in my throat, and I wasn’t sure I could take any air in my lungs.

“What did you say?” he asked. His voice was low and hard, and the faint lisp did nothing to weaken the effect.

I opened my mouth to repeat what I’d said. I owed Roya my loyalty, no matter what, but no noise came out.

“Oh, no,” Mrs. Elahi said sharply. “I have the right person. But now I have her accomplice, too.”

I had never seen my principal look so angry. She was shaking with fury, and the agent swung his gaze back to her.

“I’m sorry, Mr. Fattah,” she said, without taking her eyes off of me. “This young woman was speaking to me and not you.”

Tears gathered in my eyes. I shook my head, looking at her. She knew how Roya’s family suffered, too. I couldn’t let it happen.

“I…I am resp⁠—”

“You will wait for me in my office,” she ordered.

I shook my head. My feet were cemented to the floor. I would never be able to gather enough courage to do this again. I had to save her while I still could, before they took her away.

“What has she done?” the agent asked. He was staring into my face.

I could see momentary panic cross Mrs. Elahi’s face, but then it was gone, leaving an icy mask in its place.

She was afraid, and I had to take the weight off her. This was something I had done. I had to face the consequences. I reached in the front pocket of my skirt and found one of the folded flyers. I took it out and stretched out my hand. With lightning speed, the principal reached out and enclosed my hand in her own fist.

“She cheated, I’m ashamed to say. This girl, one of our best students, cheated with a friend on a math test.”

Mrs. Elahi yanked me toward the office door.

“Excuse me. I’ll be back out in a minute.”

I was at least half a head taller than the principal, but the grip on my hand was painful and left me no choice but to do as she wanted. I glanced at the two teachers still standing near the door, staring wide-eyed at us. I told myself there was still time for me to argue. I wasn’t about to sell out my friend.

The two receptionists were staring from behind their desks as we stormed through the doors. Neither said anything as the principal pushed me down a short corridor toward her office.

“Get her mother on the phone,” Mrs. Elahi said tersely over her shoulder before pushing me through the door.

The principal’s office walls were paneled in dark wood. The shades on the windows were drawn. She shoved me toward a small sofa against the far wall, but I didn’t sit. I was glad to be free of her grip, though. I turned, ready to do battle as she slammed the door with enough force to make the pictures rattle on the walls.

The only time a student was brought in here was when she was on the verge of expulsion. Considering what I was still prepared to do, getting kicked out of school was hardly a punishment. The principal turned to me, and I knew I only had a small window of time to explain myself.

“I can’t let them take Roya,” I said hurriedly. “It was I. It’s always been. I am the one who types the flyers. I write the material. I’ll die, khanoom, before I let her family lose another one of their children. Please, I know what I am doing.”

“Cut the hysterics,” she said fiercely. She shook her head and threw a nervous glance at the closed door. “I don’t want to hear another word of this nonsense. I don’t know where Roya is, but they didn’t come here for you or for her or for any student.”

“What?” The realization of what she was saying was slow in sinking in. “They…the teachers…they said he was SAVAK…that he’d already arrested someone.”

“Yes,” she said under her breath. “But not a student.”

“But…” My head was spinning.

“Not another word,” she snapped. “You sit down and stay there until your mother arrives.”

She started for the door but stopped and turned to me, raising a threatening finger.

“And you will never again act as stupidly as you did out there. This is not a game. Do you hear me?”

3

The minutes dragged into hours. In the overpopulated and sprawling city of Tehran, no one was only a phone call away. Since my first year at the high school, I’d taken either the school bus home or, on rare occasions, a cab. I couldn’t remember the last time my mother had to come to school to get me.

Soon after Mrs. Elahi left me in her office, one of the secretaries brought in my coat and school bag that Neda or Maryam must have brought down from the lab. When I asked the woman if my friends had already gone home and if she’d seen Roya, she said nothing. She had obviously been instructed not to talk to me.

Left alone again, I walked to one of the windows and peered around the edge of the shades. The principal’s office looked out over a large enclosed courtyard, separated from the street by a tall gate of two metal doors. Traffic was moving on the street beyond the walls. I could see no students, but one of the soldiers was standing in the street speaking with someone out of my line of sight. Mrs. Elahi’s words came back to me. They hadn’t come here to arrest a student. That meant one of the teachers had been suspected. My mind raced with different possibilities of who their victim might have been.

In Iran, people were unhappy. It didn’t matter what socioeconomic group one belonged to. The whitewashing of the truth by the media was no longer working. The repeated student protests and constant clashes with the military had forced the Shah go on TV last month and tell the people that he had heard the voice of our unhappiness. He promised not to repeat past mistakes and that he would make amends. Right after the broadcast, though, there had been many arrests. Nothing had changed. Once again, the Shah had lied.

I moved back to the sofa and searched through my bag for pen and paper. I was a good student, but studying was the furthest thing from my mind right now. I started writing down the text for the next leaflet. I wrote down ideas for a demonstration we could organize, protesting the arrest of our teacher. The administration would certainly be instructed to say nothing, but by tomorrow the students would figure out who was missing. Nothing would ignite the interest of those students who had been indifferent, up to now, like the arrest of someone so close to them.

It was my job to fan the flames of that interest and make the most of it. These were times of awakening, emotional and political awakening. The girls in our high school ranged from the ages of twelve to nineteen or twenty. The upheaval of the country was pushing the people into defined political camps. The main ideological grouping included those with feelings of nationalism and those favoring communism. Both groups were against the Shah, and this made so many students potential demonstrators on the streets, if not this week, then next week or the week after.

Over the past year, paperback books telling stories of those who’d started the people’s fight in Russia had been passed from hand to hand all over Iran. They were easy and quick reads. We had dozens of them. This was the time to pass them around to more students here at the high school.

I lost track of time, but I had already scribbled down at least a dozen pages of ideas when my mother and the principal appeared at the door.

I looked up at my mother’s face, trying to gauge her mood.

“Come, Omid. We have stops to make before six o’clock.”

Tall, thin, always professionally dressed, Azar was a striking woman. She had a strip of prematurely gray hair lightening in her tightly pulled-back hair. Right now, all I noticed was that she looked pale. Not angry, only very pale and tired.

My mother was a passionate woman. She knew what she wanted in life, and she had no trouble expressing it. I wasn’t much different. There were many instances when our neighbors had probably heard every word of our shouting matches, despite the closed doors and windows. I stuffed the notes into my bag and zipped it up. I assumed Mrs. Elahi and my mother had already gone over everything that needed to be discussed, since we weren’t doing that now. That was a relief; I was tired, too. Drained. And I was impatient to get home and call my friends. We still had a lot of work ahead of us tonight.

The secretaries were gone for the day. The lights over the desks were off, and from down the hall I could hear the buzz of a custodian’s vacuum cleaner.

“Will you call me once the arrangements are made and you know where I should send the records?” Mrs. Elahi asked my mother as we made our way though the office.

I was going to ask what arrangements and whose records, but the principal then dropped the next piece of news.

“There’s no school tomorrow.” She was speaking to me. “Tell that to whichever of your friends you see tonight.”

“She won’t be seeing any of her friends,” Azar said tightly, not giving me a chance to respond and nudging me out the office door into the lobby.

I was disturbed to see two armed soldiers lingering in the front hallway. The building’s head custodian was standing near them. As we went out into the gathering dusk, he escorted us to the locked front gate and let us out.

I decided not to rush into any explanation of what had occurred. I knew that Azar would not let it go. She never let things go. I knew we’d have not one but many discussions about the events of the day, but I would let her bring it up.

“Did you take a cab?” I asked.

“No, I drove,” she said. “As I said, we have stops to make.”

We were walking along the street, and I was surprised that her tone still wasn’t angry. I thought I’d keep the conversation casual. “Where are we going?”

My mother’s voice took on a cold bite that matched the late afternoon air. “You’ll find out.”

I stopped, pulled on my jacket, and shrugged the book bag higher on my shoulder. She didn’t slow down, and I had to run to catch up to her. As we walked, I thought about the high school being closed tomorrow. I wondered whether Mrs. Elahi had made that decision or whether the SAVAK agent had ordered it. But why were those soldiers still hanging around the school when we left? A search perhaps. Having the high school closed might actually encourage some girls to join the march. And how could I contact everyone if we were to cancel it? University students continued to have their demonstrations despite being on strike. We would, too. I couldn’t wait to get home and call Roya. We had to come up with a plan.

“I can always take a cab or bus home,” I offered hopefully. “Then you can take your time with whatever it is you have to do.”

“No, you are coming with me.”

My mother’s tone remained chilly, and as we reached the car, the first drops of rain began falling from the sky. She was parked illegally, too close to the intersection. Traffic laws didn’t mean much, however, in a city already packed with five times as many cars as it could reasonably accommodate.

“How many stops are we making?” I asked, climbing in. I couldn’t stop thinking about Roya. More important than the plans for tomorrow, I wanted to hear her voice, make sure she had arrived home safely. I wanted to know every detail of how dangerous her situation had been and how she’d managed to escape.

“Two stops,” Azar answered. She pulled into the traffic. The driver of the car she cut off planted his hand on the horn in protest.

“What are the stops?”

“I told you that you’ll find out when we get there.”

I was already thinking that I could find a public phone once my mother was inside the first stop. “I’ll wait in the car.”

“You are coming inside with me.”

“Why?” I asked, knowing that all of our arguments started with me asking why. Normally, the next step would be her saying that she was the parent and I had to do as I was told. After that, we could really get into it, but this time she didn’t take the bait. Her lips narrowed to a thin line, and she didn’t answer. Instead, she reached down and turned on the radio, a tactic I used myself whenever I wanted to avoid a conversation.

The lilting, sultry voice of Googoosh immediately filled the silence, and I thought about her. Googoosh had everything. Beauty. Fame. Money. The auditoriums and the stadiums filled when she sang. She went where she wanted, did what she pleased. She was above the problems of all the people she sang for.

We drove without speaking. I considered not pressing her now; I had things I would need to be doing tonight, and our discussion wouldn’t be simple or brief. I wasn’t entirely sure what the principal had told my mother, anyway.

One thing I was impatient about doing, though, was to let her know what I had learned about her in going through her files. I wanted Azar to be aware that I knew who she was and what she stood for. I was proud of her, and suddenly I wanted her to know that.

Not wanting to talk. Wanting to talk. Not wanting to. My own contradicting impulses were killing me. Finally, I reached over and turned off the radio.

“Let’s get this over with. Could we talk about what happened?”

“No.”

“I wasn’t doing anything you haven’t done yourself.” She said nothing, so I pushed on. “I’m sorry…but I’m only one of the million other young people in this country who are unhappy with what’s going on. I was doing what everyone else is doing. What everyone else should be doing. I was voicing my opinion. That’s not so bad, is it?”

No response. I shot a glance in her direction. We were on Roosevelt Street and traffic was crawling, but her knuckles were white as she held the steering wheel with a death grip.

“That’s what you’ve been teaching me. To speak. To think. To be active. I am the person you’ve made me into.”

“I know.”

Her voice was barely a whisper, but I was stung by the note of self-accusation in it.

“Then why are you angry?”

“Because this is different.”

“I can’t see how.”

“You are playing…playing with your life.”

Her voice cracked. I stared at her profile and saw the tears run down her cheek.

“Why are you crying?”

She stabbed away a tear, and the fingers returned to the wheel. I could deal with her so much better when she yelled at me. There weren’t too many times that she let her emotions get away from her. At least, not in front of me. She was the embodiment of strength. She was the lioness of the old children’s stories.

“Azar joon,” I said gently, touching her arm. My dear Azar. It was an endearment that I had called her since I was a child. She was as much a friend to me as a mother; we were only twenty years apart. The words always softened her mood, made her smile. But not tonight. “Talk to me. Yell at me. Be angry. I hate to see you cry.”

She glanced at me and then looked back at the road, but I saw sadness in that look that I had never seen in her eyes before. I directed my gaze out the window.

Azar took a left on some street, and I looked ahead. I knew this neighborhood. These blocks were the beginning of the American Embassy area. I looked up at the barbed wire on top of a brick wall and felt a queasiness spread through my stomach.

She took a right at the next tree-lined street and started looking for a parking space.

My mouth suddenly went dry. The part of me that always wanted to forget that two people had conceived me surfaced once again.

“Who lives around here?” My voice was shaking.

She backed into a parking space. “You have an appointment at the American Embassy.”

“Why?”

She turned off the engine. Her hands remained on the wheel. She continued to look straight ahead.

I shook my head. “No. I am not going in there. You can’t make me go.”

She swung around and looked at me. “I am sending you away, Omid.”

“No. You can’t. We talked about this, remember?” I protested. “You can only send me to America if I don’t get accepted at any of the universities here. I haven’t taken the Konkoor exam yet, but I am at the top of my class. I will get in. I know I will. You said you’d wait until after my graduation to make any decisions.”

“I’m not waiting for graduation. I am sending you away now.” The calmness in her voice frightened me. She wasn’t trying to convince me. She was telling me what she was going to do.

“You can’t,” I cried. “I am halfway through the school year. You can’t uproot me like this. That’s not fair to me. You promised to let me finish high school.”

“Omid—“

“I thought you loved me. I thought you wanted me—your only child—to live with you. What have I done? Please…Azar joon.” I couldn’t hold back my tears. “Don’t do this to me. Don’t throw me away. Please!”

She reached out and took hold of my chin. Her fingers were ice cold. Her gaze met mine through a veil of tears. “I am not throwing you away. Do you hear me? I am sending you away because I love you. Because I want to see my daughter live. Listen to me. I want you to live.”

“This is about the flyers I was passing around, isn’t it?” I asked. I was no longer able to control my emotions. “We can talk about them. The way we talk about everything else. I’ll be more careful. I won’t put myself in a situation like that again. That was stupid of me to try to give myself away to the SAVAK agent. I know now. I promise not to act irrationally like that ever again.”

Her fingers dropped from my chin, and she grasped my hands. “Omid, you’re seventeen. Next summer, you’ll be eighteen. I can’t protect you anymore. I⁠—“

“I don’t need protection.”

“But you do. You see…I know what you’ve been doing at school. And I know that you’ve been going through my files. I should have stopped you when I first found out, but I didn’t. I suppose it was vanity…I know it was stupidity. In a way, it made me proud to think how much the two of us had in common.”

“But it’s true. We are the same. That’s why I belong here…where you are. I should be with you. You are the only parent I have.”

Even as I said it, I knew I’d made a mistake. She shook her head.

“I spoke with your father. He agrees. You are going to stay with him and his wife until you finish high school.”

“No.” I pulled my hands away, pressing myself against the door behind me. “I don’t know them.”

“Yes, you will go,” she said firmly. “And you will get to know them…and your two half-brothers.”

“Please…” A sob escaped my throat. I looked outside at the steadily falling rain. Habib Mottahedeh was not a father; he was only a name to me. I knew even less about his wife and kids. He and my mother married when they both were in their first year at the University of Tehran, and they’d stayed married for only two years. I was born and they divorced and he transferred to a university in America. He left and never came back. Azar stayed. She stayed, finished her education, and kept me with her.

Habib and his new wife sent me gifts twice a year—on my birthday and at Norooz. She was American, and—oddly enough—she was the one who called a couple of times a year asking about me. In spite of my classes at school, I didn’t speak English, so my mother was the one who did the translating and most of the talking. At Christmastime, I also got a card from them with a picture of their family. Looking at it evoked no feeling in me at all. I wasn’t jealous, and I didn’t miss him. He was a good looking man with Mediterranean features. She had Irish blood and reddish hair, and the twin boys had their mother’s looks. As far as I was concerned, the family photo could have been a cut out of some American magazine.

I knew nothing about them. Azar might as well have been sending me to live on a commune in China.

“Azar joon…” I started again.

She shook her head, clearly struggling to control her emotions. This gave me hope. She didn’t really want to send me.

“Madar…” I pleaded.

Azar cut me off with a wave of her hand. “A year ago…six months ago…even in the fall, there was hope. But now, things are going to get worse and worse.”

“No, they’ll get better. The Shah can’t stay around too long. We are beating him. People are in the streets. Our voices are being heard.”

I stopped, realizing that it was foolish giving her a lecture on the situation; she knew so much more than I. Suddenly my political beliefs and aspirations were dismal and pointless compared to what mattered the most to me. I was fighting to stay in the only home I knew, with the only parent I knew. Her determined look told me, however, that she wouldn’t be easily swayed.

“I’ll change. I’ll stop doing all of this. I won’t be involved. I’ll come home after school. You don’t have to worry about me. Please. I give you my word. I will nev⁠—“

“Omid.” She reached out and took my face in her hands, forcing me to look into her eyes. “I know things that you don’t know. I am asking you to do this for me…for my safety as well as yours. I ask you to go and stay with Habib and his family until the end of this school year. If things don’t work out there…if you want to come back then…you can. You can come back here and go to the university.”

“If you don’t want me with you, send me to Esfahan to stay with your parents.”

“No. You and I will only be safe if you are out of the country,” she said in a fragile tone. “The arrangements have been made. You are going, Omid.”

The discussion was over. I barely remember the rest of that afternoon. The inside of the U.S. Embassy consisted of a waiting room and counter with a woman who handed my mother my visa. We picked up my airline tickets at a travel agency on the way home.

Later that night, I thought that there were hundreds of things I could have done. I could have jumped out of the car and gone and stayed with Roya’s family. I could have fought and argued more. I could have been much more difficult. But there was something in my mother’s tone, a note of pleading that I had never heard before. That is what made me stop. She was desperate. I had to help her.

4

I never returned to Marjan High School, and my flight left from Mehrabad Airport three days later. I was able to call my friends to tell them good-bye, but my mother forbade me to see anyone. I left Iran promising everyone…and myself…that I’d be back by next summer. I was leaving behind everything I knew and everything that I held dear.

I refused to take more than a small suitcase with me. The things that held a special place in my heart, I insisted on leaving behind. My diary, my Farsi translations of Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables—Benavayan—and Tolstoy’s War and Peace—Gangh va Solh—my Divan of Hafiz, my worn leather copy of the Golestan of Sa’di, and the dozen other books that I had read so many times but continued to go back to. I didn’t pack the jean skirts that I practically lived in. I left behind my favorite sneakers, the suede jacket that I’d bought in Mashhad the previous summer. I shoved the new underclothes that Azar had picked up for me to the back of the dresser drawer. I packed only old clothes and things that I wasn’t crazy about. I suppose this was my way of protesting the decision that was being forced on me.

In the spirit of rebellion, I did take one collection that had been critical in serving to germinate the seedbed of my beliefs…the book of poetry by Khosrow Golesorkhi, the poet, journalist, and revolutionary figure whose defiant stand before the Shah’s government—and subsequent execution by a firing squad—enshrined his name in many of our minds. Khosrow Golesorkhi had been accused by government of being a member of Fedayeen-e-Khalq…like my mother.

It was still dark outside when we left our house the morning of my flight. My mother drove. Martial law was still in effect for another half an hour, but there were special passes issued for those who were going to the airport or who had medical emergencies.

“He’s a good man,” Azar said to me in Farsi as we drove.

If I wasn’t so angry, I would have laughed. She’d waited seventeen years before trying to make me like my father. She was too late, I wanted to tell her. But I couldn’t bring myself to be mean to her. I knew she’d suffered at least as much as I had these past three days. Anytime that I’d come out of my room, be it noon or midnight, she was awake, pacing through the apartment. Her eyes were swollen from the lack of sleep… or perhaps from crying. Despite it all, she remained steadfast in her decision. She hadn’t wavered, and she wasn’t going to.

She continued to talk about my father, but I tuned her out.

I looked at the empty sidewalks, at the military vehicles parked here and there at the intersections, at the soldiers on the streets. No one stopped us to check our pass. It was as if they already knew they were getting rid of a troublemaker. Good riddance.