Senowbar Khanom

Azin Neishaboori

1.  Half a milligram of Alprazolam

It was very dark outside. Nahal[i] leaned her head against the bus’s window and tried to discern the trees on the side of the road in the scant light of the bus’s headlamps. The road stretched through a dark forest, perhaps home to foxes, coyotes, bears or even wolves, creatures maybe less dangerous than some of the men and women on the bus.

To her dislike, since Nahal had immigrated three years ago to attend graduate school, there were many occasions for her to drift into unsolicited and unencumbered privacy with her thoughts. Nahal imagined that this was a side effect of living in exile, of leaving her familiar world behind, and of saying goodbye to all the things and people she once knew. She thought of the relationship she had with her past surroundings, with the streets, with the trees, with the overpasses on which she had walked every day, with the bus stops, with the taxi cabs, with the uphill roads, with the view outside her window, and even with the polluted air, and how this relationship created undeniable parts of this experience called life. Equally, an indispensable part of this experience came from the individual seemingly insignificant relationships with the people around her in the neighborhood in which she had grown up. Individually, these might have meant little, but collectively they formed a major ingredient of the essence of her identity and a significant part of the first twenty-three years of her existence. Perhaps it was the gateman downstairs, the shopkeeper at the grocery store, the inquisitive neighbor who lived upstairs, the cheerful elementary school kids that chattered in their high-pitched voices at the end of a school day, or the cab drivers and the stories they told that had once collectively given her life the density and the thickness it now lacked. Thus, she sank further into herself, as if to make up for the density of being she had lost. She sank deep in her mind. She descended damp stairwells, and it got deeper and darker, deeper and darker.

Once again, Nahal tried to disengage herself from those thoughts. She was probably hungry. Maybe that was the cause of all those thoughts, she consoled herself. So, she pulled a plastic bag full of Iranian salted pistachios from her purse both of which had come from Iran. Her mother had decided that Nahal could live neither without salted pistachios nor those plastic bags and thus had sent some over with a friend. As it was custom in Iran, before eating the pistachios, Nahal offered some to the lady sitting beside her, a Caucasian woman of about fifty years old who was wearing gold and rectangular-framed glasses, and who had long and undyed hair with strands of white and blonde.

Surprised at Nahal’s offer of pistachios, the lady stared at them for a while before convincing herself to take one, as if out of obligation. She assessed her single pistachio carefully and in distrust, and eventually found it best to hold it in the palm of her hand. She then moved on to assess Nahal with an inquisitive gaze and asked her where she was from.

Nahal did not like that question, as she had sometimes received a cornucopia of strange reactions to her answer, many of which she had faced in her classes at the university. Sometimes it was absolute silence, sometimes heavy glances, sometimes fictitious statements delivered as facts, occasionally hate or rage, and, every once in a while, the worst of them all, pity. She knew them all by heart. Yet, at that late of an hour, on a cold winter night, and on a road in the heart of a dark forest in Pennsylvania, thousands of miles away from home, her heart and her knees did not have the strength to fight back or to challenge the collective wisdom prevalent those days. She did, however, make a mental note to never again offer a snack to people sitting beside her.

“Iran,” Nahal replied.

The lady stared at her with a newfound curiosity. It was as if she had heard the name of a disease and was pondering on how to console the afflicted body that her disease was not that bad and that there might be a cure. In a tone rich in certainty, self-assurance, righteousness, conviction, and a malignant form of benevolence, the lady observed that it was fortunate she had made it here where she no longer had to “live like that.” In a piteous tone she then declared: “Unfortunately, the countries on that side of the world are very tribal, and until that changes, nothing will improve. You guys should start from there.”

The sound of her words reverberated in Nahal’s head. She had heard that sound before. She had heard it from her mother when she spoke of Mahmood Agha,[ii] their gardener, and his family. She had heard it in history books. It was the sound that had echoed in history’s corridors century after century, millennium after millennium. It was the voice of Churchill when he called the people of India rascal strawmen of low caliber. It was the sound of Napoleon’s horse as it galloped on Egypt’s soil. It was the voice of the Dutch farmer who called the unfamiliar men and women of the good earth sons and daughters of the devil and darkness. It was the voice of the old museum guide in Washington who, in describing the art of people of Africa, told the tale of Europeans who brought goods and missionaries to those people along with hope. It was the voice of the victorious team, the team that, in being victorious, had a right not to know many things. For it was, and had always been, the irrevocable and undeniable privilege of the victorious to decide what was insignificant and impertinent, and what was significant and noteworthy.

Nahal turned her head toward the window again and stared out at the darkness. A minute later she heard the lady break open the pistachio and eat it, and at that very moment, felt a hand tap her shoulder from the back.

A soft, unassuming, and vaguely familiar male voice spoke out: “Nahal, is that you? Would you like to sit here?”

Nahal turned to see it was Peter, her tall, African American, broad-shouldered, quiet and reticent neighbor, with black knowing eyes who lived on the upper floor of the same apartment building in the graduate dorm as she did. Nahal’s encounters with Peter had been rather infrequent. She had, on a few occasions, waited outside their building’s secure entrance with him in the cold when they had both forgotten their cards and had been locked out. They had spent those moments mostly in silence. For some reason, however, their silence was not an awkward small-talk-invoking silence, but a confiding, looking-at-the-ocean-together silence, a shared-understanding, one. Peter too was coming back to Philadelphia from Thanksgiving break. She left her seat and moved to the one next to him. Together they stared at the darkness outside, and at the barely visible trees in the light of the bus’s headlamps. The dark forest enveloped them in its safe, loving arms as Nahal and Peter spoke almost in a whisper as if picking up an old ongoing conversation. Their words were young, green, full of vitality, full of philosophy, and full of being.

Next to them on the window, two little winged ant-like insects struggled climbing up and sliding down time after time. Nahal looked at the insects and told Peter of an old memory. When she was very young, she once went to a pet store with her mother, who on those days had set her mind on owning a pet parrot. Nahal was following her mother in the store when her eyes fell on an air-filled plastic bag filled with small locusts. The bag was closed on top by a knot and was resting on a pack of grains, which had given the bag a slanted angle. While this slight slope was an insignificant fact for the rest of the world, for the locusts inside the bag, it had created a philosophical conundrum, as a result of which, the locusts had divided into three groups. The first group remained in the bottom of the bag, the second group continued tirelessly to reach the top despite the slippery slope, and the third group had reached the top only to be blocked by the knot that had closed the bag, sentencing them to an irrefutable annihilation. Looking at them from above, Nahal had felt deeply sorry for the locusts. They were all bound to be fed to the parrots, their fates determined and immutable. But she had felt particularly worse for the second and third group: those who were in a futile effort to reach the top and break free, and those who had reached the top and were trying hopelessly to break through the knot. The experience had moved the young Nahal gravely.

Peter believed that from the three groups, the first one’s experience at the bottom was most pitiful. He thought that knowing one’s predestined doom and having to endure life knowing it was worse than the doom itself, for the one who kept trying could live until the very moment she faced her doom, but the one who knew it all along never truly lived.

Peter told Nahal of a program he had watched about nature in which there was a species of insects shaped like dried leaves. When their males and females met in the big world full of dried leaves, one would mount on top of the other, and from then on, they traveled like that for the rest of their lives. For they seemed to know that if they lost each other in the big world out there, they would never find each other again. Peter joked that those two insects on the window might have taken the bus together in a similar spirit.

Nahal’s heart filled with assurance and serenity. What a deep chasm existed between the world of the front row and the unburdened world of the back row, as deep as the two ends of a black hole in the space-time continuum, as deep as time, and as deep as history.

Peter and Nahal walked back together from the bus station to their apartment building. Everything was covered in heavy snow and the sky looked red. Nahal felt in unison with the universe, her origin and her destination, like a befitting piece of a whole.

Nahal knew that the memory of that night and their conversation would calm her ailing existence for many years to come, that it could soothe her like a glass of wine, like half a milligram of Alprazolam.

[i] Nahal is a name for girls in Farsi. It also means sapling.

[ii] Agha is typically used as a pre-amble or post-amble to an adult man’s name as a sign of respect in an informal context.

2.  On the phone line

Sitting at her desk facing a pleasant view of the orange trees outside the window in the study of her commodious two-story villa in Nowshahr, Iran,[iii] Senowbar[iv] Khanom[v] wore her reading glasses and examined the month’s income and expense reports on her computer screen. Her reading glasses had thick black frames and even thicker handles, and their presence on Senowbar Khanom’s face filled her with ever more conviction, poise, confidence, and a sense of control. Her cell phone rang as she studied the finance files with a faint smile. She heard Nahal’s feeble and frail voice from the other side of the line, calling from Pennsylvania.

They spoke for a few minutes when a rush of rage took possession of Senowbar Khanom. She held on to her phone tighter as if to get a better grip on life on the other side of the line.

“You traveled all that way for that? Couldn’t you find any other kind of man to marry, Nahal?”

“Any other kind mother?” Nahal said.

“How could you do this to me?”

“When you speak like this Mom, I feel ashamed of being your daughter.”

“You know what? Go ahead. Do as you wish. I am done.”

Senowbar Khanom cut the phone and held her head between her hands. She stayed in that position for a while. Then she rose up and went to the kitchen. She went toward the stove and turned on the burner under the tea kettle. Staring at the blue flames under the kettle, she thought about what was happening in a land thousands of miles away, America, the land that had harbored Nahal. Two teardrops slid down her cheeks.

As she could not see a gap between her realized self and her idealized self, it was difficult for Senowbar Khanom to assess her emotions and opinions from an outsider’s point of view. Nonetheless, consciously or subconsciously, Senowbar Khanom felt no trace of guilt in any particle of her being for how she felt about the young man she had never met. There was no single cell in her body that accused her of racism.

Senowbar Khanom’s feelings toward the supremacy of one “kind” over another, as cold and brutal as they were, were not personal. She held nothing “personal” against one “kind” over another. She did not think she believed in any type of racial supremacy. She was instead what could perhaps be best described as a “triumphant supremacist,”[vi] one who only roots for and sides with the triumphant and victorious. Perhaps Senowbar Khanom would not personally participate in a battle, say, between the people of Rome and Zanzibar. She would, however, follow their battle with objectivity and celebrate with the victors at their victory feast, regardless of how the battle was won, be it a bloodbath or even a genocide. If history determined Romans the victors of this battle for the last several hundred years, Senowbar Khanom saw no reason to second guess this outcome or challenge it.

The subtle difference between triumphant supremacy and racial supremacy may seem insignificant or impertinent to Nahal or Peter. Yet, one might claim that triumphant supremacy is perhaps much more fundamental than racial supremacy. Consider someone who defended the South African Apartheid with all his might for all his life, and yet woke up one day swearing not in the name of Jesus, but in that of Nelson Mandela, only after Mandela won. Consider the Iraqi Chaldean owner of a small grocery store in Michigan who embellished the front of his store with as big of a Jesus statue as his neighbor’s Islamophobia; only that this statue of Jesus, the defender of the marginalized of history, now feebly supplicates: take me as one of your own, take me as one of your own. Could triumphant supremacy underlie their attitudes? Could triumphant supremacy be the reason as to why some vehemently and passionately condemn those already convicted in the judgment of history, yet dismiss as impertinent, negligible, and insignificant the injustice unfolding today, right in front of their eyes, the injustice whose victims could still be saved?

Standing by the victors’ side, sharing their perceived supremacy, how far would one have to walk to join in the enforcement of the supremacists’ order? To take part in the injustice, the lynchings, the bloodbaths? Some would say only a short walk in the woods. And if indeed it would only take a short walk in the woods to become a soldier of supremacy, Senowbar Khanom had already put her boots on.

[iii] Nowshahr is a port city in northern Iran that lies on the southern coast of the Caspian Sea. Due to its beautiful nature and pleasant climate, some Iranians spend their vacations there.

[iv] Senowbar is a name for females in Farsi. The word itself means poplar tree.

[v] Khanom means lady in Farsi. To respect an adult woman in an informal context, one calls her by her name followed by Khanom.

[vi] In the original draft, the author described this quality with an invented term “victorist,” and later decided to revise it to “triumphant supremacist.”

3.  Senowbar Khanom and success

Senowbar Khanom married when she was very young, about seventeen years old, and was widowed before turning thirty. During her thirteen years of marital life, Senowbar Khanom gave birth to three children: Omid, Elham, and Nahal. Sometimes she blamed what she saw as her children’s inadequacies on their names, all rooted in abstract and melancholy concepts, all out of touch with reality, and all chosen at her late husband’s insistence.

After her husband passed away, Senowbar Khanom rolled up her sleeves and took charge of managing his properties, which consisted of approximately two hundred acres of walnut gardens. Perhaps owing to her competence, or perhaps partially due to the country’s economic situation during the years of war and sanctions, the profit return of these walnut gardens multiplied under Senowbar Khanom’s management. Using the profit, she then bought some residential and commercial properties to rent out. Altogether, at the end of the eight years of war, food rations and national poverty, Senowbar Khanom rose to affluence.

Her financial accomplishments together with raising her three children on her own, convinced Senowbar Khanom of her tenacity, pragmatic discretion, and paramount management skills. In fact, her faith in her abilities became almost like a new faith to her, a life view that, in her words, was founded upon the three pillars of optimism, acumen, and decisiveness. It was a religion that considered the irresolute, the weak, the fragile, the emotional, and those who could not faithfully believe in happy endings undeserving, inferior, and doomed to their well-deserved misfortunes. Hand in hand with success, Senowbar Khanom gradually saw herself belonging to an exclusive group of select individuals who could be best described as the “victors.”

Being a victor did not come without its share of problems for Senowbar Khanom’s life. For example, while feeling like a victor is typically considered a desirable attribute in the prevailing culture, it is at the same time a desirable attribute that one selfishly wishes only for themselves, and at best for their closest family. In other words, to consider oneself a victor one has to view others as failures; a self-professed victor consciously or subconsciously attempts to form a top-down relationship with the rest of society. This necessary condition for holding the status of a victor often makes this attribute unpleasant for many people. While many would like to follow Senowbar Khanom’s example, fewer would be willing to enlist as her disciple.

For these reasons, Senowbar Khanom’s social circle mostly consisted of members of her immediate and extended family who loved her regardless or despite her character, a few other victors like herself, and some women with low self-esteem and high ambitions who wished to buzz around the victors, hoping to become one by association or in consequence. There are people who believe that history is often built by this latter group.

Senowbar Khanom was broad-shouldered and heavily built and had a strong, determined and confident voice. In some respects, these characteristics probably helped in her financial success and her social climb. For if, for example, Senowbar Khanom were a frail and defenseless single mother with three children, there could have been many men tempted to rescue her or act as her guardian. Unfortunately, along with such supportive roles as rescuers and guardians comes the rest of patriarchy: the jealousy, the control, and the suffocating protectiveness. Senowbar Khanom’s strong build and unyielding voice created a citadel around her and her children that barred any such unsolicited attempts at heroism, rescue, and guardianship.

Senowbar Khanom raised her three children with tenacity and fortitude. She was a very strict, confident and authoritarian mother whose firmness bordered on tyranny. Like many other self-confident tyrants of this world, Senowbar Khanom possessed her paramount confidence not just owing to her success in one realm. Her unwavering confidence was equally, if not more so, owing to her ignorance and poor understanding in many other realms.

Senowbar Khanom interfered in the smallest details of each of her three children’s lives and issued a binding decree for each insignificant problem. This prevailed in diverse areas which included, among others, the interpersonal relationship of her children, their relationships with their friends, their choice of friends, their choice of attire, their studies, and even the subjects of their interest or attention.          

To Senowbar Khanom’s disappointment, in contrast to their mother, Omid, Elham, and Nahal grew up to be fragile, thin, melancholy, tender, and emotional individuals. Senowbar Khanom was most disappointed in her son Omid, who was pale and slender, did not eat meat, had zero ambitions, and was always at one of his poetic reveries. For a pragmatic victor like Senowbar Khanom, Omid was the quintessence of all the attributes which she believed a man should be devoid. Omid had studied veterinary medicine at Tehran University and preferred the company of animals to that of humans.

Every once in a while, Senowbar Khanom entered a trance-like state which urged her to “correct” her children and to rescue them out of their inadequacies. In such a state, she woke up to pour a bucket full of admonitions and criticisms over poor Omid’s head. The content of this bucket included prescriptions of optimism and its correlation with success, the names of many people in Omid’s age group or younger around the world who had already drowned in success and social status, Senowbar Khanom’s own achievements, the nobility of her husband’s family, and even a concatenation of half-baked sociological and economic theories. At the end of such interventions, Omid retreated ever more into his shell of despondent reticence, ever less skeptical of his preference for the company of animals to that of humans.

Elham and Nahal were similar to their brother in characteristics and tendencies. Being of a different gender, however, Senowbar Khanom and society had a different perception and judgment of them. They both spoke in a very low voice and looked like beaten cats walking around humbly with their heads bent lest they were challenged. They both had pale and narrow faces, and in many respects reminded Senowbar Khanom of the feeble female characters of western movies who stood on corners and helplessly whispered: “Save me.”

In Senowbar Khanom’s mind, these attributes made her two daughters the epitome of the cliché that traditional virtues expected of women, which she abhorred. But what could she do? They were her own daughters, and like it or not, were her fellow travelers in the arch, and even more fundamentally, constituted part of her identity. Thus, Senowbar Khanom who instinctively had identified her daughters’ characters as hopeless and irremediable, set her mind on changing their image among their relatives and acquaintances, instead of trying to correct them.

After Elham married a very tall and affluent husband whose father was a major shareholder at a big hospital in Tehran, Senowbar Khanom gained a sufficient level of satisfaction with her public image, but there was still Nahal’s image that needed to be addressed.

It had been three years since Nahal left Iran for America to continue her studies at the graduate level. Although Senowbar Khanom missed her very much, she could not help but be proud of Nahal’s academic success and her bright professional future. Wherever she went, Senowbar Khanom spoke of Nahal’s nanotechnology projects. She even spoke of Maria, Nahal’s roommate who was from Spain, and whose father was a professor at the University of Madrid. All of these details added to Senowbar Khanom’s roster of honors. It had seemed that more honors were to come from Nahal until that day Senowbar Khanom spoke to her on the phone about the young man she wanted to marry. Senowbar Khanom did not know how to place nanotechnology, Sharif University, the University of Pennsylvania, and a man in her view incongruous to the rest of their life, in a single image of Nahal, and present it to the public.

4.  Senowbar Khanom’s journey to America

After ruminating over the situation, Senowbar Khanom decided that it would be best to visit Nahal in America, meet this boy, and take matters into her own hands.

Senowbar Khanom loved traveling, or so she had always believed. In truth, short of her infrequent travels on one of the two main roads between Nowshahr and Tehran, Senowbar Khanom had not traveled much in her fifty-one years. Even her occasional travels between Tehran and Nowshahr were all carried out in utmost dignity, comfort, and convenience. Mahmoud Agha the gardener would pick her up from her house and drop her off at her final destination. It was due to this kind of experience that she had decided she loved traveling. She even hoped to one day go on long journeys around the world and leave the management of her properties to her children.

Alas, the year was 2005, and for Iranian Senowbar Khanom the journey to America was something quite different from her previous experiences. Omid prepared her mother’s documents and accompanied her to Dubai to attend her visa interview at the American Embassy. He helped her practice for all of the questions likely to be asked from her by the consul. Senowbar Khanom prepared for all of the questions diligently, and after a successful interview followed by several months of waiting, she received her visa to the United States of America.

During the months she waited for her visa, Senowbar Khanom prepared for her upcoming trip. She studied the tourist attractions in America and decided to pay a visit to a select few of them, such as Niagara Falls and Yellowstone Park. Other than her concerns for Nahal, her only other source of anxiety on this trip was her poor knowledge of English. To overcome this, she bought herself a book on English for tourists, studied it in her free time every day, and decided to take it on the plane with her for peace of mind.

Finally, the night of her travel date arrived. Omid, Elham and Elham’s husband took her to Tehran’s international airport and stayed with her up to the last point they were permitted. Senowbar Khanom waved goodbye at them excitedly. Her eyes beamed with happiness and poise, and with her head held high, she set out to right what was wrong.

Alas, from the moment she parted with her children, the hardships of traveling began. At the Tehran airport, they asked her to take her shoes off and wear the airport’s slippers. Once she arrived in Dubai, they made her take her shoes off again, offered no slippers, and demanded that she walk barefoot on a floor on which the security guards walked in their boots. Time and time again they requested her to present her documents. Finally, they showed her to a very long line leading to a special security checkpoint for passengers traveling to the USA. There, people had to take out their bags, jackets, phones, and watches and leave them in dusty gray plastic bins for inspection. Senowbar Khanom was displeased with having to put her purse and watch in the same bin as her shoes and worried about parting with her purse during the inspection.

Finally, Senowbar Khanom made it to the head of the security line and presented her papers, upon which a guard suddenly exclaimed: “Female secondary, female secondary![vii] We have a female secondary here!”

Keen to know what kind of creature a female secondary could be, everyone in the line turned their heads curiously toward Senowbar Khanom. Then another guard accosted Senowbar Khanom and led her to an adjacent glass-walled area separate from the regular security path.

In the glass-walled area, they asked Senowbar Khanom to lift her arms and remove her hair clip. Then they inspected her body with a device that looked like an electric baton. Then they inspected her with their hands. None of the security guards knew that Senowbar Khanom thought of herself as a competent, accomplished, and authoritative woman. None knew Senowbar Khanom was a “victor.” Neither did they know or care that Senowbar Khanom had raised her three children all on her own, with tenacity and fortitude, that she had successfully multiplied the profits of her late husband’s walnut gardens, and that when she wore her reading glasses, she felt agency and control over her life and the world. To them, she was merely a curious case of a female secondary.

While she was in that little glass-walled room, Senowbar Khanom looked at the other people and thought of them as “the fortunate ones,” the people that, all things considered, at least were not female secondaries. She felt that the people beyond the glass walls perceived her as someone very different from themselves in an indescribable and unfathomable quality.

When Senowbar Khanom was finally allowed to leave the glass-walled room, her face was soaked in tears. As she removed her watch, shoes, and purse from the gray bins, she noticed a dent on top of one of her shoes and its heel touching her purse. The new fancy and shiny shoes and purse Senowbar Khanom had purchased for her trip to America now appeared dirty and disheveled.

The flight was fourteen hours long. Fortunately, Senowbar Khanom sat next to a window. While the sky was dark or half-dark, she stared out the window and ruminated over what had happened. She felt like a person beaten so hard and felt uncertain how to feel, her emotions vague and obscure. Yet, the one thing she knew was that the treatment she had received was difficult to endure for a person of her age. It was incomprehensible to be stripped of her dignity at fifty-one and the unexpectedness of her experience made it even more difficult to reflect upon.

After fourteen hours of flight, Senowbar Khanom entered US soil where she faced fresh rounds of inspection and interrogation. When she presented her documents to the officer behind a glass window at the security checkpoint, he escorted her to a special room where she was told that her documents would be further examined. He placed her documents in a red folder on a ledge in front of another officer, a Latina woman much younger than herself, and asked her to wait until her name was called.

Senowbar Khanom felt unnerved. She did not know much English and could not really understand the young officer, definitely not well enough to respond to her questions. She kept wringing her hands, her anxiety bringing her to the brink of tears.

In another corner of the room sat a young girl about Nahal’s age who also seemed to have arrived from Iran. Senowbar Khanom looked disapprovingly at her unfashionable and disheveled appearance. The girl rose up and came to sit by Senowbar Khanom. She promised to help her with the impending questions and answers, and upon hearing this, Senowbar Khanom cheered up and embraced the girl dearly. Moments later, Senowbar Khanom was called to appear in front of the officer, and with the help of the young girl cleared all the questions and concerns. As she left the room, Senowbar Khanom did not say much of a goodbye to the girl. She was finally admitted to enter the United States.

In yet another impediment, Senowbar Khanom and her suitcases entered the customs area. After examining Senowbar Khanom’s countenance and passport, the customs officer grew suspicious of her and decided to inspect her luggage in person. He opened her suitcases and rummaged through her clothes, feeling for anything suspicious. He messed up her carefully folded clothes and touched everything, even her underwear. When he found a bag of borage, a bag of currants, and two bags of fried herbs used for Ghormeh Sabzi,[viii] he triumphantly pulled them out and tossed them aside to a corner.

Finally, after a concatenation of encumbrances, Senowbar Khanom entered the passenger arrival area, a large crowded place full of people who, to her, somehow looked insouciant, unburdened, cheerful, colorful, and optimistic. Senowbar Khanom thought maybe this was how people looked when they did not feel like, or were treated like, “female secondaries.”

She nervously scanned people’s faces hoping to find Nahal amongst all the strangers in the unknown land. She felt overwhelmed. How could she ever find Nahal in this chaotic and unfamiliar place? Who would help her if she got lost? Where would she sleep if nobody came to pick her up? She remembered the Iranian girl who helped her at the border security office. Where was she now? Senowbar Khanom’s back hurt. Her hair was disheveled. Her facial muscles felt weary. She felt desolate, disintegrated, decomposed, exposed, and almost broken. At last, she saw Nahal running toward her, alongside a young man. Nahal wore a black dress with big sunflowers printed on the fabric. Her pale, narrow, timid, and friendly face looked like a ray of sunshine. A tide of love overwhelmed Senowbar Khanom, a tide that covered not only Nahal but also the tall lean young man whom she had thought of as the sole source of incongruity in her life. In that foreign sea of the unfamiliar and unknown, he and Nahal emerged as a little island who welcomed her, sheltered her. Senowbar Khanom ran toward them, and when she reached them, hugged Nahal tightly and dearly.

Senowbar Khanom whispered: “I found you.” She then extended her hand and grasped Peter’s as she said: “And you too.”

[vii] In US airport security terminology, female secondary refers to a female passenger perceived as a potential security threat who requires additional security screening. The security guards at special checkpoints for US-bound flights follow more or less similar policies, protocols, and terminologies for identifying potential security threats.

[viii] Ghormeh Sabzi is a popular Iranian dish made with minced beef or lamb, kidney beans and herbs.

5.  The two sides of a chasm

After several days of therapeutic sleep to overcome jetlag and her injured dignity, one Saturday morning Senowbar Khanom resurrected to her familiar self.

She made tea using the tea kettle and teapot she had sent Nahal and poured some for Nahal, Maria, and herself. Like the old days, Nahal helped her mother set the breakfast table. They all ate breakfast together, with Nahal acting as an interpreter between her mother and Maria. After breakfast, the three of them went to a shopping mall. Shopping reinvigorated Senowbar Khanom’s old sense of control and agency. By the time they returned home, she was once again the victor who professed optimism, acumen, and decisiveness as the three pillars of success to the universe.

Later, around 4 p.m., Peter arrived at their place. Nahal acted anxious, unsure of how to avoid her mother’s disapproval. As Peter entered the room, Nahal recognized a familiar expression on her mother’s face, the calculating frown her mother made when she was drawing a mental two-columned table of “pros and cons,” of “advantages and disadvantages,” of “wins and losses.” Nahal wished she could take herself and all her belongings and live in the “disadvantages” column, in the column of “losses,” the columns that being refuted were forever exempt from her mother’s cold and relentless assessments and reassessments.

Nahal knew a tumult was imminent. She wished there was a way she could preserve the closeness the three of them had felt the moment they united at the airport. However, this Senowbar Khanom sitting before her was not the same disheartened and desolate Senowbar Khanom of the airport. Her mother had regained her prowess, had overcome the injuries and insults she had endured, and had even deemed what she had overcome and endured as triumphs to be added to her roster of accomplishments. Senowbar Khanom once again stood tall as a victor.

During the months that Senowbar Khanom waited for issuance of her visa, Nahal planned for activities that could prevent or reduce tension between her mother and Peter and had decided that walking out in nature and fresh air could help bring them closer together. So, for that particular afternoon, Nahal planned for the three of them to go on a hike on a path not far from where she lived.

It was a beautiful summer day as they walked through the forest. The weather was slightly warm but still pleasant. The lush green trees, the sun, and the wild yellow, blue and purple flowers on both sides of the path exhilarated Senowbar Khanom. Nahal noticed that her mother thus far had not directly addressed Peter for more than two or three sentences. Nahal perceived that her mother intended to deliver an image of Nahal and herself to Peter as a statement, rather than make any attempt to understand him or build a relationship with him. With Senowbar Khanom mostly speaking to her daughter and Peter mostly listening to unfamiliar Farsi words and Nahal’s translations of them, Senowbar Khanom, Nahal, and Peter walked for a while on the trail until a rather wide and deep pit stopped them on the road. Earlier that day it had rained, and some water had collected in the bottom of the pit, around which was muddy and slippery. Not giving it much thought, Nahal jumped over the pit. Peter began to follow her when it occurred to him that Senowbar Khanom might need help to reach the other side. He thus extended his hand toward Senowbar Khanom.

Senowbar Khanom was contemplating how to reach the other side when she noticed Peter’s hand. She hesitated and, for a few seconds that felt like an eternity, stared at Peter’s hand undecided if she should touch it.

Nahal wished that the world would end right then. To her and Peter, Senowbar Khanom’s pause felt as long as the history of injustice, malice, oppression, and bigotry. With it grew a chasm in their hearts, deepening into an abyss, deeper and darker than all the valleys on Earth, and Senowbar Khanom stood on the other side of it.

At last, Senowbar Khanom took Peter’s helping hand, and sensing the imminent eternal abyss in the air, in their eyes, and in their faces, she attempted a smile. None of them, including Senowbar Khanom, knew what that smile really meant, or how genuine it was. Yet, there is something non-negligible about attempts at reconciliation, even the disingenuous ones. First comes affected goodness, then comes goodness. And who is to say that Senowbar Khanom’s attempt, whichever kind it was then, wasn’t a step toward the latter?

Azin Neishaboori was born and raised in Iran where she attended college. She moved to the US in 2003 to attend Penn State University where she received her PhD in Electrical Engineering. In her writing, she aspires to question the prevalent narrative, and hopes to share an authentic and non-politicized perspective of Iranians and other Middle Easterners with the readers.

Azin IS ONE OF ORP’S EMERGING VOICES IN FICTION.