I heard her lock it and remove the key. I glanced at my watch: 4:37 p.m. I rubbed my arms where I could feel the fingernail indentations through my sleeves. I looked around the bare room. The walls were white, with dirty finger marks everywhere. Black curtains covered a small window, and a bare lightbulb hung from the ceiling. I pulled the curtains aside to discover that the window was barred. I tried to open it for some air, but it was sealed shut with tar. Looking out across the dirt road, all I could see was a building still under construction.
The room smelled of stale urine and sweat. The floor was carpeted, light gray with dark stains. I gagged. My legs almost gave way, but I didn’t want to sit down and absorb a stranger’s urine. I didn’t even want to lean on the walls; the finger marks were disgusting. I hovered near the window, my hands in my pockets.
I thought about Maman, and immediately tears welled up in my eyes. I knew how sick with worry she must be. But I wasn’t going to cry here. That’s what they wanted, and I wouldn’t give them the satisfaction. Those pathetic people. How could showing a bit of my neck and arm make me a whore?
What had happened to the Iran I had loved so much?
CHAPTER 2
REVOLUTION
1979
Ze gahvare ta gur danesh bejooy
— Persian proverb
Seek knowledge from cradle to the grave
Everything started going wrong when I was eight years old. It wasn’t just on the streets of Tehran, but also at home, with math homework—which, let me just say in plain language, I hated more than anything else in the world. I remember one day in particular when I sat at my desk, struggling and fuming over another impossible math problem. Maman kept trying to help me, but she was a math genius. I, for some lame reason, had not inherited that gene from her.
“Let’s try this one more time,” Maman said. “If Reza reads forty pages of his book in one day, how many pages has he read in five days?”
“I don’t know,” I said.
I was on the verge of tears from frustration and humiliation.
“It’s a multiplication problem, right?” Maman said. “You need to multiply forty by…?”
“I don’t know.”
“It’s not as hard as you think, chérie,“ Maman said. “All right, let’s start over. Now, if Reza…”
She was interrupted by loud banging noises, like fireworks.
Pop! Pop! Pop!
We ran to the living room to look outside. “Get away from the windows right now!” Baba said, storming inside at that very moment. He must have left the radio station where he worked early. “There are mobs of people in the streets. It’s a riot around Vanak Square.”
“What?” Maman said. “So close?”
“What are they doing?” I asked. “What’s a mob? What are those sounds?”
“There’s no time! Hurry, over here.” He motioned to the bathroom off the kitchen. “Get inside. We’ll wait until the noise dies down.”
Maman and I scurried into the bathroom. Seeing my father so nervous scared me more than all the sounds around us. He was talking to himself.
“There are no windows in the bathroom. We should be safe. Besides, we’re on the third floor. I’m pretty sure gunshots can’t reach that high up.”
He rolled the kitchen’s round table on its side and placed it in front of the bathroom to create a barricade. Then he closed the door.
We crouched under the bathroom sink and huddled in silence.
Pop! Pop! Pop!
“Baba, what’s going on?” I asked.
“Shh, Nioucha, not now,” Baba said.
I looked at Maman. She had squeezed her eyes shut as she held on to Baba’s hand. I had no idea what was happening, but my heart slammed in my chest so hard I had to gulp for air.
I wondered if all this had anything to do with the man with epilepsy who had had a seizure right under our living room window last week. Neighbors had run into the street to help him. Our landlord put a pencil in his mouth to stop him from biting his tongue. The landlord’s wife put a pillow under his head so he wouldn’t bang it against the pavement. I was terrified by the white foam coming out of his mouth and his eyes rolling back inside his head.
But these sounds had nothing to do with someone having an epileptic seizure. They seemed more serious and much scarier.
We heard a long series of loud bangs, some close, others far away. I kept straining my ears to gauge the distance of the racket.
From my vantage point under the sink, I counted 48 yellow tiles and 26 brown tiles going horizontally between the bathroom door and the shower. My eyes wide, I didn’t blink.
After what felt like a long time, the noise died down. I relaxed into Baba’s lap and began to doze off until Maman whispered to Baba, “What’s going on out there?”
“I think this is IT for the shah.”
Ah! Now the conversation I’d overheard at the party my parents hosted the week before began to make sense. Maman had sent me to bed, but I wasn’t sleeping. I couldn’t understand what I was hearing because people kept referring to “he” and I didn’t know who “he” was. Now I knew they had meant the shah. The tension in everyone’s voices had kept me glued to my door and awake long after I should have been asleep.
One of Baba’s friends had said, “Everyone says he is corrupt and a puppet of the United States.”
“People—his enemies—have been saying this for a long time,” Baba said.
“But he’s more unpopular than ever,” the friend continued. “There are more and more demonstrations against him around the country. I think this is serious.”
“It’ll probably blow over,” Baba had said. “Maybe he’ll leave the country for a while, and wait until things settle down.”
Remembering what I’d heard that night, I tried to keep still, pretending to be asleep in Baba’s arms.
Maman said, “What do you think will happen now?”
A note of hysteria crept into her voice. I couldn’t help stirring and opening my eyes. Baba shook his head, clasped me tighter against him, and said, “I’m not sure, but let’s hope that was the end of it.”
He stood up and opened the bathroom door. After listening for a few minutes, he said, “It stopped.”
He rolled the table back to its place in the kitchen, but Maman and I still
