Letter X

Hello Mrs. Zahra,

I hope you are well.

Mrs. Zahra, for one year and eight months, you have been present in my thoughts every day, while you yourself have been completely unaware. Knowing that you don’t have Instagram and that there is very little chance of this letter ever reaching you, I decided to write down what has been weighing on my heart.

Mrs. Zahra, I have a grievance against you. Do you remember the funeral? Do you know how this whole thing began for us? It was the middle of autumn. My sister “B” had just registered her children for school, and my sister “A” had eagerly signed up for an exercise class at the Enghelab Sports Club. After years of waiting, I was on the verge of buying a house—a house that, as Mom used to say, would not be three-by-four, so that whenever she came from Tehran we wouldn’t have to throw her mattress down in the middle of the living room “like nomads.”

One ordinary morning, money worries had left me unable to sleep or eat. As always, I had to tell Mom about my troubles before anyone else, so I called her in Tehran. But Dad answered. He said, “Your mother has a headache and is sleeping.” Mom would never sleep. No one else would ever answer her phone. Mom was always present—either herself, or her food, or her gifts. As my favorite book puts it, “Life changes in the instant. You sit down to dinner and life as you know it ends.”

I won’t bore you, Mrs. Zahra. There’s so much that doesn't fit into this letter. Like the fact that Mom and I had the coolest relationship in the world, and then it went up in smoke. Our phones were full of joke messages, or, as she called them, “nonsense and gibberish.” She had given each of us a funny nickname of our own and rarely called us by our actual names. Mom and I got along so well because we were nothing alike. From childhood, I was full of anxiety, nightmares, and irrational thoughts, and Mom was the most steadfast element of my life. I fed on her endless vitality, and she took an extraordinary pleasure in helping me—and my sisters—grow. As a result, I couldn’t get through my day without talking to her every night—which was morning in Tehran. She would pick up the phone and say, “Hello, my girl!” I would say, “How are you, Afi?” and from the deepest place in her throat she would say, “Alhamdulillah!” I always wondered what she saw in this life that, despite all the problems we had—which were many—allowed her to be so content. Afi was energetic and ate very little. She had a problem with sitting still. It was well known that she wouldn’t even sit at the dinner table. And sleeping or lounging around? Absolutely not her thing. It drove her crazy! She would pull the blankets off us and open the windows so our bodies could “come alive” from the cold air. She would say, “Say Ya Ali, get up, do a couple of exercises!” Then she would lift one of her extraordinarily flexible legs all the way over her head, burst out laughing, and wait for you to do the same. She would say, “Don’t worry! A person makes up for all their lost sleep in the first year after death.” When you finally got up, you would discover that she had already made two stews that morning, made a yakh dar behesht dessert full of almonds and rose petals, gone to the bank, washed the car, and was now peacefully drinking her little glass of tea with half a date. Then came her phone calls. She would check in on everyone. She loved being around people and adored the streets and bazaars. The family would say, “Your mother’s street pressure has fallen and she’s gone out again!” They were joking. Instead of blood pressure, they called it “street pressure.” You know what I mean? When I was little, she took me for an intelligence test for elementary school. They asked me, “What do you want to be when you grow up?” I said, “A drifter, just like my mom.” They laughed and rejected me, thinking I was stupid. But in my opinion, Afi’s job was the most interesting job in the world. She was actually the one who put storytelling and filmmaking into my blood. She loved people, and unlike me, the recluse, she courageously stepped right into their lives. I would tell her, “Afi, let it go. How much are you going to live for other people?” She would protest, “Then what about my maram?”—my sense of honor, my principles. And I would collapse laughing. But of course, she was serious. She had a personality all her own. When she got into a taxi, she would say hello. If the person didn’t answer, she would say louder, “I said hello!” And she wouldn’t let it go until the driver answered her. Every other day she was either in Tajrish or at the Grand Bazaar. She would chat with everyone, know their life story, and have gifts for them. She had arranged dozens of dowries and bails for people. Mrs. Zahra, this is how we met you, many, many years ago. But I was no longer in Tehran, and I didn’t remember you either, until one year and eight months ago, at the hospital. My brain had stopped working. My eyes had gone blurry. I couldn’t remember who you were or why you were offering your condolences. “B” and I had arrived in Tehran that very morning after an exhausting flight. What an arrival. We were late. A simple operation that was supposed to fix the problem in two days never worked: “Life changes in the instant. You sit down to dinner and life as you know it ends.”

Mrs. Zahra, do you remember the funeral? It was the coldest autumn morning of my life, at Behesht-e Zahra cemetery. The vapor from your breath froze in the air. I had all my senses focused on “A”, making sure the strain wouldn’t cause something to happen to her. I had also given Dad a handful of Xanax pills so he wouldn’t feel what was going on around him. We were sitting there waiting for Afi. People came into the Orugian Funeral Hall in groups, wailing. Dad had seated me beside him and only wanted me to tell him about the house we were going to buy. He needed hope. He insisted that I explain the floor plan to him, and he closed his eyes so he could imagine the layout. I’m sorry, Mrs. Zahra, this has become very long! My heart is heavy. Anyway, they brought Afi out, wrapped in her own beautiful termeh cloth. Before I could get close to her, the relatives crowded around her, and then “A” fell apart. I went to take care of “A”. They quickly said the funeral prayers, lifted up the body, and carried her away. We went to the burial plot. There were so many familiar faces that I was disoriented. I kept turning around, trying to find my bearings, until I saw the mound of earth. Dad, by then thoroughly affected by the pills, was standing on it. In a drawn-out voice he said, “But how is this even possible?” Then he stared at the empty, deep grave—the very one that had been meant for my grandmother, the same grandmother for whom Afi used to make soup and rice pudding every day so she would regain her strength. And now that grandmother, completely unaware, was sitting at home watching television, while Afi had silently gone away.

Mrs. Zahra… Suddenly I came to myself and saw that they had placed Afi, wrapped in white cloth, on the ground beside us. “B” and “A” fell onto her. But I couldn’t. I couldn’t believe it. I started touching her body. I said out loud, “Momma, how can this be?” I needed proof before I could believe it. I touched her, but I couldn’t make sense of anything. I went to reach for her face, and I saw a woman lying across her upper body, sobbing uncontrollably. So I had no choice but to go to her feet. I touched them. Until I reached her long, slender toes. They were hers. They were Afi’s feet. My heart swelled in my chest like a plastic bag full of water in which they sell goldfish around New Year, and my head grew hot. With the little bit of reason I had left, I told myself, “Say goodbye properly!” I went to reach for her head, to hold it in my arms. But the woman was still lying across her upper body. Mrs. Zahra, you were lying on my mother! You had been lying on my mother for a long time—or at least that is how it appears in my memory. A man was shouting, asking us to move aside so he could lift the body. I pushed you a little, Mrs. Zahra! You didn’t move. I pushed you again, Mrs. Zahra, and you clung to her even more tightly and cried even louder… Finally, people gathered up “B”, “A”, you, and me, and lifted the body. And I never got to hold Afi’s head in my arms.

Mrs. Zahra, for one year and eight months, I have blamed you for my ever-growing grief. My brain tells me that if I had said goodbye properly that day, I would be feeling much better now. Of course, the truth is that I don’t know whether this logic is actually true, but I don’t have the strength to reject it either, because then my brain would have no one left to blame. So it will probably have no choice but to turn on my own mistakes instead—the things I didn’t do for her, the years I wasn’t beside her, the laughter I didn’t share with her. Because, you see, I lost an entire world when she left. A colorful, hopeful world that, as she used to say, was ba-toma’nineh—serene, at peace. A world in which there was God. No matter how hard I try to be a little like her after she left, to constantly say, as she did, “Keep your spirits up,” to put finely diced tomatoes in ghormeh sabzi the way she did so that it would “look like a flower-filled garden,” and, like her, fearlessly step into the storm of life, I can’t. Mrs. Zahra, you were one of those people Afi cared deeply about, and that makes me feel a little calmer. So the only thing I can do, from here in the mud where I am stuck, is to imagine that in those moments, instead of me, you kissed her face and head over and over—for this honorable life of hers, a life that was short in length but extraordinarily wide in breadth. I hope that is what you did.

Mrs. Zahra, life is very strange. I opened my heart to you because it was overflowing with pain. Mrs. Zahra, if this letter ever reaches you by any means, know that after writing it, I am less upset with you than I was before. I feel, somehow, a little lighter. Kiss your children and grandchildren for me.

With affection,

Azadeh