Letter XII

Today is September 11th. Twenty-five years after that scorching Shahrivar afternoon in Maman Mehri's house in Kerman. Now I live in New York, the first Muslim mayor is in office, wars are burning in every corner of the world, and every morning I wake from nightmares of Tehran being bombed.

But you were happy that day. A nine-year-old girl leaning against your grandmother's legs while she dipped her mulberry in her tea with one hand and stroked your hair with the other. We were all there! Maman Mehri and Baba Mohammad and the uncles and the aunt and the cousins and your brother and your mother and your father, all of us together. The black grapes had weighed down the trellises in the yard and the fig tree was heavy with big leaves and fruit and generous with shade.

The spread was laid out for the afternoon: butter and sour cherry jam, honey from Ravar, fresh pistachios from Rafsanjan, and pale tea for the children. One of the uncles was talking about plans to renovate the house and Baba Mohammad was resisting any new plans. The sun was sharp and hot; even through the thick curtains it found a way in, falling into your glass of tea and spreading into a rainbow across the carpet. Those matched carpets, dark navy blue. One of them is here with me in New York and the other is in Holland with your brother.

The television was on. I don't remember what we were watching, maybe a film or a series, but whatever it was, it cut off all at once and a shaken newscaster read out something from somewhere far away and unreal, his voice carrying an unfamiliar dread. The twin towers in New York had been struck by hijacked planes and had collapsed.

You didn't know where New York was, or why those towers were twins, or why anyone would want to drive a plane full of passengers into a building. You were in the Garden of Eden, rivers of honey flowing and ripe grapes everywhere. But that afternoon the world of so many people in New York had been upended, and yours along with it. In those strange seconds, the thread of your world had come loose somewhere on the other side, and you didn't know a thing.

Maman Mehri ran out of patience for it all before the rest of us and left. The figs and the grapes dried up, the pistachio orchards were bombed, the house was never renovated and slowly became a ruin left to itself.

You came to New York, to the city of the fallen twin towers. After the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, America launched a war against Iran this year and Tehran, and many other cities, were bombed every single day of this year's Nowruz.

Now you ache for one hot afternoon in the yard of that Kerman house, sitting on those matched carpets beside your grandmother, and the longing cuts your breath short. You are worn down by the relentless filth of New York and sometimes you think about going back, about rebuilding the house. Every now and then you peer into the yard on Google Maps. The fig tree is still green but you can't tell whether it gives fruit anymore.

I have thought about you and about that day again and again and again. Sometimes I have even taken you in my arms, you as you were that day, drinking your tea in innocent obliviousness, and wept and wept. For you and for all the children who pay the price years later. Many times I have turned it over in my mind: if the television program hadn't cut out that afternoon, if the towers hadn't fallen, if the planes hadn't been hijacked... would the grapes still be on the trellises? Would the carpets still be lying side by side?

A strange restlessness sometimes swallows the dark evenings of this nowhere-place whole, and in the middle of here and there I go looking for you, you who on the other side of all the noise are honestly, purely innocent.

Sometimes on the hot, worn-out New York subway I close my eyes against the giddy young faces and the wretched homeless and imagine that you have gone to the market with Maman Mehri, a few apples and a few onions and some yogurt and milk in hand, and you are sitting together in the faludeh shop. Her body is burning from the chemotherapy and you have no idea that these hot flashes will turn her to ash sooner than anyone expected. You eat your faludeh and quietly calculate whether your Eid money might stretch to the end of summer and buy you a few more stealthy ice creams from the corner store. The sharp smell of urine hits me under the nose. I have to change trains at this station, toward Brooklyn.

Almost every day I think of you. I think of you often and each time you become a more distant memory, more lost and confused than the last, wrapped in the romantic nostalgias of exile. I wish so much that one of these days I could see you, could see you on the other side of all this noise and tell you: don't be afraid. Everything you are afraid of does happen, but you endure it. All of us endure it, with all its hardship and bitterness and grief. Don't be afraid, my dear, and eat as many figs as you can.