This piece was written in response to a call for pieces on the subject of freedom of expression by Nazy Kaviani. It is also a response to a photo posted at Boston.com on June 15, 2009. For more information on the call to write, visit Nazy’s blog. To see the photo on which this picture was based, visit here.
The scent of her mother’s cream lingers at her nose as the girl brushes the back of her hand against her lips. Her throat is dry: she has not had any water to drink since her morning tea. She knows she should not be here. Her mother, were she to find out, would surely collapse in fear. Escape from the house without permission would normally mean a sharp slap from Baba. But the severity of the punishment she would receive, were she to linger too long, made her teeth chatter and her fingers clench more tightly around the ten thousand Rials in her sweaty hand.
She has never seen Valiasr Street so full of strangers. Normally crowded with cars, it is now crowded with people, a sea of colorful headscarves and dark heads, and spotted with the bright green of the resistance movement. Their common breath, the deep inhalation and then the release of their chants comes in waves, pulling her in closer. Her ears ring with their voices in her ears. At 12, she had acquired enough height to see eye to eye with these people, so open-mouthed and insistent, but she cannot understand what they are saying.
The week before, she and her mother were picking through the cilantro, pulling off tasty leaves from stems with green-stained hands. “I want to grow up to be a doctor, Mama,” she had said. “A doctor, Azar?” her mother had replied, her forehead furrowed. The resulting silence confirmed that it was all the girl would say about the matter. She had planted the seed, hoping it would grow and bloom in her mother’s mind.
She clutches the knot of her headscarf under her chin, and watches as a woman in chador wades past on the fringes of the crowd. Her mouth and cheeks are covered by a white surgeon’s mask, leaving only her tired eyes and heavy brow exposed.
“Khanoum,” the girl shouts to her and the sound of her own voice barely reaches her ears over the bullhorn. “Khanoum! Where is everyone going?”
The woman’s head turns and she sees the child. “We are marchng towards our future.” Her
voice escapes from behind the mask like the scent of her mother’s stew emerging in clouds from under a pot’s lid.
“Khanoum! But what is everyone saying?”
“They say whatever they feel like saying. Go home, child. Let my voice speak for you.” The woman turned and waded in to the crowd.
At my house, I am silent. I seek out quiet corners to do my studies. I must evade notice by my brothers or else they will taunt me for keeping my head in my school books. Silence and obedience, or shame, these are my choices.
The girl heard the high pitched sound of an electric scooter in the distance. She knows that these scooters carry basij, young men with sticks in their hands. These sticks search out bones to break. Like the way her eldest brother twists her arm behind her until it feels like it will snap off her shoulder. She knows that these sticks, these scooters, these men, seek to silence these streets. She feels a shout erupt from her open mouth. Her teeth are bared.
Screams erupt and the crowd breaks from its procession to disperse in every direction. The girl turns to run, but her right shoe catches at the edge of the sidewalk and falls off her foot. Returning home without her shoe would give her away and mean facing her father and her brothers with an explanation that she cannot give. She hesitates. For just a moment she considers turning against the crowd to find it, but feels herself suddenly folded in to the black cloth of a woman’s chador. She is swept away and barely feels her feet touch the ground. People knock against her; she sees fear in their eyes. Her dry throat barely lets her swallow as struggles to take a breath. An elbow in her side and a sharp stone under her bare foot both remind her of the softness of her pink skin when she steps out of the tub on wash day.
The scooter engines are louder now, and she turns her head to catch a stick swing and hit a man’s head. Screaming and shouts erupt over the buzz. She recognizes the boney back of the basij, his stick red with the man’s blood. She knows that back. She knows the t-shirt that he wears straight off the laundry line because it is his favorite. She knows the
seams and the weave of it, because she washed it with her own hand the previous day.
The bullhorn is still shouting. The woman is breathing quickly in her ear. “Go child,” the woman says to her. “Run.”
