After nearly three decades of living in severe hardship, being a spectacle of the neighborhood and suffering the effects of untreatable malaise, the world and we, Iranians, watched with heart-stopping anticipation the effects of radical surgery on them. And the result was a disaster, a futile exercise in rectifying what was un-rectifiable. And they are both dead now.
And at the same time, as the world watched with unprecedented eagerness what Iranians would do on July 9th, the date came and passed, and the result was more indifference, more of the absence of any tangible improvement, and in a way a death: the death of hope.
Ladan and Laleh are flown back to Iran, the first time ever they are separate, but they will not know the difference for they are dead. Free but dead. What waste!
Their bodies will be put to rest within the soil a country which is itself numb to their newly found freedom. The country itsels seems as dead as the sisters’ cold, sleeping bodies .
Maybe we need to give up on the idea of separating conjoined twins. And maybe we need to forgo the hope of reviving a revolution where a revolution is impossible to achieve. Maybe what we need, and what Ladan and Laleh needed, is more of accepting what is and changing it little by little and inch by inch. Radical surgery is not for us, let us accept it and move on.