Azarin Sadegh

For "Iran, a hope" collection:

One day, I woke up and the world had changed.

I was back to July 1978, having the best time of my life. It was also the time when the Shah was told that he was going to die soon, and this certainty had pushed him into a bizarre kind of depression. He had decided to make everyone remember him as the greatest king of Persia. A king who didn’t want to be a king anymore.

“Call me Mohammad Reza,” he had told on national TV. “I’m just a mortal like you.” Then, he let everyone know that it was ok to say “Marg bar Shah”, since he was going to die anyway, and his eyes got red.

It made the country pitiful and sad. Uncountable lines of people gathered in front of his modest mansion to kiss his hands, but it was him who kissed everyone’s hands asking for forgiveness.

People didn’t know who else to blame for their miseries. His son was just a kid and it was hard to hate a soon-to-be-orphan.

The next day, Khomeini sent him a get-well note and to show his new friendship, he called him M.R. (But it was rumored that the exiled Mullah was hooked on American series and Dallas’s J.R. was his favorite character.) In this note, he reminded the ex-King of their coming dinner together. “We’ll cry for you every year,” Khomeini promised.

M.R. decided to free all the political prisoners, and since he didn’t have too much time to waste his money on, so he went totally insane and paid 1000000000 Tomans to each man and 2000000000000000 Tomans to each woman to prove his firm belief in the equality of men and women. To establish his sincerity and Iran’s longevity, M.R. changed the Iranian flag by adding a smile on the sun’s face, and the lion held an umbrella (instead of a sword) over his head to protect the country from sunburn. Every forbidden book was sent to schools to be added to the curriculum. Everyone read them, and even I read them and we all learned – only after a chapter or two - that it wasn’t worth the hassle and I found all of them pretty boring or childishly optimistic.

Only weeks before his death, M.R. organized a huge festivity to mark the end of his reign. Every celebrity in the world was invited. Jimmy Carter danced with Batool, Khomeini’s wife who felt liberated and decided to burn her bra while Cezar Chavez’s grand grand grandson played with the little girl from the little House on the Prairie.

When the man we used to call the Shah died, the country mourned for 40 days, and Khomeini decided to live under an apple tree in Ghom forever and the elected president of the Republic of Iran had to update the constitution to force people to laugh at least one hour a day without laughing at each other. People dreamed again about their lost dreams and dared to take a first step toward making things happen.

This world, the way it was, surpassed all my expectations.  

As long as I kept my eyes open, Abadan’s Cinema Rex never burned and nobody died in Jaleh. Saddam never attacked Iran and all the two million ghosts of the war lived to build the biggest charity, named “humans without hatred”. Nobody killed Bakhtiar and Rajavi never married Maryam and the twin towers stood tall, and Neda became a famous singer to replace Googoosh and Sohrab passed the Concour with success.

In this strange world of mine, I never left Iran and I never knew about homesickness.

Never.

But the fatigue and boredom made my eyes shut for a second, and in this brief encounter with darkness, everything crushed and hope became the only remnant of my imaginary existence.