After Tehran by Marina Nemat Page B

that photo. They had called me from the magazine and had asked if I owned a nice dress. I only had pant and skirt suits. So they borrowed a dress for me from Holt Renfrew. I gasped when I saw it. It was red, very red, and although I would never have worn it in the real world, I decided to play dress-up and indulge myself, if only for a few minutes. At the photo shoot, I remembered that thirty-eight years earlier, my family and I had gone to a professional photographer for a family portrait. I could see that photo in my mind. My mother and father were young and elegant. I wore a blue satin dress with a white belt and shiny black shoes. Alik looked quite handsome in his very-sixties shirt, which had a ruffled collar and cuffs. My mother had sewn it for him. The photo was black-and-white, but Iclearly remember the colour of that shirt. Its mustard-yellow fabric was covered with light- and dark-brown polka dots each the size of a dime.
    Soon after the publication of
Prisoner of Tehran
, Alik wrote to me in an email:
    Your life took a very difficult path and now it is great to see you getting some redemption for all your suffering. My congratulations for all the recognition and awards you will be receiving
.
    I quote Emily Dickinson: “Not knowing when the dawn will come, I open every door.”
    Your dawn has come. Enjoy it
.
    I was stunned.
    For a few years after my arrival in Canada, Alik and I had seen each other regularly at family functions, but we’d had a falling-out over my deteriorating relationship with my parents. I had told my parents frankly that I could not live up to their expectations of life in Canada. They wanted me to buy new furniture and move to a bigger house because most of our friends and relatives had a more expensive lifestyle. In Iran, we call this way of thinking
cheshm-o hamcheshmi
, which more or less means “living to other people’s standards.” I literally couldn’t afford to satisfy my parents, and I refused to go into debt to please them or anyone else. My husband and children were my priority and I had to focus my energy on them. My parents didn’t like that, and their unhappiness affected my relationship with Alik. Maybe if we had been closer in age, things would have been different, but we didn’t have much in common.
    Not long after
Prisoner of Tehran
appeared, Alik and I went out for lunch. I realized I could not remember a time when we had been alone together. He visited my father every Sunday and meevery Friday. We had not been trying to avoid each other, but our lives had been separate for twenty-eight years. Unlike Alik, who had grown up during the time of the shah, I had come of age during the time of the Islamic Republic, and my reality was quite different from his. I was sure that every time he saw me, the shadow of Evin and what I had gone through got in his way of connecting to me. Maybe he felt guilty for not being able to help me. He had never talked to me about guilt, but I had wondered about it. A friend of mine who was never in Evin had told me about blaming himself for not saving me from the prison. I laughed and told him not to be silly. There wasn’t anything he or anyone else could have done. I have never blamed anyone for my time in Evin. Only the Islamic Republic is responsible for that.
    I told Alik that I had been shocked to see him quote Emily Dickinson; I had no idea that he read poetry. He said that he had always loved literature and was an avid reader. It seemed I knew more about my neighbours than I did about my brother. To my surprise, he said he had always wanted to become a writer. We talked about my book, and he revealed that even though he was aware that Evin was a horrible place, he had no idea how awful it truly was until he read my book.
    I sat quietly, looking at him.
    I had finally found my brother and father in the rubble of the silence and secrets of our past.
    A few days later, Alik and my father came to the launch of
Prisoner of Tehran
, a