Home Is a Stranger by Parnaz Foroutan

Author:Parnaz Foroutan
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: General Fiction
Publisher: Chicago Review Press
Published: 2020-01-24T16:00:00+00:00

WHEN WE RETURNED to Tehran, I was in love. I can’t write an exhaustive list of what I was in love with, because I was in love with everything. I was in love with the taxi drivers. The surly ones. The quiet ones. The inquisitive. The ones who recited poetry. The ones who talked about their dreams. I was in love with the Kurdish men who stood on the side of the road tall and proud, with their thick mustaches and their baggy pants and the colorful scarves wound about their waists, who waited all day for someone to hire them. I was in love with the little boys who followed shoppers at the bazaar with their wheelbarrows, insisting. I was in love with the recording of the azaan broadcasted over the city from the tops of minarets at dawn, at midday, at dusk. The smell of hot piroshkis from the bakery, the colorful display of seasonal fruit, the hanging carcass of a goat, the dazed chicks that sold for pennies each, dyed hot pink and neon green and who lived for less than a day. I was in love with the merchants who napped in the late afternoons on the piled bags of wheat they sold, in the corner of their shops. I was in love with the beggars. In love with the street musicians. The prostitutes. With the policemen in their ill-fitting uniforms. With the butchers in their bloodstained white aprons. I was in love with the beautiful young women. In love with the young men. The old men. The tired mothers. The street sweepers who swept with brooms made of bramble. I was in love with the mullahs who walked in the shade of the elm trees that lined the streets and avenues, their cloaks billowing out behind them like sails. In love with the fruit dealers who sang about their produce, how ripe it was, how sweet it was, how cheap. I walked the streets in love. Delirious with love. Broken-hearted with love. Shining with love. Crazy with love. The sight of a mechanic’s hands eternally covered in grease, or the purple hands of the man who sold roasted beets from a cart, or the blackened fingers of the young children who shelled raw walnuts and sold them on the corners moved me to tears. Iran. I was in love with Iran. All of her. Her sorrow, her suffering, her beauty, her strength. Her magic. Her spirit. She was mine, I was hers, this was love.

This madness, of course, drew a bit of attention in the streets. People noticed. But it inspired a kindness in strangers toward me, the way a community accepts a village idiot. And I wasn’t afraid to be the fool. I was given to bouts of joy, of ecstatic gratuity to the world as it manifested. There, in the streets of Tehran, I walked enraptured, spellbound. The world was gifted to me. Gluttonous, I wanted all of it. I became engorged, every

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