The One

When I returned to Tehran for the first time, twenty years after my family’s escape from the Islamic Theocracy, 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 baggy pants and 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, 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 corners 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, the way a community accepts a village idiot. 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 one of those taxi drivers my confidant, every fruit vendor my friend, every beggar my guilt, every old woman my mother, every argument my folly, every act of kindness, everything, mine. I felt like I was awakening, again, for the second time in my life from a deep sleep, and I stretched myself wide to encompass the whole of it. I felt the unfurling of my ego in every direction, through the winding passageways, down the wide avenues, over the tall garden walls, into the tight and narrow streets, into homes, alleys and high-rises, schools and offices and banks and stores. I had thousands of eyes, and thousands of mouths, and arms and legs and hearts and hopes. I was all of the immense humanity before me. I walked the streets with impunity, holding a bag of persimmons or apples and handing them out to every beggar who crossed my path, to groups of day laborers and construction workers. Even the police gave me license as they watched this loudness of character, this fearlessness, this openness. They let me be. 

It was a happy time. Those days. 

My cousins and I hosted a party to share the happiness, the miracle of being alive. My uncle Behrooz had just moved the family from their old apartment in the quiet and secluded outskirts of Tehran into his new building in the heart of the city. The old apartment still stood vacant. Pouya and I searched the bazaars far and wide for black lights and hired a DJ with the right music. We soundproofed the home with egg cartons and blankets on the windows to muffle the bass so policemen passing in the streets below wouldn’t hear us. We invited a whole bunch of people and gave them a password, told them to dress outlandishly. I put on my white thrift-store hippie dress and wove myself a garland of daisies for my hair, fashioning some wings out of silk and wire. The night of the party came, the guests arrived, and that’s when Reza walked in through the door. 

Reza, the One. 

There were no formal introductions between Reza and me. I had my back turned when he walked in with his girl, brother, and gang of friends. But I felt him enter the room. Forget form. For a moment. Forget the idea of two separate people in a room crowded with other people, a certain distance between them. Reduce everything down to the atomic, to the burning core surrounded by the dance of particles smaller than even that. There, the strict boundaries of the body dissipate, elements merge with one another, breath with the particles of air, feet with the seeming solidity of the ground. And in between all those dancing atoms, nothing exists but empty space. And energy. And heat. And attraction. In the minutia of that universe, some frequency, some taut vibration of strings pulled between Reza and me, and he looked over, past the crowd of bodies to where I stood, looking at him. Then, he looked away. And his girl, who had been his girl since they were children playing on the same street, felt that connection as a palpable threat and withdrew to another room, upset. In that same moment, Amir appeared out of nowhere and asked me to dance. Even when dancing with my eyes closed in between so many bodies sweating and moving, amidst a concoction of dizzying pheromones, to the bewildering thump of the music, I still knew Reza’s precise location in space, like the needle of a compass drawn north. 

It was like that. Everything around us a shadow, a charade. The only thing that existed, that Existed, was whatever strange attraction pulled Reza and me, finally, to the center of that dancing crowd, to the apex of that gyrating storm, where he and I finally stood, facing one another. I stopped dancing, and he circled me once, twice, our eyes locked, the two of us hidden amidst the arms and legs and undulating torsos. We stood in the silent center of the tempest of all those other bodies, then Reza said to me, “Abji, you have such eyes.”

And I, already in love with everything, decided he was the One. The summation of all of Iran, in the tangible form of a single young man. And a good-looking one, too. Long, thick, brown hair worn tied back in a ponytail. Full beard. Chiseled face. Deep eyes. Hands that looked like they could fell a tree, and hack it and saw it and hew it into a home. He stood before me, the paradigm of Iranian masculinity. Proud. Stoic. Loyal. Good. Honorable. Kind. Capable. In strict control of his emotions which ran deep, but were concealed and tempered. And since Reza was already devoted, give or take, to his childhood sweetheart. And since he was one of Pouya’s closest and oldest friends, having trekked with them since his early adolescence, as well as a sort of adopted son to my Uncle Behrooz, this One was unattainable. Off-limits. Which made him even more desirable. He was the Iran I could never have, the Iran that would never have me. 

There’d been only one other boy who affected me like this, a boy I had known since grade school. I knew Kevin was the One when he let me run my toes through the stubble of his hair in the back of Mrs. Harm’s second grade classroom. I was seven years old and didn’t speak but two words of English, dark-haired, dark-eyed, lost in a sea of blond-haired, blued-eyed school kids. Kevin was green-eyed, which shone gold in the sun. Gold skinned. And his hair, an auburn gold. I took off my shoe, removed my sock. He let me feel the contours of his head with my foot. Right there, between reading groups, I knew Kevin was the One. 

Kevin was the all-American boy. Played baseball. His dad was a policeman, his mom a homemaker. He knew, from grade school on, that he wanted to be a fireman. “Why a fireman?” I’d ask him later. “You could be anything. Be a senator. Run for president.” A fireman. Because he wanted to save people. And take care of his family. Kevin was popular. Everyone admired him. But he was kind, too. Dignified. He kept from the cruelties. He spoke with whomever he pleased, danced with whomever he pleased at the school dances. Like me. I remember the first time he asked me to dance. It was on the sixth-grade outdoor education trip to Cottontail Ranch, the big dance on the last night. His favorite song started to play. He came up to where I stood, somewhere on the periphery of the dance floor, presumably in the shadows, and asked if I wanted to dance. I cried on his shoulder. I think I may have wiped my nose on his shirt. Inadvertently. But once you’ve put your toes in someone’s hair, all else is permissible. 

That same year, Kevin asked me out. At the behest of the popular girls. The Kristies giggled and told him to ask me to go steady. It was the moment I had been waiting for since second grade. I beamed yes. And then I saw, in his eyes, a genuine remorse. “I’m sorry,” he said, and he meant it. The Kristies loved it. They roared with laughter. They spoke of it for weeks. They got Ryan to do it next, but this time I was on to them. I wasn’t among the girls you’d ask to go steady. 

Years later, I got another chance with Kevin at our high school graduation dance. The theme that night was Las Vegas. There were roulette tables, blackjack, even little slot machines. But the dance floor stood empty all night until the song from Pulp Fiction played, where Uma Thurman dances with John Travolta. I decided, the hell with all of them. I stepped out of the periphery, out of the shadows, walked out onto the dance floor, right beneath that glittering disco ball, and danced. The next song, too. And the song after that. By my lonesome, with the rest of them in the peripheries, in the shadows, until someone tapped my shoulder. I turned, and there stood Kevin. Tall, proud shoulders, the expanse of his chest just at eye level, blue jeans, white T-shirt, and a cowboy hat on his head. He asked me to dance. I looked up into his eyes and said, “I’d give anything for you, anything in the world.” 

“Don’t get me wrong,” he said. “I like you, and you’re real attractive, but you and I, we’re just not meant for each other.” 

The America I could never have, the America that would never have me. 

And here I was again, on another dance floor, now locked in Reza’s gaze, and he said to me, “Abji, you have such eyes.” An echo of Kevin’s sentence, We’re just not meant for each other, summarized by a single word, abji. Sister. I like you, don’t get me wrong, you have such eyes, but we’re just not meant for each other. 

There is, of course, no fruit more desirable than the one forbidden. The one out of reach. The unattainable. And it wasn’t even mere curiosity that compelled me to reach out, to touch, to step closer. It was an urgency to know, to define not just the unknowns of the other, but also the unknowns within myself. A wall stood between us, between me and Reza. He confessed attraction, then dutifully left me in the middle of that dancing crowd to attend to the broken heart of his childhood sweetheart. I watched him leave. Some other man asked me to dance. And another after that. And the whole time, the whole long night of that party, there was no one else in that room save Reza and me. 

By dawn, most of the guests had left. Only a few of us remained. Someone filled a water pipe and heated up the coals. Someone brought out some pillows and threw them on the floor. Someone opened a bottle of red wine. Sarab strummed his guitar, and we sang softly. Dylan’s “Mr. Tambourine Man.” Metallica’s “The Unforgiven.” Radiohead’s “Creep.” 

Then I went to the rooftop of the apartment building to watch the sun rise and the light shift across the landscape. The minarets broadcasted the morning azaan. The song of that prayer echoed across the city. A tint of pink edged the dark sky above the mountains. Below the apartment, in the still shadows, there stood a single man on the edge of a vast, empty field. He had his hands in his pockets. He was waiting. Pacing. The morning azaan continued, and in the silent rooms of homes, people slept, or they prayed. The sky turned gold and orange at the base of a deep blue. 

That’s when I saw her. A woman on the far edge of the field, in the shadow of the mountains, running. She wore a black chador that filled with the wind and blew away from her hair and body as she clutched it with her hands and ran toward the waiting man. The man had his back turned. He did not see her running across that vast field. Then, he gave up. He walked away. She did not call after him, but kept running, faster. And somehow, through some unforeseen connection, some invisible force, he stopped, then turned, and saw her.

He ran to her, and on the edge of that field, the two of them met and embraced. Pouya and I stood watching from the rooftop, in awe, the sole witnesses to this meeting. They embraced for a moment. Then, they kissed. Finally, she pulled away from him, still holding his hands. She stepped back, then turned and ran in the direction from which she came. He watched her leave until she was a distant speck in that endless field. Then he turned and walked down the empty street.  

-Parnaz Foroutan

Parnaz Foroutan is the author of the critically acclaimed novel Girl from the Garden (Ecco 2015) which received the PEN Emerging Voices Award and was named one of Booklist’s “Top 10 First Novels” of 2015. Her new memoir Home is a Stranger (Chicago Review Press 2020) is about her journey back to Iran as a young woman, two decades after her family fled the rise of the Islamic Theocracy. Her essays have appeared on NBC Think, The Sun, Body Literature and other literary journals. The essay that made her mother proudest, entitled America and addressing the refugee crisis, appears in the anthology Radical Hope (Vintage 2017). This essay is an excerpt from Foroutan’s latest memoir, Home is a Stranger.