Son
Ali had knocked me hard in the jaw, and I’d hit him back harder. Right in the place between the ear and the chin, the hinge that stopped the talking. When they’d asked us how the fight had started, we’d both just stared at different parts of the floor until there was a sigh from Agha Mohammadi, then the sound of two suspension notes being torn out, a hand on either side of the perforations.
I took the note and my anger and pressed both into a closed fist, into the deep of my jacket pocket. I didn’t look back at Ali when I walked out of the school building. Or when I started running, crossing the street, past the corner baghali, into the park. It was only once I reached our spot by the tree that I slowed and turned around, and seeing no one there, slumped down by the trunk alone.
From where I sat, I could see all the way down to Valiasr. To its traffic lights that lingered on a long yellow, and beyond them, the hill that went up to the shopping strip, the planetarium, the hospital where I knew where my parents would be. They’d made no effort to hide the doctor’s words on the phone the night before: the cord is starting to wrap around the baby’s neck, if she’s not delivered tomorrow, she could die. I’d sat in the dark of my room and thought maybe I should cry, because wasn’t I afraid? But when I tried to picture what a dead baby looked like, I didn’t know. It wasn’t an image that felt possible, the beginning and ending of life being one. And maybe I didn’t want to think about that kind of thing, anyway.
I started walking towards the hospital, remembering how Ali was a Big Brother to three sisters. He’d told me they were alright, except for when they screamed, or cried, which they did a lot. But you have to look out for them, he’d said, because we’re boys, and they’re just girls. His baba had taught him that, except he didn’t call him ‘baba’ like I called mine, but ‘pedar’.
My baba hadn’t told me anything about being a Big Brother, though he was one to five. The middle boy of a neat ten – if you don’t count the ones lost. He’d held both hands up to me when he said it, a finger for each sibling, and that too felt like another impossible thing. I saw it as he spoke: one room, one mat on the floor, head to toe head to toe. Haj Khanoum counting us before turning the lights off. Quicker this way than to call out each name. I’d only ever known one of them, the eldest brother. The rest had left before I was born, and really, that was a good thing. A string of names I was lucky to not know the faces to.
That’s what Maman always said, anyway.
She thought my uncle was a man the way my baba was a boy: while my baba swung wildly, all heat and emotion and hurt hitting whoever it landed on, his brother was intentional with the pain he caused.
He’s a pincher, she’d said, motioning with one hand to show how easy it was to hide two moving fingers behind your back, while using the other to continue stirring the stew.
After that, I’d made a point of looking at his hands more closely, but I only ever saw them smoothing his moustache down on either side of his mouth. Until, a few summers later, when the kids had jumped on Zara’s bed and a hand had lifted to point at me with blame when the planks below us snapped. I’d been sent to sit outside while Zara pressed a blubbering, wet face into her maman’s neck, and my baba surveyed the bed as his Big Brother stood beside him and spoke. I don’t know what was said, only that before we left, Baba had given me some thumbtacks and told me to put them beneath my uncle’s tires. When I think of him as a child, I picture his face in that moment.
It was still early by the time I reached Valiasr, and I was thinking about how whenever I asked Maman her favourite colour, her response was always the same I don’t know, all of them which to me sounded like none of them at all. But the stalls didn’t sell rainbow flowers, so I settled for ‘none’ instead: a bunch of white azaleas. It was like the ones Maman held in their wedding video. I’d watched it over and over as a kid, sick at the thought that they really existed before me; the film washed green, some old song, my maman wrapping her arms tightly around my baba’s.
Despite what Maman said, Baba was always talking about the importance of being a Man. He showed it sometimes too, with a broken glass and a slamming door and once, a hand reaching out for mine while Maman slept, walking me out onto the street, into the world. We’d gone together like that to his office, him letting go only to drape an arm around my shoulder and introduce me as his Son to men in suits who called me ‘Agha Milad’. I’d burned with the shame of being seen as a Man when I was not yet one, and I’d thought of my baba, young, wearing his grandma’s shoes to school because his no longer fit, and my Maman, holding onto him with that tight grip, making him feel like just a boy.
And maybe that’s how it always went, me writing myself into my parents’ stories, thinking if I knew them, I’d know it all.
But that one day I can remember better than the rest of it, from the outside in, like I was God himself who made it happen. Pedar and Son hand in hand. Pedar and Son at the barbers. Pedar and Son sitting side by side, speaking to each other through the mirrors. The barber pronouncing: Asad, he is your copy. A quiver from the Pedar’s lip, or perhaps the Son’s. And then: shavers along on the Son’s scalp. Pedar remarking, I wasn’t much older than you when they drafted me. 1958, called out on the TV.
At home Maman, had run her hands along my head but spoken over me to Baba, and I could tell from her tone of voice alone what her eyes looked like.
The hospital lobby smelled like the pools, pumped with the stuff that makes your eyes burn. And if it wasn’t so crowded there’d probably have been an echo, too. I could call from where I stood and the sound would reach my maman, and her voice would sing back to me showing where to find her, like we really were underwater, whales along the ocean floor.
When the nurse pushed the door open to her room, I remembered the wrapping cord and the thought of something I couldn’t even imagine. But Maman had beamed at me right away, telling me the soft thing in her arms was warm, and she herself well enough to say, before anything: what happened to your face?
But I didn’t answer, because there she was, impossibly alive, impossibly koochik, never having existed without me. An up-turned nose, a pouted red lip, a soft chin. When Maman placed her in my arms, I sat very, very still. Too scared to speak, or sigh, or shiver, I whispered to her in my mind instead. Thinking, yes. Here I am. Your Big Brother.
this one feels very different to the others so far - i’ve loved them all but something to immediate and intimate about it 🫶🏼
<3