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By Root 373 0

incarcerated, Khaled came to live with my mother, my father, and me in Tehran. He was a cute, curly-haired toddler with a lot of energy and big, curious eyes. I was sixteen at the time. Part of me was excited—I had suddenly gained a younger brother. But on the first day he was with us, as my mother led Khaled by the hand through our house, it broke my heart to see how, from one room to the next, Khaled looked in each closet and under every bed for his mommy and daddy. He was not yet two years old.

My mother took Khaled into our home with her usual silent courage. For the next six years, while Maryam served her sentence for the crime of moharebeh, acting against Allah, my mother raised Khaled. And just as she had done three decades earlier with her husband, every month she would board a bus with Khaled and travel seventeen hours to visit Maryam in Ahvaz.

Maryam was released in 1989, once the Islamic government had killed most Tudeh leaders and was satisfied that the party no longer posed a threat. What Maryam told us about the beatings and torture of prisoners horrified even my father. Many of the torturers of the Islamic regime had been prisoners under the shah and knew exactly what methods of interrogation and torture could break a person. “It will take Maryam years to get rid of the prison memories, the nightmares,” my mother told me a week after Maryam was released. I am not sure that Maryam ever fully recovered.

· · ·

I thought I had done everything I could to avoid this suffering, and yet now the authorities had come for me. Since I’d first begun reporting in Iran, in 1997, making independent documentaries and writing for Newsweek magazine, I had taken every precaution and even censored myself in an attempt to stay below the radar. I’d chosen not to write about such sensitive subjects as separatist movements or ethnic and religious minorities. I’d made every effort to be honest and impartial, but I’d never been too critical of the regime, and certainly never of Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, who had taken over in 1989, after Ruhollah Khomeini died. I was very careful about whom I socialized with, dealing infrequently with foreigners—whom the government, as a rule, mistrusted. I had rarely dated in Iran to avoid provoking the country’s moral police. I was acutely aware of the government’s level of tolerance for things, and was careful not to cross any lines.

I detested revolutions; I believed, instead, in reconciliation and reform. I accepted the complex—or, perhaps, oppressive—steps I had to take to keep the government from becoming suspicious of me, because the most important thing to me was to be able to continue to do my work as a journalist. Having grown up under the despotic regime of the Islamic Republic—a regime under which information was controlled and severely limited—I understood that a lack of information and communication among a populace leads only to bigotry, violence, and bloodshed. Conspiracy theories about unknown “others”—the West, multinational companies, and secret organizations—being in charge of Iran’s destiny had stunted my nation’s sense of self-determination and, as a result, its will, leaving generations of Iranians feeling hopeless and helpless. I felt it was my job to provide accurate, well-reported information and, in doing so, help the world to have a better understanding of Iran and in my own way build a gradual path toward a more democratic future.

My loved ones—particularly my mother, my sister, and my fiancée, Paola—had worried for years that I would be the next person in my family to be arrested, but I’d repeatedly assured them that I would not risk my life for any cause. That morning, however, as I sat silently at the breakfast table with my mother and watched Rosewater walk angrily out of my bedroom with a box of my notebooks in his arms, I saw that in the eyes of such men, despite all my caution, I was a danger to the authoritarian rulers of the country and, by extension, to the Islamic Republic itself. I knew then that as much as I had tried to avoid my father’s and sister