• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

The living room of my parents’ house was in the shape of a square, which I now drew clumsily. The dining table was at the upper left, with eight chairs around it. The table was wooden and round, the kind you find in elegant Chinese restaurants. A buffet was next to the table, and a large silk carpet was hung on the right side of the buffet. It depicted the eleventh-century Persian poet Omar Khayyám being handed a glass of wine by a beautiful woman. The silk carpet had a golden frame. Maryam and I had always hated that tacky silk carpet, but my father had loved it. I loved it too right now, and I wrote out the words of one of Khayyám’s poems:

Ah, my Belovéd, fill the Cup that clears

TO-DAY of past Regrets and future Fears—

To-morrow?—Why, To-morrow I may be

Myself with Yesterday’s Sev’n Thousand Years.

I saw my family sitting together. In this mixture of memory and fantasy, it was lunchtime, and my father had taken his usual seat at the table, a glass of illegally produced vodka in one hand. My mother was in the kitchen, and the smell of simmering herbs from the north of Iran filled the large apartment. She was making ghormeh sabzi, a lamb stew with kidney beans and vegetables. As I drew my mother in the kitchen, standing by the stove, I could smell the simmering dill, parsley, leeks, and spinach and taste the tender pieces of lamb steeped in the herbs.

In the living room, Maryam was sitting to my father’s left, watching the news on the television that was in a corner on her right. Next to Maryam was her husband, Mohammad. Unlike Maryam and me, Mohammad is a great listener. My father had loved telling his life stories to Mohammad, time and time again. I was across from Maryam. I played with my food as I told my family about the forced confessions of a friend on television. “I don’t see anything wrong with making televised confessions,” I said. “No one believes his words anyway. So I think he made the right decision in order to be released.” I tried to avoid my father’s stare.

My father looked at me as he squeezed the juice from a grapefruit into his glass of vodka. My father suffered from hyperuricemia, a high level of uric acid in his blood. The doctor had told him to eat grapefruit and stop drinking. He’d chosen to follow only one recommendation.

“You may think it’s normal to give in and do what they ask you to in order to avoid torture,” he said, pausing to take a sip of his drink, “but you’re just setting yourself up to be fucked.”

He had such a way with words. Thinking of Baba Akbar, I felt the familiar mix of anxiety and admiration. I’d never known if his next sentence would hit me below the belt or not. My mother always came to my rescue. She would change the subject so radically that my father would be forced to stop his condescending comments. “I didn’t know that the life expectancy in Burundi is only fifty-one years old,” my mother told me. “You’ve been to Burundi several times—are they really poor?” But this time, Baba Akbar didn’t want to change the subject.

The sound of steps coming down the hall pulled me out of my fantasy. I covered my drawing with the carpet and waited. The steps continued past my cell.

In my fantasy, my father continued to lash out at me as my mother cleared the dishes from the table. This time, Maryam defended me. “Each person is different, Baba Akbar,” she said. “What did your generation achieve, anyway, that you’re so proud of it? You thought of dying as a value. Young people these days appreciate being alive. They don’t believe in martyrdom and stupid concepts like that. I think it’s about time you should change as well.” In my fantasy, Maryam stood up and left the room.

I returned to my drawing under the carpet, and when I had finished with the apartment in Tehran, I moved on to our flat in London. I drew each room, each piece of furniture. Paola and I had just renovated the apartment and had added an extra bathroom. I made sure to draw the new bathroom in detail. Even though the new bathroom was smaller than the old one,