What Tehran Keeps

Tehran remembers by keeping things in the wrong places. The mountain is in the wrong place — the Alborz range sits at the northern edge of the city like a wall, snow-capped in winter, brown in summer, and always there when you look up, which in Tehran you don't do often enough because the traffic demands your attention and the traffic always wins. I grew up looking at those mountains from my grandmother's roof. Flat roof, as they all were, covered in kilims in the summer where the family would sleep because the nights were cooler up there and the air moved. My grandmother would point north and name the peaks: Tochal, Darband, Kolakchal. She said them like she was listing family members, which in a sense she was. The mountains had been there longer than anyone. I left in 2003. This is the sentence that every Iranian abroad has practiced, because the next question is always why, and the answer is always both simple and complicated, like the city itself. I left because I was twenty-two and the world was larger than the distance between my apartment and the university, and because I could, and because the staying was harder than the leaving. I'm in Vancouver now. There are mountains here too. The North Shore mountains, green and wet and nothing like the Alborz. I look at them and think: wrong mountains. This is not their fault. What Tehran keeps is this: the sound of the call to prayer mixing with car horns. The smell of barbari bread at five AM from the bakery on the corner, the one where the baker slapped the dough against the inside of the oven with his bare hands and had forearms that looked like they belonged to someone twice his size. The taste of sour cherry juice, cold, from a street vendor whose cart had a hand-painted sign and wheels that didn't quite align. These are clichés of exile. Every Iranian abroad has a bread story, a mountain story, a grandmother's roof story. I know this. They are still true. Being common doesn't make something less real. It makes it shared, which is different. I went back once, in 2016. The bread was the same. The traffic was worse, which I didn't think was possible. The mountains were exactly where I left them. My grandmother's roof had a satellite dish on it. The kilims were gone. She was gone. I sat on the roof anyway. The mountains were there. The sun went down behind them the way it always had, turning the snow pink for about eight minutes, and the city went from gold to orange to the particular Tehran grey that isn't sad, exactly, but isn't happy either — it's the color of a place that has seen a lot and is still here and doesn't need you to feel sorry for it. I don't feel sorry for Tehran. Tehran doesn't need my sorrow. It needs its traffic to move and its bread to be hot and its mountains to stay where they are, and it has all three, and that is enough.