Shiraz. Chapter 5

The Shadows of Light

23 Khordad 1376 (June 13, 1997)

Tehran assaulted them with heat and noise. After the slow, almost sleepy rhythm of the train, the city seemed like a vast, scorching cauldron in which millions of lives were boiling. Uncle Hossein, who met them at the station, was the complete opposite of his sister, Roxana. Loud, portly, with a perpetual business smile on his face, he smelled of expensive perfume and money. He was a man of matter, a carpet merchant, for whom the world consisted not of ideas, but of textures, knots, and market prices.

“Well, Zahra-jan, ready to conquer the capital?” he boomed, seating them in his new, air-conditioned Peugeot. “Decided where you’ll apply yet? The University of Tehran is a classic. But now everyone’s rushing to Sharif, where the physics and math are world-class.”
“The physics is stronger at Sharif,” Ali noted.
“But the philosophy is better at Tehran,” Roxana countered. “A person shouldn’t just be a physicist. They should be… a person.”

They argued lightly, like people who had long known all of each other’s arguments.

The car flowed with the traffic, and outside the window, a different Iran flashed by—not ancient and poetic like Shiraz, but modern, harsh, full of glass and concrete. They drove down wide avenues, and Zahra, pressed against the window, watched this seething world, which resembled a gigantic, nervous, eternally rushing mechanism. Here, even the trees seemed not living, but cast from metal and coated with a layer of dust.

Uncle Hossein’s house was in northern Tehran, in the Zafaraniyeh district. It was a two-story mansion with a garden where plane and pomegranate trees grew. It was cool inside—air conditioners ran in every room, creating an artificial oasis in the midst of the summer heat.

Uncle Hossein’s wife, Aunt Maryam, welcomed them with traditional hospitality—tea, sweets, inquiries about their health. Zahra sat in the living room, examining the carpets on the walls—the work of masters from Kashan and Tabriz, each pattern telling its own story.

In the evening, when the daytime heat had subsided, Uncle Javad arrived. He entered the cool living room, and with him burst in the dry heat of the capital’s paranoia.

“I wouldn’t advise the University of Tehran,” he said instead of a greeting, addressing Ali. “It’s a hotbed of freethinking right now. Last week, they confiscated a batch of books from the humanities students. ‘New Philosophy.’ Nietzsche, Heidegger, Foucault. Poison, wrapped in a beautiful cover.”
“Students always read seditious books,” Hossein chuckled. “We did in our time, too. And look, we grew up to be devout Muslims.”
“It was a different poison back then,” Javad retorted. “Marxism. It was crude, straightforward. This one is subtle. It doesn’t deny God. It just makes Him unnecessary.”
“And what do you recommend, Javad?” Uncle Hossein asked, pouring tea. “The technology university as well?”
“Yes. At Sharif, at least they’re busy with real work. Physics, mathematics. The exact sciences. They leave less room for doubt.”
“Well, yes,” the practical Hossein smirked. “And Sharif graduates do very well for themselves in the States. The irony.”
“It used to be called Aryamehr,” Javad said thoughtfully, turning to Zahra. “In honor of the Shah. ‘Light of the Aryans.’”

Zahra’s father, Ali, who had been listening in silence until then, suddenly smiled his quiet, ironic smile.

“Of course,” he said slowly, as if tasting the words. “Aryamehr. That directly intersects with the name Neshan-e Aryamehr—the ‘Order of the Light of the Aryans’—a chivalric order for the Shah’s wife. But that is a direct reference to European secret societies. For example, the Masonic lodge ‘Order of Light,’ which existed in Russia in the early twentieth century. And later moved to Germany. A strange coincidence, isn’t it?”

Uncle Javad, who seemed to have been waiting for this pass, immediately caught the ball. His eyes lit up.

“Exactly! Exactly, Ali! You see! The Masons in Europe stole not only our image of Light, but the very concept of Aryans! The Aryans—that’s us, the Iranians! The West intercepts our ancient, traditional ideas, distorts them, and then sends them back to destroy us from within! They supported the Shah’s regime, which called itself the ‘Light of the Aryans,’ in order to pit our ancient, pre-Islamic pride against Islam itself! The very idea of ‘light,’ enlightenment—that is a Sufi concept, ishraq. The idea of ‘Aryans’—that is our Zoroastrian heritage. But the European Masons, all these secret societies, they stole our symbols, our philosophy, gutted God from it, and turned it into a political tool. This is their method!”

He spoke with heat and conviction, and Zahra, sitting in her armchair, felt his words constructing an invisible but solid structure in the air. A structure in which there were no accidental names, and history was an encrypted text.

At that moment, Roxana, who had been helping Aunt Maryam in the kitchen, appeared in the doorway of the living room. She stood there, wiping her hands on her apron, and looked at the men with an expression of infinite weariness.

“Are you at it again?” She shook her head. “Discussing all sorts of horror stories in front of the child. Zahra, my dear, go and rest. You must be tired from the journey.”

Zahra stood up. She was indeed tired. But not from the journey. From the weight of the thoughts that had crashed down on her in this cool, quiet room.

As she was leaving, she heard her mother say to the men, “And I’m not bringing you tea, I’m bringing you valerian root.”

Sharif University or the University of Tehran, a choice, always a choice, like in a problem where you have to choose one of two doors, and behind one is a princess and behind the other a tiger, but you don’t know which is where, and maybe there are tigers behind both doors, only one is smiling, like Khatami, and the other is roaring, like Nateq-Nouri, but the result is the same—you get eaten, and Uncle Javad says there is poison at the University of Tehran, and Uncle Hossein says people from Sharif go to America, and I don’t understand which is worse—to die from poison at home or to go live with the enemies who invented the poison in the first place.

But adults always demand that you choose, define a trajectory, collapse into a single state, because uncertainty frightens them. I made my choice. Not then, later… But what choice will my daughters make?

Chapter 6. The Garden of Forking Paths