The Ungrateful Refugee Read online

  ‘Your swimsuit doesn’t fit,’ she said one day, pointing to the folds in my straps and the creases just below my belly. Nothing ever fit back then. I had no hips and my underwear routinely fell to my ankles when I ran fast.

  It took two months away from my girls’ school in Isfahan, where my grades had earned me respect, to realise that I was nothing special. This family was better than us. They knew how to seem British, or American.

  One morning, after a visit to the Jahangirs, I woke to find Maman at the folding table by the hotplate, picking at her lips. Her eyebrows were gathered tight and low, like she had decided something. ‘We’re not going to sit here and wait,’ she said. ‘As long as we’re here, we can get two things done: you can learn swimming and good English.’ I understood that those were the skills that separated us from the Jahangirs. Educated, respected people spoke English. And they swam.

  Maman found a local grammar school for us to visit – maybe they could help. The principal, a kind, slim woman with a long braid and a sari, greeted us. She explained that the semester was long under way, that they charged tuition, that we weren’t the usual candidates. She seemed resolved that we wouldn’t enrol there and I don’t think Maman had hoped for that; it was almost May. The bell rang and the halls filled with children in uniform – the principal explained that the school was English-Hindi and so even the language courses wouldn’t do us much good. She offered us some used workbooks, free of charge (those too were populated by South Asian school children and their grownups) and Maman happily accepted.

  Back in our room, Maman erased the answers in our workbooks, making sure she left no trace to cheat by. We weren’t getting school credit for this; we would be judged by each syllable that came out of our mouths. Would we sound refined in our next life, or would we fall into the uneducated class? This seemed of vital importance, now that we had nothing. The thought of a fall in station frightened me. In my three years in my girls’ school in Isfahan, I had learned that only two things made me special: my place at the top of the class and my parents’ medical degrees from Tehran. How shameful to lose that, to sound like a villager in front of the other children and to have the most ordinary of them pity my luck.

  I wrote my name inside my freshly rubbed-out English vocabulary book and got to work.

  A few mornings later, shortly after another brutal Jahangir visit, when Khosrou was still five and I was just about to turn nine, we woke to find Maman already up, reading her Bible, underlining it in a fourth or fifth colour. ‘Good morning!’ she beamed. I sensed a scheme.

  She got up and turned on the faucet in the bathroom. ‘Come on, you two, let’s wash up and go out.’ Then she stopped, hesitated only briefly as she pulled out underpants and t-shirts for us. Something was happening; I knew it in that second before she spoke. ‘Dina,’ she said, ‘Daniel, come now, get dressed. Let’s go to the park.’

  Who the hell was Daniel?

  Khosrou’s coin shaped eyes grew rounder. He was a chubby kid and prone to masculine posturing – especially when it came to Maman and the business of her daily protection. Every day, he held her hand in his (not the other way around) and pretended he knew just what was going on, that he was in charge of it.

  Now he looked up at me for an answer and I was still working it out.

  ‘Dina, Daniel,’ Maman repeated. ‘Come on. We have work to do.’

  ‘Who’s Daniel?’ I asked, tentative, but also feeling the excitement. I loved it when Maman got up to stuff. I thought she was a warrior. And I was starting to catch on: this was no petty betrayal; it was a strategy. Maman wasn’t going to let us be any less dignified than the stupid Jahangirs.

  She smiled. I don’t remember if she explained: this will be your brother’s name from now on because Westerners can’t pronounce Khosrou. She said this later, many times. But did she say it in that moment? I remember a rushed morning and a dedication to the game – she had to see it through, like sleep training a baby or finishing a bottle of antibiotics. When the realisation hit him, my brother’s eyes welled up. It was time for sweet Khosrou to bid us farewell, to make room for Daniel, his American counterpart. He was five. Until around that year, each time he felt the sting of welling tears he would roll his eyes back into his head, stare at the ceiling and wait for the feeling to pass. He thought if he couldn’t see anyone, then no one could see him. He could hide in the cracks of the ceiling and return to us strong and brave, never having cried at all. But, though I disappeared from his sight each time his gaze drifted upward, I was still standing there. I saw his quivering chin and his wobbling cheeks, his angry eyebrows, all those very private things.

  The fact that Maman held strong meant something to us – she adored Khosrou; his tears turned her to putty. Not this time, though. She helped us dress and gather our things. She promised a day of fun, maybe a rotisserie chicken for dinner. My brother was confused for a few days, burst into tears now and then, but eventually he accepted it. And by the third morning, Daniel was Daniel just as easily as I was Dina. (And it has felt strange writing his name as Khosrou until now. I’m glad to be past it.)

  Soon long hazy days of solitude inside our trio came to an end. Baba sent money through a messenger. He also sent his friend, a man he had known during a prison stint for opium. (Once, I visited him there. The memory is unshakeable: being lifted onto the back of a motorcycle by a prison guard in the terrifying olive pasdar uniform, Maman behind me in a long, black chador, the courtyard outside Baba’s cell appearing. A thin man waving. His shaved head and white pyjamas. His eager smile.)

  The prison friend had moved to Sharjah with his wife and four children and owned two Iranian restaurants. Now, we ate at Isfahan Restaurant free of charge at least once a week, Daniel and I running around their shimmery tiled fountain with the younger children as the owner’s wife took orders. Who knows if Baba was later sent the bill? I would be surprised if he was. Iran runs on favours; and everywhere he went, Baba collected them. They saved us more than once. Now and then for many years, in our lowest moments, a man would appear at our door with an envelope of cash. Or someone would call and invite us to a meal.

  Though this family, too, had money, we were far more comfortable with them. They were villagers, like Baba, but with far less education – this made the arrangement feel more equal and dignified for us all. They fed us and we showed them interesting things we had read in books. Their naked respect for our Baba dulled the shame of receiving charity. The father had a fat, black shoeshine brush of a moustache. Their home was decorated as in Isfahan, with old Persian rugs and gaudy gold-backed chairs, nougat in silver bowls, nothing Western. Over his restaurant a sign read, ‘All Kinds of Special’. In May, they bought me a ninth birthday cake and their younger daughter blew out the candle with me. She brushed out my braids. She had never heard of Michael Jackson, never swum a lap in her life.

  And how would we have learned in Iran, anyway? Girls had to be covered from head to toe and almost every public pool was for men only.

  One morning the younger daughter and I walked into the restaurant with ice creams. We sat around the fountain and giggled and schemed. That night Maman said, tentatively, as if she had been considering something all day, ‘Dina joon, you’re nine now. Don’t lick ice cream in public again.’

  I was confused for a long time, until a decade later when, after years of screaming fights about the length of my skirts and the right to shave my legs, I realised that something dark would forever separate me and my mother. She had been brought to adulthood believing that every disgusting male thing was her fault and the fault of her daughter.

  I could see Maman wishing she could make all the men in Sharjah blind until we could escape to Europe. And she thought she could hurry it along by working harder, at anything. She read books, taught us English words, quizzed us on our multiplication tables and, every morning and night, she underlined her Bible in new colours.

  One morning, a few months after we arrived, we were shopping in an o
pen bazaar in Dubai when Maman noticed a man in Arab dress. He was watching us. The man was tall and thin with a short, modern beard and warm eyes. When he saw that he had been spotted, he walked over.

  ‘You’re from Iran,’ he said in perfect Farsi, then told a joke about the gaudiness of the market, its fabrics, its gold, the women with enormous mobile phones. Maman laughed. He told another joke. Soon he was guiding us through the bazaar. A book caught my eye. It was a photo-book of English words divided into categories: fruits, modes of transport, types of houses. The page called ‘family’ was a diagram of the Windsors. The man bought the book for me and I spent the day staring at the English royal family. The princes seemed more educated and refined than even the Jahangirs.

  Maman and the handsome man became friends. He took us on outings. I imagined they spoke of Isfahan and Dubai, of Persian food and their warring gods. I tried to notice only his face, which was striking, though he wore the long white robes of the enemy. By then, I had my categories of men and I knew that the ones in white robes wanted to rob my strength. Still, I liked this stranger. He was funny and kind and provided hours of fun. It was easier walking around Dubai in his company. People seemed to know and respect him. My mother never covered her hair or otherwise betrayed herself because of their friendship. And it made people look at us and, after months as a displaced person, an invisible girl without even a school where I could distinguish myself, I loved being looked at.

  The next day Maman’s handsome new friend revealed that he was a minor prince. I was stunned, though he said that it was nothing – the Arab world has many. Still, with one syllable, this man was imbued with all the stuff of my girlish imagination. Then, one day, when he said to Maman, ‘Your daughter is very clever,’ I forgot my objections. He was my friend.

  It wouldn’t last. One day, he invited us to dinner in his home, the only meal we ate there. We hadn’t brought dinner clothes to Dubai, but we did our best, draping ourselves and fluffing our hair. A woman greeted us at the door. She didn’t speak much, just led us into a lavish sitting room, with enough pillows arranged for a feast of twenty and left us alone there. We waited an hour, then two. No other guests arrived. Daniel began to whine of hunger, so we ate, morsels at first, then we filled our plates. As the minutes ticked on, we began to notice other details. Movement behind a screen door. His wives and children had been watching us. I imagined that they whispered about my mother’s defiant eyes and petite figure, my healthy hair and chatty mouth, Daniel’s chubby cheeks. After dinner, we were escorted out, having spoken to no one but each other. We were confused and I can’t imagine that Maman slept much that night.

  The next day, our new friend asked Maman to become one of his wives. Worse, he asked to marry me to his eldest son. Maman was livid, but she couldn’t have been as angry as I was. How dare he make me a footnote in someone else’s marriage proposal! He had said I was clever! Didn’t he understand that I was meant to study at university and to be someone in the West? Didn’t he want to help me do that? We never saw him again.

  That strange dinner in the minor prince’s home is my most vivid memory of Dubai, though I learned English and swimming there, tasted Corn Flakes and bologna for the first time, peeled tar off my legs and saw a man in Arab clothing play vigorous tennis with a woman in white shorts, her wild yellow hair brushing her shoulders as she dashed across the court.

  The asylum process involved many interviews, forms, letters, trips to Abu Dhabi. I dreaded those days when we had to sit in a hot, nauseating car for hours, all the way to the United Nations office, then in a sweaty, stinking room with plastic chairs for hours more, only to turn around and drive back.

  In May 1988, we were called to the United Nations office in Abu Dhabi for an interview or some such errand. Daniel and I tumbled out of the car, sick and exhausted, and started whining for food and water. My bangs stuck to my forehead in sticky clumps. I hated Abu Dhabi so much.

  We found a convenience store. Maman pulled on the door. It was closed. So was the next one. The streets were emptier than usual. Where was everyone? Then Maman remembered: it was Ramadan, the Muslim world was enduring a month of prayer and daytime fasting. Living in our own timeless fog, our world reduced to a room and a restaurant and a public pool; we had forgotten the Muslim calendar altogether.

  We walked for a long time before Maman found something: a small hot-food vendor idling in front of his counter. Maman tried to order.

  ‘It’s Ramadan,’ he said. ‘Not until sundown.’

  ‘We’re travelling from Dubai,’ she said. ‘They’re children. Please.’

  When he refused again, she pressed on. Then he paused. ‘Eat in there,’ he said, pointing to the utility closet. ‘And only the children.’

  We ate fast in the musty dark and made our way to the address tucked in Maman’s Bible. A sign read United Nations Development Program (UNDP). Maybe it helped that we arrived for our interview dishevelled and glassy-eyed over a single meal. Maybe it helped that Maman’s stride was wearier than her age and that Daniel and I were covered in so much sweat and ketchup and pantry dirt. Their answer would take months and who could guess what Westerners needed to witness in order to believe a story.

  A few weeks later our visa expired. We were now illegal immigrants.

  Was it before or after our change in station that we met the Sadeghis? The days blur together, but soon, our world expanded. Another Persian family arrived in the hostel. They, too, had left Iran on a tourist visa. They, too, would become illegal, or already had – we didn’t ask.

  Mozhgan Sadeghi was my age, taller, with thick black eyebrows and hair. She spoke Farsi; no more having to mutter broken English to strange girls in playgrounds. She knew all my games and songs. To have a friend here, in this waiting place, was a miracle, an event so unlikely (I now understood) that it causes pain, a brief distortion and panic that it might not have happened, though you didn’t know a moment ago that it would.

  Mozghan and I played every day in front of the hostel. We walked down the street and went to the pool in the daytime. Daniel too now had a friend, because Mozhgan had a younger brother, though Maman was cautious about allowing us to swim with him. He had bald patches in his cropped black hair that Maman suspected were caused by a fungus.

  One day, the second or third time we played together, Mozhgan was showing me a doll her mother had sewn, chattering on about its dress and hair. Suddenly she stopped. Her eyes grew wild, then emptied and both arms shot out in front. Her head fell between her extended arms, her ears grazing her biceps. She reached out far, muscles taut, like a rower in a boat. The doll dangled from the fingers of one hand. She wriggled her fingers for several seconds, as if playing a fast tune on an invisible piano, then grew still and dropped her arms, panting as she recovered from the spasm. She glanced around, eyes shy and tucked the doll under her arm. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘That happens to me. Was that very long?’ She felt her forehead, which was dry. ‘It wasn’t long. You shouldn’t be scared.’

  I shrugged. That night, I told Maman what had happened. ‘Poor girl,’ she said, ‘she has seizures. That was a special kind of seizure. Not everyone falls to the ground like in movies. Don’t worry. You just play and be kind and try not to stand directly in front of her.’

  ‘What if she kicks me or bites or something?’

  ‘Dina!’ said Maman. ‘She’s not rabid. It’s just the arms.’ I understood more than Maman knew. She had the urge to extend her arms, to feel her muscles tighten as far as they would go, like a person exercising, or the way I craved to feel my chin against my neck or breathe in so deep that the metal bar would move back down into place.

  I understood the illness and yet (perhaps because I felt only a sliver of difference between us) I ran away soon after each attack. Daniel and I were afraid of Mozhgan for as long as we knew her. But there was never any question of not playing together. Mozhgan and her brother were our friends, the only ones in our same situation. Mozhgan could sit on a stoop a
nd talk about missing our old rooms, or a teacher, or a best friend. She could lay about for hours and imagine where we would both end up, what our homes would be like and what books we’d replace first. We each had a backpack and I had lately begun to pour all of my obsessive habits into mine: counting the change, the hair bands, the Smarties in the baggie. With Mozhgan I didn’t have to pretend I didn’t crave the bag in my lap, just so I wouldn’t seem strange. I could obsess over a dull pencil point that had been sharp that morning, digging into the bottom of my bag for the missing lead tip, and she would wait for me to finish. And if she felt a seizure coming (she didn’t always), she inched away and I knew to wait quietly for her to finish. Sometimes she had an object in her hand and I marvelled that she never dropped it. One finger was always alert, hooked securely to her toy or sweater or bag of chips. Her body’s practicality impressed me.

  We were allies in our strangeness. And yet, I knew that I was luckier, because my thing could be overcome, given time and some breathing room. Mozhgan didn’t study or go to school. And this, too, felt unlucky for her. Maman let me play with her only when I had finished my lessons. I never objected. Maman’s rules made studying feel more official, like real school.

  One evening in late summer, after Mozhgan and I waved goodbye and ran to our respective doors, I saw Maman reading a letter. Her face was clouded and tense. When I asked what was wrong she said, ‘We’re moving.’

  ‘Why?’ I asked.

  ‘They’re turning the building into dorms. We all have to move out this week.’ She seemed confused and muttered about the rent we had paid. We were just a few days into the month. ‘I’ll talk to Sanjagh in the morning,’ she teased, but I couldn’t laugh. Sanjagh, Farsi for hairclip, was our mispronunciation of the Korean super’s name: Sung-Jin. We had a hundred of these mispronunciations that we kept up for laughs.