One of my resolutions is to write more. People (literally just my friends) are sometimes quite nice about my prose. This makes me really happy because it doesn’t come naturally to me and because I’d like to write a book. In fact, I started to write a book when my local supermarket ran out of bananas in 2020 and it turns out that forming each sentence can be as exacting as unpicking self-replicating knots in a tangle of fine necklace chains. 

Coming up with that simile, for example, took me about three days. Not because I was trying to be literary or humorous, but because I genuinely could not conjure an image that could convey my experience with creative writing in a way that would make sense to a reader.  

The ideas and feelings that I’d like to put into words do flow naturally, too naturally in fact. I have an inconvenient, often debilitating capacity to feel things (what’s the opposite of a pick-me?). I think this is part of the problem. The other day, I heard that Nietzsche said “that for which we find words is something that is already dead in our hearts”. I looked up the text from which this quote is extracted. It reads:

“Our true expe­riences are completely taciturn. They could not be communicated even if they wanted to be. This is because the right words for them do not exist. The things we have words for are also the things we have already left behind. There is a grain of contempt in all speech. Language, it seems, was invented only for average, mediocre, communicable things. People vulgarize themselves when they speak a language.“

I know this is proper obnoxious but Fred’s words really resonated. Some things feel so raw and yet abstract that it’s as though they exist beyond the realm of language — or at least my language. I don’t know what the feelings are, I simply know they are there and that trying to put them into a textual straitjacket is a physiological endeavour. I think that’s why I (retrospectively) enjoyed my Clarithromycin trip: the feelings came parading onto the page, heel-clicks and all, like they’d been waiting all their lives for me to get a chunky chalazion. 

Here’s some book drafting from five years ago – it’s probably stuff that would go into a preface.

Neda

Neda has always proudly referred to herself as a ‘Darband kid’. The mountainous village from which she takes this epithet stands as an enclave of serenity beyond the heaving veins of Tajrish, the northern terminal of Tehran’s 18km sycamore-lined Valiasr Street. Over the years, the north of the capital has become home to the newly wealthy: high-rises and commercial centres litter the landscape that had once served as an antidote to its increasingly congested nucleus; glass towers pose as mirrored prisms, unforgivingly presenting the reality of the metropolis back to itself. Elsewhere in the city, office blocks, malls, and double-decker highways appear where they shouldn’t. Entangled in the clash of minarets and their modern counterparts are stunted concrete blocks: their rooftops adorned with rusting air-conditioning units and broken satellite dishes; the views from their windows sliced by power lines and hazed by the stuff of exhaust pipes. In Tehran, where gluttony fuels the municipality’s method of city-keeping, accepting a fine is all it takes for a developer to breach urban planning regulations. A shallow dent in their pockets, the erection of a building with no regard for aesthetic harmony, a hefty income secured. The unironically named Bureau of Beautification meanwhile smacks plasters onto the capital’s eyesores. It plants mini manicured lawns alongside highways and as centrepieces of roundabouts; it grants artists license to transform the felled trees of Valiasr into canvases. On a late summer’s evening city-dwellers emerge from beneath the quilt of cancerous fog that lingers over the inner city, arriving in Darband for dinner or tea. But the authorities’ indifference towards architectural uniformity and natural beauty hasn’t spared Neda’s neighbourhood. Old homes were demolished for redevelopment projects that eventually surrendered to the village’s stubborn topography. Families who had inhabited Darband for generations have upped and left. The river that chugged as winter thawed and heaps of snow retired for another year has dried up. But when she proclaims that she’s a Darband kid, my mother’s listener understands. This one little phrase evokes an arcadian world which resides if not in the memory then at least in the imagination of the average Tehrani. 

I’ve probably visited Shabdolazim as many times as I have Darband, but translating spalled memories of Davoud’s hometown into wordy images is a more strenuous feat. Not because they’re any less vivid than their uptown cohabitants. Unlike those of Darband, these memories are mine alone. Free from the filter of my father’s nostalgia, they float unencumbered by a middleman’s emotions. My own filter is that of an outsider: a child who grew up in London and stepped into Shabdolazim for a day every other summer, who calls herself a ‘Shabdolazim kid’ with the knowledge that her upbringing had little in common with those she purports to represent.  As I write of the neighbourhood which lies—so aptly that you might think this a crude attempt at symbolism—at the southern pole of Tehran, I fear developing in the darkroom of your mind a stock photograph of a culturally conservative Iranian town, known for its bazaar and mausoleum. If I could ask him to sit and summon his memory to  speak, Neda would not exist but in its place a lifetime of other stories

My memories of Darband are varied. Restaurants in gorges where we sat cross-legged on wooden bed-frames; deep red rugs with greying tassels lay between my flesh and their splintered surfaces. I’m quite sure these rugs furnish everyone’s memories of dining in Darband—the Persian equivalent of the red gingham or tartan blanket we associate with picnics. I plopped sugar cube after sugar cube into my chai, watching them sink to the bottom of the estakan before picking up a teaspoon and jabbing them into service. The grown-ups never turn down chai, and restaurants don’t serve chocolate milk. I waited  for the thin mountain air to temper the steam, in the meantime devouring hunks of freshly made bread dipped into cool, garlicy yoghurt. Water streamed beneath the bed. Waterfalls did what they do while veteran chairlifts rattled overhead. Live musicians gatecrashed the landscape’s symphony. In some ways,  Neda and Davoud’s hometowns weren’t vastly different: as with any district that sets itself apart from Tehran proper, open doors and all their downsides were a natural part of life in both Darband and Shabdolazim. Everyone knew everyone, for better or for worse. Their communities took equal pride in their proximity to the shrines of sacred figures. But while Darband’s name, ‘the door of the mountains’, practically demands romanticisation, ‘Shah Abdol-Azim’ memorialises the religious figure entombed there for the last 1200 or so years.