Aug. 5th, 2003 01:07 pm
Blame Sheila
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muckefuckI was at the market with an Iranian friend. She was buying supplies for a dinner she was going to cook for me that night. After she'd paid, I saw her reach behind a row of items on a counter outside the front door, take down a glass of brownish liquid, surreptiously take a swig, and replace it. I thought, Is that alcohol>
Back at the apartment, I had to go to the bathroom. I had scarcely closed the door to the spacious room when I heard my cell phone ring in my bag, which was lying just outside the door. I opened the door partially and fetched it. It was my mother calling to tell me that Haiwa, a family friend, had been in an accident. She and my sister didn't trust the doctor, who blamed the misfortune upon her "loose morals"; they were worried that he would let her die from lack of care before the night was up. As women, of course, they couldn't try to intervene. I promised her I'd be at the clinic within half-an-hour.
[It was about this point that I realised that I and my family were also Iranian living in Iran.]
Suddenly, my female friend burst into the room. I wondered whether it would be awkward for her if she was found alone with a man who was not a family member. Then I saw an older man come in, dragging her friend Burdah. He placed a small striped bag with a lump in the middle on the table in front of her and said it was a homemade bomb. By means of gesture, he showed that it was denoted by pressing down on the middle.
Burdah defiantly confessed that she had made it and was planning to set it off herself at a cultural gathering the following week. I was shocked. She and my friend had planned that gathering, which was taking place in a private home, and invited about two dozen women. "If you want to die," I asked her, "why take all those other people with you?" The man explained that they had been nabbed trying to get someone to write the name of the blah blah blah Front on the bag, since both of them were illiterate. All I could think was that both of them were bound to be executed.