Happy New Year from Leyla - لیلا
When I look at my family’s black and white and then Kodak-brown photos of Iran, I see youth, energy, beauty. In all their photos, my family seemed to look toward their future with a sparkle and yet a wisdom or slight foreboding they could not have consciously anticipated then.
Things didn’t come as they had perhaps expected. When the revolution took its course, my family ended up with my great-parents, who had settled in Austria in the 1950s. Their wisdom crystallized in time, but as a result of much hardship and pain. Yet no matter what turn the rollercoaster of life has taken them, they rode along in it, as strong and dignified as they humanly could – always holding on to their Faith in God. Knowing some of the things my family has been through, and yet thinking of their strong, broad and heart-melting smiles as they defy some of life’s ugliest facets infuses me with great strength.
“Were it not for the cold, how would the heat of thy words prevail?...” it says in the Fire Tablet. This sentence has accompanied me for as long as I have known this Prayer. In this cold world, my mother has been a beacon of light and warmth, a gentle, kind and above all compassionate human being. Her compassion is so great, that it has the power to lift a person’s suffering as she completely absorbs it into herself. When I think of my mom I think of sunshine and flowers. And the irony is, that she thinks so little of herself.
One of her many gifts was to pass onto me the sweet and passionate Persian language and a love and ‘sense’ of Iran. My grandma, who was my other mother really, would often sit at night and read with me stories of rabbits and hedge-hogs, of snow-men and children, of everything that Persian children would read about in the books they had somehow salvaged. It was a tedious process for them to teach me Persian in Austria, back then, a very xenophobic country. But they did it anyway. And their stories of the Tajreesh bridge, of the fruit seller who would come around on his donkey, the stories of the various different neighborhoods, the romantic villages and villagers, the bazaars, the stories of the crazy Terooni drivers, of the mosques of Isfahan, of Chatanooga Café and the impressive Radiocity Cinema…all these things colored my childhood fantasy. I soaked it up and went there with them, to a place that they wanted to pass onto me, if only in spirit.
They’ve done a great job. It’s my mom’s birthday and I thank God for the blessing of her. It is because of her labor that I can even open my mouth and say anything coherent. Happy Naw Ruz mother – it’s a new day. And as cold and dark as the world may feel, it is the light of your likes that shows us the way. http://www.elham.tv