Veil of Roses Read Free

miss her every day of my life, even so. The mother I know has always been sad.
    The sun. The waves. The sound of the ocean. The sexy confidence of a bikini top and cutoff shorts highlighting the strong-muscled legs of an able woman. Bare feet. The wind dancing through her hair. She remembers it all. And she wants it for me. I am her dream deferred.
    “I promise,
Maman Joon,
” I whisper back. “I promise I will go and wake up my luck.”
    And then I grasp her to me and I cling to her because I miss her so much already, my sad mother who smells of rosewater. I try to memorize this moment, this embrace. I will need to carry it in my heart forever. I will need to be brave, for her.
    For I am not coming back.

    T hree weeks later, that little perfume bottle filled with sand from the shores of San Francisco Bay is packed safely in my luggage. I am on an airplane, leaving my homeland behind. When the pilot announces we have left Iranian airspace, a cheer breaks out. Women on the flight unbuckle their seat belts and stand. They look around. They yank off their headscarves and run their fingers through their hair. They have left Iran, and the future is theirs, to make of it what they will. I remain quietly in my seat and watch them. I think of my mother. My chest is so tight I cannot breathe.
    I watch the flight attendants serve peanuts and offer drinks, now that we’ve left the boundary of our country, where alcohol is illegal. One approaches me. He smiles and asks if I would like a glass of wine. This startles me, the fact that he is looking at me as if there is nothing wrong with an unrelated man and woman looking each other in the eye and chatting casually. In public, no less. And, of course, there
is
nothing wrong with it. It just doesn’t happen where I am from.
    And so I take a deep breath. I reach up and fiddle with the knot under my chin, and then I pull off my
hejab
. I press it into my lap, as far away from me as possible.
    He nods at me in approval. In affirmation of what I have done. I look right in his friendly tea-brown eyes. Strange as it feels, I do not look away.
    “Yes, please.” I nod back.
    I want the peanuts. I want the wine. I want to look into the eyes of a man and feel no shame.
    My name is Tamila Soroush.
    And I want it all.

I t is twenty-four hours since I left Iran, since I clutched my parents to me at Mehrabad Airport and we wept our good-byes. After three plane changes on three different continents, I am now ten minutes from Tucson, Arizona, where I am to depart the plane and meet Maryam.
    And it is clear to me that the plane is going to crash.
    It drops suddenly. Little bells ding politely but insistently, and the airplane attendants scurry to buckle themselves in. Their faces look nonchalant, but I know they are trained to put their faces this way in times of crisis. A man’s voice comes on over the loudspeaker. His English is fast and garbled, and although I have studied English all my years in school and my father spoke practically nothing but fast and garbled English to me for the past three weeks in preparation for my journey, the pilot’s words are too run together for me to make out what he’s saying. Perhaps he’s telling everyone to say their final prayers. I grip my hands on the armrests and begin a soft chant to myself:
“Baad chanse ma, Baad chanse ma.”
    “Excuse me,” the woman next to me says, slowly and with careful enunciation. She has joined this flight from Phoenix. “Is that Arabic you’re speaking?” She wears a black T-shirt that says
Power Corrupts
in bold silver letters. She would receive forty lashes on her back for wearing this shirt in Iran. Forty lashes at the very least.
    I shake my head. “It’s Farsi.”
    “I thought so. I lived with a Persian guy for a while. Was that a prayer you were saying?”
    I give her a rueful smile. The plane is clearly not going to crash. We’d just hit an air pocket. “I was a little frightened from the…mmm…how do you