From the Rooftops of Tehran

It’s the second time in a year that we in Iran have found ourselves in the middle of a war—the first was launched by Israel with US aid, the second by the two armies hand in hand. In Tehran the night sky lights up when missiles hit the ground, and we look at one another with terror. Many people have already left the city. Between these two wars the Islamic Republic, our own government, killed thousands and thousands of Iranians around the country who were protesting the rulers’ incompetence and corruption, the rising price of goods, the economy’s stagnation, and the country’s lack of social and political freedom, and who by a certain point were asking for regime change. During all three of these horrors the Internet has been all but completely shut down. (I still have highly unreliable, limited access today.) Checkpoints have been set up across cities; militia forces threaten people in the streets. This paragraph is the shortest summary possible of what we have been living through since the beginning of last summer.

As I write this, on the ninth day of the war, oil facilities have been hit and black columns of smoke have darkened the horizon, rising to the heart of the sky. I cannot tell where the sun is anymore, and I write quickly, for fear that at any moment I might be killed. Writing under such urgency demands an economy of words. If I have only a few more minutes left of my life, would the things I want to say even be considered of value? What should I put down on the page as some kind of trace of myself in this world, or as a document of our time?

Is it important to write that the aftertaste of my morning coffee seems stronger and more pleasant these days and I don’t feel guilty about it? To write that during this war I have spent most of my time, as I did during the previous war, on the rooftop, because when I am stuck in my room and I hear the sounds of explosions it drives me insane not to be able to see or guess their source? To write that, as an ordinary citizen, I wish I did not have to know the difference between a B-2 plane and an F-35, between liquid and solid rocket fuels, between MIM-104 Patriot air defense and Terminal High Altitude Area Defense systems? What purpose does it serve me to know why a heavy-water reactor is considered a highly sensitive target for attacks, what the functions of the UN Security Council and the International Atomic Energy Agency are, the details of chapter 7 of the UN Charter? Why do I need to learn how to circumvent various types of Internet filtering, only to find myself, especially during emergencies, behind the virtual walls of a blackout? I wish we could have spent our entire youth simply enjoying literature and the arts, history and philosophy. I wish we could have drowned ourselves in Persian poetry, from the 52,000 verses of Ferdowsi’s Shahnameh to the three thousand passionate ghazals left to us by Mowlana Rumi. Back then the regime’s apocalyptic fantasies of political Islam sounded to us like harmless jokes; their anti-Iranian ideals sounded like nonsense from a comedy that we could simply ignore until we couldn’t, until everything became too serious. And now the sky over Tehran has gone black with a smoke whose harms we have yet to fathom.

Yesterday I lay on my back on the bed, smoking. I never smoke in the bedroom, but war, like wine, sorrow, and love, erases one’s most basic disciplines and pushes aside all pleasantries. And I hope you do not consider this a sanctification of war, but I want to say that in a time of war, like a time of love, one can sometimes become more beautiful, more courageous. A few moments before I lit my cigarette, H. texted me a photograph of a police station—almost completely demolished, but even from its ruins I could tell which police station it was. I knew immediately why she had sent me the photo. Many years ago, when we were both young, before the morality police was instituted, we were arrested by the Basij forces. H. and I had been walking together, not even holding hands, and the two of us were taken to this police station. I still remember the painful details of that day because it was the first time in my life that I was humiliated and insulted; the worst part of it was that the bearded Basiji guy, with his foul breath, lashed out with the most disgusting words at the girl who was the first love of my life, and it hurt me that her beautiful wild eyes, her soft skin, and her mischievous attitude were exposed to such despicable, medieval behavior. We were kids who loved poetry and cinema, and we still didn’t fully understand what power and ideology and violence could mean in a totalitarian state.

As I looked at the photograph I kept taking puffs of my cigarette, and I remembered the second time I had heard the name of that particular police station, just two months ago. After the January massacre friends told me that pro-regime forces, equipped with their messianic certainty, had hidden behind the station and attacked protesters under the veil of darkness, carrying shotguns and Kalashnikov rifles. They had, my friends said, shot pellets and bullets at people who were simply protesting—no warnings, no shots fired into the air, no tear gas, no water cannons. If you have not lived these multiple realities with us, you might have a hard time understanding why someone filming from the rooftop of a nearby building might rejoice at seeing a police station bombed by enemy forces.

For the last two months everyone I’ve met has known someone, directly or indirectly, who was killed or wounded by the regime forces during the January protests. My colleague’s brother was killed in one of the provinces. The barista of my local café was missing for thirty days until his body was released to his family, bearing traces of torture and a bullet hole in his forehead. The young teacher of a friend’s kid was arrested, tortured, and sexually abused by the Sepah Intelligence Organization—an agency that was meant to act against terrorism and foreign interference—merely for driving wounded protesters to the hospital. She stopped talking afterward, but now she finds the energy to go to her rooftop, smoke cigarettes, and silently watch for the destruction of the building where she was taken, even though nothing will ever erase the memories of her harrowing experience.

You might have seen videos of thousands of families dancing by the graves of their loved ones who were killed by the military and the Basij. These are dances of sorrow, but also of defiance, meant to resist official mourning expectations, reclaim the narratives forced upon the dead bodies, and give back agency to the surviving families. We have been in mourning not just for the past two months but for many years now, and we feel that in this grief we are all alone, a nation stuck between several evils. On the first day of this war, for which no end seems to be in sight, a school was hit in the town of Minab, a strike that, evidence now indicates, was carried out by the US, killing nearly 180 people, mostly young children. Who can justify the killing of these innocent angels who died without knowing what was upon them? How can one not be angry at the US and Israel for bringing that fate to those children? We mourn them, and we also mourn the more than two hundred schoolchildren who were killed during the January massacres. We stand against both the foreign invaders and the regime. We should be ruled by a government that keeps us safe from harm—not one that targets us with bullets or commits such horrors against women in its prisons that upon their release they refuse to speak a word of their traumas to their families. We are left doubly alone. We own this grief, mourning all by ourselves.

As history violently unfolds before our eyes, it is, I believe, being documented from rooftops across Tehran. I am talking not about the rooftops of the old classical one-story houses, which served very different family functions, or about those of the modern urban high-rises, but about those of the four- or five-story buildings, each containing up to twenty apartments, spread across the city. These rooftops, even in the more prosperous northern areas, are simple two- or three-hundred-square-meter surfaces, flat and waterproof, dominated by evaporative coolers, kitchen chimneys, and sewage ventilation pipes. In ordinary times they are places to grill kabobs or watch a lunar eclipse. Life in these semipublic, semiprivate spaces remained limited in the past few decades, but these days rooftops have found a new function, as they did during the nights of the twelve-day war in June, during the protests in January, and during other times of protest when people went up there to chant their slogans against the regime.

Lately I spend most of my time up on the roof. When I wake up I take my coffee there while I smoke and talk to friends on the phone, and throughout the day, after every attack, I go back up to see where the missiles hit. Neighbors have also started showing up on the rooftops nearby, and now I have developed “rooftop relations” with them, these people whom I rarely met during the many years I have lived in this neighborhood. Now I know that the man living to our right has a brother who works at a factory in a particular province, and every time we hear news from that region our hearts sink. Now we all know that the tall, quiet old man on our block—who can look at the flames rising from oil refineries and depots and immediately recognize which materials are burning—used to work on oil rigs in the Persian Gulf forty years ago, during the Iran–Iraq War.

Today, on the ninth day of the war, the rooftop is not as busy as it used to be. Most of the neighbors have either left the city or lost interest in coming up to check things out, or perhaps they are hiding in their apartments out of fear. But the auburn-haired young woman a few buildings away still shows up on the rooftop whenever a missile falls, wearing an orange hoodie, holding a coffee cup and a cigarette that looks slim and long from this distance, asking me where it hit.

I try to guess the location of every explosion, calculating its distance and position relative to one identifiable high-rise or another, the lights of the highways, the city billboards, and public or government buildings. With every explosion in every neighborhood, I wonder: Is the smoke coming from the Sattar Khan area? Oh yes, T. lives there. I call T. and ask after him, N., and their old cat. When they hit the Shahran oil depot I call D. to make sure the flames have not reached their house. When Enghelab Street is hit I call an old artisan who keeps a workshop near there, because I fear those dilapidated buildings will not hold up against the force of the explosions. When B-2s drop heavy bombs on the military base downtown, I call the old poet who lives close by, a man so skinny and fragile that even his frail penciled handwriting seems to be disappearing from the page with every moment.

It is the same whenever news arrives from any other corner of Iran. When they hit Shiraz, close to Hafez’s Mausoleum, I call the family friend who is lucky enough to live near the beautiful gardens of the tomb of our beloved poet. In the port of Bushehr many have already left town, so expansive have the attacks become, except for one friend who loves the city with all his heart, who wanders the streets in the morning and recounts to me what he has seen when I call at night. On the fourth night of the war the largest explosions to date erupted there. That night he told me about going out to check on the city after the bombardments and seeing a lonely man in the airport square, carrying to his car only a backpack and a Nowruz water bowl with a goldfish swimming inside. He asked the man what he was doing there with the fish, and the man said: “I have had this fish for three years, sitting there on my Nowruz table. This fish has been my beloved companion, a witness to my life. I have left behind clothes and much else, but I need to take my fish with me.”

The auburn-haired woman has now realized that I know the neighborhoods of Tehran pretty well and has started to trust my speculations. I have not yet asked her what happened to the other two women who came up with her the first few evenings, why they have disappeared. I have not asked what she does or what her name is. She hasn’t asked me much either. She simply asked me once, from the distance between our rooftops, how I knew the east, the west, the south, and the north of the city so well. It was more of a compliment than a question. So I have not told her that I am a bit of a flaneur, with a habit of taking long walks around the city; that I love Tehran, just as I love Rasht and Bushehr and Shiraz; that of all my courses in college I loved most the sections on maps and cartography. I have not told her that until this past summer I was familiar with only two points of view. One was that of the human eye, the human who sees the city as they walk the streets, remembering the material of the sidewalks and the paint of the buildings and the moods of the alleys, a view that dictates the design of the urban landscape. The other was the bird’s-eye view, which we learned about in school through aerial photographs, then on airplanes as they took off and landed, a view that has become more familiar in recent years through Google Earth, digital maps, and satellite images. But during these past few months I have found a third, in-between view: the one from the rooftops.

In his study of Iranian mysticism, Henry Corbin notes that in philosophy there are usually only two viewpoints: an earthly one and an ethereal one. But the Iranian philosophical tradition includes a third viewpoint, that of the “imaginal world,” in which many wondrous creations can come to life. Suhrawardi’s philosophical treatises place the ancient, mystical Persian narratives of gods together with those of the Islamic angels. The poems of Hafez interweave the stories of Islamic creation with the sanctity of wine and taverns in ancient Persian culture. Persian miniatures depict rocks that look like clouds, cypresses that dance with twisting bodies. Books of history belong more to a literary tradition than to a historical one. And the very concept of the Iranian homeland endures, with and despite all defeats, perhaps through this realm of the imaginal.

The peculiar realities of these days in Iran are surely writing the history of our future. We Iranians dance to protest while mourning by the graves of our loved ones—young and old, from all walks of life, killed by the regime—and cry to grieve the loss of the lives of innocent schoolchildren and civilians killed by the US and Israeli war machines, even as we resist mourning alongside the regime forces. It is through this third position that we document our history now, not from the ground or from the air but from the rooftops of Tehran, and it is through the landscape of the imaginal that we can envision our future, even as dark toxic clouds rise up to suffocate us.