In 'The River of Wine'

Bring me a cup of wine that is dark red and smells like musk.
Don’t bring me that expensive brand that tastes like money
and smells like lust.

  

Rookie writers like me fumble around wondering how to even begin describing a large love. So many times in the past I have jumped in the ocean attempting to catch something big and magnificent and come back to the surface gasping for breath and with nothing but flotsam to show for my efforts.
I hope Dear reader you understand that this writing is like a small raft a lot like my fate and I am attempting here to cross the vast ocean of something as inky and wrenching as love that I was given for a country.

The day I finally landed in Iran I had already burned for many years just imagining how it would feel to be in that land. I had watched every film, read every memoir ever written. I can never clearly explain what caused me to fall in love with it. Watching Majidis films and reading memoirs of women writers of Iran are just a few things that fanned that fire. The seed for this great longing however is a mystery and I shall never know when or where did it get planted. Not much help to dig too deep either for we don’t understand the language of that world. The only thing I am sure about it wasn’t the urge to go on a holiday. Iran wasn’t an experience or a bucket list item on my capitalistic TO DO LIST.

Therefore when friends started suggesting that I must visit it I was taken aback initially. I mulled on it for years. Sat over the plan. Postponed it at every given excuse. It took me many years to grow a liver big enough that could actually digest a real visit to Iran.

In the Hostel that I stayed in Tehran that became like a home every evening the kindly Manager Ahmed would flower the wildly flowering roses morning and afternoon while my Australian backpacker friend Karen would quiz him every evening about why were these roses surviving in such heat.Roses are not meant for weather like this!  Ahmed who heard Karen exclaim every evening pretended that his lack of English was the reason he couldn’t answer this existential question. Why were there roses blooming in the raging heat? It didn’t bother me but I have to admit it was a valid question. And the roses were everywhere in the country. In the Palaces, in the ancient markets on the pavements next to the road. Near the metro station. There must have been some diverse scientific logic to them but I couldn’t be bothered. I just loved them. They fitted right in with my coffee table fantasies of Persian fairytales.. But these real roses were driving my Australian backpacker friend crazy. “How can there be roses here. She demanded to know with a benign arrogance. This is not the right weather for them. Do you know why are they flowering here?” Karen's question still echoes in my head.

Sipping the free cups of tea on the hostel Verandah was a motley mix of backpackers. Malaysians, Australians, , French, Japanese and Morrocan and English and even a few solo travelers thrown in from Croatia and Singapore. It didn’t seem half as cut off from the rest of the world as I had imagined ..that was a bit disappointing but it was also comforting to have English speaking company in the initial part of my journey. 

In the evenings as I fumbled with my Indian watch wondering how much longer the day would be, the distant Alborz mountains would twinkle. In the middle of that din of travelers was a strange comfort and pride I felt as an Indian; to have finally found myself in a space free of any Islamophobes. It was half a victory for sailing over my own fears and another half for following my dreams.