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two immense highways, and could go days without seeing anyone we knew at the grocery store, didn’t diminish the tribal and village customs native to Tehranis. Namely, being nosy about the personal lives of people we did not deign to know. For weeks Khaleh Farzi had watched a parade of lovely young women enter and exit the house of an unkempt Iranian man, who lived in the building next door. Baffled that someone
so bireekht, so ugly, could attract such company, Khaleh Farzi investigated, and learned that he dealt cocaine. It was upon making such discoveries that Khaleh Farzi would lapse into a deep funk, and try not to care that the Pakravans were buying their eleventh columned home in Los Altos. Observing all this as a child, I had the impression that if life in Iran was anything similar, society must be one vast sieve, with everyone trying to catch the people they wanted and filter out the rest.
    This émigré political salon convened each Sunday at the condo complex’s Sunday brunch, over donuts and coffee. The discussions became engaging enough that soon Iranians from around the city began showing up, and until well into the afternoon—after the last rainbow sprinkle had disappeared—they would debate the state of the country. The Sunday coffee was the ideally neutral space for an inclusive discussion; here the social regulations governing laws of interaction ceased to apply. There was no consensus on anything at all, except the fact that the country had been ruined; No one agreed on whom to blame: Jimmy Carter, the Shah, the CIA, the British, the BBC, the mullahs, the Marxists, or the Mujaheddin?
    Sometimes the intricacies and exoticness of this inner Iranian world made me feel lucky, as though I’d been granted an extra life. There was Azadeh at school, who managed to look and sound like the other kids, barring the occasional lunchbox oddity; and there was Azadeh at home, who lived in a separate world, with its own special language and rituals. More often, though, living between two cultures just made me long for refuge in one. Maman’s attempts to fuse both worlds, instead of compartmentalizing them, complicated everything. She didn’t want to sacrifice anything: neither her Iranian values, nor her American independence. She refused to abdicate one side for the other, not even for a time, and it made our life together harrowing and unruly.
    Next door to us on Auburn Way, two blocks from my grandparents’ place, lived a single mother with two young girls. Unlike Maman, who had seemingly taken a vow of celibacy after her divorce, the single mom next door went out on dates all the time, and when she decided to stay the night with the man of the week she’d leave her daughters home alone. One night the younger one began to cry, emitting keening howls of fear, which Maman listened to for about half an hour, and then could no longer bear it. She went next door, invited them over, and made peanut butter sandwiches.
We watched cartoons, while she set up little beds in our living room, and finally drifted off to sleep in front of the TV. Early in the morning a loud knocking woke us—their mother, still dressed in her evening clothes, was pounding on our door, shouting, and waving the note Maman had left her. She was going to call the police, she screamed, how dare we take her children—kidnap them—out of her house? Maman turned pale, and tried to invite her inside for tea. She explained that the girls had been scared, but that they were fine—see, all snuggly in their pajamas. I could already anticipate my father’s angry recrimination come Friday, when he’d come to take me for the weekend, and she would recount the savagery of American mothers, abandoning their children and then terrorizing a neighbor who showed them kindness. “Fariba jan,” he would say, “you can’t do that sort of thing here. This is not Iran, you can’t just take