The Invisible Belt

She always came to our house as the New Year approached. Alone—she never brought her daughters with her. She would hand my mother an envelope stuffed with cash, so that my mother could buy new clothes for my sisters and me, make us look decent. Every first day of the year, we went to their house. She didn’t want her nieces appearing in worn clothes before her husband, a man of aristocratic airs who would shame her for it.

At the bazaar, my mother never let us buy whatever we wanted. I froze in front of a shop window, staring at a pair of white patent-leather shoes topped with two tiny red cherries. My mother tugged my hand. “Your father said only sober colors,” she said. We were allowed exactly two choices: navy or black. A few shops later, I spotted an orange knit dress appliquéd with bulbous cloud shapes. I wanted that one. As she pulled me along, my mother said, “For someone so dark skinned, you really like loud colors.” In the end, my allotment was a pair of black buckle shoes and a plain navy dress with a pleated skirt. She wouldn’t even let me choose a decorative belt buckle.

My other sisters were chosen for as well. In this carefully equal lack of taste, only the sizes differed—never the colors, never the cut.

As Nowruz drew nearer, I wore my new shoes more often than my sisters did. I would pace around the house in them, then put them back in their box and slide it under the bed. I waited impatiently for the gathering at my aunt’s. My sisters, meanwhile, had been anxious for weeks. They were required to sit with decorum, wear no makeup, and respond only briefly when spoken to. They were forbidden to show familiarity with anyone at that large party, or to laugh. My father hoped my aunt’s sons would choose them for marriage; that day, my sisters were meant only to perform goodness, purity, innocence, and ignorance—like untouched white snow, bearing no trace of a footstep.

At the party, my mother’s attention was so entirely fixed on my older sisters that she forgot me altogether. That neglect granted me a quiet, delicious freedom. I could slip over to any unoccupied table piled with fruit, snatch a banana, retreat to a corner, and eat it alone—then take another. Sometimes I did this ten times in a row. We encountered this fruit only a few times a year, at the lavish parties in my aunt’s house; no one else among our relatives and acquaintances could afford such a rare, expensive fruit.

To repay his sister’s generosity—since she paid for our clothes—my father would go to her grand house a few days before the New Year. He polished the windows, washed the fruits and wiped them dry, then arranged them in large baskets on each table, adorning them with slender pine branches. He mopped the stone floors of the hall until they shone, then turned to the garden surrounding the mansion, pulling weeds, watering trees, collecting leaves from the bottom of the pool, and changing its water.

When he grew tired and my aunt offered him fruits—bananas, pineapples, avocados—he didn’t touch them. He limited himself to just a small cup of coffee. He was not accustomed to eating anything without us. Whatever gifts he received, he brought home for us. He was skilled at eradicating his own desires—and ours—and believed, in principle, that pleasure was something demonic.

The New Year arrived, and all the acquaintances gathered at my aunt’s house dressed elegantly and beautifully. The girls had styled their hair in lovely fashions, wore colorful puff-sleeved dresses, and light makeup. My sisters were barely visible. They were forbidden to look at any boy, let alone speak to one. They sat sad and silent beside my mother. Shortly after the moment of the equinox—in the magnificent garden of my aunt’s house, its trees strung with tiny lights—a dance troupe arrived to enliven the celebration. As soon as my father saw a man and a woman preparing to dance the tango, he strode angrily to my mother and said, “Money has swept away my sister’s faith. We’re going home. This place is not for us.”

The color drained from her face. At the very start of such an important gathering, how could we possibly take our leave before so many people? We hadn’t eaten dinner yet, and this would be considered the greatest insult to my aunt’s husband. She would never forgive it. My father paid no heed to such resentments; under no circumstances would he allow his daughters to watch the tango. He saw it as a prelude to shamelessness and moral abandon.

When my aunt realized that we did not intend to stay, the fear showed on her face; when she touched my arm, her hand was cold. She lived in constant anxiety that my father or we might disgrace her before her husband. At last, at her pleading, so that no one would notice our absence, we slipped quietly out of the hall without saying goodbye. One of my cousins drove us home—the same one who kept looking at my eldest sister and, whenever he found her alone, trying to strike up a conversation.

When we arrived home, my sisters went to their room in sorrow. For days they stopped eating and drinking. I, however, had five bananas in my bag and quickly swallowed them all so I wouldn’t be forced to share.

It never occurred to my mother to resist my father. She regarded it as his unquestionable right to decide even the smallest matters of our lives. And when my father was angry, he was like Hercules; no one dared tell him his behavior was wrong. By law, he even had the right to kill us, and the courts would not judge him harshly. We existed only insofar as we obeyed without hesitation. Otherwise, we were stripped of our humanity with labels like rebel, shameless, or unrestrained and beaten to the edge of death. This was not called domestic violence; it was simply the preservation of paternal authority. He used to say, “If anyone is allowed to protest a father, the foundation and order of the family will collapse.” Years later, when a tsunami of divorce swept through society, he blamed it on the disappearance of the belt and on women being granted even the most minimal right to self-expression.

But the belt had not disappeared—it had only become invisible. Another memory comes sharply into focus. As I entered the classroom one day, I asked my students to take out a sheet of paper and write whatever they wished. The resulting pieces were filled with morality and correct thinking—worthy and admirable sentiments; grand life lessons; cheerful, hopeful phrases. Not a single student had thought to write about themselves, about what they had seen or heard or what had happened in their small rooms. When I noted this, they answered with one voice that they didn’t think their everyday lives contained anything notable or important. “Authenticity matters more than importance,” I told them, and asked them to take out another sheet of paper, and instead of speaking for rain and snow and leaves and birds—rather than dissolving into inanimate nature—to place themselves at the center and write what they saw.

Most couldn’t write anything at all, and those who managed a few lines produced reports of what they thought I might want to know. No one wrote in a way that allowed me to see them. “What all of you share is an inner compulsory veil,” I said. “Tear it off and write without censorship. You are not required to appear good, pure, or complete. Writing is an act bound up with the demonic. Be vulnerable. Grant yourselves the gift of doubt, and of being less self-righteous.” They stared at me with astonishment and a flicker of fear. No one spoke. There was no time for a third attempt. The bell rang.

A few days later, the principal summoned me and said, “You have promoted moral corruption and are no longer fit to teach at my school.” The mothers of several students, though weeks later, came to the school and asked her to reconsider my dismissal. She told them that pure and innocent minds should not be entrusted to problematic individuals who sow doubt and teach children to become self-centered. When other teachers also urged her to revise her decision, she replied that this woman had independently taught material beyond our supervision; besides, it is precisely such strictness that preserves authority in educational spaces. Dismiss one person, and the rest will fall in line.

Years later, in 2022, as students hurled their textbooks in the air and burned them in metal bins at the corner of the schoolyard; when they scrawled slogans on the walls and took to the streets without compulsory hijab; when, with pounding chants, they demanded hope, a future, and a better economy—the system was forced to confront them. It began by sending messages to families: “Immediately restrain your teenagers.” When the street protests continued, the regime punished the entire country with the press of a button, cutting off internet access and even internal messaging nationwide. When that failed and the numbers swelled and the voices grew louder, labels arrived: “spy,” “terrorist,” “traitor”—rendering everyone homo sacer. Then, with cold composure, they opened fire on schoolchildren who had already been rendered faceless through accusation. Anyone who dared ask Hercules why received no answer. He claimed the divine right to get answers—not to give them. If someone persisted and asked again—“Why?”—the sequence of warning, labeling, and bullets returned, silencing another troublesome voice.

These days, in January 2026, when the internet is shut down and even reading a brief, formal email has become a rare treat, I think more than ever of my father, who deprived us of the Nowruz gathering at my aunt’s house so that our “pure” minds would not be contaminated by the sight of a tango. We were children; our spirits were assumed to be blank slates, and only a single word was to be inscribed on them: authority.

I can understand now why my students who fled school choose to burn sacred books above all others. In 1984, George Orwell writes (as rendered here from a Persian translation):

Her white body shone in the sunlight. Winston did not look at her body even for a moment. His gaze anchored on the freckled face of the girl with its faint smile; he knelt before her and took her hands in his.

“Have you done this before?” he asked.

“Of course. Hundreds of times . . . no, perhaps dozens.”

. . .

Winston’s heart began to race. Only dozens; he wished she had said hundreds and thousands. Anything that bore the mark of corruption awakened a reckless hope within him. Who could know? Perhaps the Party’s faith, sacrifice, and self-restraint were merely a veil for its injustices and filth . . .

He said to Julia:

“Listen. The more people you’ve been with, the more I love you. Do you understand?”

“Yes, completely.”

“I hate purity. I loathe goodness. I don’t want anyone, anywhere, to remain good and pure. I want everyone to be steeped in corruption to the marrow.”

~

As I was writing this piece, the January night sky flared with a violent purple light, followed by a crack of gunfire and volleys that echoed for a long while across the capital. I stood on the balcony with a bitter smile. It was as if I were back in the classroom, reading the third round of my students’ responses. They were no longer speaking; they had turned inward and were enacting courage—not in a way meant to be known, but in a way meant to be felt and seen. Even when the principal charged into my dream brandishing an invisible leather belt, no one heeded her. We were free to read and write whatever we wished.

The volleys braided themselves with my tears. My students were no longer willing to return home; Zeus’ lightning bolts had lost their force. My eldest sister stood before me in a dress of white clouds, with pearl-like flowers threaded through her thick dark hair. At the moment when my father said, “We must go home,” she shook her head and turned to the dance floor. Across our entire land, the dance of life’s blood was being performed against the cult of death.

A few days after that terrifying sound of gunfire, someone pressed their hand to the intercom and rang several times in quick succession. They had brought me a chair. Couriers are not permitted to enter the building or deliver items upstairs. On the notice board on the ground floor, a sign reads: “Several military elites reside in this building. Unauthorized entry may endanger their lives and those of their families. The risk of assassination exists.” When we purchased this apartment, we made inquiries to avoid living next to government officials. No one told us the truth.

I quickly pulled on a hoodie and jeans and went down. Furniture isn’t allowed in the regular elevator, and the freight elevator can only be operated with the building manager’s approval and after paying a separate fee. I called the manager and the caretaker several times, but no one answered. Eventually I lifted the chair myself and hauled it flight by flight up the stairs. In the middle of my living room I began peeling away the plastic wrap. My white desk sat just past the half-open door of the study, stark and deserted.

I bought this chair for long hours of sitting—for eighteen-hour days of work and reading. With the nationwide internet shutdown, I no longer have access to email, journals, publishers, or submission forms. I even find myself longing for the days when rejection emails arrived. I would read each one repeatedly, searching for signs: Had the door been firmly shut, or was there still a path back? Was there an invitation to submit again? When the tone was warm, was it mere politeness and convention—or had the piece truly been read, perhaps even discussed, and only set aside for lack of space?

In those days, despite the steady stream of rejections, I was brimming with eagerness and hope. Now, all of us have become mobile solitary-confinement cells. In others’ grief-laden gazes, I see a hidden fury: a woman strikes her daughter sharply on the head just because she’s asked for a bigger lollipop; a man shouts into his phone that there’s no way he’ll be able to pay his shop’s rent at the end of the month, the country is shut down; a girl holding a cup of Mexican corn eats a few spoonfuls, wipes her mouth with a napkin, shakes her head in irritation, and says sarcastically to the girl beside her, “We’ve become like the happy citizens of North Korea. These days all I do is overeat—I’ve given up every diet.” She wears a knitted hat with a large red pom-pom and tall fur-lined boots. Her friend seems to listen, constantly biting her lips, sometimes chewing the edge of a fingernail. Her own small online shop is closed; the money that was supposed to arrive in her account can’t be withdrawn. Her life is locked, she says.

Watching them, a knot tightens in my throat. I want to buy a hot coffee, sit on the bench by the metro beside them, and cry out loud. How easily we can be treated like hostages! This is the third time that, after nationwide protests, the internet across the entire country has been cut. The system insists that Oceania, where so many Iranians are protesting from exile, is lying and criminal; the system plunges us into total silence and, with perfect calm, stages ceremonies of hatred—anti-Oceania speeches, anti-Oceania marches, funerals for its own dead who died preserving this same dead order. They are called martyrs, while the people are labeled agitators linked to Oceania; the people’s young, still-warm dead are not returned to their families but quietly buried somewhere, so that no gathering can form at their graves and no slogans can be chanted.

I can’t bring myself to push the chair toward my study. I sit on it right there in the middle of the living room and spin—until dizziness sets in, until nausea rises. I think of my childhood, how I loved the Ferris wheel and the magic sled, the chairs that rotated at speed. I keep pushing my feet against the floor, spinning, my tears streaming.

I remember how eagerly I awaited January 15th, when magazines would resume their work. How I chafed at their New Year holidays. Even Saturdays and Sundays dragged on cruelly. I wanted them to be working—even in our stead, at this end of the world where everything is shut down. I wanted them to grasp the gifts they possess: century-old magazines, large and esteemed publishers, countless agencies and creative-writing programs. Before the internet blackout—armed only with email and open submissions—I’d climbed the north face of Everest without a support team just to glimpse their happiness. The survival of literature depended on their labor of love.

A sticky night presses against the windows. I think of the large aquarium at the building’s entrance, now wholly coated in sludge. Where is the algae-eating fish that can swallow all this darkness, so that I might once again gaze out of my small bowl and watch the throngs of active people elsewhere? I need to surrender myself to lashes of late-January wind, so I step onto the balcony, and my eyes catch on something large inside the building’s metal trash bins: a big white funeral wreath commemorating one of those killed in the protests. I rush downstairs. The wreath is fresh, newly laid. They haven’t even allowed friends and relatives to place flowers at the door of the victim’s home. I don’t know which house it belongs to. I walk down the alley.

On the white marble of a facade, childlike handwriting covers the wall:

Rahil was studious.

Rahil was an exemplary student.

Rahil never made it past fifteen.

Rahil withered so our schoolbooks might change.

Rahil hated Arabic class.

Rahil’s favorite word was freedom.

The alley is hollow and silent. All the shops are closed—even the bakery whose line once stretched to the corner, even the chicken-and-fish shop where a gentle woman worked, with a black cat, mustard-eyed, who let customers stroke the spot between its ears.

I sit in front of the marble wall. Now and then, a motorcycle roars past, the rider in the bright-pink uniform of a food delivery worker. Since the internet shutdown, grieving people sit by their satellite dishes, watch the news, order pizza, call one another, and share information by phone. My mother calls too, every few hours, to update me: “The Security Council met today.” “They met before the attack on Iraq—before Yugoslavia and Somalia too.” There is a current of excitement in her voice. For decades we were frightened away from the outside world; now even my elderly mother’s gaze is fixed outward, toward that hazy hope flickering like a distant star.

“Soon, when the country’s doors open,” she says, “we’ll become modern like Saudi Arabia and the Emirates. The country will develop. We’ll make peace with the world. And then, besides oil, tourism will bring national income too.”

My heart tightens. I know these aren’t her words; she’s repeating my brother’s. Does she truly believe that after the system falls, we’ll immediately have enlightened, just, people-loving leaders who will set everything right and distribute everyone’s share? After the great Victory Day that she keeps talking about, fruit may be just as expensive, cooking oil and meat still scarce, and only the names of squares and streets—and the emblem at the center of the flag—may have changed. For sixty-nine years she has believed things will one day be fixed.

I, too, want to preserve in myself that powerful hope for the future. I want to see this internet shutdown—and the system’s self-appointed right to impose it repeatedly—as a nationwide anesthesia: a country preparing for surgery to remove its cancer. I want to regard even the missiles that might follow a United Nations resolution as necessary chemotherapy against a sacred, imposed order. Yet the slender candle of my heart stands in a violent wind.

My mother calls again, her voice heavy with sorrow: “They’re confiscating the satellite dishes from all the buildings, and soon we’ll be cut off from everywhere. You’re in the capital—please, if you hear bombs or missiles or air-defense fire, immediately take shelter somewhere safe, and call us too, so we’ll know help has finally come from outside.”

In our building, two solid-stone levels were constructed beneath the parking garage—presumably to safeguard the lives of those same military elites, whose wives, children, and mothers blend into the crowd. Most buildings don’t even have garages; people spend long portions of each day searching for a place to park, and no shelters have been designated for possible missile attacks. Yet even this fails to trouble people much. They believe that expensive weapons are reserved for necessary targets, and place their faith in the precision of smart fighter jets that will come to uproot the system. I’ve heard my mother say many times, “Why would they waste a costly missile on the worthless house of an old woman like me? They’ll go straight for those who’ve dragged everyone into this dark day.”

After ending the afternoon’s fifth call with my mother, my mind drifts unbidden to the lines at school. Whenever there was a festive occasion and we clapped and cheered, the disciplinarian would glare at us with anger and unfathomable hatred and say, “Proper girls don’t celebrate so wildly. They don’t laugh with all their teeth showing. They clap with two fingers.” She even taught us how to celebrate calmly during state festivities.

Now, as people on the streets express their fury by burning tires, hurling bricks and stones, and attacking grocery stores, that same disciplinarian’s voice returns: “Proper protesters don’t throw bricks, don’t loot, don’t burn sacred books. Protest calmly so your demands can be addressed.” A few days later, an SMS arrives on all our phones from the center: the government has allocated credit vouchers for essential goods. Visit our chain stores to receive chicken, oil, and pasta. They are masters at diverting the narrative—offering a small ration of food in response to those whose blood has colored the streets and alleys in the name of freedom.

A few days later, seized once more by a sense of suffocation, I return to the balcony. Although municipal trucks have emptied the metal trash bins several times, Rahil’s memorial bouquet is still there—outside the bin, leaning in lonely defiance against the wall. There is no notice, no name, no marker. Yet its flowers are a white, resonant cry: in this alley there was a teenage girl whom the fierce, icy wind carried away, so that she might become a thick cloud, an unrelenting rain, a forest of thousands of green trees of freedom.

I push the chair toward my study. Finally I wipe down my white desk and my dust-coated laptop. I sit. The first name that comes to mind is Viktor Frankl—when he was imprisoned in a forced-labor camp, certain he would never see his family again, and when the Nazis burned the only handwritten copy of his book. Only one thing saved him from that radioactive storm: rewriting the book—rewriting it better. I turn on my laptop.