War on Error: Real Stories of American Muslims

2. Roxana

T W O Roxana When a (courteous) greeting Is offered you, meet it With a greeting still more Courteous, or (at least) Of equal courtesy. God takes careful account Of all things. —QUR’AN, AL NISA (THE WOMEN), : You may try a hundred things, But love alone will Release you from yourself. So never flee from love— Not even from love in an earthly guise— For it is a preparation for the supreme Truth. How will you ever read the Qur’an Without first learning the alphabet? —JAMI, FIFTEENTH-CENTURY CLASSICAL PERSIAN SUFI POET,YUSUF AND ZULAIKHA Lounging contentedly on the bed in her apartment some thirty-five stories directly above the FDR, Roxana looks at me standing over her and proclaims ,“Interview me,” as though she were Julia Roberts promoting her next blockbuster.I know this is going to be difficult.I have known Roxana for over eight years now. We met in college at Wesleyan when she was a senior and I was a freshman,and within days,we were inseparable.She was the only other Iranian girl I had heard of at Wesleyan, and she seemed to know everything and everyone there was to know there. We were both loud, opinionated, sarcastic , and naive. We were also both virgins and agreed that men were useful almost solely for opening unyielding jars of pickles and hooking up electronic equipment.Roxana is my dearest girlfriend from college,and that may be part of the reason why she was the first person I chose to interview for this book. That and it gave me a decent excuse to escape the Atlanta summer heat and go shopping and dancing in New York City. I found it incredibly difficult to get Roxana to sit still and be serious long enough to conduct an interview, but I had a plan. I took her to an Indian restaurant and filled her to the point of near-explosion with samosas and chicken tikka masala.Once I got the impression that fullness had wholly debilitated her,I asked for the check and made my move.By the time we got home, her gorged state made her too weak to mock me or protest, and with a little persuasion, she began to yield. Roxana is quite possibly the least repressed individual I have ever met. She’ll yell when she feels like it, she’ll laugh when she feels like it, she’ll cry when she feels like it, and she’ll dance when she feels like it—the location or circumstance is pure coincidence. Demure is not part of her repertoire. She can be painfully socially inappropriate, but she could never be disingenuous if she tried.   Roxana was twelve when her family left Iran, in the summer of .They left at the end of the eight-year-long Iran-Iraq War,but the end of anything is only apparent in hindsight. Things grew progressively worse toward the end of the war. The Iraqis started bombing Tehran that summer, and that same year, Roxana’spaternalgrandparentsdiedwithinsevenmonthsof eachother.Roxana insists that her dad would never have left Iran and made somewhere else his permanenthomeaslongashismomwasalive,andherdeathmadetheirdeparture an imminent possibility. Also, on the night of the first Iraqi missile attack Roxana  on Tehran, Roxana’s maternal aunt died in a car accident.After that, her mom was fainting all the time and had to be put on IV fluids. Just the sound of missiles overhead, or anything akin to it, would send her into a fainting spell. Thus, Roxana’s mom’s deteriorating emotional state and her father’s loss of his greatest ties to Iran precipitated their flight. Her family began selling various household items—particularly, she remembers a Persian rug. She recalls a man coming to buy the rug and wondering why on earth they were selling it.Of course,her parents wouldn’t tell her.They were afraid to tell her. The rug reminded her so much of her uncle Hamid Reza,who was one of the hundreds of thousands of Iranians killed in the war.He was only twenty years old. She can’t remember why that rug reminded her so much of him, but it did.After selling it,her father told her that they were going to Japan for health screenings and to obtain their visas. After less than a year in Japan,they moved toVictoria,British Columbia, staying for only...