Acuity (2005)

_____Plastic is not strong but it is enough against the wet monsoon rains and perpetual damp quality of the air.
_____Burlap is durable but unkind to my skin. It is rough and monochromatic, scratches me, like those men in green uniform.
_____My swing will take me home. With my eyes closed I see my home and I am going there. My brother baradar and sister khahar too—they are in their own craft but we all have one destination.
_____Our cooking pot is metal, but Maman says not to touch the metal wires, or test its strength. Metal lodges, secures, binds the things that are too feeble to hold themselves together. Why do they say we are helpless?
_____It’s hard to see the sun when my eyes are open: either a dense but smouldering fog covers it, or its rays saturate the seamless sky like an unmerciful lightshow—I can’t look at it plainly.
_____In the darkness of my closed-eye sight, I smell polow that Maman prepares after she has gathered in the fields with our auntie neighbours. Today she wanders alone into the engulfing mass of trees, beyond those spiky metal wires. With the closed face she has been wearing a lot since we arrived here, she holds us very tight to herself, silent, for a very long time after she puts away the sticks she gathered from those forests.
_____I miss Baba. With my eyes shut tight, he is laughing and running after me, catches me and I am soaring on his back. He runs fast, and together we are quick like Verethragna when he is a raven, and then I go with him to meet uncle, where they sell food at the market. But I can’t find him in the square anymore, even if I shut my eyes harder. I hope my swing will take me to him soon—I don’t want to forget anymore.
_____The rubble beneath my feet are like puzzle pieces—quadrilateral, jagged, elliptical, fully dimensional, though none of them fit to make a smooth plane for my bare feet. In the boundless space of my mind’s visions, these stones lay the floor of the palace that Baba and Maman, baradar and khahar and I live in. The trembling tarps of our tent are the vibrant billowing curtains in the rooms, and this strong rakish tree is our protecting roof. When I slip into the seat of my swing, we go there all the time. Branches that hold my swing-seat—firm, unmovable, reaching, are secure like the columns that guard the chambers.
_____It is all ashen here, but even if the palace of brilliant colours cannot be inhabited, I would give anything for our dwelling in our old village. The colours of Tehran belong to us—Baba and Maman, baradar and khahar and I. We made the hues, and our relatives enhance its tone when they come. But I only see them sometimes on my swing, eyes wide shut.
_____Refugee. That’s what they say we are, those sinewy and proud men with blue helmets. What is “UN”? Refugee. With that name, I am no longer Arshan, but whatever a “refugee” is: one who received lilting smiling comments from people who don’t speak Farsi. But I have a home, I just can’t see it like I can’t see the sun. But it’s there. Maman says this place, with an unpromising glance she can’t help, this littered and desolate terrain—is only for a little while. How long is a little while?
I want to be Arshan again.