Reflections on shared cultures, histories, geographies, and pain in the midst of senseless destruction
By Mandira Nayar
Mohabbat. Love. We love in the same language. Joy too, is shared – khush, as is God, khuda, and sorrow, gham.
Rang, darya, bagh, darvaza, khoob, khush, dil – colour, river, garden, door, nice, joy, heart – our everyday words, the same in Farsi, Persian. Does heartbreak then feel the same? Dard, too binds us together in the word for pain.
It is spring — bahar – outside my window in New Delhi. A word again, we share. In Iran, bahar will be quite different from this. In a world fixated on differences, I can only find similarities.
Punjab, where my grandparents came from, a name that makes sense in Farsi. (Panj, five and aab for water.) A name for home, I carry in my heart as well as their gham of its loss.
I see Iran everywhere – my new table cover with the cypress tree that I bought in Jaipur; a picture on my dressing table of me in Bagh-e-Finn. We sat on a takht, platform, sipping chai sweetened with saffron flavoured mishri, eating glittering ruby-red anar, pomegranate; the blue plate on my wall — shades of turquoise, a reminder of brilliant blue sea of mosques in Isfahan.
All I now have are pictures of a trip to a country that I loved describing as an overdose in beauty and of my favourite square that represents the world in Isfahan — naqshe-jahan. A square in a country that wanted the map of the world to be laid out in beauty.
A tall man with a prominent nose accompanied us on the trip. We later became friends. He had two daughters and had spent a lifetime making dossiers for heritage sites in Iran trying to get them on the World Heritage List. His brothers live in America. He refused to leave.
He was no fan of the regime. He just didn’t want to leave home. His wife is a doctor.
I thought of him and his family when I heard about the bombing of the hospital in Tehran. Would he have left if he knew this would happen? Would his brothers have stayed? Was he freer?
Words are useless sometimes. Even the ones we share, especially the ones we share. The word that breaks my heart is dost, friend.
Mandira Nayar is a senior journalist in India and a Sapan Foundation board member. On Instagram at cleareyedblurredvision.
Feature Image: Bagh-e-Finn, Isfahan, Iran. Photo by Mandira Nayar.
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