Omid's Shadow

By Hichkass Hamekass

Two Iranian women are caught up in revolutions thirty years apart, but it is a third woman—the woman that connects them—that carries the scars of loss that time has not healed.
Omid’s Shadow tells the story of Omid, the daughter of one revolutionary and the mother of another.

Laced with the literary wisdom of Iran’s great poets, the novel draws on and illuminates a Middle Eastern culture that continues to fascinate readers. Omid’s Shadow, although fiction, draws on many actual events that occurred on Tehran’s streets after the election in June of 2009. Like the great tragedies of literature—from Romeo and Juliet to A Doll’s House to Ragtime to The Kite Runner—Omid’s Shadow takes us from the public politics of the street fight to the private power of the human heart.

ABNA 2011 Semifinalist title

From Publishers Weekly
This timely political novel features three generations of Iranian women who dare to stand up to repressive regimes. Scenes alternate between a worried mother in Connecticut and her naïve daughter who becomes a passionate reform activist and hunted fugitive in Tehran. In Connecticut, Omi sees her marriage crumbling and regrets telling her daughter about the family's fate at the hands of the Khomeini government and her own past as a student activist. The importance of social media to populist reform and revolutionary movements is demonstrated convincingly. Urgent appeals to embassies and official departments yield more delays than information, but Facebook updates, text messaging, and prepaid phones dramatically reduce the isolation of the repressed. Relevant and realistic, this novel is a fair fit for those concerned about the changing nature of world politics.

• Language: English
• Publisher: May McGoldrick
• Release date: Apr 14, 2011
• ISBN: 9781458023919

Book preview

BOOK 1

We have not come here to take prisoners,

But to surrender ever more deeply

To freedom and joy.

We have not come into this exquisite world

To hold ourselves hostage from love.

Run my dear,

From anything

That may not strengthen

Your precious budding wings.

Run like hell my dear,

From anyone likely

To put a sharp knife

Into the sacred, tender vision

Of your beautiful heart.

For we have not come here to take prisoners

Or to confine our wondrous spirits,

But to experience ever and ever more deeply

Our divine courage, freedom, and Light!

—Hafiz

CHAPTER 1

Tehran, Iran

December 1978

I was seventeen and I was breaking the law. Deliberately.

The single-pane glass in the tall windows of the old high school building rattled from the shrill sound of the dismissal bell. The metallic ringing raced through the empty hallways and disrupted the solemnity of the packed classrooms, creating a frenzy amongst the dozens of girls packed into each room.

Slamming my books shut, I quickly stuffed them into my bag. The pitch and volume of voices smothered the calls of our science teacher as she tried to relay last minute instructions on our lab reports. I grabbed my bag and jacket and searched for my three friends. They were already by the door.

Omid, our teacher called to me.

I saw her holding an article from an engineering journal that she’d promised to copy for me.

"Farda. Merci," I called back. Tomorrow was soon enough. I couldn’t be distracted. Not now.

Even as I turned to go, my joints protested the movement. My body was trembling. I attributed it to excitement. We were breaking the law. The consequences, if we were caught, could be disastrous. It didn’t matter. We were fighting for the greater good.

My friends waited for me, and I sailed by them, the first one out into the second-floor hallway. As I did, the bell stopped abruptly. Before its echo could fade, the empty hallways began to fill with girls spilling out from their classrooms. The four of us dispersed.

We each had our stack of flyers. We’d rehearsed our routine. We knew how many other students were going to help us and at what designated place in the school they were going to meet us. We’d divided the sprawling skeleton of Marjan High School and its grounds between all those who were willing and courageous enough to work for freedom.

Students crowded the hall. Most of the girls from our classroom already had the flyers we were distributing. The others didn’t need much prodding to take one.

The two-sided leaflet was packed with information. Dates of demonstrations. Time and place to arrive. Shout-lines of who we were, what we stood for, and what to chant during the march. There were specifics about martial law, which had been imposed on the city of Tehran since September. What streets were safe to pass, starting at 5:00 a.m. The back of each page was covered with descriptions of the atrocities committed by the Shah’s regime. The crimes that the hated SAVAK—the Shah’s CIA-trained secret police—were committing in their hidden prisons. We spoke of why it was critical for us, the high school students, to join the others and make our voices heard. We’d copied most of this from the flyers that carpeted the streets by the University of Tehran.

A classroom door to my left opened, but before anyone could get out, the teacher pulled it closed. She was shouting instructions over the pandemonium inside.

Tomorrow’s march started at 7:00, before the morning commuter traffic began. Last week, there’d been a rally of 40,000 university students. This week, we were joining them for what was certain to be a much larger turnout. We would deadlock the city.

Another classroom door opened belatedly and students poured out. The first five students took flyers out of my hand without any encouragement. This second-story wing where I was standing held the twelfth-grade classes. The navy blue uniformed girls teemed into the hall like bugs leaving a nest beneath an overturned rock. The noise in the crowded corridor was now louder than the dismissal bell. I put my bag between my feet, fighting the onslaught of humanity, desperate to change the ancient stream of thinking.

I was a self-ordained member of the rebel group Fedayeen-e-Khalq, and the school leader by default. My three friends and I had started a chapter at the high school four months ago, at the start of our senior year. We each had our own reasons and motivation for getting involved. But we all had one goal in mind.

I passed out three more flyers.

"Farda sobh. Tomorrow morning, I told each girl. Geloyeg madresseh." In front of the school.

My friends and I wanted freedom of speech, freedom of expression, freedom to choose leaders who had the interests of the Iranian people at heart. We wanted to put an end to the blood-soaked dictatorship that ruled our country.

We were old enough to fight and we wanted change.

My best friend Roya, sadly, had the most personal reason for wanting to bring about change. Her brother was a political prisoner. He had been locked up for the past six years at Evin Prison in the northwestern part of Tehran. We had heard so many stories about the place. Horror stories. Even if a person were lucky enough to get out of Evin Prison, they were never the same.

Our friend Neda had reason to hate the Shah, as well. She was the cousin of a famous leftist poet who’d disappeared from his house one day over a decade ago…never to be seen again. It was whispered that SAVAK was to blame for the disappearance. No one doubted it. Neda even had the same last name as the poet, and it was still a name that was synonymous with protest. She saw it as her calling—as her hereditary purpose—to take part in this fight.

And Maryam was involved because the rest of us were. Born into a wealthy family, she had enjoyed the perks that belonged to the inner circle of the privileged few. She knew no one who had suffered or had been imprisoned because of their intellectual views. Still she joined our fight, and she had the respect of us all because of it.

I was involved in all of this because I was raised with my eyes wide open. My mother would not allow me to lead a sheltered life. I was encouraged to listen to the arguments that Azar had with the other intellectuals and activists she brought home. Arguments about Shah, country, God. She had strong views on everything. Growing up, I watched the bootlegged films that were forbidden to be shown legally in Iran. I heard the stories of the fugitives and the dispossessed.

And as a result, I become a renegade. I never conformed. I challenged life and rules that I believed were arbitrarily set by those in charge, men who had no other purpose than enriching themselves and protecting their own interests. I frequently questioned authority at school, and I got into trouble because of it. But I chose my moments. I wasn’t antagonistic all the time, and not with everyone. My mother always said that was my saving grace.

Disagreeing with the Pahlavi regime was as natural to me as the air I breathed and the water I drank. I’d traveled with my mother through the country, going south to Abadan and north to Mashhad. I’d seen starving children begging for food in the countless crumbling stone villages in between. I’d walked through the dirty streets in the south end of Tehran, through the city’s most impoverished neighborhoods. The smell of hashish and garbage hung in the air, and ragged children sat with old men in the shade of ruined buildings on dusty streets. These were places where the people no longer even dreamed of running water or a decent school.

And I’d also been to the sidewalk cafes in Shermoon, in the north of Tehran, where affluence hung in the air scented with Chanel and Givenchy and Gauloises. Here, wealth and comfort were defined by the glittering shops and the beautiful people who frequented them. And in the tree-lined streets and neighborhoods of northern Tehran, the houses of the rich sat behind high stone walls, built from stone and mortar and the blood of the masses.

My anger with the injustices around me had boiled over this past summer after a discovery my friend Roya made. My mother, Azar Parham, a University of Tehran history professor, had been one of the founding members of the Fedayeen-e-Khalq at the university eight years ago. This discovery brought my entire life into focus. In that one moment, dozens of questions that I could never find answers to evaporated into thin air.

I understood my life, and her life, and the respect that her students and the other faculty showed her. In the blink of an eye, I knew why she let me be as I was—opinionated and headstrong. It made sense to me now why Azar continued to hold her classes outside of the striking university and why all of her students continued to attend them. There was an adoring quality to the way they treated her, absolutely unlike the way I felt about any of my teachers.

I’d always known she was smart, even brilliant. She’d been among one of the first women to be awarded a PhD by the University of Tehran. And there was an authority that went along with that designation. But the attention she attracted was at a different level, and I couldn’t understand it until now.

I also better understood the reason behind the estrangement that existed between my mother and my grandparents. She was a single mother and a free thinker that wanted to change the world. They were devout Muslims who led peaceful lives and kept to themselves. They stared at each other across some yawning abyss.

I knew we had family; Azar was the youngest of three sisters. Everyone else in our family lived in Esfahan, and yet we never went there. We were never invited to weddings. We didn’t go to funerals. Norooz, the Persian New Year, was celebrated by only the two of us. My mother exchanged news of family by talking occasionally to her sisters on the phone.

Azar had nothing against the religion but plenty against the clerics. She believed they had become increasingly reactionary in her lifetime. They used Islam, not as it was intended, but in a way that was a throwback to the Middle Ages, and as a means of controlling the believers.

Growing up in the 1950s, she had known the delicate balance wrought by Reza Shah, the present king’s father, between the forces of westernization and the Islamic traditions that had originally been forced on the Iranian people after the Arab invasions some fourteen hundred years ago. Azar accepted this balance, knowing that an individual could choose the lifestyle that suited them. What she wanted now was democracy to replace the corruption that seemed to permeate the monarchy like the rotted timbers of an ancient house.

When I learned these things, my opinion of her skyrocketed. She didn’t know I knew. She had no clue that, since that summer day, I’d researched and found many of the articles she had written. I’d found transcripts of the numerous public speeches she’d given. There were files buried within files in our own house. She was a teacher. Boxes overflowing with papers and shelves stuffed with books were a part of her existence…part of our existence. I pored over her work and searched out the hidden gems of knowledge. I found revolution between the lines. I discovered the roots of her beliefs, and somehow knew I was a living branch. Reading her words helped me formulate my own.

And it was comical that, as all of this was going on, with all her intelligence, Azar had no idea why I now looked up to her with wide-eyed admiration after years of rebellion and constant arguing.

She also didn’t know that, instead of attending the daily Konkoor class after school to get ready for the national university exam, I was distributing anti-Shah flyers and holding meetings and working on the layout for our next publication. I was an organizer, a leader in my own circle, hungry to help bring about change…as she was working to bring about change.

"Farda sobh." Tomorrow morning. Many girls took the proffered paper. But there were a few who pressed their shoulder against the opposite wall to try to avoid me. They made no eye contact.

They were the lowest of the low. Most of them were students who were escorted by their fathers or brothers to school. Hypocrites. They wore the hajab while they were with those men, but once inside the walls of the school, they ran to the lavatory and removed their head covering and applied the thickest layers of make-up. Some of them would even take off at noon and spend the afternoon with their boyfriends. I would see them slip back into the crowd of students at dismissal, their faces scrubbed clean and their hair covered so properly. They pretended to be so docile and dutiful and decent in front of the men in their families.

There wasn’t a week that went by, however, that the news of one of them having a ‘miscarriage’ in the bathroom didn’t reverberate through the building.

I’d heard those girls say that our thoughts smelled like gormeh sabzi, the pungent green stew served in every Persian household. They meant that there was no hiding our thoughts or our actions. It didn’t matter what we said or did. To them, we were dangerous because of our way of thinking. We were openly critical of authority. Even worse, I suppose, they saw us as communists. The changes we were seeking, they thought, would take away everything what they valued. Money, boys, and their faith the way they liked to practice it.

I forgave them for their ignorance. I believed they’d be herded like sheep to our way of thinking once we were able to win our battle. They were not leaders, but followers. And I welcomed the challenge of someday teaching these women the value of independent thought. The power of freedom. I longed for the day when these same people would recognize and value their equality with men in society.

Another flyer. "Geloye madresseh." In front of school.

I was happy to see that the number of students who took the flyers had increased substantially over this past month. Change was in the air; it was contagious. Any fear of getting caught was overwhelmed by the adrenaline coursing through our bodies. We were all being carried along on the electric currents of change.

I pulled out another stack of flyers from my backpack as Maryam motioned to me from the next hallway intersection that she was running low. Our science teacher left the class and locked the door behind her.

Khanoom Habadi, I called out, waving a leaflet in her direction. She rolled her eyes and shook her head, touching her swelling stomach. We all knew that her first baby was due before the Persian New Year in March. She was one of the good ones, as far as we were concerned. Although she didn’t join our fight, she never condemned it, either. And we understood that she was a lot more vulnerable than any of us.

Personally, I had a soft spot in my heart for her. Because of her continuous encouragement, I had doubled up the number of science classes I’d taken. She wanted me to pursue a career in engineering—something that I’d started to think about more and more.

Only a few students remained in the halls. I saw Maryam walking empty handed toward me. Behind her, Neda appeared from the stairwell. The panic in her face froze both of us.

They’re here, she yelled out.

The statement put an end to my peaceful daydreaming about babies and engineering. The papers slid through my fingers and spread out at my feet. I immediately crouched down to collect them. She and Maryam reached me in an instant. Together, we scooped up the loose flyers as Neda filled us in.

An army truck is at the back gate of the school, and another is in front. A dozen soldiers have spread out along the street. They’re armed and they’ve set up check points at the gates. Everyone is being questioned before leaving. She lowered her voice. SAVAK agents are here, too.

The mention of the Shah’s secret police on the campus meant disaster. I found my hands were shaking as I stood up with the papers bunched in my arms. I stuffed the flyers into my backpack with the few hundred others already there.

What do we do? Maryam asked. Her face was ashen.

I led the others to the window overlooking the front gates. Students were backed up trying to get out. The soldiers were opening some schoolbags, and I could see the flyers we’d just passed out littering the schoolyard where the girls had dropped them. The buses were waiting, and traffic was at a standstill on the street beyond. I looked into the faces of two soldiers, armed with rifles and standing by the first bus. They could not have been more than a year older than we were.

The information that I’d typed on the back of the flyers was suddenly a reality. Students were arrested every day. They simply disappeared. There was no judge and jury, no trial for those picked up. No laws protected the accused. Families received no news. At Evin Prison women and men were tortured to confess the names of others who could be arrested.

Cold spikes of fear pierced my spine. I felt Maryam’s hands clutching my arm. We were all shaking.

You girls, Khanoom Habadi said sharply from behind us. Come with me.

The science teacher was looking out the window from behind us. Until that moment, I hadn’t realized that the young teacher had returned. With anxious glances at each other, we followed her back to the classroom, where she unlocked the door and let us all in.

The large space doubled as a chemistry and physics lab. She led us to an oversized sink at the side of the room and told us to put all the flyers we had left into it. We did as we were told. She helped me go through my backpack, making sure none were left. Even those stuffed into the textbooks were pulled out and added to the others.

When we had them all, she lit a torch to the paper.

I looked in horror at the smoke, but she calmly switched on the fans for the exhaust vents over the nearby line of burners.

Open the windows half way, she ordered.

I hurried to do as I was told. The acrid smell of the smoke burned my nostrils, but the cold air pouring in was a slap of reality of the danger we were in. With this woman’s effort to help us, the consequences of our actions became even sharper. Our recklessness was endangering both her and the baby. I looked over my shoulder. There was still smoke in the room, but the young teacher appeared calm as she poked the sheaves of paper and then told Neda to turn the exhaust fans to the highest level.

You were staying late and finishing up a chemistry experiment with me, Mrs. Habadi told all of us.

I looked around, realizing that Roya wasn’t with us. She’d been passing out flyers downstairs.

Roya, I whispered her name aloud.

She couldn’t get caught. Last Friday, we’d gone to her house for lunch. Her mother was younger than mine, but the weight of the grief she carried for her imprisoned son had made her so frail that she looked twice Azar’s age. Her family had suffered so much already.

I ran for the door. The science teacher called after me. I only turned to them at the door. My two friends were standing with her, their eyes open wide and fixed on me.

I’ll be right back, I lied.

CHAPTER 2

The halls were empty, and the stairwell had the echo of a mausoleum as I went down two steps at a time. At the bottom, I pushed my way through the doors leading to the hallway where I knew Roya was supposed to be. The heavy door bounced against its spring with a loud bang and came back at me.

This corridor led to the main entrance of the school. In addition to the double rows of glass doors leading outside, three separate hallways, two sets of stairwells, and a line of administrator’s offices all opened onto the spacious lobby.

Two people stood by the main office door. Mrs. Elahi, the principal, was speaking to a middle-aged man dressed in dark gray suit and tie. He had nothing distinctive about him except for a hair-lip and a gaze that focused on me from the moment I entered the lobby. At the sound of the banging door, Mrs. Elahi also glanced in my direction. The man continued to stare. I slowed my steps and tried to look calm, as if nothing were wrong. My heart pounded in my chest and I felt fear spread like ice water through my body.

Two teachers were standing by the glass doors leading out of the building. I could make out some of the military uniforms and the crowd of students still inching toward the gates.

Roya might have blended in with the other students and tried to get out. I hoped so badly that she’d done just that. With a nod to Mrs. Elahi, I approached the two teachers. Both of them knew me, and one of them had been my math teacher the year before.

What’s wrong? I asked quietly as I joined them. Why are the police here?

Not the police, one of them said under her breath, gesturing toward the gray suit with Mrs. Elahi. SAVAK.

My heart sank. It was true. I knew enough about SAVAK to equate their presence to the ultimate demise of everything we were trying to do.

What do they want? I managed to ask.

I believe they already have…uh, the person they were after, the other teacher whispered. That’s why they are finally letting the students leave.

Roya… I whispered in dismay. The two looked at me.

They had picked up Roya. I didn’t do it consciously, but I found myself moving toward the main office. Like a robot, I mechanically moved one foot and then the other. My mind raced as I tried to think of scenarios I could use that would not involve my mother in any of this. She would be in danger, too, of course. But I couldn’t stop myself. The agents would search our house. If I was able to find the evidence of her activism, so would they.

But then, there was Roya. My best friend since first grade. She couldn’t bear the responsibility of our actions alone. She was a follower where I had led. I had provided the rushes that had fueled the flames of her rebellion. I had been the wind that spread the fire. I could not let her walk this road alone. I would give myself up, tell them that she was just doing a favor for me.

My body continued of its own accord toward the SAVAK agent and the principal.

Mrs. Elahi’s gaze was fixed on the man, but I knew she was watching me approach. The SAVAK agent had his back to me and he was looking into the office as he spoke to the principal.

There’d been times during my years at this high school when I had been terrified of this woman. She didn’t have to use an iron fist to keep discipline. Her disapproving glare was enough to instill fear in every one of the girls who attended her school. I saw her face grow pale as I approached. She was the one who looked afraid.

You have the wrong person, I said as I reached them.

He whirled and looked straight into my eyes. As he did, I felt my blood freeze in my veins. His dark gaze held within it nightmares, fears beyond anything that I could have ever imagined or written down on any of our flyers. It was the look of the dead. I felt my chin begin to quiver. My tongue swelled in my throat, and I wasn’t sure I could take any air in my lungs.

What did you say? he asked. His voice was low and hard, and the faint lisp did nothing to weaken the effect.

I opened my mouth to repeat what I’d said. I owed Roya my loyalty, no matter what, but no noise came out.

Oh, no, Mrs. Elahi said sharply. "I have the right person. But now I have her accomplice, too."

I had never seen my principal look so angry. She was shaking with fury, and the agent swung his gaze back to her.

I’m sorry, Mr. Fattah, she said, without taking her eyes off of me. This young woman was speaking to me and not you.

Tears gathered in my eyes. I shook my head, looking at her. She knew how Roya’s family suffered, too. I couldn’t let it happen.

I…I am resp—

You will wait for me in my office, she ordered.

I shook my head. My feet were cemented to the floor. I would never be able to gather enough courage to do this again. I had to save her while I still could, before they took her away.

What has she done? the agent asked. He was staring into my face.

I could see momentary panic cross Mrs. Elahi’s face, but then it was gone, leaving an icy mask in its place.

She was afraid, and I had to take the weight off her. This was something I had done. I had to face the consequences. I reached in the front pocket of my skirt and found one of the folded flyers. I took it out and stretched out my hand. With lightning speed, the principal reached out and enclosed my hand in her own fist.

She cheated, I’m ashamed to say. This girl, one of our best students, cheated with a friend on a math test.

Mrs. Elahi yanked me toward the office door.

Excuse me. I’ll be back out in a minute.

I was at least half a head taller than