For the tall sycamores

My favorite memories of my favorite place in the world, Tehran, are all in the same street, Valiasr or Pahlavi – to be quite frank I could not care less about the semantics of the naming convention; I grew up calling it Valiasr and will be calling it Valiasr here. Valiasr runs from the northern-most part of Tehran all the way to the south. The longest street in the middle east and one of the longest continuously running streets in the entire world, it is adorned by sycamores on the sides.

When I was little, my mom and I would go to Valiasr to do our ritual mother-daughter day. We would start in my favorite toy store in Valiasr, where I would bicker with my mom about getting my seventy-seventh Barbie, stop by the CD store nearby to look at the newest Sponge Bob release, which I vividly remember used to be 1000 Tomans at the time, and go to my mom’s favorite interior decor store where she would debate getting different lamp shades or a new set of candle holders. We would get Mexican street corn right after, and my mom would eat all of the mushrooms because I used to despise mushrooms until a few years ago. We would get in a yellow shared cab to get back, get off in front of the pizza store that went bankrupt three times, and walk down the 45º incline street home. 53ºrd street, number 20, second floor (or first, depending on how you count).

As I became older and we moved to a completely different neighborhood, Valiasr remained a constant. Now I was sixteen, at the peak of COVID, and my friends and I would walk around the very top of the street, near Tajrish, and grab coffee from the new trendy place that was supposed to emulate whatever new bougie coffeeshop had recently opened in the West, and walk down the street. If you were a trooper and could withstand the heat, you could walk all the way to our staple hangout spot, Boomi, where we would argue about sitting in the balcony so the smokers (yes, sixteen year old girls from protective families who had gotten their hands on a pack of Winston cigarettes) could smoke or indoors so we would be cool, literally and not figuratively.

No matter where in the street you looked, the sycamores stood tall, the wind made the leaves fall off on the ground. At the peak of summer dryness, the sycamores would look tired, sad, exhausted. In the winter air pollution when breathing felt like inhaling twenty Cuban cigars, sans the head high, the sycamores worked relentlessly.

I truly have no idea when the next time I go home will be. Home at this point has become an idea, a vision, a place that is to be frequented in my dreams but never in reality. My family says that it has changed a lot over the past two years, and sometimes I wonder if I want to see the change — the cafes that have gone bankrupt, the streets that were bombed, the sycamores that have dried out.

As my favorite poet, Sohrab Sepehri puts it, “my city is lost, with restlessness, I have built a house on the other side of the night”. I have built a home away from home, yet there are moments where I feel like an alien dropped on an unknown planet. As I walk in Newbury street, I am filled with solitude — I am far from lonely, yet none of these magnolia trees know me the way that the sycamores do. Over the years I have felt a strange mixture of feelings toward Tehran, but the strongest one arguably has been guilt. It is not survivor’s guilt or shame for having left, but guilt for continuing to live in a state of more or less peace and tranquility. I wonder if I deserve the peace that I have now, and the undeniable truth is that I don’t, none of us do. None of us can pick where we are born or the circumstances surrounding it; none of us have a say in whether our home is bombed or if it is adorned by sycamores, or sometimes both at the same time.

It is difficult to put into words what I feel for Iran, and perhaps even more strongly, for Tehran. The tall sycamore trees stand tall in my heart, steady, the way they have been for the past tens of hundreds of years. Tehran, as once a 17th century Italian traveler said, is the city of sycamores. They have survived a revolution, an eight-year long and brutally bloody war, economic crises, political uprisings, droughts, and hundreds of protests, a second war, one of the bloodiest massacres of citizens in recent history, and now a third war. To the beautiful, sometimes thirsty, sometimes tired, sometimes bent, but always strong sycamores: stand tall, this time too.