Back then, I had no idea I wouldn’t be able to come to terms with his death, even though it had come about in the friendliest, kindliest, most compassionate of circumstances, taking my grandfather’s life in his sleep. But inside those moments overflowing with grief, I wasn’t reflecting on my grandfather, his death, or the bereavement that had followed. At the end of the day, people’s absence, at least in such moments, turns out to be of more importance than their presence would have. But I was standing by the immovable headstone, remembering the boulevard where I had once walked while expecting someone. And then, slowly, memories came to me: of an old woman’s sun cap, a teenage boy’s camera lanyard with his eyes being struck by the sun while he peeks at the floral designs of a woman’s skirt as she walks away. Then, I suddenly remembered the collar of a man’s shirt, the man appearing on his bike in the distance, pedaling towards me by the river’s blue bank. He sends a smile my way. Yes, we knew each other; and that was when, like pieces of a painting, everything took its color in my mind’s eye.
I benumbed myself in the sweet bewilderment that had befallen me. My grandfather’s loss and that distant memory—I wanted to do away with both. But one was before my eyes, and the other was transpiring inside the playhouse of my imagination. It was for good reason that, after those electroshocks that had aimed to wash away a deeply entrenched summer from her head, Esther Greenwood, that innocent rebel, wrote: “Maybe forgetfulness, like a kind snow, would numb and cover [the memories]. But they were part of me. They were my landscape.” Sooner or later, we will eventually come to realize that our landscapes aren’t the oral or written but our hidden history, with the same distortions to which no history is immune. It is for our dim glow that we are terrified of “bewilderment” but still go after that which we have lost; similarly, humankind dreads the unknown but travels to new places all the same.
I knew fully well when and how—standing by my grandfather’s grave—those landscapes came to me, of the river I was supposed to forget. Two or three months prior to his death, my grandfather had told me a story, a glimpse into another person’s landscape and hidden history like I’d never heard from him before. He had just woken up from his habitual afternoon siesta, and was preparing a pot of tea. We sat at the table, and death had no business being there inside that kitchen. Even if I had talked to the old man about death, it would have ended with him accepting it, much the same way that Ivan had accepted the loss of life the moment Alyosha had kissed him on the lips in The Brothers Karamazov, though the old man—my grandfather—had never read Dostoyevsky in his entire life.
I don’t remember how, but, that afternoon, we found ourselves talking about my grandfather’s maternal family, which, I knew, had emigrated from Baku to Iran, though I never knew that, in her teenage years, my grandfather’s mom used to go fishing on a boat with her dad and two uncles. The men in the family snickered at her dream whenever she told them that she aspired to purchase a boat of her own someday and go seafaring. But more than men, it was “immigration” that had poked fun at the teenage girl’s dreams. After moving to Iran, she insisted that she join her dad and uncles on their fish boat like she used to, but doing so was out of the question. Bandar-e Anzali’s gigantic motor launches were teeming with male workers who didn’t approve of the three fresh-off-the-boat men, let alone my great-grandma, whose dad and uncles eventually went on to buy a boat and fish for a living. It was a decent life, even if never a prosperous one. But now that they had their own boat, my teenage great-grandma could accompany them.
Had my great-grandma’s dream of the brine and buying a boat of her own faded away? Was this the coming true of Alyosha’s kiss? No one knows. But my great-grandma continued her small-time seafaring until sometime after her seventeenth birthday, when she got married. She must have realized that this blue and maritime dream of hers was impossible to achieve. Her mom gave her a pillow to cry into in case she lost her husband, who was a seaman himself. Why? My grandfather didn’t know the legend behind this tradition. Later, I read somewhere that within Caspian Sea lore, it was customary among those living by the sea to give their daughters a pillow, so that if the husband died in a war, the bereaved wife could shed her tears into it. But why? Like many other mysteries of Caspian Sea folklore, this, too, remains unraveled. But if the young girl in my grandfather’s story had ever cried into her pillow, it must have been for the demise of her dreams.
Later that afternoon, there were guests visiting my grandfather, which meant that I didn’t get to investigate the story further. Was it my great-grandma’s passion for seafaring that had led to my grandfather’s interest in working on a boat? You’d think that they (grandfathers and grandmothers) would live forever, that you, too, will live forever, and that there is always time. We always count on the “is.” We are oblivious of Alyosha, not the one in The Brothers Karamazov, but Dostoyevsky’s Alyosha, the three-year-old son who died during an ambush of epilepsy.
The bewilderment that carried me all the way from that gravesite to a riverside in New York was one thing and one thing only: water—of rivers and that of the sea, as well as the fact that the sea in my grandfather’s hidden history happened to be the Caspian Sea, a sea that would forever remain to me an unsolvable and enigmatic mystery, an immensity I will never be able to puzzle out. Even among people in northern Iran, finding someone who would choose the Caspian Sea over the Persian Gulf is extremely rare. Golden sands and a turquoise sea are far more desirable vis-à-vis a black river with brown sands. There is very little complication in such preferences; it all comes down to the point of view.
The Iranian beaches of the Caspian Sea are said to have an unsightly and filthy shore with a headstrong and raging sea (perhaps like the ghost of a Russian), but to people like me—even though there are very few of us—this violent mutiny and the Caspian Sea’s rebellion against allure is exactly where its beauty lies. When in stormy weather, it ripples towards the coast and, with black unbridled crests and whips of seaweed and rioting roars, lashes at the black-and-blue sands, as if it were disgruntled with someone, beset with a baffling charm. That indignant existence never leaves the Caspian Sea waters. It is always there, waiting. When the Caspian Sea looks blue and untroubled on a midsummer’s day, there is still a dark insubordination to it, and the foreboding presage of a mysterious being lies beneath the corners of its calm. Even in its sunlit tranquility, it has an unknown and quiet terror. It usually takes lives exactly on such balmy days: the lives of travelers who go seafaring in its waters, having fallen for its charm and serenity.
Now that I’m writing these lines, I have accepted one thing: my relationship with the Caspian Sea has never been sharply defined, and it probably never will be. I am equally enamored and terrified of it, and such unwavering love and constant dread allow me to have only a half-baked personal definition of it: the Caspian Sea is beautiful, blithe, barbaric, and brutal. It is blue, dark blue, gray, and black, like Dostoyevsky’s scripts. The Caspian Sea is Alyosha, Ivan, Dmitri, and Smerdyakov.
No one knows what becomes of broken dreams. One of those broken dreams, which belonged to a teenage girl, passed on from generations ago and hit me on the forehead like a bullet when I was standing by my grandfather’s headstone, causing three distinguishing holes in the middle of my skull as it wriggled its way toward the back of my head: my grandfather’s death, my love for the Caspian Sea, and the half-finished tale of a teenage girl’s dream—death, mania, and a story—as if the three constituted a kind of guide for me in some cryptic order. This wouldn’t make sense to you if you’re not a dreamer, but it was right after that moment that I began to conceive the seas, the oceans, and, long story short, the waters in my head. When you put those three holes together, you could say that the spark of a drama lit the blue touch paper and marked my entrance. Why shouldn’t I have entered? I did enter, and the further I went on, the more I noticed that I was returning not only to waters but also to my encounters with them; a kind of testament that showed me what exactly I had gained in return for crossing paths with every body of water, every river, lake, and sea. I was certain that something lay in those encounters, awaiting, like a creature in the heart of water.
Saint Augustine once wrote, “Our heart is restless,” and fifteen hundred years later it was as if Baudelaire had picked up this line of thought: “So, we travel. It doesn’t matter where! It doesn’t matter where! As long as it’s out of this world!” He wrote, “This life is a hospital in which each patient is possessed by the desire to change beds.” Traveling is the departure of restless souls; this one at least is a sentence I dare to compose with confidence. After one of those intense dramas in my twenties—the kind we all experience, one of those heartbreaks we believe we will never survive—leaving, distancing, and going through the motions became the sweetest kind of self-discipline for me, a kind of self-discipline that protected me against everything outside traveling and within the ordinary world. I was being carried far and away, but I could never fathom how the sight of cracked stair treads in Beirut would harken me back to a memory I had from Rome. Or how, sitting under the cooling fans of a hall ceiling in Bombay, my mind could drift back to the swashing waters of the Pacific Ocean in Washington’s Oysterville. The one walking under the crescent-shaped ceilings or the one breasting the ocean waves barefoot, which one am I? Which one of me is real? Where exactly are we the very moment we summon another world while standing on a bridge in a different continent or in the middle of a square inside a war-stricken town?
What I had to go after was an encounter of this ilk—what you may call “a journey within a journey.” The name was inconsequential, anyway. Whatever that encounter happened to be, it gradually made me understand that I had been contemplating waters the day before showing up at the cemetery. Long before that day, in fact. And then, the landscapes quietly led up to a coexistence of committing to paper. Everything looked like the answer to a question that was constantly becoming more mutilated and mind-boggling but all the while yielding more exhilarating answers. The most indubitable of truths was that if I were to take on waters and new encounters, passing through dry land was going to be inevitable. I discovered that all things were bifurcated into water and dry land. I let them be. And I learned that now, more than ever, I wanted to find out what was in store for me at the intersection of and the symmetry between those two encounters, those two journeys. Perhaps I can discover new things by virtue of wandering into journeys—first in waters, then in dry land.
