My parents left Tehran for the US when the Iran-Iraq war, as my mom put it, “shattered our mirrors.” An air raid broke all of them: the antique mirrors her father collected from Tabriz bazaars; novelties made to look like Reza Shah; even the unlicensed Minnie Mouse compact in my cradle (probably my first gay icon).
“The mirror eats itself,” my mom said of some giant monstrosity she bought from the Los Angeles Convention Center when I was eight. She swore it looked like one she saw at Persepolis, though I couldn’t imagine how she spotted a mirror in those Persian ruins.
“In a gift shop,” she said. “There was one just like this.”
But despite the pains she took to bring the thing home, strapping it to the top of her car with a towel underneath to keep from excess scratches, the mirror almost immediately started to decay. From the outside, the frame started to crumble inward. Even granules of the glass came loose.
The mirror was once the centerpiece of our living room, where we entertained other Persian immigrant families on faux rococo furniture bought wholesale. But once plaster clumps started dropping on the silk rugs from Isfahan, she retired the mirror to the garage.
What a short reign, I thought, after the beast was carried away. I dusted the ash the mirror left behind, using Windex to polish my mom’s wax roses.
“What do you hope to bring back?” Luis asked me on our first date. The next morning, I was flying to Iran for the summer.
“Maybe a mirror,” I told him. “Similar to one my mom used to have. If I can find it.”
Luis suggested we visit a Highland Park fortune teller he’d seen before.
“Señora Fatima knows all.”
We climbed up three flights of stairs in a building that smelled like pineapples, thanks to the Mexican juice spot next door. Señora Fatima recognized Luis immediately.
“Great to see you again!” She lunged forward to hug him. “I see good things with you. Always good things.”
Her entire demeanor changed when she saw me. “YOU.” She pointed directly at my heart. “You will never find love.” It was definitely not what I wanted to hear on a first date. “Who did this? Who put this curse on you?” I wasn’t clairvoyant, but I knew a scam was coming. “I can burn ten candles for you. Ten candles, the cure. $99 each.”
I shrugged. “Maybe when I get back. I’m heading to Iran tomorrow.”
This upset her further. “You mustn’t travel across the sands and seas with this curse on your heart.”
I took my chances.
Maybe my curse was consciousness: I was going to Iran knowing I wouldn’t go back ever again. At 21, I had started to make artwork that was very Persian and very queer. Even though I doubted Iranian airport security would ever know me by name, I’d never take the gamble of imprisonment or death. Each visit had a finality to it. Even at age five, I wept before our plane departed for LAX knowing things would change between that summer and the next visit. People would move, people would die before we returned.
The breadmaker at the barbari stand, would he be my lover? Would I gesture to a sesame seed caught under his eye, one I’d remove if he let me get close enough to touch?
Usually when we landed, my mom insisted we stop at the graveyard first to visit her mom, her dad, and whomever else might have died since the last trip. It would be long after corpses were wrapped in cloth and lowered into graves, and beds removed from empty homes. By then, mourning was rhetorical. I did it because I was there. I mimed crying while my mom looked up the latest dead relative. I made whimpering sounds and wiped away fake tears, while passersby seamlessly wept as soon as they were at the foot of a familiar grave.
I unpacked as soon as we got to the apartment we’d rented for the month. I purposely brought along a tame wardrobe, not the tight pants and V-necks that were fashionable in the late 2000s. I had shaved my beard, and got my scraggly Mick Jagger-inspired hair trimmed. After zipping up my luggage, I opened the sliding balcony door and looked out of the window. On a concrete wall across from our building, someone had written words in English aside a mural of hyacinths:
i love you, sina
I wondered what my life would have been like if my parents hadn’t left Iran. What if I met a young man named Sina and loved him too? How would I know if he was into me? Where would we kiss? Could we even hold hands?
The thought followed me throughout my visit. There were enough homosocial displays of affection on the street, men kissing each other on the cheeks, men linking arms, and men tickling each other’s sideburns. The breadmaker at the barbari stand, would he be my lover? Would I gesture to a sesame seed caught under his eye, one I’d remove if he let me get close enough to touch?
I looked for a mirror identical to the diseased one we had wasting away in our backyard.
“I might know a place,” my cousin Bahar said.





She took me to the Darband mountainside. After checking several marketplaces, we gave up. We shared a Tupperware of her cooking. I always thought there was blood in the rice Bahar made. It didn’t help that my mother insisted she put so much of herself in her food. Later I found out she used cherries that somehow disintegrated before being served. The stains made the rice a color she was proud of. After, she smoked blueberry hookah. I ate dried cherries.
“What kind of music do you like?” Bahar asked.
It took me a while before I was able to translate The Velvet Underground.
“Makhmal Zeerzameen?” I was trying way too hard.
“Never heard of them,” she said. “What about Beyonz? Do you know Beyonz?”
I didn’t correct her pronunciation. “Yeah, her music is always playing on the radio.”
“It must be nice where you live,” my cousin said.
I didn’t know how to tell her it was complicated, that back home we lived in a city where post-9/11, kids drew turbans on the Neighborhood Watch signs. A football player called me “Al” for months before I realized he’d been referring to “Al Qaeda” the whole time.
“You wanna change your name to David?” my mom asked once, as if anglicizing my name would make my nose less angular.
Bahar had her own secrets too.
“Please don’t tell my family,” she said on our drive back to Tehran.
Taking me outside the city center lines was enough to scare her, even in her late twenties. Her brother looked like an Iranian Robert Mitchum, with a quiet snarl of violence just out of reach. And her mother was the most vain woman I’d ever met. She championed cheap cosmetic surgery that always looked far more bizarre than she had planned: uneven cheek fillers, eyebrow tattoos that were too high, and permanent lipstick that was much wider than her mouth.
“No, I won’t tell,” I assured Bahar.
“I knew I could trust you.”
“You barely know me.”
“Not true,” she insisted. “Because of the videos.”
I always felt weird when my dad recorded videos of us to send to cousins in Iran. He would load up a mini-DV camera and we would give a tour of our house, all the new furniture, musical instruments, and appliances. He probably saw one too many episodes of The Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous. My brother and sister went from room to room showing off new couches, autographed Michael Jordan jerseys, and my sister’s new piano. They’d seen one too many episodes of MTV Cribs. Eventually my dad turned the camera on himself to show off his new Mercedes.
It was a partial portrait of our lives, since he never filmed the blood stain on the Persian rug from when he hit my brother.
It was a partial portrait of our lives, since he never filmed the blood stain on the Persian rug from when he hit my brother. While he toured the garden, my dad didn’t capture the rose bush that was misshapen because he’d strangled it pretending it was me. My mom picked the flowers for a table centerpiece, but I couldn’t keep my hot dog down when I spotted flecks of my dad’s skin dried on the thorns.
My cousin had watched the videos I’m so embarrassed about now.
“What else do you want to do today?” Bahar asked me. We needed to wait until the blueberry smoke loosened from our clothes.
“Can I email someone?”
The only option was an Internet cafe. I wanted to write to Luis, to tell him about what I’d seen. In my message, I left out the words ‘gay’ and ‘love’ because of any watchful government eye. Those words made me cringe anyway.
I’m here and it feels weird. I wish I could show it all to you.
Bahar took me to the internet café several times. The messages were brief, because I didn’t want my cousin to have to pay too much of the by-the-minute rate. I told Luis about my trip to Mashhad with my mom and aunt, and the woman sitting in the lobby who had nectarine-sized lips. My bout of vertigo was given two sentences.
The interior of the mosque is one endless mirror mosaic. It’s like being in the center of a white kaleidoscope.
I told him about finding a folder on my uncle’s computer labelled AZZ with porn clips I didn’t have the nerve to click through.
He’s an AZZ man, I wrote.
Sina never made it to those messages, the name I saw spray painted on a concrete wall. It was more intimate that way. When our flight took off, I knew I wouldn’t go back to Tehran anymore. There would be no more graveyard visits after landing in Imam Khomeini Airport. Whoever I ended up with would never taste the blood rice colored by cherries.
Years later, Bahar drowned trying to leave Iran. She planned to immigrate illegally to Sydney.
“There’s no catch,” she assured my mom over a phone call. She figured if her American relative gave her blessing, the rest of her family would approve.
There was no catch, except she had to transfer from boat to raft at some point near Jakarta. She saved up thousands of dollars for this trip and, ever enthusiastic, was determined to go.
My mom called me while I was at Union Station to tell me that Bahar was missing. The boat had capsized, but not all bodies were accounted for. A bluebird got caught in the train station when she told me, flapping around from one corner to the next.
The huma bird never lands, I remembered. Somehow the bird from Persian mythology stays aflight, even when it sleeps. It never touches down, not in fantastical forests. Not when talking to kings. I thought about the enchanted bird during that call.
“Don’t go,” my mom cried, as if a train ride from LA to New York was the same as a boat to a gentler life.
“Everything okay?” Luis asked after checking in with an Amtrak clerk.
I held onto hope that somehow Bahar was alright. “She’s alive,” I said. “I just know it.” She was kicking her legs to keep her head above water, and the huma bird was proof. I didn’t give up hope all at once. The thought process was something along the lines of: It’s possible. It’s possible, isn’t it? It might be possible. It isn’t.
There’s video footage of the shipwreck that took Bahar’s life on YouTube somewhere, a snippet from a news report. I’ll never watch it.
“Shot on someone’s phone,” my brother told me. “While they were trying to see who was left.”
Most people were boarded down below when the boat capsized. There weren’t bodies floating on scraps of wood, an image I surely got from the movie Titanic. The majority of the passengers were stuck in closed quarters with no way to get out.
It meant so much to my mom to help identify Bahar’s body, maybe because she never tried to fill out a tourist visa for her niece. I got the official word of her death during the train ride to New York. Luis and I were stretching our legs at a stop in Lawrence, Kansas. He wanted to comfort me but the locals were already eyeing us because we were two men of color. We refrained from holding hands in public. His fingers hovered but hesitated to land.
Señora Fatima the fortune teller was mistaken. I’d forever travel across sands and seas with a curse on my heart, the hypothetical question: why her and not me? And some days an especially brutal thought eats me away: better her than me. Leaving is an act of longing. Leaving is an act of cruelty.
Navid Sinaki is an artist and writer from Tehran who currently lives in Los Angeles. His works have been exhibited at museums and art houses around the world, including the Lincoln Center, British Film Institute, Cineteca Nacional in Mexico, and the Modern Museum in Stockholm. His first solo art exhibition, The Infinite Garden, debuted at Shangri La Museum of Islamic Art, Culture, and Design, and the Honolulu Museum of Art. Medusa of the Roses (Grove Atlantic) is his first novel.