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Dan Kennedy (1:31)

Hey, welcome to the Moth podcast. I'm Dan Kennedy. Thanks for tuning in for some more stories this week. So last week on the podcast we shared stories about the transformative qualities of travel and that was the first of a two part series. This is the second part of that series. You have effectively binged the entire series. We're going to be finishing up today with a couple of more stories about travel. The first, from Reza Jalali, was told at a Moth mainstage that we held up in Portland, Maine a few years ago. The theme of the night was into the Wild. Here's Reza live at the Moth.

Reza Jalali (2:11)

So we were in a car traveling in Kurdistan, heading for the border to meet the war. Or to be exact, the war's aftermath. Eighteen years earlier, the war between Iran and Iraq had ended and I wanted to visit my birthplace, small border town, to see for myself the war's aftermath. The war had happened in the 80s when I was away attending college. Despite the distance, I'd followed the news of the conflict closely. My family still lived there and I wanted to make sure they were safe. As the war continued, it became an eight year old war. I gave up hope. I I started to lose hope for the town, its inhabitants, and seeing my family again every now and then I would get a call or a letter from my mother, who was alive back then, and my siblings, all older than me, to let me know they were okay. To be honest, there was this nagging guilt, for even though I followed the news closely and I was frightened by the news of the war, secretly I felt relieved for having missed the war. I'd asked my siblings to take me to the town I'd left as a young man. They were surprised and sounded unhappy. Why would you want to go there? There's nothing to see. A town ravished by the war. Don't punish yourself. But I was stubborn. I longed to see my birthplace, where I'd spend a happy, happy childhood, where most people knew your parents and your name. I remembered its flat rooftops, crowded on summer nights by families spending the night there. To escape the heat, we ate late dinners. The men played loud games of backgammon, argued politics and whispered, sharing anti government news and rumors, while the younger women chewed on roasted pumpkin seeds and gossiped. And mothers, being mothers, told wild stories to sleepy children. Even now, if I were to close my eyes, I still could see the star pinned the sky, the large yellow moon, and feel the hot wind and the smell of the desert outdoors. We slept on raised wooden beds under white cotton mosquito nets, fearful of the tiny yellow scorpions which could be hiding inside our shoes, left for the night under the bed. At dawn, we woke up to the sound of azan, the Islamic call to prayer breaking the night silence and barking of stray dogs that followed only to fall back to sleep watching the stars fade away and the sky changing colors. That was a sweet, sweet life. In summer we went to open air cinemas. It's very much like the drive in theater you have in the US except we sat on folding chairs rather than being inside a car, mesmerized, watching Liz Taylor come to life on large screen, speaking in Farsi as if she'd done it all her life. Because Hollywood movies were dubbed Tufarsi, I was naive enough to think that the town with the river which crisscrossed the town would be there, unchanged, frozen in time, waiting for me to return. So here we were, my siblings driving me to the border town which had been at home till the war had come, uninvited, unwelcome, like a toothache. As we drove closer to the border, I saw the destruction caused by the war. We passed villages, some in ruins, some rebuilt after the war. Most houses were built of hardened earth, leaning on each other as if taking a nap. They almost looked the same as before, except now there were cars here and there and satellite dishes sat on rooftops reflecting the sun. During last night's arguments, my relatives had said that all the palm trees, the orange and lemon, the mulberry trees filled with noisy spirals, had been burned down by the Iraqi soldiers. The roaring river with millions of fish had become a stream. I didn't believe them, thinking they were making it up to have me change my mind. How could all the fish and the birds be gone? But a small voice inside my head said, what if they were right? What if they were right? What if the cinema, the flat rooftops, my oldest school, all had vanished? What if I went to my childhood neighborhood and found a stranger opening a door to a house built after the war in the place of what was our home? We were stopped at a military checkpoint. I had lived in the US for so long that I started to feel anxious and became frightened. But the uniformed man looked quite bored. A guy with a lowered machine gun came and asked questions. He didn't bother to search the car. As we drove away, I was told that the checkpoints, the searchings of the cars and questionings were part of the new reality in Kurdistan, Iran. My sister gave me a bottle of water. As I sipped some and watched a group of nomads traveling with all they owned. You see, in my family there is this story going back to my childhood. It starts with a knock at the door, my mother carrying me. I must have been a few months old. The youngest of her nine children opens the door to find a group of singing gypsy women. One of them offers to tell my mother's fortune in exchange for money. My mother, curious, stretches one hand out while holding on tight to me. The gypsy peeks at my face and sighs. Your baby shall drink much water in a strange lands. My mother gets upset on hearing that her youngest child might move to faraway lands to live among strangers and never to return. As I grew up, every time I heard this story, I felt sad and made a childish, perhaps childish, promise that I would never abandon my mother. Back in the car, my brother Ahmad pointed at the approaching mountains, tall and majestic, the sharp tops puncturing the palest sky. I started to feel anxious. It meant we were very close to our destination. I did not know what to expect. So I loved it when we stopped at this roadsider stand where a young boy wearing the Kurdisher style loose pants tied in the ankles stood selling locally grown vegetables, herbs and berries. I wanted to see if he had any of my favorite berries, but it bothered me that he greeted me in Farsi rather than Kurdish, mistaking me for a tourist. I touched my face. Of course I shaved my mustache. I did not look like a local person. Most Kurdish men have some serious mustaches. Going all kinds, Walrus, handelbar, even the pencil thin. I'm ashamed to say Kurdistan can be a serious mustache country. Watching the boy, I calculated his age, and I saw him as an infant, surviving the daily bombings, the shrieking missiles passing overhead to rain terror on the cities further inside Iran. He must have belonged to a local Kurdish tribe whose ancient and nomadic lifestyles were interrupted every now and then by political unrest, revolutions and invasions. I thought, this land, the mountains where he's home. I felt as an intruder. I had no business to be there. I started to doubt what I was doing there. I'd left a long time ago, and with my departure, I'd not only betrayed my mother and the promise I had made to her, but the town and my childhood friends. I was gone for years, and now I was back as a tourist with a camera and a spectator. With or without a mustache, I was an outsider, a foreigner. I decided I could not go to my birthplace. I'd lost my resolve to come face to face with war. I walked to the car and sat inside. I told my sister maybe it was better to hang on to the old memories and to save the romanticized and somewhat exaggerated pictures of the life before war. I asked them we should turn around. This time they did not argue. With my brothers sitting in the front talking to one another, we went back the same way we had traveled that day, leaving behind the mountains and the boy, I started to weep. My sister reached out to hold my hand. Watching her wrinkled hand covering mine and my aging siblings, their hairs grayed, faces wrinkled, I thought with some relief that revolutions happen, wars come and go, loved ones age, but the stars rise and shine in the sky. Night after night, the shy Kurdish girls will gossip. Boys with curly hair will chase a ball. The Islamic call will wake up the faithful, and wild vegetables will grow in the mountains of Kurdistan. And sometimes, sometimes men missing what was once home will cry silently in order to become old men. Thank you.