Excerpted: Back Where I Came From

We are ligaments, all that connects. When they tell me about the breast, they say: picture a constellation, chain-link fences. A line of moon-faced children holding hands. That’s what I see on the diagram that the oncologist spins her screen all the way around to show me. Globules of fat and oblong ducts separated by rivers of lymph nodes and walls of fibrous tissue.

“Everything is connected in the breast,” Dr. Yassa says, her eyes puffy and purple with tired bags. She rubs them, taking off her glasses, her voice calm and sure like someone explaining the rotation of planets to a curious child. This is just the way things are. Mercury is hot. Venus has no moons.

“We can’t just remove the tumour,” she says, “we must remove the whole breast, just to be sure. It’s the safest thing to do.” A week earlier, on a cold grocery walk home, my fingers holding together a broken and bursting maxi bag, half a joint between my fingers, and the phone clamped between my head and my shoulder, a doctor had told me that cancer cells had been found in my biopsy report. The little lump that I had been told the previous summer was nothing to worry about had become something to worry about.

I had walked slowly to my east Plateau apartment and sat for hours on the wobbly chair in my kitchen, staring at the small painted plates of Qajar-era women that hung on my wall. Their expressions were mysteriously neutral under the monobrow that shadowed their eyes. They were petite, flat-chested. In my mind, I peeled my body off like a mango, sat in my skeleton and watched the fear figure eight around my rib cage.

My childhood and teen years coincided with a time in Hollywood in which cancer movies were having a moment; all of those heart-wrenching stories that eventually culminated in heartwarming tales that brought families closer together. This is what life had made of my expectations. Love’s prevalence. The inevitability of family. But the months that followed my diagnosis were absent of silver linings. Guilt and grief met in the back of a bar and destroyed each other, held nothing back. Breast cancer materialized, like bubbles of oil to the surface, deep-seated and uncomfortable conversations around gender presentation and sexuality that had been carefully and comfortably avoided in previous years in my family. I felt responsible — as if I had manifested the cleaving off of my most feminine asset.

“God takes from you what you are not grateful for,” my mother used to tell me. She mourned and mourned my gone womanhood, picturing her plump and healthy lineage curved against the ghost of a chest. When the winter at last showed the first signs of melting away, the long and jagged scar across my chest a satisfying shade of pink, my mother clasped, with all her might, at a spidery thread of hope, and refused to let go. She presented my family with a solution to our heartbreak.

“I think it’s time for a visit home.”

My sister and I were lucky enough to spend many summers of our childhood in Tehran, surrounded by family, watching our parents transform in the confidence and comfort of being in a home they knew. My mother laughing with her sisters. My father gifting a yellow dress to his niece. We saw these moments. We understood that distance was a feeling.

My parents had left the country in 1989 when my father was granted a student bursary to study molecular biology in Edmonton. He was to return to Iran, work, raise his family. We were never supposed to stay. But as Iran was plunged deeper into economic difficulty, following decades of stifling Western sanctions, we stayed. We moved to Toronto, settled into a Regent Park apartment, became Iranian Canadians. Collecting scratch-off calling cards in a corner of the kitchen table. Driving to Niagara Falls on long weekends. Waiting for summers in Iran.

In the early years, when we’d arrive at the airport in Tehran, we’d be treated like celebrities. My mother’s huge family would stand behind the glass at Mehrabad International Airport with bouquets of flowers in their hands, eyes glistening, jumping with excitement. When I was small enough to be carried, I remember being passed from arm to arm, pinched and smothered in a blur of kisses. I remember picturing myself crowd-surfing like in movies I’d seen, all that love carrying me to the warm, gasoline-scented air outside.

Our family’s arrival was an opportunity and excuse for everyone to gather. Old fights would be resolved or be pushed to autumn. Spontaneous road trips to the Caspian would be arranged. Not a day would pass that we weren’t invited to someone’s home. I’d spend the days following my grandmother, a devout Ashtyani woman, as she fed the pale-chested pigeons on the balcony. I’d play gorgam be hava with my cousins in the cracked and mouldy waterless pool in my aunt’s yard, where in each cracked corner, small yellow flowers sprouted among bunches of weeds.

We silenced our grief with these memories on the plane ride over.

Do you remember Amoo Ismail always snoring in the back room? May God grant mercy to his soul.

Remember the year Moha and I painted all the tiles on the balcony? And how we wept when the rain washed it all off?

Remember all the laughter?

Everyone stuffed together in red-carpeted rooms?

We told story after story on the plane until our excitement bubbled off the wings and into the night’s blinking sky. All our hope, like eggs in a Tehran-shaped basket. “Ay vatan,” Baba said from his seat, his hand beating against his chest. Oh, homeland. We were going back to Iran and surely it would wash all the salt from our wounds, all the mud from our hair. It was Norouz. A new day, a new beginning. Enough, enough with the loneliness and sorrow and rooms holding all the pain of the past six months. We would find our way back to one another. This is what life had made of our expectations: home is what heals us.

Inshallah.