The House on Sun Street
Excerpted from The House on Sun Street, by Mojgan Ghazirad. Blair, 2023. Reprinted with permission.
Early in August, Baba enrolled us in McDonnell Elementary school for the upcoming school year. He asked the school principal to assign Mar Mar and me to two different first-grade classes. He wanted us to avoid speaking Farsi to each other in class. The principal accepted Baba’s request and placed us in separate classes. I hated the fact that Mar Mar and I were both going to attend first grade. All I had achieved during the previous school year learning Farsi turned into rubbish! I looked as illiterate as Mar Mar in English and the ambience of the clever big sister had vanished. I’d bragged about my ability to read when we played together, accusing Mar Mar of not knowing the words. How could I start with her again?
“Baba, I don’t want to be in first grade with Mar Mar!” I said in the car the first day he drove us to school. “I am one year, three months and three days older than her!”
Baba glanced at me and Mar Mar in the rearview mirror. She was leaning on her brown backpack, her soft black hair draping across the shoulder straps.
“Well, Mar Mar is growing faster than you,” Baba said.
“But I’ve already passed first grade. The math is too simple for me.”
“You know how to read in English?”
“Can’t they teach me that in the second grade?”
“You want to eat more so you get taller and skip a grade?” Baba asked.
I didn’t answer. I always got enraged when Baba or Maman talked about my eating habits and compared me to Mar Mar. Baba parked his Chevy in the parking area in front of the school. A vast green cotton field surrounded the school, and the cotton leaves shimmered in the sunlight as if the workers had greased the green leaves on every plant. Baba took our hands, and we walked on a concrete sidewalk toward the entrance. The school’s name was written on a short brick wall in front of the building. Two white crape myrtles flanked the name, and their white conical flowers stretched out in every direction, as if the workers of the field had decorated the trees with spools of cotton thread. We passed a few wide, brightly lit corridors and turned a couple of corners. The classroom layout differed from what I’d pictured in my mind. In my school in Tehran, classes were separate from each other, every classroom door opening into a long corridor that faced the schoolyard. But at McDonnell Elementary, all the first-grade classes merged in a spacious square space, divided by low-lying cubby rows into four sections, leaving an empty central area. We stood in that space where other parents and children were waiting. They assigned me to classroom A and Mar Mar to classroom D. I held Baba’s hand as tight as I could, but in my ears, I could still hear the throbbing of my heart. My mouth was dry. The white neon lights on the ceiling seemed so bright I had to squint my eyes in order to see. I glanced at Mar Mar, who was in tears. Baba kneeled down and hugged her. I tried so hard not to cry, not in front of Mar Mar, and not in front of Baba. At that moment, I wanted Baba to hug me more than anything in the world. How could we survive in those classrooms when we knew almost no English?
“Don’t be afraid, Mar Mar. You’ll be fine,” Baba said.
“I want Maman. I want to go home,” Mar Mar said.
“We’ll come and pick you up soon, sooner than you think.”
Baba caressed her hair and extended his other hand toward me. I was standing behind Mar Mar, watching them. He embraced me and whispered into my ears, “Take care of Mar Mar.” I nodded. Baba’s comforting breath spread on the nape of my neck.
“Moji will be here with you.” He pointed to my classroom. “You can see each other during class.”
“But how can I say I need to go to the bathroom when Moji is not with me?”
“Raise your hand.”
I parted my face from Baba’s shoulder and looked at Mar Mar. A thin strand of black hair had stuck to her cheeks. Her dimples had disappeared. Warm teardrops drizzled onto my skin as I wrapped my arm around her neck.
“Baba,” I said, “can you ask the principal to place us in one class?”
A loud bell rang, and a friendly voice spoke over speakers. Everyone became silent, a song was played, and parents chanted along. A lady gave a speech after the song. I understood nothing of what she said except her name, which I’d heard from Baba. It was the principal. Perhaps she was welcoming us on the first day of school.
Baba disappeared with the other parents and Mar Mar and I held tight to each other among the kids. The children around us were mostly fair skinned but a few kids had dark brown and coiled hair. Mar Mar and I were the only girls with black hair and peach skin. A blond girl came close to Mar Mar and asked something. Mar Mar stared at me as if I knew what she’d said. I shrugged my shoulders and said nothing. Mar Mar pointed to the name badge hanging in front of her chest, trying to introduce herself to the girl. The blond girl looked at the badge and laughed. The situation was hilarious: an illiterate little girl pointing to a name tag the other girl couldn’t read. We all struggled to communicate with each other, whatever language we spoke.
I enjoyed the first day of school more than I expected. I had my own desk with a small wooden chair attached to it. In the desk’s drawer, there was a yellow pencil box with tiny roses on it, two sharp pencils, a pair of children’s scissors, a pack of twelve Crayola crayons, and a glue stick, which I loved to smell. There were twenty kids in my class. A sweet white lady, maybe a few years older than Maman, introduced herself as our teacher. Mrs. Berry was wearing a fine cherry red suit and had made a little bun on top of her head with her hazel-brown hair. As she moved about the class, small pieces of short hair jiggled playfully on her forehead. She started the class with a storybook, reading from the page and showing the pictures to us. Even though I didn’t understand the words, I could deduce the story from the pictures, her gestures, and variations in her soft voice. She caught my attention by starting with a story. Perhaps she knew the magic that would turn me into an enthusiastic listener.
Mrs. Berry had a giant world globe on her table. As soon as she finished the story, she rose from her seat and fetched the globe. She placed her finger on the map and helped us see where we lived: In the United States of America, Alabama, Huntsville. After a few seconds, she pointed at me, twirled the globe, touched another place, and said “Iran.” She wanted to introduce me to the class. She beckoned me to the front of the class and asked my name. I could only whisper. She asked me to speak louder so that everyone could hear—but I was still too quiet. So, she said my name out loud. “Moji? Am I right?” I nodded. The entire class repeated my name after her. I felt my cheeks burning like glowing pieces of charcoal. She tapped my back and guided me to my seat. On the first day of school, everyone found out I’d come from a different part of the world.
The bell rang, and suddenly Mar Mar was standing in front of my desk. “My name is Mar Mar!” she shouted. Her dimples reappeared on her cheeks. She’d enjoyed the day—just like me.
* * *
One year of school in Tehran was not a total waste after all. It wasn’t long before Mrs. Berry noticed my speedy progress in learning English and realized I knew more math than other kids in class. She divided us into different color groups based on our reading ability. Each group met with her separately while other groups did their assigned activity in class. The black group had only one student, and that student was me. It was the last group she worked with during the morning sessions. By December, she assigned second-grade study books to me and asked me to look up a word every night at home. We only had one American Heritage dictionary, which belonged to Baba. He helped me search each word in his dictionary. I wrote the meaning in my notebook and made a sentence with the word. Even though it was cumbersome to find a word and decipher the mysterious symbols in an adult dictionary, I loved to slide my fingers on the extra-thin papers and fumble with the adorned red edges of each page. The crisp sound of flipping papers made me feel older and wiser than a first grader struggling to do her nightly homework.
Before winter break, the first-grade teachers decided to decorate a huge Christmas tree that had been erected in the common area of our classrooms. Mrs. Berry announced there would be a competition between the first-grade classes, and the classroom that made the best ornaments would win a prize. She asked us to bring a few popsicle sticks and a small ball of yarn in red, blue, or white to school the next day. She said we were going to make an Eye of God in class.
Mar Mar and I ate a few popsicles and gave one to Maman, Baba, and Leila so that we could collect the sticks. From Kmart, Baba bought three balls of wool yarn in different colors.
“Eye of God? What kind of a craft is that?” Baba asked when he drove us to school.
“She will tell us today. I’m sure we’ll win,” I said.
“Who says so?” Mar Mar said.
“You’ll see. We’ll make the best craft. What are you going to make?”
“It’s a secret. Mrs. Hamilton asked us not to tell anyone.”
“How are you going to make it?”
“I’m not telling you, Moji! Nice trick!”
In class, I could not wait until we got to the art session. I was eager to see how the Eye of God looked when we hung it on the tree.
“First, y’all need to glue two sticks together in a cross.” Mrs. Berry glued two sticks perpendicular to each other and then held them over her head. “This serves as the skeleton of your craft.” She picked some red yarn, found the thread, and wrapped it around one stick. Then she wrapped it around the next stick and continued doing this until a small red diamond appeared on the branches of the cross. We all started weaving like her. We used the white yarn in the middle and the blue yarn for the outer layer. A blue diamond encircled a red-eyed white diamond when we finished.
“Mrs. Berry,” I said, “why is it called the Eye of God?”
She nodded and said to the class, “Moji is asking a good question. There is a story behind it.”
Everyone was busy, weaving the final blue over their crosses.
“We’ve learned this craft from the Indians of Mexico. They weave the Eye of God in silence, thinking of Him. They make these little crosses to bless their homes, their roads, their children.” She raised the one she had woven and asked, “Does this remind you of something?”
Michael, a stout boy who always wore denim overalls, said, “Colors of our flag?” He was in the orange group, a group immediately below mine.
“Excellent, Michael. We made these to remember our men in Iran. May God bless them and bring them back home as soon as possible.”
The color and configuration struck me the moment Mrs. Berry mentioned the flag. I had seen the American flag everywhere—when we strolled in our neighborhood, in our schoolyard, and on TV while Baba watched ABC news. I had seen it being burned and stamped on by angry people in Iran. I’d heard the news of Iranian students holding U.S. hostages in the American Embassy in Tehran, but I didn’t pay much attention until that day.
“Now if y’all have finished, you can hang them on the tree,” she said to the class.
I sprung out of my chair and ran toward the tree.
“Easy guys! Do it in silence.”
I tiptoed the distance between my desk and the tree. Michael followed me. I wanted mine to be on the top branches, somewhere visible to everyone. I stood on my toes and stretched my hand as far as I could. I hung my Eye of God on a branch facing our class. My creation twirled on its little blue hanger. The white yarn I used had silver threads woven in with the white, and the silver threads glistened when the Eye of God swung, twinkling like a star.
“Why don’t your people let our hostages come home?” Michael said. He was staring at me, one hand on his waist, the other in his jeans pocket. “You Iranians!”
I froze in front of him, not knowing what to do.
He took his hand out of his pocket, jumped high in the air, and snatched my Eye of God from the branch. He smashed it and shoved the broken sticks into his pocket. “Ya don’t need to make these. You ain’t American,” he sneered. He turned his back and headed to our class as if nothing had happened.
My eyes filled with tears, but I didn’t say anything. I had no idea why Iranian students had held hostages in the American Embassy. In my simple seven-year-old mind, I thought the terrible news of hostages would remain on TV and would never enter my classroom. It didn’t occur to me—not even for a second—that I would be confronted by a classmate about a political crisis happening in Iran. I trudged back to my desk, thinking of my crushed Eye of God in his pocket.
On the way back home, Mar Mar was very excited. Their class had won the competition with their five-pointed stars made from thick art paper covered with colorful glitter glue. Their giant gold star sat on top of the tree, glowing like a splendid sun above the shining stars. She couldn’t sit and squiggled in the space between the front seats. Glitter sparkled all over her hair and on her cheeks as she explained to Baba how they made the stars. I sank in my seat, leaned my head against the window, and listened to Mar Mar while we passed street after street. I fiddled with my fingers, trying to remove the sticky white glue on them that had turned dirty and gray.
Baba peeked at me in the rearview mirror a few times while Mar Mar talked. “How about you, Moji?” he said. “How did you make the Eye of God?”
I shrugged. “Easy, I guess.”
“Daddy,” Mar Mar said.
“You mean Baba, Mar Mar?” Baba said.
“Yes, I mean Baba. Their art-crafts didn’t shine like ours. That’s why we won,” she said.
“OK. But they tried their best.” He winked in the mirror. “Moji, you may not be the winner all the time.”
I nodded and said nothing. I spotted the American flag at every corner. I noticed a wreath decorated with white, blue, and red flowers hanging on our neighbor’s front door. When Baba switched off the engine I said, “Baba, why are Iranians holding American hostages in Tehran?”
“You listening to the news?” Baba said.
“A boy asked me today at school.”
“It’s complicated. Why did he ask you such a question? Were you guys talking politics in school?” He laughed out loud.
I knew if I insisted, he would have asked about the details, and I was never good at telling lies. I didn’t want to tell Baba what Michael did to my Eye of God. It hurt so much to think about, and I didn’t want to make Baba angry about it. I feared he might come to school and talk to the principal. So, I decided to keep the fate of my Eye of God to myself.
* * *
The Iranian hostage crisis didn’t end that Christmas or New Year as many had hoped. It dragged on throughout the spring. Every time Baba turned on the TV news, a counter on the left upper corner of the screen showed the number of days Americans had been kept in the embassy against their will. It had become routine to start the day hearing about the situation on public radio as Baba drove us to school. It seemed as if an evil ifrit had cast a dark spell on our life in America. Our neighbors suspected we were foreigners from our skin tone, our dark hair, and my parents’ accents, but they didn’t know what part of the world we belonged to. Maman and Baba didn’t mingle with them.
One day in March, as we were preparing for Nowruz, Baba called us into the living room and gathered Mar Mar and me by his side. He said he had something important to tell us. Maman peeked at us from the kitchen while she mixed walnuts and egg yolks in a deep bowl. She had shelved the bowl on her swollen belly as she prepared our favorite Nowruz cookies. We were expecting a baby brother in May.
“From now on, if someone asks you where you’re coming from, you don’t say you’re Iranians,” Baba said. “We’ve come from Jordan, understood?”
“Baba, where is Jordan?” Mar Mar asked.
“Why from Jordan?” I asked.
Maman stopped beating the batter in the bowl. The rhythmic sound of her fork broke off, and a deep silence ensued. We all looked at her standing in the doorframe, frozen, holding the fork in the air. “Jordan?” she asked, surprised.
“Because Americans are friends with Jordanians nowadays,” Baba said. “Jordan is an Arab country close to Iran. If you bring a map, I’ll show you.”
Mar Mar ran to our bedroom and fetched the glossy world map Baba had bought for us a couple of months before. He unfolded the map and pointed to a country that resembled an upside-down V, somewhere close to the Mediterranean Sea.
“We could call it Iran’s neighbor if we skipped Iraq.”
“Baba, but we are Iranians. Why do we have to tell people we are from Jordan?” Mar Mar said.
“Baba, didn’t you say we are from a great country?” I asked. “We are bigger than this tiny country. Why should we suddenly become Jordanian?” I touched the smooth brown mountains of Iran on the surface of the map.
“Never, ever doubt the glory of our civilization,” Baba said. “We know who we are, but some of our neighbors might not know our country that well. They might mix us up with the bad guys who are holding hostages in Iran.” He pointed to the TV stand in the living room corner. “Do you see the news every day?”
“Yes,” we both said.
“I don’t want anyone pestering you, knowing you are Iranian.”
“Daddy . . . mmm . . . Baba, what does civilization mean?” I asked.
“It means we had, well, still have, a well-organized society in Iran. We have great art, music, and literature that we are proud of. Our people admire beauty from ancient times.”
“Baba, will those barbarians let the Americans come home?” I asked.
“Do they know Marcie is waiting for her brother to come home?” Mar Mar asked. “Didn’t they see her crying on TV?”
“Where did you pick up that word, Moji?” Baba asked.
“From Sindbad’s stories,” I said.
“I see,” Baba said, nodding his head. “Well, let’s not call them barbarians, but they have committed an outrageous, uncivilized action against the Americans.”
“What do you mean by uncivilized action?” I asked.
“La elah ella Allah!” Maman said from the kitchen. “Don’t you girls have homework?” She had spooned the batter onto the cookie sheet and placed the tray in the oven. She came to the living room and said, “Will you let these Jordanian girls do their homework and muse on their nationality change for a few days before you lecture them about civilization?”
Baba laughed out loud. “Sure, my Jordanian lady.”
Maman sat on the coffee sofa beside me and pulled me close to kiss my head. She combed her fingers through my hair as she glanced at the map shining under the light. I folded the map carefully on its creases, trying to restore its original shape.
“Baba,” I said, “can you buy us a world globe, like the one we have in our class?”
“Is this map not enough for you?”
“The mountains are raised on the globe, and the oceans have rims. Can you please? I’ve seen a couple in Kmart.”
“You like geography?” Maman asked.
I nodded and said, “Maman, there’re too many islands, too many eccentric names written on our globe.”
“Eccentric!” She patted my hair and winked at Baba.
“Next time we go to Kmart, we’ll go to the school aisle.” He leaped from the sofa to turn on the TV.
* * *
Carla, our neighbor’s daughter, was a year younger than Mar Mar. She was taller than both of us, and she wore dresses all the time. Her mother must have been fond of dolls, buying so many clothes for Carla and dressing her like a doll. Pleated or plain, she wore colorful dresses when we played. Her freckles darkened in sunshine like chocolate spots on her cheeks, and she always tucked her soft, light brown hair behind her big broad ears. She was an only child who loved playing with us and eating Maman’s saffron rice. Every day at quarter past five, she knocked at our front door and said sholom since she couldn’t pronounce salam the way we said. We had tea parties with our dolls and colored our Wonder Woman coloring books when she was at our house. Late in spring, we rode our bikes back and forth in the street. I was the fastest even though I was the smallest, and I often had to wait for Mar Mar and Carla at the end of the street.
One Saturday morning in April, when the dogwood tree in our yard was in full bloom, we cycled the neighborhood many times. Toasted by the sunshine, we grew thirsty by noon. We pulled up to Carla’s house, panting over the handlebars of our bikes, trying to catch our breath for the next race. Carla’s mother came out to the porch to fill the food bowl for their black cat. She was wearing a snow-white bouffant dress that covered her skinny legs and made her look like a dandelion on a thin green stem. She called to us as she poured the cat food in the bowl. “Y’all wanna come in for some Kool-Aid?”
Carla nodded. “Let’s go inside.”
Mar Mar and I had never gone to their house. We stayed where we were.
Carla noticed the hesitation and said, “We’ll be back soon.” She followed her mother and disappeared into the foyer. “Come on in!” she yelled from inside.
I glanced at Mar Mar. “Shall we go in?”
Maman didn’t like us going to the neighbors’ houses, but we were both thirsty and tired. We decided to go in for five minutes to drink the Kool-Aid and then return to our bikes. A cool, dark hallway led to their living room. Unlike our bare rooms, their entire house was decorated with fine wooden furniture. A tall grandfather clock emerged at the end of the murky hallway. It struck twelve as we meandered past the decorated walls. The bay window in the living room had off-white voile sheers covered by aster-patterned curtains. Mar Mar and I sat on the white cotton sofa facing the windows, and Carla slid onto the love seat in front of us while we waited for her mother to bring the Kool-Aid. An old gramophone, similar to the one Leila and Saba had, played “You Needed Me”—a hit love song I’d heard many times those days. Withered and parched, we faded in our seats, listening to the song.
Memories flooded back as I glanced at those curtains hanging in front of the windows. Maman used to take us to Zartosht Street in central Tehran to buy textiles for sewing dresses. The stores in Zartosht Street were famous for their upholstery fabrics, curtains, and clothing. I would touch the curtains while Maman haggled over prices with the sellers. Aster flowers, with their lavender petals embracing the marigold anthers, were my favorite pattern. The flowers, kittenish and coy, lived on a rough, starched cotton background, and the petals turned a slightly different shade as I caressed them. I could smell the dampness of the sea, as if they bore the sea mist in their threads.
Once I asked Maman if she would sew a gypsy skirt out of those aster-patterned curtains for me. I dreamed of dancing around the house, floating the skirt in the air, and spreading the scent of the sea.
Amid the melancholy of the moment, I suddenly noticed the oceanic blue of a world globe in the far corner of the room. The giant globe shone like a star on its cherry wood stand, attracting me like a magnet. The next moment, I found myself beside it, fondling the raised amber mountains.
“You like the globe?” Carla’s mom asked, jolting me out of my dream. She’d entered the room with three ice-filled glasses of cherry Kool-Aid.
“I love world globes and maps.” I ran back and sat on the sofa.
“Come, drink the Kool-Aid and let’s see what ya know.” She placed the drinks on the marble table in front of the sofa.
Carla jumped out of the love seat and gulped down the Kool-Aid in three seconds.
“Moji? Am I right?” she asked Mar Mar.
“No, Mom, she’s Mar Mar. She looks bigger, but she’s not,” Carla said.
“Carla always talks about y’all.”
“Thank you, ma’am,” Mar Mar said as she picked up her glass from the tray.
“Ya gals need to come here more often. Carla enjoys playing with you.” She sat in the love seat, placing one leg on the other, twirling her pointed kitten heels in the air. “Now tell me, where are you from?”
I placed my Kool-Aid back on the tray and darted to the globe to spin it to the Middle East. The blue sphere twirled a few times before I could locate Iran on the map.
“Mar Mar and I were born here!” I touched the raised Alborz Mountains. “On the foothills of this silent volcano, named Damavand.”
“Oh,” Carla’s mom said. She rose from the love seat and came toward me. She bent down to look closer at the globe. “But this mountain chain is in Iran.”
“Yes ma’am. We were born in Tehran, the capital of Iran. Our country was called Persia before, and we are Persians. Persia was a great empire. Have you heard anything about our history?”
“Ha! But I thought ya gals are from Jordan.”
Mar Mar shook her head in silence. I suddenly remembered all about Jordan and noticed what a huge mess I’d made.
“Yes, I mean, I mean the Persian Empire stretched to the Mediterranean Sea in the old times. It included Jordan as well,” I said. “Iraq and Jordan were part of Persia before.” I slid my trembling fingers from the mountains to the blue sea.
“I see,” she said. “You know a lot about history, don’t ya?” She moved back to the love seat. “You want some more Kool-Aid?” “Thank you, ma’am. Can we go back to our bikes?” Mar Mar said.
“Yeah!” Carla screamed. “I’ll win this time.”
Mar Mar and Carla rushed out of the room. I stumbled after them, ashamed of the conversation I’d started, mortified by the identity I’d revealed, and terrified of Baba’s reaction once he discovered I’d broken his rule. A gush of remorse washed over me as I realized that I had endangered myself, Mar Mar, and the whole family.
* * *
For a few days, at a quarter past five, we expected Carla to appear at our door. But she didn’t come to play with us. We wondered if she was sick, so I decided to check on her one afternoon when we were biking outside. Mar Mar sat on her bike beside the porch while I knocked on their door. After a few seconds, Carla’s mother opened the door.
“Hello, ma’am,” I said. “Can Carla come and play with us?”
“Carla is not home. She’s gone with her father to see her grandma,” she said. She was wearing a lemon-colored lacy dress with a teal blue belt that day. She placed her hand on her waist and said, “She won’t be back for a few days.” She shut the door without a goodbye.
I shrugged as I turned back to Mar Mar. As soon as I got on my bike, Mar Mar said, “Moji, look!” I followed her eyes and glanced at their bay window. Carla was peeking at us from the corner of the aster curtains. She waved at us and smiled. Suddenly, she turned her head back and dropped the curtain.
* * *
Two weeks after the incident at Carla’s house, all our neighbors knew we were Iranians. There was a giant maple tree close to the cemetery where kids gathered under its shade after school. They had roped the inner tube of a truck tire and hung it from a thick branch of the maple tree to make a tire swing. Mar Mar and I sometimes went there and took turns riding the swing with the other kids. One day after a thunderstorm, we biked all the way up the hill and parked our bikes against the short wall of the graveyard. The dogwood petals that had been blown off in the storm covered the sidewalk like a white floral carpet. As always, we said hello to the other kids and joined the circle around the swing. I noticed that the tall boy I stood beside stepped away from me. No one said hi to us.
“Who’s the last in line?” I asked.
“You ain’t going to swing today. You and your sis,” the tall boy yelled back at me.
“Why?” Mar Mar asked.
“’Cause you keep our hostages!” the girl on the swing shouted back.
She jumped off the tire and stamped on the green grass in front of Mar Mar. She pushed her hands against Mar Mar’s chest and said, “Ain’t you Iranian? Carla’s mom told us you are!”
Mar Mar fell back on her hands on the wet grass.
The tall boy snatched the swing’s rope and pulled it toward himself. “You have no turns. Go back home!” he yelled.
Mar Mar and I walked back to our bikes, leaning lonely against the wall under the dogwood tree. I saw Mar Mar’s tears trickling down her cheeks. She wiped her face with her dirty hands. A streak of mud lined the lower rims of her eyes.
“Don’t cry, Mar Mar.” I tried to cheer her up. “We’ll go home and play together.” But my heart broke when I saw her crying. She was the most patient girl I’ve ever seen in my life. She never cried when we quarreled or when Maman reprimanded her for something. It hurt to be accused of holding hostages when we had nothing to do with the crisis. I had buried the story of the Eye of God in my heart. I wanted to calm Mar Mar, but how could I console her when I was deeply hurt myself?
We never biked in the neighborhood again.