My younger son was two when he first saw the sea. He looked at it a long moment, then asked: “Who is pushing all those waves?”
And I have been trying to answer that kind of question for more than thirty years.
I was supposed to be a mathematician. In Tehran, where I was born, my father taught mathematics and my mother taught the first grade, and I loved numbers — their order, their quiet magic. Then I found that a poem is an equation with one lovely flaw: the answer is never only one. I have been on the side of the flaw ever since.
The war between Iran and Iraq began when I was eight. My mother used to take the children of our building down to the shelter and read to us there, so we would forget the noise overhead. While the city held its breath, we listened to stories from Persian literature: heroes, dragons, impossible journeys, and the quiet courage that stories carry. Looking back, I never entirely came up out of that basement.
A magazine changed the direction of my life when I was sixteen. Through Soroush Nojavan, a magazine for teenagers, I discovered fiction, and the joy of writing. Soon I found myself working with teenagers — editing their poems, publishing their stories, and learning from their honesty. Many of those young writers have since become some of the most distinctive voices in Persian literature. They taught me something I have never forgotten: young readers recognise honesty immediately, and they never forgive being underestimated.
In time I returned to the Shahnameh — one of the books that filled those nights in the shelter — not because it belonged to the past, but because I wanted today’s children to hear those old questions in their own voices. My retelling of Zahhak, the king with two serpents growing from his shoulders, ran every Sunday and Wednesday in a newspaper for young readers. Before long, children were calling the newspaper to ask what would happen next — and whether I could please tell them today, because Wednesday felt impossibly far away.
By now there are more than ninety books behind me — novels, poetry, picture books, and retellings of ancient Persian stories. I also work as an editor and translator, and for the past fifteen years I have been Literary Director at Ofoq Publishers.
As a child I wanted more friends than one alley or one classroom could hold. But there was no way to have them. How was I to knock on the doors of everyone I did not know?
Then a few poems and stories turned up in my notebook, and I found more friends. I don’t know when my left hand wrote them there, or how. I only know I am fastened to writing by a great coiled spring: the further I go, the faster I fly back.
Stories have introduced me to more friends than I could ever have imagined.
Perhaps you are one of them.
