A story adapted from my mom’s high school diary. It’s written in Persian—it’s been so long since my mom has been to Iran that she couldn’t translate it in full, so most of what I write here is an interpretation of what she told me. The journal is orange, held together by string, and kept in an old health sciences notebook.
The man at the front of the class sends spires of chalk dust into the air as he screams about math.
The most basic of human myths: that one must equal one. He scrawls it across the chalkboard, two ones facing each other like a pair of pasty soldiers.
The class doesn’t care. A girl in a pink hijab passes a plastic bag of gojeh sabz—sour green plums—around, and the room swells with the smell of roses. Everyone cries at the taste of acidic juice; their faces turn as red as the man’s, but they laugh, their hands sticky with fruit instead of chalk. A group of boys in the sunlit corner of the room—their uniforms dirty and hair cast over their eyes—try to juggle the green fruit, but can only throw two in the air before they scatter across the dirt floor.
One does not equal one. A tall, thin, dark girl at the front of the class interrogates the man. How can one equal one if I must go to school here while my brother gets fat off American schools?
That girl’s father is dead, whispers one of the juggling boys. That’s why she is so sour.
The man wraps two white circles around the lines as if to emphasize their equality. One must equal one. But he doesn’t succeed; one circle is fat and the other is skinny and leans slightly left.
How can the two be equal, the girl says again, if we look so different? She gestures over to the pink hijabi. She is nothing like me, yet according to you, we are both one. You are nothing like me, but one equals one, right?
This turned the man an even brighter crimson, as if his face were stained with pomegranate.
That is not the same! He yells. This is math!
Where is the line between math and reason? The girl stands now, her black curls falling down her back, her feet planted firmly in the hard-packed dirt. You worship math as you would a God. If you believe in something so deeply, what’s to say you don’t simply see me as a one that equals one?
The rest of the class has stopped playing with the gojeh sabz. Their eyes, still watering from the acid, give them a look of mourning.
Why do you cry, children? the man says, opening his arms to the still room. This is no sad thing—this is a joyous thing, to know the perfect rules of the universe.
There is no perfect, says the pink hijabi. Her eyes are wide and crystal blue, two skies at the core of her beautiful face. Everything mixes and tangles in the universe. I love a boy but he never loves me. My bedroom has no windows. My brother lives across the ocean.
And my mother cannot afford sangak! calls the smallest of the boys, voice high and ringing. The class hums in agreement; the dark girl grins in triumph. The sun stretches across the room and bathes the children in gold.
We have lost ourselves to a war, remarks the standing girl. The sound of war slaps the man across his face. He lets a weak smile slip from his lips and fall to the floor. You silly girls and boys. Within a second he wipes the soldiers from the board, and returns to the class to its original state: chalk swimming in the hot air, tears dried, bag of gojeh sabz tucked under the girl’s desk.
