Nightly Serenade
It has been quite a while since I heard crickets chirping. At home, in Tehran, when evening fell, the crickets would start singing their hearts out as soon as night fell. As a little girl I remember sitting in our garden on summer evenings as the skies began to darken. First, the lizards would timidly scurry up and down on the garden walls. I would watch them with curiosity, worried that they would slip and fall right into my lap. In those days, we did not have many electric lights in the garden, only on the pathways leading to the house. Sometimes, when we sat outside in the evenings, lanterns were hung on the branches of the trees that towered over us on the edge of the garden walls. The stars in skies above us winked and twinkled merrily. They seemed to joyously dance across the evening skies. The stars in those velvet skies fascinated me. They twinkled magically across the interminable expanse. As my parents chatted softly with friends who dropped by, I would lean back sleepily into the chair. My eyelids drooped as I fought against the arrival of Mr. Sandman, but I always lost the battle. Someone would carry me up to our summer sleeping area on the terraced roof. Even up on the terraced roof of the house, I could hear the crickets. Their soft chirping was like a lullaby to my young ears. As I gazed at those twinkling stars and listened to the crickets, my eyelids grew heavy, and I fell into a deep slumber.
The next thing I knew, it was morning. The sun was shining in my eyes. Slowly, I opened my eyes. I realized I was sleeping on the iron bedsteads on the uppermost terrace of the house.
Many years have passed since then. I married and became a proud young mother to a son and a daughter. We lived in a large flat on top of a hill in the Yousefabad district of Tehran. My ex-husband communicated to Abadan and Khorramshahr and back on a regular basis. The British company he was employed by had several projects in the south of Iran, one of which was to build an airport in Shiraz. Very often my toddlers, Naneh, our maid, and I were alone in our flat. In the evenings, when my children and Naneh were asleep, I would sit reading. The house lay in peaceful silence except for the soft chanting of the crickets and the tick-tock of the clock that has become my faithful companion even up to this day.
Time has a way of flying by. The Iranian Revolution at the end of 1978 forced us to flee our country. The Shah was ousted. We now lived in New York. In New York, we were reviled and hated. I felt like we were violently pulled up by our very roots and painfully flung by the wayside, struggling to survive any which way we could. It was a dark and dismal time for Iranians. There was no sympathy for our plight. Somehow we were blamed for the rise in the cost of the fuel in the country. Some people were quite unfriendly as well. One time, a very unpleasant woman, who is in the habit of making unpleasant remarks each time she saw me, smeared dog feces into the keyholes of our car and our home. My children were tormented at school. In despair, I wondered why? Why? Why? My ex-husband and I were not able to withstand these difficult times. Our marriage had been a rocky one to start off with. We divorced.
Bad times make people grow stronger. From being a soft, gentle, and shy woman, I became a strong and self-assured one. I no longer hesitated to express my feelings and opinions. I stood up for my children and my rights but was never unfair. I met my Peter, and in time, we married and were gloriously happy. On summer evenings when we returned home from wherever we were, we would pass a wooded area near our home. We always made sure to open the car windows and slow down the car to a crawl. That way, we were able to hear the most heavenly choir of crickets singing their hearts out. There were a myriad of them! Their songs would rise to powerful crescendos and sink to hushed whispery soft pianos. Their songs were so enthralling that I was sure that they rose to heaven. I often imagined that God Himself bent an ear to listen in delight at these, one of His wondrous creatures. I know that they comforted me, how very much more they comforted God in heaven?