Ill-Fated
My name is perhaps Reza, or perhaps Mohammad. Call me Mohammad Reza, it’ll do. My trade and occupation is business, not commerce exactly; well, let both of them go to the devil.
My name is perhaps Reza, or perhaps Mohammad. Call me Mohammad Reza, it’ll do. My trade and occupation is business, not commerce exactly; well, let both of them go to the devil.
First the wretched pandemic, then the indifference of Iranians towards wearing masks, and finally the complete unemployment of us genetic engineers following the birth of Hana, the first cloned goat, during the Ahmadinejad era. These three factors combined to bring about the total extinction of red kangaroos in Australia.
It is seven in the evening on a Sunday, the tenth or eleventh of July, and I am still thirsty. There is a smell of wet sulphur and iron filings. The smell of a damp mop, as though it has been dragged across the filth of the corridor no more than five minutes ago.
As a family, we’ve never liked doctors. You could say we have a blood feud with them. The roots of the hatred go back to the night my great-great-grandfather fell ill and, suspecting he had pneumonia
When the corpse-cleansing ladies brought Mum in and laid her on the slab and pulled back the cloth from her face, Auntie fainted. Nazi, the wife of Gholam the flower seller, rushed off to make a glass of sugar water and brought it back.
I have been awake for nineteen days straight. I counted the pebbles in the Styrofoam cup this morning before I come to the shore and lie down on this smooth slab of limestone and watch the sky with half open eyes.
‘Except for a few exceptions,’ he said, ‘people enter this world alone and leave it the same way. Do you see? It shows that at heart we’re solitary creatures. We don’t really want to be with others, yet we’re forced into companionship: friends, spouses, family, all that.’
Gol Alam insisted that Americans’ blood was green. He said his brother had taken him to see the corpse of an American soldier he’d just killed and he, Gol Alam, had seen it with his own eyes. “The man was drenched in green blood. His face, his chest, his hands, all his clothes were green,” he said. “I swear I’m not lying.”
A thunderous roar hurled me from my bed and slammed me hard against the floor. Like a madman, I rushed out of the house in nothing but my underclothes. Dust had blanketed everything. At first glance, nothing could be seen.
There are only five songs saved on his smart phone. One is the one I just mentioned, which plays from his room whenever, according to my mother, “his elephant remembers India.”