Waiting for the second tick

“They are planning to discharge me tomorrow, Insha’Allah.”

Maman is wearing a green surgical cap and a pink hospital gown. Her face is tired and her voice shaky, but she keeps the smile on, as always. This was ten days ago. Nearly eighty, she had just undergone an operation for what doctors fear is cancer.

Since then: radio silence.

Maman used to send me a steady stream of Quranic recitations and warnings about Western imperialism. Even though they were a nuisance that triggered an eye-roll, I find myself aching for them now. While she was in the operating theatre, the ground outside was shaking. Another tremor under the surface has erupted into protests. The internet has been throttled, phone lines are down, and I am cut off.

My parents were pro 1979 Islamic Revolution. Pictures of Ayatollah Khomeini adorned our walls. I marched in Qods Day rallies, my small fists clenched, shoulder to shoulder with my brothers, chanting death to America and Israel. My father went to the frontlines of the eight-year war with Iraq to fight for his religion.

Yet, as the revolution’s promises fizzled into autocracy, and Islam became a tool to justify state violence, and as I realised my country punishes my own identity with the death penalty, my beliefs faded. A gap formed between me and my family, especially my religious brother.

During the 2022 "Woman, Life, Freedom" uprising, Maman told me how my sister-in-law attached that very hashtag to her Instagram posts. I wonder if she is on the streets now, her chador flowing behind her, chanting against the machine she was raised to revere.

I have lost touch with my friends in Tehran, my "chosen family" from the city's secret underground gay scene. They have every right to be desperate for a change. But here in the diaspora, I am left scrolling through social media for crumbs of news. Exiled Iranians cheer for a revolution that feels cinematic from a distance. I, meanwhile, am only waiting for the second grey tick on my WhatsApp message to Maman:“Are you OK?”

While I want a change of the regime, I worry about the "after." Will my sister-in-law be harassed for her chador in a new Iran? Will Maman keep that picture of the Ayatollah on her dressing table, not as an emblem of the current regime, but as a relic of the hope her generation once carried? Over time, that hope curdled into the keffiyeh-wearing militia and morality police we fear today.

‘HELP IS ON ITS WAY’ was Trump’s latest post. If there was an internet, I imagine, no I hope, Maman is seeing this and swearing at the TV or whispering ‘Astaghfirullah’.

I watched these protests with a feeling tempered by history, familiar and uneasy. I do not know how this ends, or if I will ever sit by my mother’s bedside again. I only know that I am waiting through the blackouts for a sign that she is there.

Until then, I wait for the familiar conveyor belt of Maman’s sermons.

I wait in hope.

I wait in fear.