The Ungrateful Refugee. Dina Nayeri
a set of Transformers. Dubai was alluring in its Westernness, and I still associate certain items with those first fugitive days. Playgrounds featured giant exotic fruit—banana slides, pineapple swing sets, seesaws like a pair of cherries. I liked the alligator slide, the way you emerged from its open jaws, uneaten. Rotisserie chickens turned behind foggy glass doors, the birds on the top rows red and juicy, dripping onto the paler ones below. Maltesers and bananas constantly beckoned. Dubai had supermarkets with long aisles, shopping carts on wheels, mountains of Western snacks. Nilla Wafers. Cornettos. The deceitful promises of a tin of Spam. Kentucky Fried Chicken with salty, minty yogurt soda (a magic pairing). And Corn Flakes: in a city that drew out your sweat within minutes of waking, crushed corn soaked in ice-cold milk was a revelation. It cooled your mouth like a summer dip in the Caspian. And yet, it wasn’t sweet enough to satisfy us.
Then, we found Frosted Flakes and were busy for weeks—eating it, waiting to eat it, walking around remembering the taste of it.
“Why don’t they crumble in the milk?” I asked one day, randomly, as we walked. “Why do cookies crumble and not Frosted Flakes?”
“Don’t talk about food all the time, Dina,” Maman said. She wiped her brow. “Do you want people to think you’re some nadid-badid?” This was a primary concern, it seemed, after the loss of one’s entire life: to be recognized as someone who has seen, done, eaten as much as the next person. Nonchalance in the face of displacement—that was our strategy.
Those first days in the hostel thrilled us because we were alone in a wonderland. Nothing seemed real here; we were only passing through, or acting in a play, and for a while, we let the days slip away. Briefly, life narrowed to three in a bed (or a capsizing boat, a desert island, an enchanted castle), on the run, having broken free. However briefly, we lived in a land of Smarties and real Kit Kats and Big Macs. We had no school. Maman never had to leave for work. We walked a lot, trying to tag each day with a marker for future memories. The days blurred anyway.
Then we had an invitation from Mr. Jahangir, our sponsor. We took care with our hair and clothes. “It’s impossible to stay clean in this heat!” Maman said as she dressed us. “You step out looking like doctors’ children and by the time you arrive, you look like you’ve crossed the Sahara.”
“We can take our clothes and change there,” said Khosrou, big sincere eyes on Maman. He lived to protect her, and his plans were always serious.
“We’ll just change in their front yard,” I teased. “No problem.”
Maman tossed her head back and laughed—a triumph for me every time. “Excuse me, Sir,” she said, “if you just give us a minute with our plastic bags, you’ll see we’re very respectable people, not dehati at all.”
“May we just use your shower please?” I said, giggling.
“Can we play your Nintendo?” said Khosrou, jumping up and down.
“You can ask that,” said Maman, stroking his cheek. “That one’s OK.”
We played this game all the way to the Jahangirs’ house.
Mr. Jahangir lived in a huge house with his beautiful wife and a preteen son and daughter who I assumed were twins. When we arrived, they eyed us like defective merchandise. The girl’s sleepy, heavy-lidded eyes gave the impression of simultaneous boredom and a kind of patient, blueprinted treachery. They were beautiful people, all four of them. And the first time we stood in their foyer, waiting to be invited in, Khosrou and I shuffled around, speechless, graceless, like children of the help.
Outside their enormous door, the jokes we had made mortified me.
The twins spoke three languages, listened to Michael Jackson, and drank Pepsi. Each had a bedroom draped in music posters. The girl wore rock star pins on her jean jackets and a tight Speedo racing suit. She knotted her T-shirt at the waist and undid it theatrically as she prepared to dive into their private pool. Then she swam laps as her father kept time. We paid them a handful of visits over ten months; each time the girl eyed me with a disdain I had associated, until then, only with the British. How did she learn to make that face, I wondered, when she isn’t even blonde?
“Your swimsuit doesn’t fit,” she said one day, pointing to the folds in my straps and the creases just below my belly. Nothing ever fit back then. I had no hips, and my underwear routinely fell to my ankles when I ran fast.
It took two months away from my girls’ school in Isfahan, where my grades had earned me respect, to realize that I was nothing special. This family was better than us. They knew how to seem British, or American.
One morning, after a visit to the Jahangirs, I woke to find Maman at the folding table by the hot plate, picking at her lips. Her eyebrows were gathered tight and low, like she had decided something. “We’re not going to sit here and wait,” she said. “As long as we’re here, we can get two things done: you can learn swimming and good English.” I understood that those were the skills that separated us from the Jahangirs. Educated, respected people spoke English. And they swam.
Maman found a local grammar school for us to visit—maybe they could help. The principal, a kind, slim woman with a long braid and a sari, greeted us. She explained that the semester was long underway, that they charged tuition, that we weren’t the usual candidates. She seemed resolved that we wouldn’t enroll there, and I don’t think Maman had hoped for that; it was almost May. The bell rang and the halls filled with children in uniform—the principal explained that the school was English-Hindi, and so even the language courses wouldn’t do us much good. She offered us some used workbooks, free of charge (those too were populated by South Asian school children and their grown-ups), and Maman happily accepted.
Back in our room, Maman erased the answers in our workbooks, making sure she left no trace to cheat by. We weren’t getting school credit for this; we would be judged by each syllable that came out of our mouths. Would we sound refined in our next life, or would we fall into the uneducated class? This seemed of vital importance, now that we had nothing. The thought of a fall in station frightened me. In my three years in my girls’ school in Isfahan, I had learned that only two things made me special: my place at the top of the class, and my parents’ medical degrees from Tehran. How shameful to lose that, to sound like a villager in front of the other children, and to have the most ordinary of them pity my luck.
I wrote my name inside my freshly rubbed-out English vocabulary book and got to work.
A few mornings later, shortly after another brutal Jahangir visit, when Khosrou was still five and I was just about to turn nine, we woke to find Maman already up, reading her Bible, underlining it in a fourth or fifth color. “Good morning!” she beamed. I sensed a scheme.
She got up and turned on the faucet in the bathroom. “Come on, you two, let’s wash up and go out.” Then she stopped, hesitated only briefly as she pulled out underpants and T-shirts for us. Something was happening; I knew it in that second before she spoke. “Dina,” she said, “Daniel, come now, get dressed. Let’s go to the park.”
Who the hell was Daniel?
Khosrou’s coin-shaped eyes grew rounder. He was a chubby kid, and prone to masculine posturing—especially when it came to Maman and the business of her daily protection. Every day, he held her hand in his (not the other way around) and pretended he knew just what was going on, that he was in charge of it.
Now he looked up at me for an answer, and I was still working it out.
“Dina, Daniel,” Maman repeated. “Come on. We have work to do.”
“Who’s Daniel?” I asked, tentative, but also feeling the excitement. I loved it when Maman got up to stuff. I thought she was a warrior. And I was starting to catch on: this was no petty betrayal; it was a strategy. Maman wasn’t going to let us be any less dignified than the stupid Jahangirs.
She smiled. I don’t remember if she explained: This will be your brother’s name from now on because Westerners can’t pronounce Khosrou. She said this later, many times. But did she say it in