Auto Bio Nobody: A Narrative Memoire

By Rasheed Soofi MD

You hold in your hand the pen that draws the course of your life.

Rasheed Soofi does an outstanding job of incorporating world journeys into experiences and interactions with other cultures. From the evolution of professional and social life from these roots to experiences in America and other countries, readers receive a close inspection of different encounters and life-changing experiences that charts both physical and mental roadblocks in life and the process of overcoming them.
- By Midwest Book Review

In this intriguing autobiography, the author begins with his birth and early family life in Iran, sharing fascinating details of his experiences along the way as he eventually makes a new life for himself in the United States. He earns his degree and then practices medicine. We meet and learn of the idiosyncrasies of his mother, father, siblings, friends, school, and work colleagues through stories of his travels and studies. Vibrantly full of color also are the tales of his relationships with various women, from one-time affairs to the three women with whom he has been married.
- By US Book Review

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Nov 16, 2020
• ISBN: 9781664128446

Rasheed Soofi MD

Dr. Soofi was born in small town of Langrood in province of Gilan, Iran. He was a gifted child and the last of the thirteen children of an affluent feudal landowner in era of collapse of feudalism. At youth, he had interest in mathematics, history, and philosophy, but at the persuasion of his family he studied medicine at Tehran University that continued in New Jersey and Illinois. He practiced Medicine & Surgery in Chicago area for 20 years and retired shortly after the peak of his professional career. He moved to California for retirement and pursuit of rediscovering his old passions. He studied gemology with interest in precious color gems and developed skills in sculpturing and artistic tilework. Dr. Soofi is author of three volume autobiography and memories of his fascinating path in life, from months before his birth to his current life in the suburb of San Diego, CA.

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Copyright © 2020 by Rasheed Soofi, MD. 816816

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced

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Xlibris

844-714-8691

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Library of Congress Control Number:  2020916621

Rev. date: 11/13/2020

To my parents. To my siblings. To my daughter. To those whose presence, words, directions, or contributions enriched or steered my life. To all immigrants infatuated with flirtation of lady America and her over promises. To over achievers with never resting minds, busy climbing up long social ladders for all the wrong reasons. To risk takers with much to lose. To those in search of true love and finally, to very few who have sensed the true love and suffered because of it. My story is the one of yours.

AUTO

BIO

NOBODY

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

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Dr. Soofi was born in small town of Langrood in province of Gilan, Iran. He was a gifted child and the last of the thirteen children of an affluent feudal landowner in era of collapse of feudalism. At youth, he had interest in mathematics, history, and philosophy, but at the persuasion of his family he studied medicine at Tehran University that continued in New Jersey and Illinois. He practiced Medicine & Surgery in Chicago area for 20 years and retired shortly after the peak of his professional career. He moved to California for retirement and pursuit of rediscovering his old passions. He studied gemology with interest in precious color gems and developed skills in sculpturing and artistic tilework. Dr. Soofi is author of three volume autobiography and memories of his fascinating path in life, from months before his birth to his current life in the suburb of San Diego, CA.

Contents

Chapter 1     To Love And Be Loved Is To Feel The Sun From Both Sides With Sweet Ocean Breeze

Chapter 2     The Unwanted Child

Chapter 3     The Childhood

Chapter 4     Amlash

Chapter 5     Rasht

Chapter 6     Tehran

Chapter 7     Medical School

Chapter 8     Insane Exit

Chapter 9     Christmas In Madrid

Chapter 10   The Big Apple

Chapter 11   Yes, I Do

Chapter 12   Trenton, New Jersey

Chapter 13   Chicago, The Windy City

PREFACE

BREAKING THE PROTOTYPE of traditional autobiography writing, the author brilliantly blends daruma and comedy of his first three decades of his life into a delightful tale that resonates to millions of immigrants and others in the same situations across the planet, who either have thought of travelling outside of their homelands at some point, or have been forced to take a similar path as author did. The story appeals to all creeds and colors of immigrants, in every corner of the earth who lived some variation of the same life; either ending in success or in catastrophe, or between these two extremes; but hardly has been shared in any languages with such detail or passion as author did.

The story is just one account of one immigrant who relentlessly chased his destiny like millions of his kind do in each year; except that the author found the courage to share the heart-rending and cherished events and moments which most tend to sensitively safe guard for life. This memoir could easily be the one of any nobody we encounter in our daily lives. In part, it could be the story of any persons sit next to you at a bar, the mechanic who works on your car, the nurse who draws your blood, the doctor you trust, or the neighbor you recognize but never heard his or her story. That is why it is so precious of a privilege to read the story of any nobody’s life and his or her aspirations and struggles. That is the beauty of the non-monolithic society of America; and the beauty or the diversity it displays to the core; particularly when the thought provoking writing of the author demonstrates, in detail, the stigma it takes, the enormous efforts it demands or hefty price needs to be paid for a chance of basic right to live, for search of freedom or for pursuit of happiness, for whatever reason, so many thousands harsh miles away. Only so few lucky ones make it through the inevitable treacherous path of the forced or voluntary human migration, the high hop over all the unpredictable, like author did; to make and remake entirely new lives at each stagnant phase, before thriving on to a more rewarding life ahead at additional risk or loss.

What is captivating about the life journey of the author and that it will appeal to readers across the globe is its innovative concept of first-person narrative fashion, with the most candid details in an inspiring taste, as he manages to weather the storms on his path with the chaotic and emotionally tearing moments in his life. It is chronologically paced and remarkably accurate in time and locations so far up to his third decade of life. The events are layered with random sequence of true life daruma, comedy and tragic comedy in life of man growing in small town of a third world country, envisioning all together a different future for himself. The collection of his true-life dramas continue to be unraveled colorfully to demonstrate to the readers the complex adversity that exists in making a decision of remaining in the a war torn native country or leaving all he has for a chance of reaching America, his utopia; welcoming the fatal risks on a tortuous journey to a farfetched neverland called United States. The conflict within is whether to acquiesce to the same fate as his birthplace must have; or to leave and float helplessly in the unchartered water with menace of sinking to the bottom in his sight. Along that journey, the author shares with his readers, in great detail, endless of other mind-boggling dilemmas of his short life which is akin to what every immigrant experiences a part of it in various degrees.

No one wakes up having dreamt of leaving behind their homeland, their mother tongue, their family, friends, culture, music, and everything they are made of or are a part of. It is a decision that is made against all forces of sanity or rationality, often the decision is made for them such as lack of food, fear of losing one’s life in a of territorial conflict, as result of terrorism, or by other forces and fears; and less frequently it is driven by power of ambition or uncontrollable infatuation, such as in case of the author. The immediate blaze is aimed at the cultural identity at its root, burning it down slowly, initially by cultural deprivation and social isolation that may last for, some immigrants with less aptitude for adaptation of a new culture, often a life time; provided one is lucky enough to survive the merciless waves of the course in physical or financial term as the author did. This path, however, is a common one. Millions of immigrants do it every year leaving homeland for a promise land under compelling circumstances, or untainted necessity. With it, develops stamina, resilience, bravery, endurance and abundance of untold stories, each unique in its own class that is the building blocks of the character each immigrant brings with himself or herself; and endows it to the new culture and its society; making it enriched, intriguing and exciting to live in that community for other immigrants from elsewhere; and for the natives to live in congruence. Although there are some articles to the contrary, nobody is yet proven to be genetically suited to withstand the inherent hardship or suffering of a traumatic immigration. It is likewise, unrealistic, and cruel to expect such stoicism. The strength is built due process, a little at a time, discipline shapes, goals establishes, earthly desires is kept at check, and direction is lightened up step by step and in due process; where the little hero within grows larger and outsizes the person to meet the challenges it demands.

In this memoire, you will find just one nobody man turns into his own hero at childhood and remains the same along his long journey to his promise land. Autobionobody, daringly dissects the emotional and physical elements of a classical immigration; italicizing the names, food and places recognizable to readers of his origin, and is stimulating and will appeals to all immigrants in western world, as well as to the natives who may have faced, in their own homeland, a displacement, by force or on own will; and had to overcome the same very obstacles as the author.

In his first day in a new world, author elegantly describes the very sentiment of every immigrants in their newly found promised land, "I could not have possibly gotten lost as everywhere was where I wanted to be." This construed mindset is an impermeable shield of protection, instrument of survival, an armored knight to defeat the impending human tragic experiences. It is this sentiment, in the case of author that outsmarted the smartest around, out-gambled the gamblers, and thrillingly out-smuggled human smugglers. No matter where our path may lay, this zest, hidden deep inside of our brain, in one form or another, like a dragon guardian angel is ready to be awakened into paly to clear the path, where the one’s heart is desired to go. This resolute animalistic trait, more astounding in human, is as pious as life or love itself.

The story so far pertained to an era that I was not yet into play. By what was shared so far in Autobionobody Part I, I learned more about the author, his ambitions, his courage, his perseverance in such detail than he ever cared to share with me personally in the past thirty years. The author has many great quotes of his own; one which is worthy of sharing here is, No tragedy in life is too big not to laugh about. As you, reader, laugh reading through tragic segments of Part I, your will be attesting to the truth of his quote. And when the event of his memoire raises the awe in you, you would be wondering, like I did, what will come next in Autobionobody part II & III

Another Nobody

Chapter One

"TO LOVE AND BE LOVED IS TO FEEL THE SUN FROM

BOTH SIDES WITH SWEET" OCEAN BREEZE

AS COUNTLESS MANY times as I had been to Coronado Island, the very last one on Thursday, November 23, 2017, was not a routine visit by all means. I had been to this unique, rich, and wonderfully landscaped part of San Diego since 1990s, when I first discovered it accidentally by attending a continued medical education conference. I remember it vividly; I was then married for the second time, with a young daughter. The conference was in a convention center. At that time, both the city and the convention center were not as gloriously developed as they were in later years. We had come for a long weekend conference/vacation. We had not rented a car since my wife was not too fond of driving around a busy city while on vacation, especially with an infant on board, and I was to be at the conference most of the two days and during the daylight. That would have alone made renting the car futile, if not an unpleasant driving for my wife alone with an infant in the car. We were staying in a hotel downtown, a short walking distance from the convention center, and we did not mind taking that quick walk in our shorts while the rest of our hometown of Chicago at that time was in deep winter freeze. In the afternoon of the Saturday conference, with a lighter workload, we were treated, as part of the program’s diversion for families of the attendee doctors, to attend a party at the internationally known Hotel Del Coronado. We were all taken there in a large, air-conditioned luxury bus from the conference center. I remember looking from the large window of the bus on my second-row seat on the right with a panoramic view of the street. I was enjoying the sun shining straight at us from the front and right window warming up my capillaries. My wife, Jean, with our daughter in her lap, had entered into a trance state for the very same reason. The fact that we knew how freezing it was at that moment in Chicago made the sun feel much warmer, the palms much greener, and the flood of tourist pedestrians more enticing to watch. The architecture and cleanliness of the city street leading up to the magnificent resort captured my soul in such a way that I intuitively knew, at those moments, that I would be back here again, and indeed, I was. Coronado Island, later on, became my most favorite and adored place on earth for many reasons, among which two stood up high on the list. One was the tranquility it brought me, walking on its shoreline, and walking atop a row of many white sandy hills stretching from Hotel Del Coronado to the US naval base. Those sandy hills were more or less aligned in a row, a hundred feet away from the ocean, yielding a decent width of the prettiest white sandy beach I had seen in United States. A mighty naval air force base of this country sat comfortably to the west of this heavenly shoreline. In most of my days in the many months of January or February of several years, while in San Diego, I used to pack my lunch consisting of a can of sardine, a piece of dinner roll, and a couple of cans of 7UPs, along with my reading materials, and spend the two to three warmest hours of midday walking under California’s soul-warming winter sun on those sandy hills, up and down, until I reached the chain link fence of the Air Force base where I then marked the eighth post away from the ocean with a Roman number with my car key. This post was too far inland for the ocean tide to bury it too deep to reach, no matter how much water level raised. Later on, when I walked the same walk with the love of my life, we added one or more passionate kiss to that marking on the very same post and sometimes enjoyed the revitalizing, cool winter Pacific breeze as we captured our kisses on our iPhone. The healing peace I sensed in that island was not limited to that walk. I spent countless lovely hours people watching on the cute beige-colored benches, each dedicated to the memory of the individuals who had donated the fund for their installations. They were well positioned, with a great view to the ocean, and were large enough to comfortably fit two persons, or possibly three, and certainly with ample room for my packed lunch, drinks, phones, and books spread next to me. These benches were at a right distance from the ocean to benefit from the palliative melody of the Pacific waves and to feel the refreshing breeze, yet not too close to be disturbed with the commotion and boisterous beach activities of vacationers. I loved to nest on those benches for long hours and watch the horizon on the Pacific before and after its sun setting and have lunch or read the daily paper I used to borrow from the nearby Panera Bread or Starbucks on my way there. Those were the only few rare occasions that I would experience a wakeful rest. There were seven benches on Ocean View Street along the half-mile stretch of pedestrian walkways. Three of the benches were in sets of two, close to one another, and one stood alone at the foot of the stairs leading to the pass connecting the street parking area to the hotel or the beach. This one bench, unlike the others, was not directly facing the oceans but rather was diagonally positioned, facing southwest, with a view of Point Loma on the horizon, and also facing, in part, the magnificent-looking oceanfront homes lined up next to one another, each with a different character and one better looking than the others on the north side of the same street. All these benches were decorated with metal plates screwed in the middle of the back support of the bench describing the name of their donors in their memories, each with a special quote on its own. This one bench dedicated to the city of Coronado by Grady and Betty Beaubien and Don and Polly Valliere used to dazzle me for minutes every time I read the quote inscribed on it. If it were possible, it would have been the closest description of love in a layman’s term that I had read and experienced on personal level. It said, To love and be loved is to feel the sun from both sides with sweet ocean breeze. Anyone who has truly fallen in love or has been loved will surely relate to this profound quote, that not only finding true love or truly being loved is as improbable as having the sun shine at once from both sides simultaneously, but also so much better than most San Diegans get to have in Coronado by having sun shining from one side only, with that heavenly ocean breeze.

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Evening walk on the beach, Coronado, CA

Secondly, I revere Coronado, in some ways, as my last love was consummated on this island, in fact, on the very same bench with the quote. It was not like in that age, I had not been given love or lovely affections before. It was not like I had not confessed my love or affection to others before true love dashed on me in spring of 2010. I had read much about true love before in the vast wealth of Persian literature surrounding the subject, and I knew such things actually exist, but I had not yet realized the full depth of it, despite having had six profoundly passionate relationships with six other fine ladies, two of whom I actually had married and two others I had lived with. In two marriages prior to the last one that were wrecked ultimately, I did feel emotion, affection, lust, endearment, possessiveness, craving, and several other poorly described feelings that I then thought were collectively called love, and it might have been, at least some version of it. I still carry leftover feelings for those four from a distance and wish them well when their thoughts or images come to my mind and cherish the time, the memories, and, in one case, a daughter I shared graciously. But the last one was strangely encapsulating, overwhelming. It felt like a lightning or thunder as described by the bodyguard of Michael Corleone when Michael was first stroke by it while on exile in Sicily. But I found a better and humorous version to define it, fitting both genders equally. I think experiencing love, in my mind, is similar to having orgasm. It has various ranges and relevance at various times and circumstances. One could only appraise the pleasure of the past ones when a more fulfilling one comes around. It is only then one realizes what he or she was missing in the years past or, better even, how lucky he or she is to have finally sensed such reward of nature or how few are so fortunate to have seconds of that feeling while it lasted me close to seven years. How exhilarating and egocentric to know that there might still be better ones out there, and the cruel nature was not just kind enough to bless one another shot at it once again.

I remember my last one as if it were yesterday. I got a call that ended up bringing me to Coronado for one last time, at the cusp of riddance of such love, so much sooner than I expected. I ordinarily do not pick a call with a number I do not recognize. I developed this habit, like any other doctors, who fear wasting their free time on the phone answering what could be a sale call or a call that is hard to get rid of quickly. I was perhaps so much at peace, sitting on that bench under the glare of the setting orange sun in my eyes, hastened in my reaction, and I robotically answered that phone call. I was well rested, in good mood, and ready to head back to my dinner date, and I had absolutely nothing to do or to worry about in that moment, except to get back to my car and drive to the restaurant some ten miles away in an hour’s time, where I was to have dinner with this Chinese Canadian gal I had met the night before at Imperial Beach. The voice on the other end was weird, in a quiet tone, and thickened whispered voice, a bit much like a call from the 1-900-LOVE ME number. At first, I could not understand what was being said, but when I listened carefully, she was speaking English in a low and broken syllabus and interrupted tune because of poor connection on account of my old phone having been dropped by accident in the sand the day prior while bending backward to get a good look of the bottom of the military jet flying so low. It took two or three minutes of ponder as to where that call was coming from; and knowing that shortly after, it put a smile on my face instantly. She was the lady I had been chatting with since Christmas of the year before on a dating website called Iranian Personal. I was surprised that she had actually called me. She had not given me the slightest inkling that she would be the type of gal to call, mostly from the kind of note exchanges we were having in the weeks prior. I had given up on that website and on all those ladies. I found later, some by experience and some by assumptions, that most of them were fake and intentful, to say the least. Almost all of them were on the hunt for marriage at all cost and meaninglessly. In fact, I had met two of these ladies from that site in San Diego, one on the Thanksgiving holiday of the prior year and the other in the same month of February. One was a mother of two who had flown from Charlotte, North Carolina, to meet me in San Diego, and the other one came from Toronto, Canada, a daughter of a well-to-do owner of a few McDonald’s franchises in Toronto. Both had come on their own cost, spending two days and one night in San Diego and being my guest, of course, from pickup to drop-off. In their defense, I had started on the wrong foot and had no intention of pursuing a relationship with them. The disastrous outcome in both instances were partly due to my deep-seated ill images dating back to my college years at Tehran University School of Medicine. Regardless I was polite, discreet, and extremely pleasant, more than I normally was, to make them feel welcome and not have the slightest regret making the trip. The best metaphoric impression summarizing my opinion that most men, and particularly Iranian men, can easily understand is the metaphor of Mercedes or BMW, which are universally loved by Iranian men. Those two Persian ladies whom I met in San Diego were like a brand-new Mercedes Benz or BMW with a very shiny metallic exterior and a luxurious interior, as sub-metaphor for their overdone makeup and revealing short dresses with exposed bosoms, except that they were either missing an engine altogether when the hood went up or, if the engine was endowed in rare cases, it was too rusted to get started with the first few attempts, and if, in some miraculous way, it got started, the ride would be uncomfortably bumpy that it will surely be followed by overwhelming regret to have taken up that ride in the first place. A great deal of patience and fake adulations is typically needed to get their rusted engine accessed. That was my exact experience when I dropped them off at two different times at the airport for their outbound flight, and I felt the same sigh of relief that I normally felt when I finished my past written school exams. But these two times were not the only sighs of relief I enjoyed; the three other ones were also gifted to me when my three other dates with Iranian ladies ended in my own hometown, Chicago.

For some strange reason, that telephone call was hard to hang up on despite the pierce temptation. The conversation went longer than five minutes, and that was odd for me to stay on the phone that long with any woman up to that time after my mother had passed away. This time, I was not going to take a chance at all, so I was very upfront with her, slightly less polite than I had ever been with anyone. I went right to the core of my concern as soon as the usual long, boring habit of Iranian-style exchange of pleasantries were done with. It was not like I was in a rush since I had a whole lot of time on my hand and I knew a nice Chinese dinner, plus some other likely surprises, was awaiting me a short ten miles away. I wanted to break the news to her that no matter what kind of tricks she had up her sleeves for me, they had already been played on me by other gals of her kind. No need to sweat too hard on this unfortunate soul; maybe she would move on to some other lonesome, gullible man on her list of favorite losers. I gave her an earful when it came to my turn to speak. I told her that I was not much of an exterior or interior guy or fond of the model of a car. I needed a car that started fast and gave smooth rides. I told her I was driving a Ford Expedition for the same reason. It is there for me when I needed it, whether it be an all-night ride or an early-morning ride or a two-o’clock-in-the-afternoon ride. It was comfortable and made me feel secure and welcomed me in any way. Moreover, hardly anyone noticed such car or admired it or stole it. Nobody with sane Iranian mind will desire it, except an esoteric guy like me. I told her nothing was wrong with a Mercedes either, so long as I first lifted its hood to see the engine and started it before I cared about its mileage. I told her about my take on the website and the experiences outside the site. I was honest and spoke my heart out, and she was listening; I could tell. Most Iranian girl would have hung up on me in the first few seconds of hearing my dreadful testimony about their kinds, not to mention a large section of telepathic Iranian women who claimed they can sense which man suits them best as soon as a few words are exchanged, and by that they mean they can sense a man who cannot be fooled from that first assessment, hence a good reason to move on quickly to the next. But she was still on the line and listening, not rejecting what I was saying or reputing it. She was agreeing to it with one caveat, and that was, in her opinion, that I had not yet been fortunate enough to sample the right kind of Iranian woman with Diezel and that she would prove it to me soon. At that moment, I suddenly felt weak and intimidated a little. I reverted to my nicer defensive gear by twirling halfway in that bench, now facing Point Loma. I felt a slight chill down my spine, mostly anxious as to what I was getting myself into again. Was it not enough trying the same venues? We kept talking, and it came natural afterward, with laughter and cracking jokes, as if I was chatting with an old male college friend. I lost track of time, and we talked some more. She was eager to make travel arrangements for the following weekend of February 20 and 21, 2010, and she could not wait to meet me in the great city of Chicago, where I was also headed to the very next day, back to my real life. That call ended with some more exchanges of lovely words, in a way assuring that neither of us were going to regret that upcoming date, and in fact, it turned out to be exactly that.

That forty-five minutes of initially unwanted conversation made me as light as a feather, prancing for the rest of that evening on tumultuous notion of having been pursued by a woman wanting to travel on her own cost and time, despite any lack of persuasion on my part. The events that followed that phone call in the course of seven years had brought me to this special visit to Coronado for a final farewell and a lot sooner than I had imagined. A visit to Coronado without her being by my side and following an eight months’ lapse was unimaginable to me only eight months ago. I never imagined that her warm hands and touches that palliated my hours of anguish would let go of mine so sadistically and so abruptly and that someday, when my turn comes, I would take my last breath in her arms. But sadly, once again, the cruel nature had a different fate and final lesson in store for me. In a matter of weeks, my life changed from that of a healthy and happily married man who came home to have supper with his beloved wife to a man who miraculously escaped a traumatic death by a thousand cuts before the eyes of his adored wife. I saw and felt death for minutes, and I was convinced that I was taking my last breath not in her arms, but by her watching and wishing it. Sadly, I survived it, and things did not go to her liking. I lost my vision as a result and sustained and suffered multiple excruciating flesh wounds, a broken shoulder, and aortic dissection and remained in psychotic depression and in the depth of a sucking pit of despair under the weekly care of a psychiatrist for months. I suffered from insomnia, and when fallen asleep with the help of cocktails of sedatives, hypnotics, and antidepressants, I woke up soon after, night after night, by horrific nightmares, in profuse perspiration and pounding palpitation, gasping for air alone in my rural home. Twice in the course of the first five months of it, I had put a revolver to my temple to do away with the excruciating somatic pains and the life I no longer could endure. The second time, I was distracted just a minute prior to pulling the trigger of my Smith & Wesson by honking of the car belonging to my home care lady, Brenda, checking up on me on the order of the psychiatrist and bringing me food. I was physically disabled because of my broken shoulder. I could not move in any direction without some level of pain. I could not wipe or wash myself for a month until Brenda took me for a surgical repair a month ago. I was mentally crippled and emotionally incapacitated, unable to attend to any work requiring any grade of focusing. Nothing mattered to me any longer. My house was in a disarray and my mail not opened and my bills not paid for months. Most days of the first three months she had gone, I sat on my desk chair by the window, overlooking the road below, dazed most hours, only aroused by the hum of a passing car to see if that belonged to her coming back up the driveway. I imagined her getting out of her car and kneeling down in the front yard, asking me for my forgiveness. Most nights, while in my bedroom, I could hear her talking, and I would run down two steps at a time to see if that was her. Every time Brenda pulled up to the gate to drop off food or my medication, I pictured and wished that the car was hers to have come to see me from the window of my office. I recovered very slowly but steadily, one day at a time, and became more oriented to time and place and mindful of personal hygiene.

In my helpful psychotherapy sessions, I was told by the skilled court-appointed psychologist that he is facing a good amount of guarding and resistance on my part in his psychoanalysis, and he cleverly deducted in the third session that it was because of my literate background and fair knowledge of human psychology. He suggested that if it was hard for me to talk about awful things that had happened to me in the course of my life or it hurts to say them during the session in a way that I would not be missing bits and pieces, as an alternative, I could write about what bothered me or how I had coped with them all along and how I should cope with my current anguish on hand or in the coming months and years ahead. I thought it was a great advice; it could be the very instrument of desensitization to painful events of the past to begin grabbing bitter memories one by one by their horns, event by event, from the very start and in detail, dissecting them to the core by recollection, finding the facts by means of reasons and reconciling with the truth extracted, and coming to closure issue by issue, a chapter at a time. If a physician of my complex background, with good command of language, the psychologist said, could not share the detailed narrative that he needed to analyze, how could you expect the same from a lay person in agony with no education or literacy? He added an old adage to support his suggestion: What is not shared is lost. That was extremely and augmentatively perplexing, killing three birds with one stone: to desensitize myself from agonizing images that still haunted my days and nights on a weekly basis, to help my therapist to treat me better, and to share the story of my convoluted, sad life with enumerable humorous and tragic events in every phase of my life and all the lessons learned with every overachiever like myself, every immigrant enthralled by American dream like myself, every man or women in pursuit of notoriety by means of education, and finally every man or women in search of true love. My right shoulder pain had been reduced significantly in its third week of recovery, and the range of motion of my right arm that was being improved slowly with physiotherapy sessions had recovered to the level that I could use my right hand to type comfortably. I had no work, no job, but surely, I had a long, interesting story of my life to tell. So, after eight months, I was back walking on the shoreline of Coronado, with a right shoulder brace and sunglasses on for the photosensitivity I had developed by the traumatic loss of my right vision. I was there to tell the beloved Pacific Ocean what had happened and what she had done to me since the last time we were both there walking in each other’s arms. Had I not answered that call on that afternoon in February of 2010, would my life with her have turned out with some other way at another time? Was the experience of the rarest gift of nature, the gift of true love, even one-sidedly, worth the massive devastation of my state of physical or mental health that love inflicted on me? I was there at that shoreline for one last time to reaffirm the love I harbored for the Pacific Ocean for so many decades and the love the Pacific had gifted me seven years ago and release all that, the sweet sip of true love nature had gifted me, the bitter taste of hatred that nature was force-feeding me, back into Mother Ocean. It was my last visit and a goodbye to Coronado, the way knew and adored. I was to metaphorically submerge into the ocean, returning back to the safety of the womb of my mother Pacific to cleanse my physical body and my mind from all ill or evil thoughts or feelings, vengeances, repercussions, and retributions and drift consciously as I once floated innocently in the womb of my own mother with a heart as deep as the Pacific Ocean.

Chapter Two

THE UNWANTED CHILD

IN MID-OCTOBER OF 1955 (Aban Mah of 1334) in one upper-class household in the city of Langrood, a small eastern city of Gilan province in Iran, some five miles south of the Caspian Sea, the lady of the house was deep in thought, with three major dilemmas on her mind as she laid her head on her pillow alone. She was no stranger to conundrums, growing up as a daughter of a poor Kavkaz peasant with only one brother as sibling. But this time, they were much different and hard to sort out. She was in her early thirties and the master of this comparatively large household and responsible for the day-to-day and long-term affair of her six children aging from six to thirteen years, with a husband who was mostly a ghost visitor or part-time father at his best. She also had her aged and very frail mother living with her, who required physical and medical care. She had her mother move in with her when her father had left them right after her wedding in an argument with its roots in her marriage and he had gone to live and work with a nephew of his in Esfahan in the center of the country with no regular contact on account of vast distance in those days. He was a tall, skinny guy with bright blue Caucasian eyes. It is said that he made some trips to Russia to visit his relatives during that time period but never made an effort to visit his daughter, her family, or his wife. He and his wife, then as young kids from two different underprivileged peasant families, had moved down from the southern territory of the Soviet Union to northern Iran on foot, amid the rapidly rising Russian Revolution for fear of religious persecution, and had adopted this little town as home. Although, after leaving his wife and daughter in a heated argument, he came back to town nine years later and chose to live with his son and his family in the same town. He never approved of her only and dearly loved daughter’s wedding and grieved up to the last of his days of his daughter being wed forcefully to a socially feared and egotistical man against his will. Even after his return so many years later, living only a few miles away from his daughter, he did not keep in touch regularly. His only daughter, on the other hand, would make regular visits to see him. She also regularly visited her only sibling, an older brother, and his family, consisting of a wife, two teenage boys, one girl, and one infant baby boy. A few times a year, her father would come to see her and her family for lunch and tea when he was sure his son-in-law was absent. Her father had died in his sleep from a massive heart attack a few weeks prior while taking an afternoon nap on the second floor of his son’s residence. She was still mourning his loss in a black dress and veil that normally stayed on until the fortieth day of his passing.

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Seven months of age, in backyard of our house, Langrood, Iran

The maid had just lit up the wood-burning stove on the second-floor bedroom just before she went upstairs, and the chill of the early winter wind whistling through the cracks of the wooden window frames was a promise for a harsher winter in store. As she tucked herself into a very thick white blanket made of chicken feathers with lamb wool lining, she thought of the details of the upcoming wedding of her oldest daughter, Sahra, that was to be held in that house. The wedding reception would go on for seven straight days as it was the custom for the rich and prosperous in those days to show off their affiance. She had to make sure every facet of that wedding would be carried out to her liking. After all, everyone in the town would be expecting it as such; otherwise, humiliating gossips were a sure bet in places like public bathhouses, barber shops, and women gatherings of two or more. But this was the least of her concerns compared with the other two parading in her mind. She had just heard a gossip the previous day that her beloved husband had his eyes on the daughter of her longtime next-door neighbor. It was not like that her husband had not done that sort of things before elsewhere. The truth was that she married him and entered into his life knowing he was already married with two children from another wife who were kept separately in another household thirty miles away and had courted many other women in the area. This remained to be a bleeding wound for her dad and brother for their remaining years. She had accepted that one prior marriage willingly on three persuading notions. First, she no longer could bear the parental discord she had witnessed in her home since early childhood while struggling with poverty and could not wait to bail herself out of that home. Second, the wealth, glamour, and recognition she thought of herself undoubtedly deserving lured her into turning a blind eye to her husband’s previous marriages and unaccounted matrimonies. Lastly, and more importantly, as an underprivileged young girl, she was enchanted by the way she had been pursued for her hands in marriage in an amalgam of measures such as persistence, taking no for an answer, dispatching numerous matchmakers with valuable gifts, and a bit of intimidation and threat. She soon regretted it not because he was married before or had two healthy children, but because of the sort of person she later found him to be.

In due time, she came to grasp the bitter reality and carried on her life, cunningly accepting her husband as he was and his other marriages, and later bore him six kids. Perhaps, her numerous pregnancies may have been her subconscious attempt for not falling behind on the scoreboard as the other wives had only done five. It was one thing if her husband was courting women indiscriminately far away from her home, but it would be another thing to look into the eye of the young girl next door at the age of her own daughter day in and day out as another rival. She knew she could not handle a neighbor as rival and must do everything she can to stop it from happening. But that night, the issue was not the worst one in her mind; she had found unexpectedly that she was pregnant with her seventh that nobody was aware of, but herself. Since her last pregnancy was six years prior and her absentee husband had hardly showed up, she thought there would be very little chance of this last pregnancy, and she was regrettably wrong. It was very early in the pregnancy, and she had just missed her last period twice in a row. She had some milder signs of hyperemesis gravidarum in the mornings that had alerted her of this possibility. There must be something she could do about it. She had conflicting feelings common to all who are suffering from unwanted pregnancy, among which were self-prosecuting guilt feelings and abhorrence of her husband and the horrid events awaiting her in the coming weeks. Although she was raised as a Muslim girl and educated up to sixth grade in Madras-style teaching, with strict observance of all sacred rituals in Shiite faith, she was not a devout, mosque-going Muslim, and that was one less barrier for her to do what she was about to do. Moreover, the northern cities of Iran in the 1950s were far from being labeled as religious-minded cities such those at the center or south of the country. The influence of the Russian Revolution that had spread across the northern boundaries of Iran had helped the formation of many political groups of communists and Marxists active among the youth or intellectual bodies of those cities. The people of Gilan and Mazandaran had welcomed and adopted part of the lifestyle that went with the Communist ideology and its modern version the best they could, hence making it easier to break, in part, from strict religious codes that governed issues such as abortion. On the other hand, on a personal level, to make the agonizing decision of ending an unwanted pregnancy and to accomplish it was far from easy. Just the shame of announcing it to her ill mother or to her oldest three teenage daughters and facing the indifferent look of her husband was itself unbearable. Luckily, there was Ghamar Khanoom, her longtime confidant and social counsel and the town’s well-respected, unschooled homeopath/witchcraft practitioner she had reached out to many times in the past with great success.

In the coming days, while attending to all of her daily tasks, she had started to increase her physical activities around the house, only as much as discretely possible, while having several servants attending to the same chores of cleaning, cooking, and gardening. Certainly, the house offered her one viable option of three stories of staircases to run up and down repeatedly and some of the chores requiring considerable amount of physical strength; these duties were basically left for young and strong male servants to do, such as carrying large loads of dry woods or coal through a very narrow stairway leading to the basement with low ceiling or pulling a wooden bucketful of water from the deep water well in the backyard. Since she micromanaged everyone in that household, including her children and servants, it was not too unusual to anyone that she engaged in more physical activity, therefore leaving her the opportunity to effectively inflict on her unborn fetus just as much extrinsic trauma as she could hope that the fetus pop out from all the extra pressure lifting, climbing, or at times directly pressing on her lower abdomen. Failing in these measures, she decided to turn up her efforts a couple of notches before asking Ghamar Khanoom to step in, knowing that she would have approved of these primitive steps before her expertise was to be exploited. Fatigued with extra chores and stressed about the upcoming wedding, she fainted once on the stairway leading to the second floor, falling six stairs down, losing consciousness temporarily. She regained consciousness minutes later and returned back to her activities without such luck as what she wished for. In the midst of all the commotions and excitement for planning an exceptional wedding with guests of honor of almost every celebrity in the province and a handful from the capital city of Tehran, in despair, she reached out for help. She knew it will be least suspicious to her mother and her three teenage daughters, one to be wed soon, if she did not go to Ghamar Khanoom’s house but rather have her come into her house on pretense of consulting on matters of the wedding. Her husband, of course, was nowhere to be found but had instructed to be summoned for a vote of approval in matters related to wedding; the rest he would not care much, except very rarely on an impulsive veto sent through a messenger, who then rode horses to deliver the messages, which would ruin all the effort put in place by many in days prior. It was no secret, nor unproblematic, that he was not present at the birth of any of her previous six children from this wife, and the verdict was not clear in the same regard for the birth of his other five children by the other wife who quietly endured her fate.

Attending to the affair of the wedding was a blessed golden opportunity to call on Ghamar Khanoom and her magical power to set things straight, as she always did. Four different crises on hand could be resolved by Ghamar Khanoom, way before the wedding. She needed prescriptions for each crisis separately, and this is best accomplished in a face-to-face visit, bearing the least confusion or suspicion of her three remarkably curious teenage girls. Sahra was normally dispatched to summon Ghamar Khanoom, but that could not have worked this time for obvious reasons. These prescriptions Ghamar Khanoom wrote were basically holy verses in Arabic, either taken from the Quran or she fabricated herself. Nobody was able to read or verify them in any way. Everyone treated those prescriptions respectfully in the same way they did to the pages of Quran in a combination of divinity and fear, blended intimately, as it is the same in other faiths. They were written in blue, red, or black ink using a bamboo hand-carved ink dip pen with very pointy end that wrote just as smoothly as a Waterford Beaumont fountain pen. It also had a fine-quality leather sleeve she carried with her when she traveled out of her house. Whenever the verbal instruction with homemade herbal remedies would fail to do the job, she was quick passing out these prescriptions to her clients or their families to be used in various instances, ranging from curing an illness or repelling evil eyes. They came with some liquid in which the prescriptions were to be soaked first for a while and then fed to the subjects, and in some instances, the method was as simple as putting them in one’s pocket or under one’s pillow at night. Piecing girls’ earlobes and treating hernias and malaria were her other services. The chloroquine pills had just found their way to that little town, and she powered those pills and added some homemade additives to them and named them Ganganeh in Gilaki, which would do magic to revive malaria-infested patients, and the credit all went to Ghamar Khanoom while the same pills were available by prescription of two local doctors. She had a sturdy short statue of only four feet and some inches in height, supposedly a pious old lady whose face was revealed to ladies only in private, otherwise covered head to toe with a black veil. She was married twice, with one grown son from her first marriage, with whom she was living in a modest home only a ten-minute walk away. She carried a worn-out copy of the Quran with her in public at all times, with most pages ripped but still in order with handwritten notes similar to those prescriptions in between every third or fourth of those pages. It could indicate that not only she wore out that copy of the Quran in her readings, but also, if needed, she would have a few generic prescriptions available for emergency cases when there, for whatever reason, was no time to write a fresh one.