Caspian Elegies Layli Shirani (bio) for Ali First Elegy When we were kids, we found Paradise in the dewy Hyrcanian forests and moody, sentient waters of the Caspian seashore. You handsome, a bit serious, dimple-chinned with a drooping lower lip; me scrawny, messy, eager to keep up. Every family has its own unique geometry. Where I was inconsistent, changeful, rebellious, you were steady, committed, argumentative: a Euclidean vector conferring, upholding, the symmetry and harmony that bound us together. Host to endless hectares of shalizar, our Caspian region has always favored the Mehr varietal: the rice that stretches and gives more of itself after a good salty soaking. Our people prize quality over yield. The cultivation of rice is a delicate process involving rice buds—shaltooks—gestating safe and warm and away from any inclemency for a whole year before being plunged in saltwater and gently stirred, allowing the heavier, heartier seeds to announce themselves by sinking to the bottom. The shalikars rinse the more viable seeds, place them in semi-full gunny sacks and submerge them in fresh water, allowing the seeds to swell in size before laying them out to sprout. You would think the surviving seeds are now ready to begin their separate journeys, but they are not. [End Page 69] Picture our homeland as it is often described: in the shape of a cat. Now see its scruff and there we are, in the middle . . . in Vanoosh village, Nowshahr County, Mazandaran Province, on the wrong side of the highway from the seashore, in a modest villa surrounded, saturated, by damp, green shalizar. A cradle. Think: nobody worried about us crossing the busy Nowshahr-Mahmudabad Road during our daily treks to and from the darya, or how often we young shaltooks ventured into those turbulent waters, unaccompanied and unseen. How free we were. I had my big brother next to me. I had you. Iranian shalikars practice the seedling method of cultivation. Every shalizar has a khazaneh—an enclosed area either adjacent to or on the land itself—where the seeds are released into water at least three centimeters deep. Often the khazaneh is covered with a layer of plastic at night to protect the babes from aberrant drops in temperature or other calamities. Here they will germinate, grow tentative roots, begin their adolescence. Once, on our way back to the villa for lunch, you were running ahead of me through a narrow passageway, and the next thing I knew your face was swarmed by attacking bees. I don’t remember which side of the highway we were on, but we sprinted, eyes half-shut and screaming until we reached Mom, who was nearby at the villa if not on the land itself. In the khazaneh, when the plants become teenagers, the shalikars withhold water for three weeks and then flood them, tricking the young seedlings into believing they are ready to separate from the earth. They emerge, quivering, their fledgling roots intact for nearby transplantation. And they are yet a long way from becoming the grains presently soaking in a bowl on my kitchen counter here in California—continents away from their birthplace—resting beneath a watery western salt cap. Suppose I were to tell you that I have never stopped trying to return to that place where danger and separation were neither thoughts nor words, and safety and comfort were always nearby if not on the land itself ? Where the best part of eating balaal by the roadside in Vanoosh was not so much the grilled corn but the process of receiving it by the cob’s end with a bit of newspaper wrapped around and dunking it into a communal saltwater [End Page 70] bucket that was blackened . . . with bits of char, ash, and rootlike filaments. Suppose I were to tell you that my body rejected its transplant, that the distance was too far, the soil too alien. That my roots are still flooded, still seeking familiar earth.1 Second Elegy In one of my earliest memories, we are in Princeton, our leafy anchor to this country. I am scared of the neighbor’s dog who barks whenever we walk past. You grip my...
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Jun 30, 2024
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