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My body reached
maturity early, on a day in 1975. When the breast’s cherry
touched me, I flourished and recognised God’s paradise on earth.
My mother channelled springs of fresh water into my heart,
covered my body with scented herbs, and poured the water of God
into my soul.
Silence descended on me and became my companion. I travelled
through the first years of my life astonished by all I saw. My
body overflowed its banks. I often wore my clothes inside out,
and gathered birds and the neighbours’ peaches in my pockets,
unaware of the curse to come.
Of my brothers and sisters I was the eighth. When my father
descended from the night, fragrant with prayers and rosewater,
his desire was to be blessed with an imam, so he called me
‘Ali’. I carried this inheritance, and the sacred tablets, and I
pulled the skies along with me.
I was sent to the compulsory university, accused of love, and
for the sake of a poem, because I had contemplated the lifelines
of my hand at the age of seventeen. Then at the age of twenty I
joined it again to complete my higher studies.
I graduated, stripped of my certainty about wisdom and
revolution. Nevertheless, those thoughts still beat in my heart.
Maybe I am a kind of bee, because I have loved, and love, and
will love more than one flower, but what a curse this is…
Translated by Ayesha Saldanha
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