There were moments in Istanbul full of inspiration for a unique dark comedy. I was writing the script in my mind as it was happening. Yes, a script. On the last night of our stay in Istanbul, I told my parents, “So, let’s have a deep talk. Tell us your heavy thoughts, complain to us, anything.” I was not expecting much, but my mom, who is a joke and also a sniper of truth, instantly said, “It’s been a while. Your father has been depressed.”
My eyes practically popped out of their sockets, and my vision panned from my mother’s heavy facial expression, something somber on the border of humor and deadpan honesty, zero filter, zero prep talk, to my father, who was lying on his back at the edge of the bed, facing us as we sat on the sofa or on the floor of the hotel room. My mother said the thing she had obviously been waiting to say, and my sister laughed as if she had been struck by some internal tickles. “No, seriously,” she said, with an exclamation point on her face. Then the quiet set in between us. “There were a few things that led to each other and mounted into my depression,” my father said. That was a big mood shift in the room, from foamy to fatty. And here and there, in between our deep conversation, it was my mother who mainly spoke the words of my father’s confession, bleakly and bluntly, just like that, throwing his cards on the table. But she had to. Someone had to pull the trigger for my father to speak. He never really speaks about his feelings. With every bullet and every pull of the trigger my mother delivered, my father elaborated on the matter further.But the conversation quickly became therapeutic for all of us, each in a different way. And still, the instant itself was so fucking funny. You know what they say, everything is funny … eventually. This one was funny right away, and eventually it became more wholesome, or even sad.
Now it has been days since we returned to Vienna and my parents went back to Tehran. And the more I recall those horrifically funny moments with such a dark undertone, and wholesomeness they had -the more I think I am truly interested in exploring further some kind of family dynamic as the focus of my novel. But not the usual kind of family dynamic, you know. I am not doing a one to one translation of what I experienced with my own family. But it is definitely happening somewhere, somewhere in Tehran. It cannot be anywhere else, even though I have not been there for so many years that I feel as if I do not remember much anymore. But I am wrong about that, because I do remember a lot. I just have to log in, insert the passcode, and go deep enough for the cartography of Tehran to open up in my mind, at every street corner and write from that space, and surprise myself with where I end up.