Elias Alizadeh, sixteen and a half

Prologue - Elias

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My name is Elias.

I'm 16 ½ years old.

I live in a small shithole just outside Malmö, Sweden. Seen from above - a huge grid of tidy looking houses, a mass of pleasant conformity. Total Suburban Utopia.

My parents wanted it that way, to ensure that my Sis' and I would grow up in a child-friendly environment. Nice, kind and cozy. A place where kids can roam around in the summer evenings without getting snatched by dirty old men or run over by rush hour drivers. Very cute.

Mom and Dad fled from Khomeinis Iran in the 80's, to Sweden, this safe, secure and splendid country of maypoles, freedom and medium fat milk. (So Swedish. Everything has to be medium - even the milk.)

They had met in Tehran in the 70's. The dentist to be, Fereshteh, and Kamran, the poor literature student. (I've seen pics of them, seriously Dad, your look...) Mom looked like a moviestar and dad had to work his ass off in order to get her attention. But he succeeded at last – and kaboom! Love and marriage.  

Anyway. They were young and politically active, opposing the Shah regime. (I've always wondered how they went from revolutionaries, to such middleclass squares...)

The more agitated the situation got in Iran, the more the persecutions of the opposition escalated – and both Dad and Mom got thrown in jail. (My Mom in jail – I can't picture it.)

They were lucky that time and got out unharmed. Hopes were high that things would change when Khomeini rose to power after the revolution in 1979.

Things did change. They became worse.

All of a sudden, Dad wasn't allowed to shave and had to grow a beard. Mom wasn't allowed to step outside the home without wearing a completely covering Chador (a type of those huge black garbage bags that some muslims wear. Hey - I'm muslim myself. But they DO look like that...) Their friends, in politically active circles, started vanishing one by one and a religious reign of terror took over from the previous secularised one.

Some time in the beginning of the 80's, when Madonna had managed to make tutus a legit fashion trend and Star Wars made people runt to the movie theaters, (ah, the birth of a corner stone in my personal religion...) Mom got pregnant.

She wasn't allowed to be for very long, though.

One day, when she was on her way home from the grocery store, she was jumped by a group of female religious police who were hysterical about Mom's hair showing a tiny bit from under her Chador. They beat her with their sticks and batons, kicked her black and blue. The beating wasn't enough to cause life long physical damage, but apparently still enough.

She miscarried.

My parents didn't dare to try getting pregnant again, as long as the insane regime was in power, and they still had hopes that things might some day become better, that Iran would become a good country to live in. It didn't.

A couple of years passed and everything kept getting worse and worse. The net around the political activists got tighter and the punishments more severe. Friends started disappearing without a trace. One night, Dad's best friend was arrested, right after Dad has left the friend's appartment. He saw him getting dragged away by the military, bleeding and beaten. That was the last time anyone ever saw him.

When Mom discovered that she was pregnant again, they decided to flee the country.

After an arduous and dangerous journey through the mountains into Turkey, they eventually ended up deciding to apply for asylum in Sweden.  They were lucky and got their application approved and at last, they stepped over the border to their new home country.