Parvin E’tesami: The Sapling of Aspiration

In the American Girl’s School of Tehran, besides the English and Persian language and literature, I learned other things too, adding to my treasury of knowledge. The school was a world which introduced me to myself. When I saw the girls playing in the yard of the school or get together and debate with youthhood excitement, I used to stand and watch them carefully. I used to surpass their appearance and enter the inner world of each of them. To me every girl was a mysterious girl full of mysteries and secrets. I too was one of those girls who felt that she had a mysterious world inside her. An intact, untouched world full of feelings and thoughts and… I tried my best to decipher those secrets. The teachers too were to me each a world full of secrets…

When I left the school, I watched the people in the marketplace and neighborhood who each had a world inside them and these intimate worlds were very close to each other. Although entering the worlds of the people of neighborhood was more difficult than those of my friends and teachers, when I entered their world, I felt that their world was much wider, stranger, and mysterious than that of those I had seen around me at the school. Those days I was always thinking about the strangeness inside human beings, about the things around me, and explored new, astonishing feelings. When I looked at the sky, I felt that I too had a contribution to the rain and wind. Through my walking, thinking, feeling and loving, I assisted the clouds to fall rain on the kind earth. I too used to rise along with the sun and rotate along with the earth.

The world around me was full of wonderful odors and fragrances and everyday I became full of the odor of the world of creation and that of the memory of God Who had created all those beauties all together for me.

Translated by: Sadroddin Musawi