I left Iran with two suitcases and a backpack brimming with clothes and books, the essentials. I left behind the rest of my belongings in my room at my parents’ home, in Tehran. I assumed I would go back every year for a visit and gradually bring what I’d left to my new home.

My mother kept my room intact for a year before she realized I had no plans to go back. Then she started convincing me to give away my stuff.

She went after my clothes first. Every day she would pull out a pile from my wardrobe, take some photos of them and send them to me with massages like, “This green dress is too tight for you. You remember you couldn’t move your arms?”

I had bought the dress for my cousin’s wedding. I liked everything about the dress, but it did feel tight beneath my armpits, meaning I couldn’t reach above shoulder level. Despite my mother’s warning, I wore it to the wedding, where I’d carefully move my hands when I was dancing. Everything was fine till the Kurdish dance began. In every Iranian wedding the Kurdish dance is the spotlight of the ceremony. It’s the dance that everyone, from kids to seniors, can join, standing shoulder to shoulder in a circle, locking elbows and grabbing each other’s hands, then jumping and swinging hands up and down, up and down, all together.

The second I joined the circle, I remembered my dress problem, but it was too late. As soon as my hands shot above my shoulder, I heard the awful sound of fabric tearing. My aunt at the other end was moving her eyebrows up and down, pointing at my armpit. I nodded my head, meaning that I knew, but there was no way to escape.

The rest of the night I sat at my table, arms close to my body. I tried to avoid looking at my mother’s I-told-you-not-to-wear-this-dress face. She later fixed the dress. Still, I never danced with it again.

“I’m going to donate all these winter clothes. You said they are useless there.” That message came with pictures of all my colourful pullovers, jackets, and coats. I didn’t resist. She was right. The definition of winter clothes changed for me once I experienced winter in Canada. None of the clothes and boots I brought here were helpful. I had to buy real winter clothes just to survive freezing. Still, each piece back home had a special memory for me. I wore those clothes at weddings, birthday parties, on my first dates and to graduation ceremonies. Even so, my mother was right, “What is the point to keep them when you can’t wear them?”

A year later, though, she surprised me with a patchwork coat, fashioned from my most memorable clothes. Assembling the fabrics in an artistic way, she had sewn a coat for me. A coat that carries all those memories.

After clothes, it was my books. Floor-to-ceiling bookshelves lined one wall of my room, filled with books I had been gifted or had bought. A real treasure full of memories made it doubly hard to say goodbye. My mother gave the books away, to a library in a village. “Imagine how many girls could have access to what you had?” she wrote. She knew I could not say no to a women-empowering plan.

Clothes and shoes gone, bookshelves bare, childhood toys gone, too, my desk and bed were the last to go. Finally, she had the space she needed. She transformed my room into the sewing room she’d always wished for.

In our small apartment, no one had his or her own space. All the rooms were multifunctional. There was a freezer in my bedroom, and our extra fridge on the balcony that protruded from my room. This arrangement meant I could never have the privacy I wanted. When I would lie up in my bed with a friend, our legs up against the wall as we talked about girlish stuff, suddenly my father would enter the room to get out to the balcony. Without a word, he would place the fruits and vegetables he just had bought into the fridge. In middle of my concentrating on a math problem, my mom would come to grab meat or vegetables from the freezer. Most of the time she couldn’t find them, so she’d start digging around the drawers, and the freezer alarm would go off, and would not shut off till my mother finally closed the door. By the time she left my room, I’d lost my focus in my studies.

My brother had it even worse, what with my mother’s sewing machine and the ironing table in the corner of his room. For me, people would come to put, or grab, things and leave. But for him, people would come and stay to finish their work. No one treated it as someone’s room, or thought of privacy, or thought to ask permission.

No one apologized for intruding. We all accepted that we had to share our space, together.

In our living room, which functioned as a dining room and family room, my father would use the dining table as his working desk. We’d want to watch TV, but my father was working or having a meeting. We’d want to eat, but his stuff was all over the table. It was total chaos when we had a party. I still don’t know why my parents liked to hold such gatherings in that small apartment. Sometimes they invited fifty people, and with not enough furniture, everyone would sit on the floor. I would go around offering tea, pastries and fruits, carefully stepping so as not to crush anyone’s hand or foot. Serving dinner was another story. My mother would put the pots on the kitchen floor, where, with help of other guests, they would fill the plates. I would start putting the plates on the dining table and even before we would finish putting all the stuff out, most of the guests were already full. Then it was time to bring back the dirty dishes to the kitchen, and pile them on the floor, to wash the next morning.

When my brother left home, my mother right away transformed his room to an office for my father. “No more writings and books on the dining table,” she said. When I left, she did the same for herself. This “Let everything go and make a fresh start” was not just for making space. It was also my mother’s response to living with our absence. Now, she is looking at a sewing room and an office instead of her children’s rooms. Without our belongings, it’s easier for her not to visualize the memories.

Still, there is one thing in the corner of that sewing room that belongs to me. My mother never tried to get rid of it, at least not until the Covid-19 pandemic.

“I think it’s tires gonna be rotten soon,” she said cautiously. She sent this message with a photo of my bike leaning against the wall. By this time, my mother was sure I wouldn’t be back home anytime soon. Maybe this was the time to talk about the last item in what had been my bedroom.

“Maman, if you just spin the wheels more often, nothing will happen to them,” I said.

You see, I can’t let this one thing go.

Growing up in Iran, I had to follow too many dos and don’ts dictated by the law, religion, society, and culture. Laws written and unwritten. Especially if you are a girl, there were more and more bans, more nos than you can imagine. One of those many taboos was riding a bike in public.

Boys and girls as kids can have bikes, it’s when girls step into adolescence that most parents stop buying them bicycles. Boys go to the streets and play with their bikes. Girls, it is thought, should stay home and watch street life through the windows. Sometimes girls sneak the use of their brother’s bike. Some of my friends did that. Still, having one of their own would be a big no.

MIn our family, it was vice versa. My brother was not into cycling. It was I who loved spending time outside. I was lucky to have open-minded parents in that society. They were worried all the time, but they never did say no to me.

As a teenager my summers passed by my cycling for hours in the streets of Tehran. In loose jogging clothes and a cap, I would look like a boy, and no one would be suspicious. At the time I went to a prestigious private high school with restrictive Islamic rules, like many schools of its kind. In addition to wearing a scarf and uniform, which is mandatory in Iran, I had to wear a black chador—a full-body-length fabric. So imagine if someone from school found out about me riding a bike like that in the street. I would have been expelled.

Still, I found so much joy and freedom in my cycling, I cared less about what would happen to my education and future.

I was sixteen when my old bike broke. I tried to repair it for a week, but all attempts were unsuccessful. My father noticed my distress. “It’s time to buy a new one,” he said. I had never been in a bicycle shop before. I’d inherited my previous bike and the one before that from my cousins. It was always my brother who would get the new bike, and I would use his when he’d outgrown it. I had never had a brand new bike, one of my very own. I couldn’t imagine having one now.

Stepping into the fancy shop where my father took me was like being in bicycle La-la land. I walked the rows, inhaling the smell of new rubber. I looked at the bikes and their options, while the owner gave his lengthy speech about different Iranian brand bikes, promoting their qualities.

“Do you have something better? I mean, which one is your best bike?” my father interrupted the owner’s speech. He paused for a second, as if hesitating to say something. He looked at me, then at my father, then he pointed to a bike hanging from the ceiling at the far end of the shop.

“It is expensive though,” the owner cautioned. He might have thought that it was waste of money to buy an expensive bike for a girl.

“It’s okay,” my father said. “Can you bring it down?” From his tone I could tell he didn’t like the owner’s attitude.

The owner reluctantly retrieved the bike and handed it to my father, who passed it to me and asked, “Do you like it?”

I nodded without saying a word. I touched the body of the bike, so smooth, with no rough welding marks like my previous bikes. The colour, so neat and shiny. There was a place for holding a water bottle, and the bike had gears. I had never ridden a bike with gears. It was a dream bike for me, something beyond my expectations.

My father bought the French-built Peugeot bicycle, and it cost him a third of his monthly salary. That surprised me. The father I know is always about supporting Iranian-made products, and yet he had just bought me a foreign-brand bike. He had made an exception, and gone against his beliefs, because he knew that cycling was important to me. I already had so many obstacles ahead me, before I could pursue my dream, he wanted to do what he could by giving me the best bike I could ever dream of.

I was lucky that way. He and I shared the same feeling about cycling. Cycling for us was more than sport or entertainment. It was a way to a freedom. The freedom that we didn’t have, but that we would never, ever give up.

My father was born and raised in a remote village. To attend school, he had to walk ten kilometers to the next village. It might be the reason that most of the kids including his own siblings would drop out of school very early on. Not my father. Even as a young boy, he knew he needed to go to school to find answers for his nonstop questions.

He asked his father to buy a bike. A bike would make it easy to get to school and back. My grandfather refused. A bike was likely seen as useless and expensive for a villager. My father didn’t give up. He went on a hunger strike for days that left my grandfather no choice but to buy a bike.

That bike took him from his village to best the universities around the world.

Imagine how a bike can change the destiny of a child.

My own dreams expanded, thanks to possessing that silver-pinkish bike. I wanted to become a champion in cycling.

I would watch Tour de France for hours on our satellite TV and imagine myself on a road, cycling from one city to another. My favorite part was the mountain stages, where the leader gets the red polka dot jersey is named as King of the Mountains. I would watch all the stages with envy and ask myself “Is it possible that I could ride a bicycle professionally one day?”

The summer that I turned eighteen I was determined to find out the answer to my question. Every day for a month I went to the Cycling Federation and even to National Olympic Committee to talk with authorities. As I expected, most of the time I would face closed doors. They ignored or rejected me, and even humiliated me.

“What are you doing here? This is a men’s place,” a doorman at the Cycling Federation told me on the first day. I passed through the gate and got these responses,

“What? Women cycling? Impossible.”

“Are you joking? I don’t have time to listen to your nonsense.”

“Do you think here is Paris or New York?”

“You are like my daughter. The best thing for you is studying now. Don’t confuse yourself with this stuff.”

It was a taboo and no one wanted to talk about it, let alone to break it. I wrote my personal story about riding a bike in Tehran’s streets and all my attempts at creating a women’s cycling team. I sent my story to many newspapers. None of them published it. I didn’t have the power to change the system. Still, I knew, as my grandmother would say, “begin to weave and God will give the thread.”

Through these activities, I got in touch with other girls and boys who also thought women should have the right to ride a bicycle.

At nineteen, with some of these friends, we created our team and took our first cycling trip. It was not normal—and also not legal—for a group of boys and girls to travel together, let alone go backpacking on their bikes.

On the second or third day, close to sunset, I was struggling to cycle up the hill. I stood on the pedals to take full advantage of my body weight and apply more force. With each pedal, I breathed deeply. Sweat was running down my forehead and dripping into my eyes, which burned with sunscreen. I wiped my sweat with my forearm. Raising my head to take a deep breath, I saw an absolutely brilliant orange and red sun go down, right behind the mountain. There, in front of me, the sun’s rays paled and slowly disappeared. “This is it,” I thought to myself. “I am The Queen of the Mountains.” I felt like a champion, with no need for competition, a cheering crowd, or a polka dot jersey.

After that, I took many road trips. Still, in Iran, still on my bike, I had my own fears, worries, and difficulties, but most of the time I would enjoy pedaling and visiting different places. People would open their houses and offer me their food and local treats. I would sleep in the schools and mosques in the villages, where most of the time I would be welcomed, praised, encouraged.

People know what is right and wrong, beyond the rules.

“Look, Maman! She is a girl,” little girls would shout, pointing at me while I passed through their cities and villages. What they were seeing was possibility—the possibility of something they’d thought was impossible. If she can do it, I can do it too. This was the champion feeling I had on my bike.

I rarely get attached to things. Especially after immigrating to Canada, I’ve learned nothing is permanent. I’ve lost my beloved ones, my home, and my identity. There might not be much sense in keeping an old, worn-out bike. But that bike in the corner of my mother’s sewing room is not just a bike. It is a reminder of fighting against all odds, of never giving up. That bike is a trophy that represents the triumph of rebellion—rebelling against unjust rules.

I don’t think I can let that go.

A few weeks after the discussion with my mother, she sent me a new photo of my bike. She’d installed baskets on the front and back, and they now held two pink and red pots, brimming with geraniums. “How do you like it?” her message read.