I was five or so, standing in a line with my mother for rationed butter and sugar on a sizzling, hot summer day. Butter had been out of stock for months, and I hadn't had my favourite breakfast for so long that I had forgotten how it even tasted. "Maman," I said, "can I have honey and butter with bread tomorrow morning?"
"Sure, darling," she said. "We'll get the butter today and we'll have a delicious breakfast." Her smile was reassuring.
The designated store was far from our house. People went there from all parts of the city. We had no other choice. You couldn't simply drop by the supermarket close to home and get the rationed items. My mother used a newspaper to fan me and herself. Another woman in the line fainted and people were asking for water to revive her.
After hours in line, we finally got two sticks of butter and a kilo of sugar. We took a taxi home. Looking out the taxi window, I watched the streets of Tehran, war-torn, windows crisscrossed with duct tapes, sandbags stacked against walls, and young soldiers marching off to war. My attention was still mostly on the next morning's breakfast.
"We got the butter, we got the butter," I sang as we entered the house.
My brother ran into the room. "Where is it?" he asked.
My mother opened the plastic bag to put the butter in the fridge, and when she did, we noticed the butter had melted. An oily mess streamed out of the packages and all over the plastic bag.
My brother's smile faded. He stood by the kitchen door, not moving.
My mother knelt on the floor, the oily mess covering her hands. Then she broke into tears. "Sorry baby," she said.
I hugged her and stroked her hair. "It's okay, Maman. Please don't cry." I could smell the butter. It smelled delicious.
I was born in the middle of the Iran-Iraq war, a war that began in 1980 and lasted eight years. During the war and for years after, people would stand in line for hours with their ration coupons, to buy essential food and goods. Sugar, rice, meat, cheese, oil, tea, and other commodities were in short supply. People would stand patiently in line, sometimes for a whole day in the sun or rain. It could be a heatwave, it could be storming.
Supplies were scarce. No one knew when the next time something essential would be available again. Every other day, my mother would leave home early in the morning to get a place in line to buy our share of milk. Two bottles. The distribution truck would arrive at the supermarket just after sunrise and there was no guarantee that people waiting at the end of the line would get their milk.
During those long years, electricity was also rationed. For hours, several blackouts occurred throughout the country. Kerosene heaters were the main source of heat for most households during the winter, only kerosene was scarce like everything else. In the cold Tehran winters, people would stand in endless lines, in deep snow, holding portable cans, waiting on their refills. I can still see them, covered in snowflakes, blowing on their hands, rubbing them together, shifting from foot to foot, just trying to get warm.
Filling a prescription was another story. Most of the time, people couldn't find heart pills for their grandmothers or cough syrup for their kids. People would go all over the city, from one pharmacy to the other, to find the medicine they needed, or go to the black market and pay ten times the original price.
As the years went on, the memories of the war-torn Tehran of my childhood faded somewhat. But the COVID-19 pandemic brought them back. I saw scenes I thought I would never see again, especially not in Canada: shortages, empty shelves, long lines at grocery stores, banks, and supermarkets, cancelled flights, deserted streets, panicked eyes, and the constant news of death. It was similar to what I'd lived through during the war.
"Can you believe I stood in a line yesterday to enter Costco?" one of my colleagues said during our break. She took a sip of coffee before continuing, "This is the craziest thing." It was mid-March 2020. The pandemic had just started.
"During my childhood, people stood in line for almost everything," I said to comfort her. "It's not a big deal." Her blue eyes grew wider, still sipping her coffee, with a look asking "Where on earth did you grow up?"
A few days into the pandemic, I realized that my Canadian colleagues were panicking more than those of us who had lived through wars or economic sanctions. People here had lived a peaceful privileged life for so long in their democracy far from war, famine, forced lockdowns, or any kind of shortage, that they felt their lives change dramatically. It was being called a war against the virus. "I just can't believe it," I heard people say. "This feels so unreal, like an apocalypse movie."
I watched my colleagues go out at lunchtime to look for sanitizer and toilet paper. My Iraqi and Syrian colleagues and I would listen and nod our heads in sympathy but we were not panicked, especially not about toilet paper.
I did not stockpile groceries. I wasn't scared when I faced empty shelves. But I got angry when I couldn't cook Sabzi polo Mahi — herbed rice with fish — our traditional dish made for Nowruz, Persian New Year. There was no fish at the grocery store. "What are they thinking?" I asked my husband, Aydin. "Is famine coming to Canada?"
Being from the Middle East — where war and sanctions never stop, where your movement is restrained, and your freedom is taken from you — has prepared me for many aspects of living through a global pandemic. It didn't seem like an apocalypse movie to me. The life that Westerners describe as abnormal is the reality of countless people in different parts of the world.
My immigrant experience also helped me cope with things that were unfamiliar to many Westerners. For most Canadians, the notion of virtual attendance at their loved one's birthdays, weddings, and funerals was novel but also weird. My immigrant friends and I had been doing that for years. When two of my uncles died during my early years in Canada, I could not take part in their funerals. When four of my cousins got married, all I saw were their spouses' pictures on social media. My mother takes videos for me at weddings and birthday parties and sometimes I have Skype chats with my extended family.
I have had a virtual family since I immigrated. The pandemic hasn't changed that for me but it has added to my suffering and the pain of loss. When Canada closed its borders, I did get scared. "What if it stays like this?" I wondered. Being lonely and isolated, far from my loved ones, terrified me more than being hungry, more than the hardship of standing in line for hours trying to buy essentials, and even more than getting sick.
Early on, Iran became a hot spot and the virus spiralled out of control. Due to the economic sanctions, there was no PPE and there weren't enough ventilators. Every day, many people lost their lives. I was terrified because I have parents in their mid-seventies. I would call twice a day to check if they were okay. "Please stay home," I would beg them hundreds of times.
I had a breakdown when one of my mother's friends passed away from the coronavirus. I would cry every night and tell Aydin that I would never forgive myself if my parents died and I couldn't be there.
In April 2020 we moved to another city because of Aydin's job. Suddenly, we couldn't hire movers, or ask for help from friends. It fell to the two of us to move the queen-size mattress and the two-hundred-pound dining table. The following day, my muscles were sore and trembling. Aydin's fingers were so swollen that he couldn't even open a jar.
At 7 p.m., I heard loud noises outside the apartment. It started with a cheer, a woman's voice from the far side of the building. Then other voices joined in, howling, cheering, clapping.
"What is it?" I asked.
"I think people are thanking the health care workers," Aydin said.
I rushed out to the balcony and started clapping. It was chilly out and I was barefoot on the cold cement but I didn't care. I didn't want to miss the moment.
The sound of whistles caught my attention and I saw two women dancing in the visitor parking lot. Grabbing the balcony rail, I stretched my neck out and saw my new neighbours to the right, banging pots and pans with wooden spatulas. We nodded and smiled at each other. One person had a walker. She waved and then had to grab it quickly to keep her balance before she could wave again. I waved back.
A moment before, I had been moaning in pain and cursing my bad luck. Then all of a sudden I was cheerful, clapping and howling. I felt better when I stepped back inside. That joyful ruckus was more than just a thank you to health care workers. It lifted my spirits. It reminded me that I was not alone in this pandemic.
That was collaborative therapy and it worked better for me than other therapies did. Standing on my balcony in Burlington, I realized that this feeling wasn't new; it brought back memories from a decade earlier, on my rooftop in Tehran.
In June of 2009, a controversial presidential election took place in Iran. The results were rigged, and the people pushed back. Massive protests broke out throughout the country — the Green Movement. People marched peacefully in the streets, holding up signs that read, "Where is my vote?"
The authorities retaliated violently. Still, people found a way to deal with their fear, grief, and anger. Every night at 9 p.m., when darkness fell, people would go to their rooftops and shout, "Allahu Akbar." God is great. As soon as the first voice pierced the quiet of the night, more voices would join in. The cries echoed across the city.
This was like a code between us, meaning we were together in this catastrophic situation. We stayed on our rooftops for an hour every night and vented our anger and sadness by shouting and crying. It gave us hope.
Then, the security forces cracked down on us. They would identify the houses from which the cries would come by marking the doors with black or white spray paint. The following morning, they would raid those buildings and arrest people. This never happened to any building in my neighbourhood, though, thanks to Mr. Tamjid, an artist in his late seventies. Every morning before sunrise, he would go around and paint out the marks on the doors.
"You can go to the rooftop tonight," he would say. "I took care of the marks." Then he would disappear into our building with his paint bucket and brush.
During my youth, I watched as an oppressive system tried to isolate and frighten people. Now, the oppressor was a tiny virus. It might not be the same but it feels similar. Both situations trigger terror, fear, and grief. But from shouting on the rooftops in Iran to cheering and howling on my balcony in Canada, I felt like I was part of something bigger — part of a large group of people spreading the message that we need to be unified to overcome hardship.
I grew up during a war and I lived under a totalitarian government. Western countries impose sanctions to punish the ruling systems but they only end up targeting ordinary citizens like me. People in the West had no sense of what it would be like to live in a situation like that until the pandemic. The pandemic is a glimpse of life in forced lockdowns, under constant fear of losing lives because of a lack of access to medicine or food. The pandemic showed them how it feels to be separated from loved ones without knowing when you will be reunited. Just a glimpse.
I thought there would be a silver lining to this pandemic when I saw the unification and determination of the world to fight the virus. I thought this global solidarity would help end other ruinous forces, whether war, economic sanctions, oppressive systems, or borders. I was wrong. More economic sanctions are being imposed, more fuel is being poured into war machines, and more refugee crises are being created. Once again, I witness the contrast between "our" lives and problems, and "theirs".