Modern.
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Produced by the Ilab at WBUR Boston from the New York Times and WBUR Boston.
This is modern love stories of love, loss and redemption.
I'm your host, Meghna Chakrabarti.
Growing up, Susan Sajadi believed her mother was fearless.
Years later, she realized the truth was more complicated.
Her essay is read by Sarah Shahi, who stars in the new NBC drama Reverie.
My mother liked to drink tea in the afternoon when the weight of the day had sunk in and the heat was still and heavy.
This was in our walled in backyard in Tehran in the early 1980s, after the iranian revolution had changed everything.
My parents were doctors, and under the shah they and my older brothers had enjoyed the kind of privileged life such positions would normally afford, frequent trips abroad, a nice house with a swimming pool, other luxuries.
But in the years right after I was born, when the islamic government came to power, our foreign travel ceased.
Our swimming pool was drained.
Alcohol was forbidden, though my parents kept it hidden in sugar jars.
And despite having friendships that stretched back decades, my parents no longer knew whom they could trust.
On those oppressively hot afternoons, my mother used to take her glass of tea, place two sugar cubes delicately between her lips, and sit in the garden while I played with my toys in our empty pool as if it were a giant concrete playpen.
She sat on the ledge and slowly unbuttoned her shirt, let it slip from her shoulders, and allowed her skirt to fall loose.
Bubba, our cook, was blind, and Nabah Khan, my nanny, was asleep by this hour, so my mother would take her time to undress just steps away.
On the other side of the wall, the pastor on stood guard, their russian supplied AK 47s strapped on their backs.
My mother had reason to fear them.