Next Stop, England
For as long as I could remember, as a child, I heard my parents say that our family was only in Iran on a temporary basis. We had been stateless until I was 10, and my feeling was that the world was open to us and we could go wherever we wanted to, once we decided where that would be. I had no notion of geopolitics and the impossibility of such free access to the world. It seemed to me that we had ended up in Iran by accident and that our destiny was elsewhere, somewhere less fraught for me as a girl, in a place that considered me chattel and a target of arbitrary male malice. By early adolescence, girls (and women) were considered fair targets for men’s harassment and could not walk on the street without being pinched, groped, or attracting prurient comments. I was entering that stage in my life, where my fairly carefree access to the streets of Tehran were hampered by unwanted attention. I knew it was difficult to leave Iran, since in the past, my stateless father had to b