The ordeal started with a ring at the door.

Parkinson’s had already been part of my life for a few years, so when I opened the door, my left side was doing what it usually did.

Standing on the doorstep was a young couple from across the road. They looked serious and upset. Their Tesla was parked outside with a long scrape down its side.

“Did you hit our car?” the man asked.

It wasn’t really a question.

“I didn’t.” I said.

He glanced at my left hand.

“Your are shaking. It must have been you.”

His wife stood beside him with her arms folded, staring at my tremor as if they’d caught me out. The truth was, my left hand always shook. But to them, that was all the proof they needed. My tremor had become the evidence against me. I tried explaining again that I hadn’t been anywhere near the wheel, but they’d already made up their minds.

They lived in one of the new townhouses with bright white façades that looked slightly out of place among the older 1930s houses. Earlier I’d seen them pushing a pram. I’d smiled and nodded hello; they had looked straight through me. Now they finally noticed me, and only because they thought I’d damaged their car.

What should have been an awkward conversation on the doorstep quickly escalated. Word was already spread through their WhatsApp group, which I wasn’t part of. Neighbours started coming out into the street. One woman walked over to my car and placed her hand on the bonnet to see if the engine was warm. Then a young man arrived, arms folded, simply watching.

My partner touched my arm and whispered, “Please, just go inside.” But I couldn’t. Walking away felt too much like admitting guilt.

Then came a neighbour I’d often seen wandering barefoot up and down the pavement. He got right in my face.

“It’s you. Definitely you. The scratches match.”

He announced that he worked in car insurance and knew exactly what collision damage looked like. His certainty seemed to carry more weight than anything I said.

It went on for a long time. They accused me. I denied it. At one point I even suggested letting the insurance companies sort it out, simply because I wanted the whole thing to end.

Then something shifted. I stopped arguing with them and started arguing with myself.

What if it really was me? What if I’d been in some medicated fog, clipped their car and genuinely couldn’t remember? Parkinson’s had already taught me that my body couldn’t always be trusted. Standing there, surrounded by neighbours who all seemed convinced, I found myself wondering whether my memory had betrayed me too.

Eventually people drifted away. Later, looking out of the window, I saw someone photographing my car. More evidence for the WhatsApp group, no doubt. Even after the street emptied, I couldn’t shake the feeling that people were still watching.

I didn’t sleep properly for days. I kept replaying everything in my head: the knock, the crowd, and my own tremor making the case against me.

A few days later, while I was in the shower, the couple came back. They handed my partner a small box of chocolates, mumbled an apology and left.

We stayed in that flat for another year, and I hated it. I always parked as far away from their house as I could, convinced they were watching me whenever I got out of the car.

It wasn’t until our last day, with the car packed and ready to leave, that I finally heard what had really happened. The grandmother of the baby in the pram stopped for a chat.

“Turns out it was the elderly neighbour,” she said casually. “The Tesla’s camera caught it.”

She said it as though she were commenting on the weather. A whole year of feeling like a pariah, dismissed in a single sentence.

As I was closing the boot, another neighbour wandered over.

“So you’re leaving?” he asked with a faint smirk.

“Yes,” I said. “Because of you. And because of the rest of the neighbours.”

It just slipped out.

We got into the car and drove away. I never hit that Tesla, but it took me a long time to stop feeling as though I had.

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I found this photograph somewhere online. It was blurred and scanned the wrong way round, so I enlarged it and flipped it.

It shows a small pushcart on a street in Tehran, perhaps in the early 1970s. There is everything on it. Cigarettes and matches, sweets and biscuits, chewing gum, toys, stationery, and a few things that look like firecrackers and sparklers.

The results of Iran’s national lottery, Bakhte-Azmayi Melli, are hanging from the front of the cart: a rooster, a fish, and rows of winning numbers.

A Nowruz advertisement for Iran’s pre-revolutionary National Aid Lottery. The slogan reads:

The grand prize was a Peykan 51. A small snapshot of 1970s Iran: Nowruz, luck and the dream of a new car.

Now we can see the old Tehran that smoked its Oshno cigarettes, chewed Khoroos Neshan gum, wrote with BiC pens, bought toys and abnabat for its children and, sometimes, with a Bakhte-Azmayi Melli ticket in its pocket, put its hopes in luck.

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Some images are discovered. Others are imagined. And some begin with breakfast.
This one started with a freshly baked sangak. I looked at its long shape and saw a woman wrapped in a chador. So I followed her.

Sangak is a traditional sourdough flatbread, once baked on a bed of hot river stones. Its name means small stone. The pebbles gave the bread its wonderful uneven surface.
These days, most bakeries use dimpled steel plates instead, and commercial yeast has largely replaced the sourdough starter.

I miss the old sourdough sangak in London. Nothing quite tasted the same.

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I started there in 1970, aged six, and spent twelve years there. It was run by Catholic fathers. I remember the playground, the stairs, and the blue tiles on the walls. There was Persian poetry on them, including these lines:

Four hardships in four lines. Rather a lot of hardship for a six-year-old on his way to class.

And then there was Tintin. I loved Hergé’s books.

Tahamtan is one of Rostam’s names in Ferdowsi’s Shahnameh. Somewhere in my head, Tahamtan became Tintin. So here it is: The Adventures of Tahamtan.

Rostam and Rakhsh have taken the place of Tintin and Snowy, the boys are back on the school steps, and the old poetry tiles are still there.

For twelve years I walked up those steps. The verses were on the walls, Tintin was in my head. It only took me fifty years to introduce them.

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Mirza Rahim Yaghma Jandaqi (1781–1859) was a prominent Iranian poet and satirist of the Qajar era, famous for his sharp wit, independent spirit, and critical verses targeting the political and religious establishment.

In this portrait, he holds one of his own verses:

Ganjoor, the remarkable online library of Persian poetry, brings together the works of hundreds of Persian poets. Its homepage greets visitors with the familiar faces of Ferdowsi, Saadi, Hafez, Rumi and others. But most of these faces are inventions, imagined centuries after the poets themselves had died.

Yaghma is different.

Look closely and you’ll notice a reed pen tucked into the green sash at his waist. Together with the poem in his hand, it quietly declares his identity. His weapon was not a sword, but a pen.

Yaghma’s portrait was painted during his lifetime. This is not a symbolic image of a great poet. It is probably the closest we can come to meeting the man himself.

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My mum’s Ash-e Reshteh and a Jackson Pollock painting.

Ash-e Reshteh is one of Iran’s best-loved comfort foods: a thick, nourishing Persian noodle soup. Kashk is an essential component of ash-e reshteh.

The photograph was taken in 2005, long before Alzheimer’s changed my mum’s life. She always garnished her Ash-e Reshteh with dramatic drizzles of kashk, fried mint, generous saffron, and caramelised onions. She never simply garnished it; she painted it.

Looking back, I realise I was fortunate enough to have been eating edible Abstract Expressionism for years.

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On the morning of 12 August 1999, I bought a copy of The Guardian. Its front page was still dominated by the previous day’s solar eclipse. A photograph of a black disc surrounded by a halo of light filled almost the entire page. Beneath it ran the headline, “The greatest show off earth.”

London had narrowly missed totality, but with more than 96 per cent of the Sun covered, it was the deepest eclipse visible from the capital in generations. It was an extraordinary sight. That same morning at 4:48 a.m. my son Max was born.

There is another solar eclipse will be visible from London on 12 August 2026. It will be the most significant eclipse seen from London since 1999. News of another eclipse, twenty-seven years later, sent me looking for the newspaper I had bought on the morning Max was born.

As I turned its pages, a folded sheet of paper slipped out. It was my first sketch of Max, drawn at 8:36 a.m. on the morning he was born. The lines are tentative, the work of a sleep-deprived new father trying to capture a face just a few hours old. At some point, I tucked the drawing between the newspaper’s pages and completely forgot about it.

For twenty-seven years, it remained there. It took the coincidence of another deep partial solar eclipse, exactly twenty-seven years later, to see it again.

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Looking at that portrait, I wondered what Reza Abbasi might have looked like if someone had taken his photograph.

One detail stands out immediately. He is wearing spectacles, something rarely seen in 17th-century Persian painting. They seem just right for an artist who spent hours painting tiny details. Persian miniatures are incredibly intricate, and every brushstroke counts.

There is another detail that is easy to miss. Tucked into his sash is a dagger. It reflects the high esteem Reza Abbasi enjoyed at the court of Shah Abbas.

I think seeing an old painting as if it were a photograph helps us feel a little closer to the person behind it.

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After writing A Map by Heart, I imagined a geography classroom through the eyes of the great Dutch painter Johannes Vermeer. Inspired by The Geographer, I wondered what such a classroom might have looked like if Vermeer had painted one.

I included a few details from my days at Andisheh School: the geography textbook we studied from, a copy of the Adab-e Mo’asherat (Social Etiquette) notebook that I came across years later, and the familiar verse from Ferdowsi on the wall:

“Whoever possesses knowledge possesses strength. Through knowledge, even an old heart becomes young.”

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The first thing Mr Asgari did at the start of every lesson wasn’t to greet us or take the register. He picked up a piece of chalk, turned to the blackboard and, with a few quick, fluid strokes, drew a perfect map of Iran. He never hesitated, never rubbed out a line and never had to start again. It was as if the shape of the country had been engraved into both his mind and his hand.

We watched in amazement. Later, I learned to draw the same map myself. Decades have passed, but if you put a pen in my hand today, I can still sketch the outline of Iran from memory.

It was the late 1970s. Mr Asgari was our history and geography teacher, at a time when the two subjects were still taught together. Perhaps that was for the best. After all, how can you separate history from geography?

In one corner of the classroom stood a long wooden pole used to open and close the tall windows. Whenever Mr Asgari picked it up, it stopped being just a window pole. It became a spear, leading armies across the map of Iran.

Every lesson began with the outline of Iran on the blackboard. Once it appeared, it became the stage on which history came alive. Every story had its place on that map. Battles were fought across mountain passes. Empires spread over plains and deserts. Journeys followed rivers and ancient roads. One moment Mr Asgari would be tracing the Zagros Mountains with the wooden pole; the next, it became the spear of Ariobarzanes making his last stand against Alexander, who never seemed quite so great from the Persian side of the mountain.

Looking back, I realise he wasn’t simply teaching history and geography. With every map he drew, he quietly passed on his love of Iran.

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We have all seen the London Underground map, whether in London itself or in the many metro maps it inspired around the world. Few people realise that its elegant simplicity came from an unexpected source: an electrical circuit diagram.

When Harry Beck designed his Underground map in 1933, he wasn’t trying to draw London exactly as it was. He was trying to make it easier to understand. He ignored the twists and turns of streets and railway lines, straightened the routes, spaced the stations evenly and turned a confusing transport network into a simple, useful map.

The result was revolutionary. His map fundamentally changed the way transport maps were designed and became one of the greatest achievements in information design. Nearly a century later, its influence can still be seen in metro systems across the world.

What if the map really were an electrical circuit?

That question became this image.

I reimagined Beck’s iconic design as a modern computer motherboard. The Underground lines became electronic pathways, the stations became connection points, and the familiar map suddenly looked as though it belonged inside a computer rather than in a Tube station.

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Every museum has one object around which everything else seems to revolve. In the V&A’s Jameel Gallery, that place belongs to the Ardabil Carpet.

The Ardabil Carpet is one of the greatest surviving masterpieces of Persian art. Woven during the reign of Shah Tahmasp, it was probably commissioned as one of a pair for the shrine of the Sufi master Shaykh Safi al-Din in Ardabil. Measuring more than ten metres in length and containing around twenty-five million hand-tied wool knots, it is a work of extraordinary technical and artistic achievement.

Unlike many great works of art, the carpet tells us exactly when it was made. Woven into one end is an inscription giving the date 946 AH (1539–40 CE) and the name of Maqsud Kashani, who is generally believed to have overseen its production. Above it appears a couplet by Hafez:

The verses refer to the threshold of a sacred place, fitting for a carpet believed to have been made for Shaykh Safi’s shrine. Standing before it in London, however, they seem to acquire another meaning. For many Iranians living far from home, they speak not only of devotion, but also of memory, belonging and the quiet comfort of finding familiar things in unfamiliar places.

When I first stood before the carpet, I admired its extraordinary craftsmanship and the harmony of its design. At its centre lies a radiant sunburst medallion, surrounded by intricate arabesques, flowers and vines. Two hanging mosque lamps appear at opposite ends. They are deliberately different in size. Some scholars believe this creates an illusion of perspective when viewed from one end of the carpet, although others remain unconvinced.

I also quoted William Morris, who described the carpet as a work of “singular perfection” and was instrumental in persuading the V&A to acquire it in 1893.

The carpet originally had a companion. During the nineteenth century, the second carpet was dismantled so that damaged sections could be used to restore the one now in London. The surviving companion is today in the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, a reminder that what we admire today is itself the result of careful conservation.

While looking back at my photographs from that visit, I came across one of my son and me looking through one of Monir Farmanfarmaian's mirrored works. He was not yet seven years old.

Today he is an adult. The Ardabil Carpet is still there. Five centuries after it was woven, it continues to reward those willing to pause and look.

That is why museums are worth revisiting. Not because the objects change, but because we do.

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As Jude Bellingham stood on the touchline waiting to come on for England in the World Cup bronze-medal match, something looked strangely familiar. His head was turned, his body slightly twisted and his gaze lowered towards the shirt in his hands. For a brief moment, I wasn’t looking at a footballer. I was looking at Michelangelo’s David.

At first, the resemblance was purely visual: the bare upper body, the turned head and the slight twist of the pose. Then I noticed something else. David is waiting to face Goliath. Bellingham is waiting to enter the match. Both are suspended in the quiet moment before everything changes.

When Michelangelo carved David, he chose not to show the victory. Instead, he captured the moment beforehand: every muscle alert, every possibility still ahead.

That visual echo became the starting point for this image. Instead of a sling, the figure holds England’s number 10 shirt.

My first World Cup memory is of Pelé wearing Brazil’s number 10. Ever since, that number has never seemed ordinary to me. No one owns it. Each player wears it for a while before passing it on.

Bellingham eventually stepped onto the pitch and scored a magnificent goal. Yet the image that will stay with me is not the celebration, but the young man standing quietly on the touchline, England’s number 10 in his hands.

It was a moment made for marble.

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Last November I published Edward Lear and Me. It began with a coincidence: Edward Lear and I share a birthday, 12 May. He was born in 1812; I arrived 152 years later. That small coincidence became an excuse to revisit the work of an artist whose humour and imagination continue to delight me.

Lear travelled widely through Italy, Greece, Albania, Egypt and India, sketching landscapes, monuments and people with extraordinary curiosity. Yet his travels never took him to Iran. I imagined what one of his limericks might have looked like had he wandered through a Persian garden instead of an English seaside town.

Rather than simply translating one of his verses into Persian, I imagined it had been written there in the first place. Drawing on the visual language of nineteenth-century Persian lithography, I recreated one of Lear’s best-known limericks.

In my version, Ryde became Shiraz. The clogs became a pair of shoes. The little spotted dogs became two pairs of white dogs. The setting changed, but the delightful absurdity remained.

Lear’s nonsense has never depended on English alone. It lives in the freedom of the imagination. That, I think, is why it survives translation. It asks us to accept the impossible with complete seriousness, reminding us that nonsense can travel surprisingly well across languages, cultures and centuries.

There is one final twist to Lear’s story.

Among his sketches is a drawing titled Haniá, from the Persia, 11 a.m., 31 May 1864. At first glance, it sounds as though he was sketching from Persia itself. He was not. Persia was the name of the steamship from which he drew the harbour of Chania in Crete.

It is a delightful coincidence. Even here, Persia appears only as a name painted on the side of a ship. For all the miles he travelled, Persia remained absent from his sketchbooks.

That missed journey became the starting point for mine.

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Some voices enter our lives before we ever hear them. For me, that voice belonged to Qamar Vaziri (1905–1959).

I have no memory of my grandfather, Hasan Marandi. He died in 1965, when I was only a year old. Everything I know about him has reached me through stories, and one story my mother told again and again was how much he loved Qamar’s voice.

The truth is, I hardly listened to Qamar myself. By the time I became interested in Persian music, her surviving recordings already belonged to another age. Recorded on fragile 78 rpm shellac discs, they reach us through a century of surface noise. The hiss, crackle and scratches can make them challenging to modern ears, yet they also remind us that this is not simply music. It is history made audible.

Recently I came across a rare 1928 recording of Morgh-e Sahar. At first I found myself listening through the noise, waiting for the voice to emerge. Then I realised that the noise is part of the journey. It has travelled with Qamar’s voice for nearly a hundred years. Across all those decades, it still carries the power to stop us in our tracks.

Yet her name was never distant. Growing up, I heard people invoke Qamar whenever they spoke about great female singers. She was the standard by which others were measured. Long before I knew anything about her life, I knew that simply saying “Qamar” was enough.

Born in 1905, Qamar lost both her parents before the age of two and was raised by her grandmother, a celebrated rowzeh-khan. Listening to her grandmother’s powerful religious recitations shaped the young girl’s extraordinary voice. In 1924, at the age of nineteen, she stepped onto the stage of Tehran’s Grand Hotel and soon afterwards became the first Iranian woman to sing publicly before a mixed audience without wearing a veil. It was not simply a musical debut. It was a cultural turning point.

For more than thirty years she worked with the great tar master Morteza Neydavoud, recorded dozens of songs and became one of the defining voices of twentieth-century Iran. She was also known for her generosity, frequently giving charity concerts and donating much of what she earned to people in need.

Listening to that old recording, I found myself thinking less about Qamar than about my grandfather. I have no idea which songs he loved, how often he listened to them, or what they meant to him. My mother passed on a single sentence: “Your grandfather loved Qamar.” That was enough.

This is how culture really travels. A grandmother sings in a mosque. A young woman grows up to change the history of Iranian music. A grandfather falls in love with her voice. A mother tells her son. Decades later, that son listens to a century-old recording and begins to understand that he has inherited more than a piece of music. He has inherited a memory.

As I was writing this, I was struck by another thought. Nearly a century separates Qamar from today’s generation of Iranian women singers, yet the story is not over. In 1924, she stepped onto a stage in Tehran without a veil and changed the history of Iranian music. Since the establishment of the Islamic Republic in 1979, women have been prohibited from singing solo before mixed audiences inside Iran. A century after Qamar’s groundbreaking performance, the singer Parastoo Ahmadi performed publicly without a hijab and, according to reports, was sentenced to 74 lashes, banned from travelling for two years and prohibited from artistic activity.

The struggle over a woman’s right to sing in Iran did not end with Qamar. It has continued through the decades since the Revolution, and it continues today.

If you have never heard Qamar before, begin with this rare 1928 recording of Morgh-e Sahar.

Listen beyond the hiss and the crackle. They are not flaws. They are the sound of time itself, carrying one remarkable voice across almost a hundred years. Perhaps, if you listen carefully enough, you will hear not only Qamar, but all those who kept her voice alive by passing it from one generation to the next.

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Nearly four thousand years ago, Babylonian scribes recorded recipes in cuneiform, the wedge-shaped script of ancient Mesopotamia. Many of the surviving recipes are for slow-cooked stews. Although they predate Persian cuisine by many centuries, many Iranians will recognise something familiar in them: dishes patiently simmered over a low heat, not unlike a khoresht. Rather than detailed instructions, the tablets read more like reminders for cooks who already knew their craft.

One of those recipes, known simply as Stew of Lamb, combines lamb with onions, garlic and other familiar ingredients. To an Iranian reader, it feels surprisingly close to home. The flavours have changed over the centuries, but the underlying idea has not: a patient meal prepared by cooks who needed only a reminder, not a recipe.

This image imagines a different kind of recipe tablet.

Tahdig, the crisp golden crust that forms at the bottom of the rice pot, is one of the great pleasures of the Iranian table. It is usually the first thing to disappear. That makes it a wonderfully unsuitable material for recording history.

Civilisations preserve themselves in monuments, inscriptions and libraries. Families preserve themselves in recipes. Most are never written down. They pass from one generation to the next through memory, imitation and the quiet confidence of hands that already know what to do.

My siblings and I grew up watching our mother cook. She rarely measured anything. Plenty of rice, a pinch of saffron, a little more water if it looked right. If we asked how much, she would simply smile and carry on cooking. She already knew.

Today, she can no longer cook. I still cannot quite match her cooking.

The ingredients can be written down. The instinct cannot.

If you're curious, you can read translations of the Babylonian recipes, including Stew of Lamb, in the Yale Babylonian Collection – Babylonian Cooking.

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At the interview, the zookeeper sighed.

“Our gorilla died last week. He was the star attraction. Since then, visitor numbers have collapsed. We’ve had a gorilla suit made. We just need someone to wear it until we find a replacement.”

The Iranian thought for a moment.

“All right,” he said. “I’ll do it.”

He was superb. Like many Iranians in London, he didn’t just do the job. He became the best at it. He became the gorilla. He swung from ropes, scratched convincingly, beat his chest, and soon the crowds were pouring back into the zoo.

Then one afternoon he got carried away. He launched himself across the enclosure, missed the rope entirely and crashed into the lion’s enclosure.

The lion looked up. The Iranian looked at the lion. The lion began padding towards him. Terrified, he forgot all about staying in character.

“Ya Hazrat-e Abbas!” he shouted.

The lion stopped. He glanced left and the right. He leaned over and whispered,

“Agha... shoma ham Irani hastid?” (“Sir... are you Iranian too?”)

While browsing the archives of my old blog recently, I rediscovered this post from 2006. The joke itself is much older and exists in many countries.

What always amused me was how familiar it felt. Anyone who has spent time among London’s Iranian community knows the feeling that, wherever you go, you’re likely to bump into another Iranian. At the GP surgery. The Home Office. A corner shop. Or, apparently, the lion enclosure at London Zoo.

Twenty years later, it still makes me smile.

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A few years ago, I came across an anonymous family photograph online. It had been taken somewhere on the shores of the Caspian Sea in Iran during the 1960s.

The moment I saw it, I thought of Botticelli’s The Birth of Venus. The resemblance is, of course, entirely accidental. Nobody in the photograph set out to recreate a Renaissance masterpiece. They were simply enjoying a summer afternoon by the water. The water is the Caspian, the world’s largest lake. The car is a Triumph Herald. It is exactly the sort of family photograph that filled albums across Iran during those years.

Instead of Venus, I called the work The Birth of Nahid. Nahid is the Persian name for the planet Venus, and the name reaches back to Anahita, the ancient Iranian goddess of water, fertility and purity. The title brought together two traditions that had never met.

I made just one intervention. The Tehran number plate has been reimagined so that its Persian numerals can also be read as the word LOVE.

Working on the image sent me back to my own family’s albums. We too had spent holidays on the shores of the Caspian during those same years. There I found another photograph, taken on the same shore.

My late sister was called Nahid. The work is not about her, yet it was her name that made this journey possible. Through her, Nahid became more than the name of a planet or an ancient goddess. It became part of my own language of love, memory and loss.

The journey began with an anonymous family on the shores of the Caspian. It ended with my sister’s name.

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A city first enters us through ordinary details, long before we understand what belonging means. The feeling that the world, however large, begins from this one familiar centre.

My mother arrived in Britain in the spring of 1987. She was fifty-two. She took to London almost immediately. She learnt English surprisingly quickly, chatted to neighbours, bus drivers and shopkeepers, and loved exploring the city. London never felt foreign for long.

Yet every now and then another city quietly appeared beneath this one.

One day she said, “Let’s get off at Hasan Abad.”

We were on the Northern line, arriving at Camden Town.

Camden Town was Hasan Abad. Archway was Chahar Rah-e Qasr. Junction Road was Andisheh. I would gently correct her, and she would smile as though it hardly mattered.

Years later, standing outside Camden Town Underground station, I finally understood. The red brick. The dome. The busy crossroads. The feeling of a place that had stood at the heart of city life for generations. It wasn’t Hasan Abad, but I could see why she thought of it that way.

She wasn’t making mistakes.

She was translating one city into another.

She had lived in more than one city before London, but Tehran was the map she carried inside her. Whenever a street, a building or a station stirred an old memory, London quietly borrowed another name.

We never replace one map with another. We carry them together. A familiar street recalls another one thousands of miles away. A smell unlocks a forgotten season. A song removes the distance between two cities.

Now, when my mother says, “Hasan Abad”, I no longer hear the wrong station.

I hear home.

Our maps rarely follow geography properly.

They follow memory.

© Mehrdad Aref-Adib 2026

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Today, after hearing of Shahrnush Parsipur’s death, I returned to three photographs that friends had sent me over the years. They were small, low-resolution images. Restoring them felt like a small act of remembrance.

Shahrnush was a friend of my late sister, Nahid, which makes these photographs especially meaningful to me. I also came to know Shahrnush’s voice through her book reviews on Radio Zamaneh, which I rarely missed.

In novels such as Women Without Men and Touba and the Meaning of Night, she blended myth, memory and everyday life in ways that reshaped modern Persian fiction. Years of imprisonment, censorship and exile never diminished her imagination.

The photograph that moved me most shows Parsipur as a baby with her mother, Samilah (Fakhr al-Muluk). When I learnt that Samilah’s mother was Shams al-Muluk Ghaffari, known as Touba, I immediately thought of Touba and the Meaning of Night.

More than fourteen years ago, I restored this same childhood photograph for Yesterday’s Kids, a ShahreFarang feature celebrating childhood photographs of notable Iranians. With today’s restoration tools, I was able to recover details that were impossible to reveal then.

Old photographs are more than records of faces. They preserve lives, relationships and the threads that connect memory to history. Restoring them has become my small way of preserving cultural memory, one image at a time.

© Mehrdad Aref-Adib 2026

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Framed/Unframed Thanks for reading Framed/Unframed. If you enjoyed this piece, the best way to support my work is by sharing it with a friend or upgrading to a paid subscription. Every bit of support helps keep this newsletter going!