On Friday night, Sara and I huddled around the old TV set, waiting to be transported from our dingy basement apartment in Tehran to the sun-dappled fields of Prince Edward Island. The aroma of chicken and steamed rice wafted out from our cramped kitchen as Mom insisted that we finish dinner before 9 o’clock. “I don’t want anything to distract me,” she declared. “I want to be able to drink in every moment.” After airing Road to Avonlea for an entire year, Iran’s state-run television had announced the broadcasting of a feature film called An Avonlea Christmas. And the three of us were consumed with anticipation.
Sara and I didn’t know Avonlea was a fictional name. We talked about the people there as if they were our neighbors, greeting us with their warm smiles. We envied those living in the Avonlea homes—houses bathed in sunlight, with flower boxes adorning the windows and rocking chairs swaying on the porches—everything a stark contrast to where we lived. To reach our home, you had to pass through the main door of a nondescript two-story building in some marooned alley, walk to the left corner of the parking garage, and then descend two flights of stairs. There, you would have found two timeworn wooden doors—one leading to the mice-infested storage room, the other to our home, where the floor was rough, unfinished stone, bare of any ceramic tiles or hardwood.
Our landlord was an old woman who owned the entire building and lived on the second floor with her two sons. She had agreed to rent us the apartment only after learning that my dad had died as a martyr in the Iran-Iraq War—because her youngest son, too, had been killed in the war. Otherwise, the whispers of being called zan-e-bishohar or “a husbandless woman” chased my mom everywhere. On one occasion, a realtor hurled insults at my mom right before my eyes, his voice dripping with disdain. Every Friday night, though, as the familiar theme music of Road to Avonlea filled the room, everything else paled into insignificance for us.
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