I descibe my mother “As an Angel.”
By Pasha Afshar
This description, in my view, is a bright and expressive image to know a woman whose very life meant nothing but love and sacrifice and compassion. You would think she is not from this Earth…
When she left us, I was about twenty two years old and I well understood the death’s inevitability in Life, notwithstanding I believed she was going to live forever. I simply believed her love and her beauty will be with us as long as we live.
All I remember of my Mother is her love for whatever is good and gentle and noble in life, however I didn’t fully understand the meaning of these words. Today when I recall my childhood, I see my mother woven into all that is beautiful. She didn’t know evil, and she couldn’t tolerate children’s pain, suffering and deprivation. I remember her riding in my father’s American Pontiac, full of cloths and food, to the poor neighborhoods of Tehran. I was just six or seven years old. I would sit next to her and watch the people who would run after our car asking for food donations. One of those days, I recall a five or six year old girl with long hair and green eyes, who caught my eyes. It was probably the first time I had seen green eyes. I was astonished. We were staring at each other; maybe for just a few seconds, and then, she ran to get food from Lila. This green magical gaze had a lasting impression in my mind, and every time I see someone with green eyes, I remember her. I have thought of that day many times. Back then I couldn’t full grasp the highs and lows of life and recognize the fact that life is full of injustices. Years passed and I reached a period in my life when providing the minimum for survival was a great wish demanding a greater will. We had a very hard time to really understand the reality of the days when I would ride along with my mother in my dad’s Pontiac to get food to the people in need. Life plays such strange games, doesn’t it?
Mother was educated in England and knew that country real well. After graduation she returned to Iran and got a job at the Petrochemical Company of Iran, and then she married my father, a high officer of the National Bank of Iran, whom she loved passionately. They were obviously made of totally different and even contrasting material. Dad was the firstborn son in a traditional family belonging to the Afshar tribe. He was brought up in a noble feudal system and his word was an order to be carried out with no ifs or buts. If he was day, mother was night. She was calm and tender; she was vulnerable and knew what pain meant. She was compassionate and had a deep understanding of Love. My mother’s art was not just poetry, it was Love and being the best wife any woman could be.
My dad loved hunting. During a trip to our family lands in “Malekabad”, he intended to hunt a deer. Mother, full of her poetical tender feelings, was so deeply offended that trying to stop him from hunting the poor animal, started to threaten him with separation, in order to save the deer, but it didn’t work. Mother acted on her threat and separated from dad and left for London. But the separation didn’t last long. Dad was remorseful, because he loved mom so much, and she loved him back. I am their first child and I have two brothers, Jahanshah and Alidad.
I remember well when mother found out about her illness. I was eleven, and I was standing next to her when she was putting on a dress and felt this gland in her breast and touched it. This image is left in my mind vividly. I didn’t understand what a gland was and never had heard of cancer. Much later I realized what she had gone through that day. She was thirty nine and Alidad had just been born. I will never forget the sudden pain and the fear emanating from her face in that moment.
My youth passed with mother’s illness. Her dealing with the illness was followed with my dad’s fortunate release from the consequences of the Iranian Revolution. Many of his colleagues and friends were arrested with different accusations, and had to go through unknown fates, while he was able to acquire exit visas for mom and all three of us to England; the country where Lila had her college studies and had lived there for a while.
While mom was going through the nightmare of her illness, me and my two brothers were having a good time in London. She had her treatment work cut out for her, while we were touring the City and mom, like a tour guide in love, showed us all the sights that she loved so much. She showed us the apartment she lived in when she was a student, and the university, and her favorite restaurant; she showed us all the streets, alleyways, parks, department stores, and the resorts she had good memories of. It was truly like a dream.
We had a good life in Iran. Due to mom and dad’s jobs which took a lot of their time, we didn’t enjoy the traditional family affairs with parents who would spend their whole time with their children. There were relatives, aunts and maids who took care of our daily needs, our food and dress. We were growing up under their direct supervision, but now here in London, we were with our mom fulltime, and were so happy about mom and dad’s presence.
This was when mom underwent a painful surgery and its consequences, which ended up not being a success. My kind maternal uncle, Anooshirvan Kasra, who lived in the U.S. brought me, Alidad and Jahanshah to this country, and took good care of us till my dad and mom joined us. Only now I realize what a hard task he had taken over.
Lila’s treatment went on in America in good haste and serioudly, and continued till the end of her life. Her painful illness, her being far from the country where she was born and grew up, and she never forgot till her last moments of life, and the ups and downs of her marriage to dad, despite a lasting love, and also hardships of life in a foreign land as an emigrant, had its toll on her. I believe all those hardships left their mark on her poetry and filled her poems with heartfelt and sensitive feelings, and these poems became, in my opinion, some of her best pieces.
She had gained fame with the song “Dawn’s prayer” and had known many great singers who wanted to perform her songs. I remember well the presence of all those singers and composers in our house, who would gather around to discuss many issues in loud voice, and would play music that they loved so much. And we would become friends with their kids, without paying attention to what they were doing.
Mother tried so hard to keep our family life in a good mood, despite all those painful physical ailments she was going through. We had a great family life together, enjoying her kind gaze, her nice smile, and the presence of her friends. Our close relatives would come to visit from Iran. Mom had all those surgeries and many trips to the hospital, along with all our family affairs, all those good and bad days, all those friendships and all those glooms. That’s how life went on for us.
The most bright image in my mind of all those years is of mother with a notebook and a pen which she carried with her all the time, when in pain and when in calm mood, in the house or in the hospital, in silence or in tumult. She would spend many hours with singers and composers in recording studios , arguing with them over everything, and would come back home late.
I was with her often. When a singer’s voice would rise, and mom, or the composer, would stop the recording, and start again, stop again and start all over again, I would be bored and tires and had a hard time dealing with the moment. Dad had his own hard time with all this and had many arguments with her. Their life together was full of many sweat and sour days and there seemed to be no end to it.
Alidad, Johnny and me were growing up, and mom was slowly melting down like a candle. Her physical problems bit by bit reached a point when she couldn’t even drink or eat anything, and she needed help to breath…and pain…pain…pain. She had so much pain. In her last days, her bright gaze became dull so much that she lost her eyesight. During the last moments, my aunt Molouk, her brother Anoosh, and her close friends Fattaneh Kasra and Afsar Adl were with her, along with my dad, me, Jahanshah and the little Alidad.
After her, the world was not the same for us anymore. A short while after her passing, my dad asked one of his friends to take care of Alidad, who was only thirteen, for a three month period when he wanted to take a short trip to Iran. Me and Johnny stayed with our aunt Molook, whom we loved dearly, in a big house and some money my dad had left for us for a short time. We had no idea what life would be like, had no worries about tomorrow, and had no fear of what was going on around us. You can fathom the result. Aunt Molook went back to Iran; the bank foreclosed and took over the house, and we were left out, like homeless people. We rented a small house in Reseda, in the San Fernando Valley area of Los Angeles, and started living life with a few friends who were left homeless just like us, and we called that Life, whatever it meant to any of us.
Before that, I had a girl friend and a two-year old daughter, called Lexie, who was born the day before we buried mom. Thanks to having Lexie with me, the two of us took a room of the house to us. The others were scattered in the rest of the house. We had many more poor friends who would spend time with us. Youthful events and many stories…as you would probably can imagine. We would put together $900 a month to pay the rent, but for the rest of our needs, we would do anything and everything we could and we could think of. With all those hard times, and all those sad and happy days, we eventually were able to spend our lives the best we could, and all of us went our own ways.
Today, when I think back about the past, a belief becomes stronger in my mind, that Lila’s loving heart was still beating with passion even after her death, and the warmth of her loving mind, kept us – me, Alidad and Johnny – form all the harms that our youth could cause and let us find our ways to get to a point where we could reach a healthy life and moral security to be able to go on with our lives.
Other than her personal belongings, what was left of mother, was a big box full of papers and notebooks that she had scribbled her poems on, and had a lot of tea or coffee stains on them which made it so hard to read all of it. I knew all of those were her handwriting, but I didn’t have a clear idea about what it was all about, written in Farsi. I had no knowledge of Persian poetry, and didn’t understand the value of what I had in my hand.
In those days of need, when hunger and poverty had their tolls on me, and I didn’t see any other way to make money, and thinking that Lila’s poetry were the only assets left to me, I decided to sell them. So I talked to one of my mom’s close friends, Ando, a renowned composer, who strongly advised me against it. He believed publishing Lila’s work in those turbulent times, would harm her name. so I left the box in a corner, and I carried it with me when I had to move to a new place.
About two year ago, accidentally I came upon an interview in a website, and realized that in the Mexican culture, they have a special way of looking at the reality of “Death”. They believe every human being lives three times throughout the time.
First is the childhood, which has no specific description. A child, whenever gets acquainted with the word Death, and the fateful journey to the other world, he has confronted his first death.
The second time is when his physical death happens, and every human being’s life ends.
The third and last death of each person is when he or she is still alive in someone else’s mind and his or her name is pronounced by other people… and this is the last remembering of a human being that has lived a life and is no more. This last remembrance is the final death of each living person, and is his or her final death.
After listening to this interview, I was left motionless and astonished and scared for a while. I was wondering if my mother was done with? Was she finished? Has she reached her last stage of Death?
I didn’t want the angel who I thought was far away from Death, to die. In my mind, my mother was immortal. She would never die. I was an adult and I knew death is unavoidable. But I wanted her to be alive for ever. What I heard that day, told me I could keep her alive and I had to do something about it.
Then I started to plan my fantasies. My friend Behnaz Saranj, opened the box and took out its content. She went through the whole thing for a while. And she was amazed of what was left of Lila. She insisted and encouraged me to find a publisher. I had no idea how I would do something like that. I didn’t know what to do, and where to begin. She told me the only person who could help me and guide me through the task, is the Iranian writer and journalist, Homa Sarshar. So I had to find her and ask for her help.
Thus the kind Lady, Homa Sarshar came to my help and put my mother’s collection in an orderly manner to publish this book, launch the entire Lila Kasra website, and maintaining the contents of the magical box. That’s how the box came out of my house’s and handed over to Ali Shirdel and Jila Mir Afshar.
