Free The Last Living Slut by Roxana Shirazi Page A

was killing her. Had we given up love for this? What did freedom mean? Surely not this.
    My grandmother survived England for nine months. During one of her hospital trips, she caught a bug. That evening, while washing the dishes at my uncle’s place, my aunt told me the news. “Anneh died this morning at four a.m.,” she said simply. I looked at her for a moment, then carried on wordlessly with my work. I would always remember my grandmother as she was in Iran: joyful, laughing, loving. I felt an overpowering relief soothe my spiky insides because my grandmother wouldn’t suffer anymore.
    My aunt winced with unease as she watched me quietly bury myself in my schoolbooks. I was determined that my grandmother’s sacrifice for me would not be in vain. When I achieved the best marks in my class in French, my teacher rewarded me with a Dairy Milk chocolate bar. This achievement had dire consequences: That day at lunch break, Sally and her gang circled me, gripping sticks and cricket bats.
    “Paki, Paki, Paki,” they chanted, doing impressions of freaks with screwed-up eyes, distorted limbs, and tongues hanging out of their mouths. “Go back to your own country, Paki!”
    I didn’t speak. I just carried on reading—lovely, lovely reading. Bad boy Huckleberry Finn, being wild and rebellious.
    I was also teased for the things I ate and drank. “It’s piss she’s drinking,” the boys taunted when I opened a bottle of apple juice at lunch. I blushed, embarrassed.
    I knew I wasn’t completely dark, but I knew I wasn’t completely white either. My skin was olive, but secretly I wanted it to be very white—luminous, pure, snow white. One day, I decided to try to bleach it. In the Carsons’ bathroom, I slathered thick creamy hair-lightening paste all over my face, avoiding my eyebrows and eyes. I laughed at the snowman in the mirror! Beneath the layers, my face tingled and sizzled like bacon and my eyes burned. When I couldn’t take it anymore, I scrubbed the paste off. But instead of turning white, I had only become red and raw.
    My mother knit clothes and sent them to me. They were invariably thick wool, soft and so warm because she was afraid I’d catch cold. In one package was a traditional Persian folk skirt and a head scarf. Although she must have spent hours knitting the intricate pink-and-blue designs, I looked at the two items with horror. I knew the consequences would be grim if the gang of girls at school saw me wearing them.
    Instead, I hid the clothes in my room. And, for the first time, I began wearing my skirt short. I also shaved my legs within an inch of their lives and left the top buttons of my shirt undone. The day I showed up at school looking that way was the day the girls no longer teased me. I was a Western girl now.
    One Friday afternoon in June, I found a bit of blood on my underwear. I looked for a cut and didn’t see anything. But there was a screaming pain in my tummy, like an angry alarm clock. The Carsons’ toilet was a minuscule room with a frosted window facing their garden. I could hear birds chirping and smell jasmine from the garden. But the scent made me want to retch. The only way I could think to stop it was to dab at the blood from where it was coming with clumps of tissue and hope it would close and dry up.
    That weekend, I walked around thinking I was bleeding to death. I didn’t dare tell anyone. It was only when I started leaking onto my jeans that Mrs. Carson noticed and pulled me aside. She promptly issued me little diaper things and explained that bleeding happens to all females every month. In the bathroom, I peeled off the plastic strip and mistakenly stuck the sticky side of the diaper thing all along my pubic hair.
    In July, my mother managed to leave Iran with my brother and sister. My stepdad couldn’t make it; he would remain stuck there throughout the war, sitting on the roof watching bombs hit Tehran night after night.
    My mother arrived at the Carsons’