I was in the upper-class district of Tehran. It was still a desert, only the locals called it “upper town.” Velenjak was no different from the rougher parts of the city. Walking at night was just as dangerous as strolling downtown or in the lower districts. Its people were crueler than anyone else I had seen in Tehran, and everything was ten, twenty times more expensive, sometimes even more. Yet everyone dreamed of living there. But I hated it. Nothing about that part of the city brought me joy.

On weekends, supposedly expensive cars—worth barely as much as a ten-thousand-dollar car in America—constantly poured in from downtown, the rest of the upper town, and other provinces to Velenjak for skiing. Everyone had a story. “The Shah skied here, or the Shah’s son lost a shoe here for the first time.”

“The Queen struck a pose here, and they photographed her.”

“Actors came here, and when we greeted them, they wouldn’t even look at us. So classy.”

Every story they told was more merciless than the last.

I always thought that if these people emigrated, they would probably change, gain better perspective. But when I went abroad, I realized I was wrong. People don’t change after fourteen or fifteen.

When the bus stopped downtown and we, all of us who had come from the other side of the mountain, got off, my journey was only beginning. I had to take five or six more buses to reach the dormitory. I never had money for a taxi—or even sometimes for the agency fee. I always had to find the cheapest way. The final leg, when I reached a place near the exhibition with an even sillier name than “exhibition,” my strength was gone. That was just the beginning of Velenjak. Cat-sized rats ran through the water channels, sometimes climbing up and slipping under our feet.

I always asked myself: why does this barren, tree-less desert draw so much attention? I still don’t understand. But those people were used to that ownerless desert, as if their standards were set by the lifeless, birdless, tree-less wasteland. While my only goal had been to escape it, and my opinion never changed until the very last moment I spent in that ruined, ownerless city.

Now, years after leaving that desolate wreck, I tell myself: those poor people, what on earth were their hearts tied to? In a world moving toward democracy and modernity, the Shah and the Queen were still the most important to them. And rightly so, they had nothing else to take pride in. A Shah and a Queen who had abandoned them, who had fled multiple times. Poor, ignorant, miserable people.