The School Dungeon

#آگاهی Please read and share. A small, painful story from elementary school, about our cruel school disciplinarian. I was in second grade when my father's work took us to Tehran. I enrolled in a small school in an old neighborhood. Its little courtyard was paved entirely with asphalt. Instead of planting a few trees or anything green, they had painted a blue sky, two white doves, and a few trees on the walls. The rest of the walls were covered in slogans. You know the kind. Wooden desks, and a blackboard that was not black at all but more of a muddy green. In one corner stood a little kiosk where Mash Hamid made us sandwiches for fifty tomans each at recess. Our disciplinarian never smiled. He was always shouting, always scolding, and we were afraid of him. He was forever threatening to beat us with a hose or throw us into the dungeon beneath his office. At first I was so afraid of that dungeon I could not even look him in the eye. Months passed. He had threatened us with it so often without actually throwing anyone in that we had almost stopped caring. At first, when he dragged a child into his office, shouting that the dungeon was next, we all crowded outside the door and begged him to forgive our friend and let him go. It went on so long that we began to believe either the dungeon did not exist or he was afraid of us. Fewer and fewer children came to the office door. We had grown indifferent. Then one day he took me and two other boys inside. He opened the back door, then the door to the stairwell, and shoved us down into the basement, the place he called his dungeon. At first we thought it was a game. After a while we realized it was dark, and nobody was opening the door. We looked at each other and began to shout: Open it! Open the door! We were crying. Why couldn't anyone hear us? I asked the others, 'Do you think the children are begging him to let us out right now? They've come to save us, haven't they?' A little later the disciplinarian came to the other side of the door and laughed. 'Stop all that yelling. Nobody can hear you down here. Besides, there's nobody left to listen.' When I think about it today, I see that nothing has changed. Execution is the same dungeon, and the Islamic Republic is the disciplinarian. It was as though those three children, one of them me, had been executed today. And I wondered: did they, like me that day, think someone was standing on the other side of the prison door? Something else came back to me today, something that made me hate that disciplinarian and the Islamic Republic more than ever. Both worked to make us indifferent to an atrocity. Both played with children's and people's minds until we stopped reacting to what they really were. They released word of an execution days or months in advance, so people would spend their outrage, grow numb, and drift apart. Then, when my turn came, when I was thrown into the dungeon or a black notice was hung on my door, no one would be left outside to cry out for my freedom. Do not become indifferent. Light will overcome darkness. Long live Iran. #جاویدشاه