Sixty Four Days by Shaya Tayefe Mohajer

May 2, 2026, Los Angeles



When my grandmother died in Iran years ago, I found out about it from an Instagram post. 
My cousin Salar's wife, who I've never met, had posted a black screen with white text in Farsi; I had to pause to read it slowly. Farsi text doesn't spell out most vowels. I always doubt myself a little bit. But the context clues were there. We knew my grandmother was very ill, she'd lost her grasp on time and people. She had been refusing food. 

In my memory she will always be who she was when she visited us in Southern California. 
The red-headed woman who could never resist a game of hopscotch chalked onto a sidewalk, thrusting her big purse into my arms as she bent to snatch up a pebble. She called the game something else, I forget. Ye ghol, do ghol, maybe? "One promise, two promise" is how I always translated that for myself, but I don't remember. I remember her raucous laughter. 

I showed my sister the screenshot and called my mom, who was very angry I'd found out that way, but wouldn't tell me if it was true. There is a superstition around giving news of death, I don't quite understand it. 

Over the years, I kept parasocial relationships with my cousins in Iran, hearting their photos of weddings and new babies, sending birthday wishes now and again. Everyone has grown up from the little children I remembered; I haven't been to Iran in twenty three years.

Now, for sixty four days, there has been an internet blackout in Iran. They turned it off like a spigot. No more posts of cute babies, friends smiling, the familiar pots full of fluffy rice or eggplants steeping with tomato and sour grapes -- all of it is just gone.

Now, for sixty three days, there has been war against Iran.

Whether the bombs took my family or the internet kept their news from me, I don't know. I would have to hear their voices or see their faces to be certain, Iranians don't share news of death for some reason. My own mother withheld my grandmother's death.

I don't know.

That's what I say when people ask if my family is ok in Iran. They don't usually ask twice, I haven't found the energy to soften the response or help them feel comfortable with this reality. 

But for anyone who wondered: I still don't know.

This is the first year I can remember that we didn't talk to Iran during Nowruz. Even during the Iran-Iraq War in the '80s we sat and dialed and redialed until a line got through -- this was my holiday chore. Dial, wait to hear the rasp of the lines, with the connection whooshing under oceans and over continents, until the operator in Tehran played the honking busy signal, dropped the call, or finally, connected us.

Though they call ceasefires now and again, it's not over; The loathing of men feels bottomless, they just sink lower and lower in bloody nothingness. I am still glued to the screen, wondering if today is the day we'll see something from them. BBC Persian posts photos of two young men who are being executed in Tehran today. These types of posts are frequent. Every one stops me. I search their faces for my kin -- the little kids I shared the backseat of my uncle's old Peugeot with. Salar, is that you, I ask the young men's images. It's not, the executioner will take the light from these eyes -- beautiful and dark -- but these eyes don't have Salar's mirth, my grandmother's mischief.

Someone else's cousin was killed today. Mine is gone, too.

Shaya Tayefe Mohajer is an Iranian American writer who lives in Los Angeles. Born in the Midwest to parents from the Mideast, with a last name that means “Tribe of Immigrants,” her work lingers in the ephemeral experiences of diaspora.

7 September 2026