The Twelve Days of War by Altaf Saadi

On the first day Israel bombed Iran, I thought of my grandmother braiding her hair. As a child, I would perch at the edge of her bed, mesmerized, watching as she meticulously wove each section of her hair like a master weaver. It was about 8 p.m. in Boston when the news of the first bombing flashed across my phone. This was about the time when she would braid her hair as part of her evening routine. But it was 3:30 a.m. in Tehran. Her hair would already be braided. She would be fast asleep. My grandmother–living with early dementia, her hair thinning, silver, but still like braided tree trunks.

I thought about the ways people may perceive her, or not perceive her at all. Illiterate, mother-of-five, hair tucked beneath a black scarf and a black chador in public, telling my fiancé, now-husband, on their very first encounter: “You need to wait to have children until she finishes medical school. You cannot interfere with her career.”   

I thought about her wry sense of humor, how she would sneak small, fake plastic spiders to scare us. 

I thought about how the first and last time I saw her cry was when my immediate family left Iran to immigrate to Canada, boarding a plane to Heathrow, then to Toronto. My family descended into the airport like the score on a music sheet, except that the music fell flat. There was my ten-year-old excitement about in-flight meals, the somber faces of my uncles, and the sound of my grandmother’s tears reverberating beneath the steady hum of rolling suitcases, shuffling feet, and airport announcements overhead.

On the second day Israel bombed Iran, I thought about the American woman who, after finding out I was born in Iran, asked if I had experienced oppression before moving here. Even after I explained that I had left at age ten, she insisted on a story dramatic enough to sink her teeth into. Tell me, her eyes demanded after a side-glance at the headscarf wrapped around my head. There must be a story. Are you sure there is not a story? 

Of course, there are stories: My uncles lifting me higher, wading deeper into the Caspian Sea, me gulping sea water amid squeals and saline. Our families roasting tamarind-glazed fish on the mountainside. Me, pretending to enjoy playing with the girl next door, just so I could steal glances at her older brother, all thick eyebrows and long lashes. 

As a second grader in Iran, my ticket to cool was pretending to be related to the Persian poet Saadi, whose tomb in Shiraz is a popular pilgrimage site. When we moved to Canada, and then the U.S., my lying about being related to a poet was not met with the same bright-eyed reverence. I resorted to hiding poems in my pockets.

The woman left disappointed, and I was brimming with more stories to share. 

On the third day Israel bombed Iran, I read– more poetry. I was desperate for connection and meaning, in a world where thousands upon thousands of children in Gaza had already been killed, amputated, or starved, without pause, remorse, or repercussion. And what, to that callous world, was another child, 1,000 miles away? Same cherub hands, dimpled elbows, and swaddle. Same bombs, drones, and rubble. I read and wept, and read and wept. 

On the fourth day Israel bombed Iran, I thought I should get to know my neighbors better. Those killed as “collateral damage” in Iran were neighbors of government officials, or weapons manufacturers, some living down the hall or on a different floor of an apartment building. I thought about how I usually pass by my own neighbors, sometimes with a smile or a nod or barely a tired glance if I have not had my coffee yet. I do not really know what they do, or who they work for. I thought about the toothsome banana wafer pudding pie a neighbor had made at our neighborhood block party last year- what was her name again? Who did she work for? 

I thought about the mother in Tehran, cradling her son’s bleeding head as he died–how she might’ve wished she had known her neighbor better. Or maybe she was thinking of the pistachio rose cake she once shared across the hallway, unaware of her neighbor’s ties to the government or a weapons manufacturer. Or maybe she knew and shared a cake anyway because she believed in cakes. Or maybe she was furious with herself for falling in love with that apartment, the way the light hit the kitchen, perfect for baking. I thought about her mind spinning amid the infinite permutations of what-ifs and should-haves, grasping for meaning in the midst of the horror she was witnessing–her son’s bleeding head from a bomb dropped, “meant” for her neighbor.

I wondered how many people I know work for Lockheed Martin, one of the largest employers in Massachusetts. The CEO of this world’s largest weapons manufacturer sits on the board of the hospital where I work. He lives just a few towns over, in a suburb I visit often to see a friend. There are always people living among us whose values we may not share–maybe they even help to build the machineries of war that haunt us and our patients–and yet we may share puddings and pies and cakes with them and their neighbors. And even if we did, and even if we knew, we would not deserve to die, or to cradle our son’s bleeding head as he dies.

On the fifth day Israel bombed Iran, Trump posted a message on Truth Social urging everyone to “immediately evacuate Tehran.” 

I thought of my grandmother who was largely bedbound, or a two-person assist, which is medical parlance for: she needs two people to move her, from her bed to the chair, the chair back to the bed. And these are not any two ordinary people. They need strong biceps and strong quadriceps to lift and pull and position, and if they don’t have those strong muscles, she stays in bed all day and develops a heel ulcer that gets infected and requires intravenous antibiotics. Then, the bacteria grow resistant, and she needs more hospital stays to get stronger antibiotics. All the while, the heel ulcer lingers, stubborn, like the smug smirk on a bully’s face, even when there is a war aging and raging outside.

And there are so many other needs to consider. Reading news stories about traffic congestion on the roads leading out of Tehran, I thought about what would happen if my grandmother had an accident on the road, should my uncle try to evacuate her too—not a collision of cars, but the bodily type of accident that requires a change in adult diapers and two-person assist to clean. 

I thought about the sounds of bombs and if that was scaring her. If she was making sense of what was happening, even if her sons and grandsons protected her from the news. I thought about how disorienting evacuation would be for someone with dementia, and then how in Gaza—all roads lead to Gaza these days—evacuations, bombings, and overhead buzzing of drones had become constant. What is it like to be a person living with dementia there, or to be their caregiver? I imagined patients as more disoriented than usual— waking in the night screaming, wandering off into the dark like so many with dementia tend to do, but never to be seen again. They might try to return but their homes may be bombed, the land posts they may recognize decimated, their families relocated, or dead. I thought about the medications they were missing, not prioritized amid the limited supply permitted to enter, if any are allowed to enter at all. I thought about the adult diapers they cannot get. 

Meanwhile, I am thousands of miles away in Boston, a medical mecca. Here, where fireworks light up the sky to cheers, not fear. Here, where no one flinches at the sound of an explosion. 

On the sixth day Israel bombed Iran, I got into a fight with my husband. Amid the dropping of bombs and my worrying about my grandmother’s heel ulcer, silvery braids, and degenerating memory, there were lunch boxes to pack, back-up clothes for camp to label, and hugs to be given for our children’s minor hurts and scraped knees. 

“How can I help?” My husband would ask, with the same quiet earnestness and goodness that had made me fall in love with him, all those years ago, but now the question caught like a splinter. I met him with a cold stare, or rage. Make the bombs stop dropping! Revive the dead children! Reunite all families! While you’re at it, can you stop the mass starvation in Gaza too? If I were in a good mood—meaning surviving, breathing, buoyant enough to float—I would respond, “Can you do the dishes?” 

On the seventh day Israel bombed Iran, I thought about whether to tell my children. I had taken them to Iran over the winter holiday break—six months before the bombing started. It was their first trip. They had met my grandmother, my uncles, my cousins, and their children. They were regaled with my childhood stories. My daughter had belted Frozen’s “Let it go!” in my uncle’s study, against the backdrop of his hanging Pothos plants. My uncle took them shopping and bought them whatever their hearts had desired: an owl-shaped pencil sharpener, a notebook with a unicorn on the cover, a whistle in the shape of a mouse, a blue stamp. 

Last fall, I had taken my older daughter to a protest calling for a ceasefire in Gaza. I had fond memories of attending protests with my father as a child and wanted to replicate those memories—the sense of community, purpose, cause. We had bought a chocolate-chip cookie and fudge brownie at a local bake sale before heading over. There, one speaker bellowed, “the schools are burning! the children are dying!” And my daughter had turned to me, with brownie in hand and questioning eyes, filling like a red balloon about to burst. I fibbed. I told her the schools were being rebuilt as we spoke, the children were healing, and isn’t it wonderful that we can rebuild and recover? I desperately wanted the balloon not to pop. But, of course, the schools were not being rebuilt. And it was not only schools burning, but children too. Burning while waiting for ambulances, for baked bread, for a hug, for a warm hand to extend and rest on a thigh or a shoulder, for a nurse to come in as they lay in hospital rooms or corridors, for medications that did not exist, burning while attached to IVs. 

I decided not to tell my children. But there are other parts of the world where parents like me don’t have the choice to protect their children from the horrors of state violence.  

On the eighth day Israel bombed Iran, I thought about whether to tell my co-workers. I would introduce it casually in a check-in or a hallway conversation, like “life is so hard as a working mother,” “I’m devastated—my last grant was rejected,” and “oh yes, how could I forget, my family is being bombed with our tax dollars. Did you know?” I asked an Iranian American colleague how she was managing and whether she had shared with her co-workers. “My co-worker asked me whether I was happy to see Iran being bombed,” she answered. 

I thought about my father—so gentle and Muslim and Middle Eastern—declining landscaping services because he had not wanted to displace a bird and her family from their nest in a tree outside of our house. The homeowner’s association had asked him to remove the tree because it was dropping too many leaves, the leaves too untidy for the neighborhood’s manicured image. My father arranged a date for a landscaping company to cut it down. But when the workers arrived, one of them pointed out a nest tucked quietly in the tender branches of the tree. My father stopped everything. “How can I bear the responsibility of displacing a bird and its family from its home?” he asked. He turned them away and paid the cost of the same-day cancellation fee. Birds can be metaphors, but not in this case, not for my father. He was speaking literally about the birds- common sparrows, brown and overlooked.  

I wouldn’t have known what to say if a colleague had asked me if I was happy to see any country being bombed. There is no joy in bombing. There is no joy in forced displacement—not for a human, not for a bird.

On the ninth day Israel bombed Iran, I wondered about writing an Op-Ed. I had written some before. And even though English is not my first language, or second language, or one that welcomes me into its house, perhaps I could weave together some words and stories that could make someone feel, enough to pause their grocery shopping, or their Sunday brunch, after mimosas but before the afternoon siesta, to call their elected representatives, begging for the bombings to stop. Maybe if I brought enough of my brownness to the paper, bled some trauma so vivid and red, placed some words in Farsi like gauze on a wound—ishq, azadi, shadi—but not too many to be scary—I could shift someone’s perspective.

Maybe, it could even serve as the invitation my co-workers needed to check in on me, even if “Iran” remained a forbidden word. “How are you doing?” they could ask, instead of, “are you going to meet this Friday’s deadline?” Or, “how are you holding up?” instead of, “can you get back to me by tomorrow?” Or, even, “Don’t worry about deadlines or responding this week. I know you have a lot on your plate.”

But I could not quiet my words and feelings enough to avoid being seen as too scary, too Muslim, too brown, too angry, too despondent, too in need of therapy instead of a ceasefire. And then, of course, the prolonged neglect of authors and poets and doctors and mothers and children in Gaza was so fresh and current, I waffled between writing too many feelings, and not writing at all. I did not write the Op-Ed. There were few coworkers who checked in. I met all but one deadline.

On the tenth day Israel bombed Iran, I considered attending a protest. There were rumors of a ceasefire, but one could never be too certain amid the fear and warmongering. I was born in the aftermath of the Iraq-Iran war. At that time, the fighting continued for a month after the United Nations had declared a ceasefire in 1988. At one protest I attended for a ceasefire in Gaza, a woman saw my headscarf, white coat, and sign (“Hospitals and Health Workers are #NotATarget”) and told me that I should go to Gaza— “just wait and see what they do to you” and “you will get what you deserve”—meaning that I would get killed, meaning that I was guilty simply because of how I looked, white coat be damned. Thankfully, this upcoming protest against the war in Iran fell during daycare pick-up time and I comforted myself with the demands of my motherly duties. I did not go. I could not go. But really, I was just scared. I had been scared since that woman wished upon me the fate of collective punishment seen in Gaza. This was not the first time someone had wished upon me harm—even death—simply for how I look. But it felt different this time as a mother. I just wanted to get home, safe, to love on my children—growing, whole, and alive.

On the eleventh day Israel bombed Iran, I picked up my Farsi language textbook. Maybe I could take this opportunity to expand my kitchen gossip Farsi vocabulary and become fluent. What did it mean to lament the bombing of a country whose language I did not speak, in the language of the country condoning the bombing? 

But I have never been a good Iranian that way, not really. Maybe because I am not “fully” Iranian. My family has connections to both Iraq and Iran. Arabic was my family’s first language, and I lost fluency in Farsi after immigrating to Canada and the U.S., prioritizing English-learning above all else. In college, I would joke: “I am two thirds of the axis of evil!” It was a terrible joke, even at Yale. It made most people uncomfortable. They would shuffle their feet, shift weight from one leg to the other, not sure how to respond. And maybe they felt guilty that the U.S. was bombing Iraq, but mostly they just wanted the moment to end, to switch topics to something that made them feel less complicit. 

Experiencing my extended family in Iraq get bombed during the U.S.-led war felt like a gut punch, though I have never been punched in the gut before. If I had to approximate the feeling, it would be like when someone spray painted “sand nigger” on my Hindu, Indian American friend’s driveway after 9/11, or when a classmate shouted at me— “raghead!” —on my walk back to my dorm one evening in college, or when I was pregnant and had terrible morning sickness, except that the morning sickness was all day long, and vomit constantly coated my teeth and throat like a varnish.  

There is something profound to be said for the experience of having both the countries you hail from being bombed, first in your 20s and then in your 30s, once by the country of your residence and dreams, and the second time by a proxy. Maybe, I thought, it was that I didn’t need to be fluent in Farsi to feel connected to humans being bombed. I put the Farsi language book down.

On the twelfth day Israel bombed Iran, there was news of a ceasefire. The rumors were true. There would be a ceasefire. I checked and re-checked the news to make sure it was real. My grandmother remained among the living, although the heel ulcer lingered and her memory continued to deteriorate. My uncles, cousins, and their children were safe. There was now a ceasefire. I said it to myself slowly, carefully, chewed it like watermelon gum in my mouth, letting the sweetness linger. And then, I wished for more. More of it, sticking, everywhere, and all at once. 

4 June 2026