Rain I

One balmy winter day in 1991, during the first Gulf War, I was sitting by the window in my classroom watching the clear blue sky above Ahvaz, the city in Iran’s southwest where I grew up. The teacher was working through a physics problem on the blackboard when, on the horizon, I noticed dark clouds approaching the city with menacing speed.

Within a few minutes the blue sky turned a metallic black. The teacher stopped scribbling and walked out. We followed him. Around the school everybody had come into the open, watching the sky from under the awning in front of each classroom.

I was a deeply religious child back then, obsessed with end-of-the-world stories and with accounts of the Day of Judgment in Shia literature and the Quran. “When the sun is extinguished/and when the stars fall down,” begins At-Takwir, the sura that paints a vivid picture of the final day. As I watched night descend at noon I started tallying my vices and virtues, trying to decide whether I would go to paradise or to hell if the world were to end.

Then it rained. First the drops were sporadic, then steady, then a downpour cascading off the shed above us. The storm had a strange, metallic odor. “Stay under the roof!” the principal shrieked into a microphone. “It’s not rain!” It was oil, falling in curtains so thick they veiled us from the world.

Later we learned that a few hours earlier Iraqi forces had bombed enormous oil lakes in Kuwait, some of the largest such reserves in the world, sending up black clouds that rained down oil as they passed across the Persian Gulf. When they traveled over Ahvaz they left behind chaos: crashed cars, dead trees, the rigid bodies of stray cats, birds knocked out of the sky.

Fire I

Two years later, about twenty-five miles outside Ahvaz, a bomb went off at the junction of two of Iran’s most strategic pipelines, which carried oil from the southern fields to the north. The explosion was heard for miles, and a column of flame shot high into the air. It was an act of sabotage, apparently carried out by the armed opposition group MEK to disrupt the flow of oil across the country.

For days afterward the evening sky east of Ahvaz glowed red. If you climbed onto the rooftops at dusk you could see dark tongues of fire licking the horizon, casting a vast orange halo. Evening after evening I sat watching the fire rage above the roofs of stunted houses and the fronds of palm trees.

I was still steeped in Shia apocalyptic literature, where such unfathomable fires appear frequently. A few days before the explosion I had been reading Montaha al-Amal by the well-known theologian Sheikh Abbas Qomi. “One sign of the return of the messiah,” he writes, “is the emergence of a fire in the east that will burn for three or seven days between earth and sky, causing great confusion and terror.”

My father had no patience for my worldview. By vocation and nature he was an engineer. In his world every problem had a material origin and a material solution, to be found through the proper application of the laws of mathematics and physics. Problems of the mind might exist, but they were hardly worth obsessing over.

While I was lost in apocalyptic reveries on the rooftop, he and his colleagues at the National Oil Company were trying to figure out how to extinguish that fire. I don’t remember the technical details, and because of the internet shutdown I can’t call him and ask. From what I recall the blaze consumed all the oxygen around it and created a kind of vacuum, which made it impossible for firefighters to approach. Nor could it be put out from the air. Eventually they brought in a massive pipe with acoustic shielding and lowered it over the spot where the bomb had ruptured the line, finally bringing the technician close enough to do the repairs.

For years my father remained proud of his involvement in that operation. It had been an immensely difficult engineering problem, and nothing satisfied him more than solving one. He was still in his forties then, still a believer in the socialist aspects of the Islamic Revolution, a strong supporter of the independence it brought to the oil industry, brimming with energy and optimistic about the future.

Fire II

Some thirty years lie between the first and the second fires. No one in my family lives in Ahvaz anymore. My sisters and I are scattered around the world, in Canada and Germany. I am here in Ithaca, in upstate New York, as far from my life in Ahvaz as possible, married to an American woman, raising American kids, working American jobs, writing in a language I did not speak back then.

My brother and my parents are in Tehran. They live in a residential tower in the northwest of the city, nestled against the Alborz Mountains. Just behind them rises a tall hill, and at the top of it sits the Shahran oil depot, which Israel bombed on the night of June 14, 2025, the second day of what came to be called the Twelve-Day War. People on the ground heard a deafening blast, then flames rose and brightened the night.

My parents had been asleep; they woke when the explosion shook the floor and rattled the windows. By the time I called they were standing in the living room, watching the flames through the window. I urged them to leave but they wanted to stay put. It took a while to convince them to let my brother drive them to safety.

I went outside for a walk through my quiet, green neighborhood, lush with oak and maple trees. I thought about my relationship with Iran, a country I hadn’t seen in ten years and hadn’t lived in for fifteen. The day I left for the US I had vowed never to set foot in Iran again. What was supposed to be my motherland, my fatherland, had offered little but censorship, oppression, pollution, poverty. It had failed its end of the bargain, so I was abandoning mine.

Now that the country had come under attack that relationship had reversed. All of a sudden I felt toward Iran the same feeling I have toward my children. From afar it seemed fragile and defenseless, besieged by high-tech flying machines controlled by someone thousands of miles away, or perhaps by an infiltrator in my parents’ own neighborhood. A country of ninety million people, a civilization that has existed for some three millennia, suddenly came to seem like a frail child being beaten by thugs, struggling to ward off the blows.

Then came the January massacre, which revealed to us that we have as thuggish and murderous an enemy at home, that our own government had become a killing machine. And now another war.

Fire III

After the Twelve-Day War I kept asking my parents about the oil tanks atop the hill. They said there was constant activity around them, tankers climbing up and down the slope, people working. There were several tanks in the depot, and the drone strike had destroyed only two. My father speculated that they were draining the oil from them. The site had long been considered an earthquake hazard anyway, he reminded me, and the city had been discussing shutting it down. The war must have given them the incentive.

The second war with Israel began on February 28, the US now joining from the start. No one was surprised this time, though no one expected the supreme leader and so many top army commanders to fall within the first half hour of the bombardment. The government instantly shut down the internet, plunging the country into its current digital darkness. Since then the war has intensified with each passing day. Like millions of other Iranians, I have been glued to my phone, scanning Telegram channels and Twitter accounts for updates, constantly trying new VPNs and making direct calls in the hope of reaching my family.

A week into the war I went to New York City for a few days. One afternoon I met a friend who works for a human rights organization. He had spent two grueling months documenting the mass killings the regime had carried out in January. Some of the details he shared were new to me, though I had followed the story closely from the start. I had not fully grasped the scale and brutality of the atrocities committed in poorer small towns, nor the ruthless silencing of victims’ families in the aftermath, or the extent of the regime’s success at weaponizing the communication blackout to disseminate its own narrative to the world.

We checked the news every half hour as we talked, like addicts returning to their substance. Sometime in the afternoon I saw the fire. Israel had bombed oil depots around Tehran.

The first images that reached me were of the oil refinery in Shahr Rey, south of the city. They were apocalyptic: fire and smoke rising high into the sky, a pall so dark and so vast that it swallowed most of the horizon, avariciously stretching left and right for what remained of the blue.

The Shahran oil depot was not spared. All my father’s assurances that they had drained the tanks turned out to be wrong. It might have been wishful thinking, or perhaps a story he had told me to calm me down. Compared to the inferno on my screen the fire during the Twelve-Day War was a joke. This time all the tanks appeared to be full and had been bombed with, it seemed, the goal of destroying each and every one. The fire spread fast. Soon oil was streaming down the hill and into the streets of my parents’ neighborhood, leaving trails of dark orange fire that burned slowly along the asphalt.

I spent a sleepless night on my friend’s couch in Brooklyn, drifting off for half an hour at a time, then jolting awake to call my parents and my brother on their phones and messaging apps, listening to the silence on the other end before falling back asleep. Only early in the morning did I hear from my sister in Canada, who had been doing the same throughout the night. She had finally managed to get through: they were safe. They had stayed inside during the bombing, doors and windows sealed. Having fought the fire in the 1990s and escaped it last year, this time my father could only watch and wait.

Rain II

The day after the bombing it rained in Tehran. Clouds gathered over a city that had endured decades of severe drought and had long been pleading for rain; that may have been the only day all year when no one wanted to see it fall. On their way down the drops passed through thick plumes of soot and carbon monoxide, reaching the ground oily and black. Unlike during the Gulf War, now everyone had a phone, and despite the internet shutdown many videos still found their way out. From thousands of miles away, sitting in the basement of my house, I watched them one by one, searching for echoes between the rain on the screen and the one I remembered.