One afternoon, when I was 6 years old, my mother took my sister and I to the bazaar and hid us underneath corn and burlap in the back of a hearse. I didn't know it yet, but we were escaping Iran.
"Whatever happens, just be quiet," she whispered to my sister and I.
After she finished covering us, she also snuck into the car. We later joined others in the back of a pick up truck, and as we approached the Iranian border with Pakistan, she revealed what was happening.
"We are leaving," she said. "And if the authorities catch us trying to escape, we might not make it out of here alive."
I was terrified. I continued to crouch down and held my breath whenever we hit a bump. After a few hours, I felt the car speeding up and then heard loud bangs. I covered my ears and tried not to cry. The border authorities were shooting at us. Suddenly, I felt a flutter in my stomach as the car seemed to jump into the air. It felt like it crashed on the ground. I thought we were doomed. But thankfully, we just kept going. A short while later, we crossed the border to Pakistan where we stayed for three months, awaiting visas. Eventually, we made it to the United States, where I have been living since.
My family knew we had to leave Iran years before that afternoon in 1985. In fact, we knew as soon as the Iranian Revolution began in 1979 and Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini overthrew Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi. Among other radical changes, the new government mandated that all women start wearing hijabs. We went from a progressive, free country where women could wear short skirts and go to college and work prestigious jobs to one that would rather we wear the chador and not step out of line.
We got the memo pretty quickly: If you were a woman in Iran, you were a second-class citizen. My parents didn't want my sister and I growing up in that restrictive society; one they viewed as backwards. We knew we had to leave.
Unfortunately, many women were not lucky enough to escape. Others, like Mahsa Amini, only knew a post-Revolution Iran. Amini, and young women like her, have lived their entire lives under a regime of discrimination and inequality.
Amini, a 22-year-old Iranian-Kurdish woman, died in an Iranian hospital on September 16 while visiting relatives in Tehran. The Iranian regime's morality police arrested Amini for allegedly not wearing a hijab properly. Witnesses claim they saw her beaten by officers. She later fell into a coma and died. Of course, the Iranian authorities say that Amini had "suddenly suffered a heart problem" that caused her death.
Amini's passing was a tragedy. But why does it have to take a needless death to bring attention to this barbaric regime? I can't help but wonder: Where was the international outrage the moment Amini died? Where were the protestors gathering across the globe? It makes me feel hopeless when the women and men in Iran protest and share their stories, but the rest of the world is slow to catch up.