Roshan means "light"

Oakland, California

1964

This story has been told to me many times, and as I tell it I know that the facts have faded into fable. This is my version as I’ve come to know it.

This (right) is a picture of my mother, Roshan, very soon after she immigrated from Iran. It was 1964 and she was 26 years old. She is standing near Lake Merritt in Oakland and it is around the time that she met my father.

She’d been married already once before, in an arranged marriage in Iran that ended violently. She’d been forced to flee “all black and blue” and abandoned her 3 year old son with his father in Iran. My grandmother, the progressive woman that she was, made sure that Roshan had the option of divorce included in her marriage contract. My mother took that option and escaped.

She arrived in the U.S. without speaking a word of English, to live with her eldest brother who had immigrated a few years before. She was despairing over the loss of her child, vulnerable, and in need of an anchor. My father, 20 years her senior, was breathtaken by her exotic beauty and became that anchor as he wooed her with poetry written on tiny scrolls tied with dried flowers. A single father, he offered her his daughter to raise, he promised her stability, a home, a family. She had few options and sought the refuge of marriage.

They married in 1966.