Monologue excerpt from THE SCENT OF JASMINE

A-B-C
 
MARAL sets down her suitcase and puts on a scratchy record: “When you sing you begin with Do-re-mi, Do-re-mi...” She turns it off.
 
MARAL
When you read you begin with a-b-c, a-b-c...a-b-c-d-e-f-g-h-i-j-k-l-m-n-o-p-q-r-s-t-u-v-w-x-y-z. There, now I've said it all. It's all within that combination. What's left? Things that cannot be spelled, extraneous, superfluous things. Things that exist above the everyday and yet are what make every single day.
My name is Maral with a hard rolled "r" in the middle. When I was six, I was given a snow globe with a Las Vegas sign that teeter-tottered as the liquid bubbled before my eyes.
 
Snow begins to fall only where she stands.

There, in a corner of my room stood this souvenir that had come millions of miles, over oceans and seas and now decorated a corner of my mind. "I am going to live in America one day. Teeter totter on the see-saw from Las Vegas and dance in the Florida sun," I repeated night after night before I went to bed. And I did. I danced in Las Vegas and rode a see-saw in Florida. Then my granny Natasha would ask me, “What do you want to be when you grow up?",“I want to be a blonde Hollywood film star," I would reply. “Yes, of course,”she would say,“Of course, you will be. You can be sure of it. Whatever you want, you will become.”
And I was sure of it though it was so far away. We would watch America on the television and never imagine it real. The things that happened there were so different from the things that happened to us. They were shiny and pretty and fun. They had nothing to do with us, tucked away in a corner of the third, fourth or fifth world. Beyond...lay the untouchable, the unreachable, the ultimate, protected by a screen of glass. And if you reach inside, will it shatter, this illusion made of lights and a tube? I want to put my hands inside the glass and grab the little people. I want to enter this sublime. Go through the glass. Come out the other side. How could I enter the competitions in the comic books I read? Would they even know where to send my prize? What does that imply to the mind of a six-year-old trying to make sense of the world? Your arc of imagining becomes so limited. After all, you can only go as far as you can see.
And then one day it happened. A broken dream of a far-away place. A paradise now shattered, the surface has cracked, the water seeps through. My snow-globe broke.
 
The falling snow stops suddenly.

Bits of glass crunch beneath my size three feet. My fingers ooze with the vital blood of this new world. So glossy, so gay, so por-tr-ayed. Tell-tale signs of a liquid world. And when it shatters, a six-year-old girl learns early on what can become of dreams. The fragility imprints crystal clear on her brain the stuff that dreams are made of. Tears in her eyes, remnant liquid of a dream disintegrated, mists of time, vapors of reality like pixie-dust glimmer here and there. Glints of glass, hints of existence. Shimmers of being and then...Gone. Instantaneously, one world crumbles into another. One disappears as the other appears. Simultaneity smudges.
 
MARAL picks up her suitcase and sets it by the door.

That is where I come from. And that is where I'm going back to.
 
 
Lights out.

She eats ice cream out of a tub of Haagen-Daaz.

SHE
As the ice-cream melts in my mouth, it takes me back to many such occasions where ice-cream melted in my mouth in a similar way. Its frozen texture takes me to a Friday night.
 
Everyone's here! There's Herand. And Anush and Alek. Not a soul missing. Such a pleasant, cool summer's night. Perfect for a summer drive and to stop for ice-cream. The flavor is strawberry as I indulge on the hood of a beige Carmenghia. I am small, the world around me large, and it all seems to be gathered here in the town square. Mothers, fathers, daughters, grandmothers, wives and children. Such luxury represented only in the sweetness of the dessert in the year 1966, when such luxuries can still be afforded amongst the people of Iran.
 
Another Friday night. This time I taste a creamy vanilla as I observe the happiness around me. Bright lights surround the live area until it becomes almost day. A band is playing at one end and everyone is dancing. Boys with girls, girls with girls, moms with grandmoms, dads with moms. I sit at a table at the other end, soaking it all in. As I watch the dancing, I sense something so incredibly pure about this gaiety, so incredibly sweet, it leaves the appropriate taste in my mouth of vanilla ice-cream.
 
The next time I vividly recall tasting vanilla ice-cream it is four years later. We sit at one of the many newly opened restaurants. As you walk in the front entrance, you pass through water falls so thin they resemble walls on either side. I sit facing these walls. I like to watch the people as they walk through. They are distorted and blurred...shimmering as though in a dream. Our party is quiet and reserved, conforming to the newness of the atmosphere. I eat my ice-cream with a touch of boredom. It fails to awaken in me the delights and passions of previous years. It tastes somewhat different, a more mature, tired vanilla than that of before. I sit in my disillusionment and wonder at the shimmering figures that continue to enter. The year is 1970.
 
I never tasted ice-cream again in Iran after that night at the new restaurant. Somehow, it lost its flavor for me then. The 1979 revolution swept away the Shah's monarchy, along with a lot of other things, and brought the Ayatollah Khomeini to power.
 
It is Friday night ten years after the revolution as I sit in Los Angeles with this tub of Haagen-Daaz. I swirl the vanilla around so as to extract every hint of its flavor. It tastes sweet and cold and its texture carries all the physical characteristics of ice-cream, and that is all. I think back to the revolution that happened soon after the night of the shimmering figures and I wonder how long it will be before Iran regains the flavor of its people, the pureness of its land, but, most of all, I wonder how long it will be before I can taste the sweetness in the air of a cool summer's night.

Lights out.