When we first visited Ferdswi Café, and saw it was actually open, I blinked away a few tears of relief. I saw the hipster young staff with their converse sneakers, and smelled the aroma of real espresso, and something in my chest expanded and smiled. It was the oasis of Western culture and familiarity I had been craving. It doesn’t matter that they use UHT milk that gives me diarrhoea with a consistent time lapse of four hours, or that the staff are polite to the point of subservient to us. It doesn’t matter that I feel customers and staff alike intensely scanning my face for longer than is polite whenever I’m here. None of that matters. The point is they play The Supremes and REM and Colin Hay and Pink Floyd and Elvis. I know the names of the beverages, because the menu is written in English and Farsi. This café could be in Brisbane or Seattle, or yes, here in Shiraz.

It would be easy to take the difficult aspects of Iran into this café with me: the exhaustion of these last few weeks, the sparse desert-mountain terrain surrounding Shiraz, or the way some locals’ eyes flicker to my purse as they charge outrageous tourist prices, but that’s not what this place is about. This place is about the aqua tiles that climb halfway up the walls and provide an aura of calm, with the colourful fishes and flowers and oriental faces painted on them, looking cartoonish and comical. It’s about the old records lined up on a shelf from biggest to smallest above the front door, and the way they have hand-painted the large hanging globe lights suspended high above us in bright colours.

It’s also about the raised workstation that I can’t see into, and the mysterious smells that come from it. I can see jars of nameless teas lined up along the high bench, which acts as barrier between us the kitchen. I want to know where the music is coming from (who put together the playlist?), and what sneakers the cook is wearing. Now that I think of it, I want to merge with the solid Persian man with the hippie hairstyle leaning languidly on the front counter. I want to know him, and understand what he is about and why he exists. If I could become him, maybe just for a few seconds, how differently I might see the world, and what a shift in feeling it would be. I want him to see me, to feel me, to look at me and know the entirety of me, and in his expression see reflected the thought: I see you. And I understand. Instead, he brings us our latte and French coffee, and there is a tension, a straining on his part to get it right, to anticipate us and yet to not be less than us.

 I need to understand who painted the half-finished aquamarine beams high above our heads; to picture their whole history, and immediately understand the heart and soul of this place; how and why it breathes, how people come to be here and what they feel and, by extension, what they want from me. Could it be that in this place of Western celebration that someone like me, a Westerner, is some sort of ideal, some sort of standard by which to measure their success? They are attentive, grateful towards us, and full of ways to improve our experience. And I want to tell them – don’t. Don’t be like this. You are amazing. What you have is enough, and you are enough. You are more than enough. I am not your judge. We are not the kind people you need to impress. You, and your sneakers and hipster glasses and that trendy vest – the person who decided to put “I want to know what love is” on the play list – are the true stars here, my heroes. You have saved my life, and will never know what this – what you – mean to me. Thank you. Thank you for doing this.

Inside, there is an icy hand gently stroking my stomach, pressing down finger by finger, and now strengthening its grip and starting to twist. The coldness begins to vibrate and then suddenly, like a dam bursting, it flows like a powerful river through my whole body, cascading waterfall-like over my thoughts, pouring cold water over everything. Now something heavy is lowering slowly yet firmly on my chest, and my breath catches just short of an audible gasp, because suddenly I am awash with a nameless fear, an existential terror, at being stripped bare and naked in a big, cold world: a white woman with a pink headscarf and little else in Iran, and then…I don’t know what, or where, or how, or why. At the same time, a familiar jazz track is playing and cheerful pansies are looking back at me from their boxed rows along the glass shop front. Maybe everything will be OK after this, in the nameless place where I will take off my headscarf and conduct the next phase of my life because, thank God, there are pansies and familiar jazz tracks here, and a young guy whose face lights up every time we tell him the coffee is great, as though it really means something to him.

Today they played Johnny and June Cash, and in the middle of singing along to Jackson someone – I don’t know who – skipped the track, and now it is Bob Marley, and Jesse reminds me that I am committing a crime right now, at this very moment: I am a woman in Iran, dancing in public (with my feet and hands and head and shoulders whilst seated, but still). I danced harder, and then promised I would have a blog post by 6pm. He held out his hand and, mid shake, I pull away, quickly spit in my palm, and force it back into his hand. Oh, I will pay for that one. I will pay. Instead, I go into the bathroom and notice that there are stains on my headscarf, and then imagine how happy I will be to liberate my hair in a week’s time, and how it will bounce and flow and animate its way in the world around it, cheekily speaking its own language, uninhibited by foreign laws.

Yesterday from a crowded and cheap fast-food restaurant near our hostel, we sat and watched a flock of homing pigeons flying overhead in the afternoon sky. They wheeled in a tight circle, dark silhouettes against fresh blue space, and disappeared behind a building, only to appear again, and again, again. 30, 40, 100 times, never detouring from their tiny flight path. Had no one told them they were free, that they needn’t return home to their owner? How easily one might have broken free, and flown alone, poignantly into the distant sky, his back towards the others. And maybe they would have seen the idea, and followed. But no, they have been trained well. 120, 130, 140 times. Again and again, going around in circles, an invisible wall between them and the rest of the sky. How big and impossible it must have seemed to them, how very much beyond their ken. That they might take up more than a tiny wheel of space and truly spread their wings in any direction they choose – well, maybe it is better they do not know of it, of the bigness and possibility, which itself can be a burden.

The small sausage pizza I ordered was really vegetarian pizza with some pale pink deli meat tucked under the layers of cheese. The large bottle of non-alcoholic beer was really a pineapple-flavoured fizzy drink, and the cheap plastic cups they gave us bent and caved in with the slightest pressure. Later, in our room, we alternated between this drink and the thermos of black tea the hostel owner had presented to Jesse earlier in the evening, which we sip out of ceramic blue and white mugs with lumps of white sugar tossed in.

We watch Kramer vs Kramer, and afterwards I wax lyrical about Meryl Streep and Dustin Hoffman, and posit that there is no bad movie with either of them in it, but that’s not even it: if I were to really articulate my meaning, I would say they are my heroes, geniuses, and that I am at once envious of them, and also grateful that things are exactly as they are. What a thing it must be to see the world through their eyes, and have the talent to inhabit the skin of any person or object or situation at will, with such apparent ease and grace. Only five days ago we had watched Meryl Streep in Out of Africa, and every now and then, for no reason, I will say to Jesse, in my own version of a an old woman with a Danish accent, I had a farm in Africa. I had a farm in Africa…

And even as I speak, it I am reminded of my Nana, and her love of the book (the real-life story and literary masterpiece of Danish author Karen Blixen) and of Africa. It was she, my Nana, who first gave me the book maybe ten years ago, which I never read until now, on this trip, in Iran. What a relief and thing of beauty I found it to be. And all the while, through the movie, amidst my love of Meryl Streep and the snatches of time reading the book on buses and trains, I am seeing my Nana, and her sarong and green-olive sun-hat, on the beach, and feeling the strength and warmth of her hands. She went to Zimbabwe and loved it, never stopped talking about it. And now, maybe twenty-five years after that, I am in Iran, carrying this book around, thinking of my Nana and saying over and over again in bad Danish accent, I had a farm in Africa, I had a farm in Africa…

 We leave tomorrow night, and will spend 24 hours on a train from Shiraz to Mashard. In four days’ time from then, we fly to New Delhi, and then to Kathmandu. The time here has been full of plans for Pokhara, Nepal, and talk of the small, rural property I would like to hire for a month, overlooking a lake and rice paddy fields and against a backdrop of the Himalayas. Will I hire a scooter or a bicycle to make the three-kilometre journey into town for daily yoga? If I have drinks in town with friends, is it easy to navigate my way home in the darkness? The owner hasn’t replied to my message with all of its questions, and in the silence there are dozens of exciting possibilities, which I know will soon be whittled down to a handful of cold, hard facts. So in the meantime, I continue to imagine and discuss and plan, blissfully unaware yet of the stark realities.

We have been in Ferdswi Café for five hours today. The staff know how much I enjoy listening to Johnny Cash, and keep replaying his tracks. The large hanging globe lights are on now, and it is nice to see the precise shade of light they give out underneath their hand-painted green exterior. In an hour’s time, when the dinner menu starts, we will order some vegetarian pasta, drink some more water (we have been slack this week) and then make our way back to our hostel, amidst the traffic and bazaars and hawkers and crowds of women in black chadors and men in tight jeans. Of what rubbish we will discuss then, I know not. But it is now 5:24pm, and I believe I will deliver my blog post on time – early, in fact. The slimy, unexpected spittle squashed between our palms must have worked to make it so.

I had a farm in Africa. I had a farm in Africa….