Years ago I had gone on a pilgrimage with my mother. I sat in front of her on a donkey, with her hands around my waist. I would fall asleep and wake up to see the stars and the moon above and feel my mother’s breasts like pillows.

Now I looked at her. From a whole day’s hard travelling, the lines of her face were deepened. I reached out and touched her arm. “How do you feel?”

“A little tired,” she said, her head shaking. “But we should be there soon.”

On and off people would speak to each other and then fall into silence.

Lights began to glimmer before us and we reached a group of cafes, stalls, and shops lit by gas lamps. Behind them stood an immense field, surrounded by trees, with rivulets of water running through it. There were many tents of various sizes and shapes raised on the field, some no more than thin mosquito nettings or heavy cloth hung on trees. Men, women, and children were coming in and out of them.

We stopped there, giving our donkeys to one of the men who stood by a stall ready to take them and rent us a tent. Many of the other pilgrims stopped there as well.

One man led the donkeys to a pen. Another man took my mother and me to the tents, showing us the selection we could choose from. We took a small one, tied by ropes to four trees. Mattresses, pillows, blankets, and a jug of water and two glasses were the only things inside. A wide stream ran through the field in front of the tents, bright with the reflection of the moon, stars, and gas lamps. Some children came back and forth to get water in pots or jugs. In the center of the field several fires were built inside of stone stoves and people stood talking with each other and cooking. Groups of children sat around playing with marbles, rag dolls, or jumped over the chalked lines.

My mother lay down to rest while I went away to buy food for us. I zigzagged through the people and trees. Stones from the unpaved ground kept getting into my shoes and I had to stop from time to time to shake them out. No one noticed me. I was an Iranian woman, wearing a chador. Beyond the field there was a hill and many people had gathered on it. I went up the hill and joined the crowd. A group of musicians sat in the corner and began to play—violin, santur, and drums. A young woman with a rather sad face and coiling black hair began to sing, her voice rising to feverish heights at times. On the other side of the hill I could see the lights of some peasant huts showing behind trees.

I stood there for a while, listening, watching, my mind filled at the same time with other similar scenes from the past. I suddenly thought of my body as an immense shell, emptying from one side and filling from the other. The stars, the pink flowers on my chador, the knobs on the singer’s black hair, the dark eyes of a young man standing in the crowd and smiling at me just then—were all little grains being fed into me. I took them in with each breath, slowly.