Perspective: Gentle voices soothe the poison of the day

The phone has been ringing constantly since that tragic Tuesday. Calls keep coming from friends and neighbors, the director of our son's preschool, my daughter's baby sitter. "Are you okay?" they ask in gentle voices. "I've been thinking about you."

I don't live in New York or Washington. I didn't lose friends or family in the Sept. 11 apocalypse. They are calling me because I have dark eyes and dark hair and dark skin; because a tiny gold medallion with the name of God in Arabic has hung over my children's bed since birth, because when my family travels, we pass beneath the Koran as we step out the door. They are calling because they recognize that on the periphery of death and destruction and unspeakable loss, people like me are among the minor casualties.

Muslims. Terrorists. Fanatics. Them.

Muslims. Ordinary. Workaday. Us.

Can you tell us apart? Will you try?

I have always resented the way my individuality is erased by my heritage. In 24 years of living and loving in this country, only in the past few have I felt strangers looking at me with open curiosity, the kind that waits for my identity to reveal itself; without preconceptions. More often their eyes have been full of what they think they know about me based on watching CNN. I am either fanatical or non-religious. I am either radical or Americanized, meaning sanitized, cleansed of my differentness. I am either one of them, or one of us -- although my status as a belonger is always probationary. It may be revoked at any time, due to events beyond my control.

In my early college years, which coincided with the Iranian hostage crisis, I told a boy who tried to pick me up in the student store that I was from Iran. "I forgive you," he said. I was unable to return the favor. It took Timothy McVeigh to teach America that fanaticism and righteous martyrdom are not the monopoly of one religion, or indeed, any religion at all.

So now these men of the Middle East have wronged America. The Islamic schools in town are closed. My cousin calls from London to urge me to "lay low for a few days." I dread the idea of entering an airport once again. I am ashamed to be grateful that I don't have a foreign accent, that I don't wear a scarf and tunic, that I am not a swarthy man with a beard.

A couple days after the attack, I imagine the heavyset man in the blue uniform of the Florida Aquarium is looking askance at me as I push a stroller through the wetlands exhibit. In front of the shark tank, I glance surreptitiously around each time I speak Farsi to my son, on guard for signs of hostility. The mothers standing next to me are more interested in their discussion of toilet training. A young dad with a diaper bag is busy chasing his toddler.

A few moments later, the uniformed attendant hails me with a smile to tell me a live animal show comes on in two minutes. "She'll like it," he says, gesturing at my son, Max, who is overdue for a haircut. I smile back at him, filled with a sense of relief. Of reprieve. Some days later, I feel disproportionate gratitude when a fellow motorist brakes to allow me to merge into his lane.

That same afternoon, I run into a fellow mom from my daughter's T-ball team, hauling groceries and her two children through the Publix parking lot. She is a nervous wreck, she tells me, terrified for her Kuwaiti husband, her dark-skinned children. We clasp hands, exchange phone numbers. That night, I hear a scratchy, hesitant voice on my answering machine. The voice of a mother in my Farsi group, calling to tell me her family has received a death threat. I call her back instantly. We talk in low voices while my children splash and yell in the bathtub. She reads me the note promising death for the "sand n-----" and his "white whore." It's one person, I keep telling her, promising her. The toxic words linger, though, dispensing poison into my day.

At night, I pray for the bereaved whose pain will not end tomorrow or next month or next year. I pray for the living -- let there be some living -- trapped in the dust and darkness with no light but for the glimmer of a fading hope. I pray that retaliation, when it comes, won't start something that can't be finished. And I pray that the next time someone expects me to apologize for my heritage, I will remember all the gentle voices that have called to me since the attack. I want to bottle kindness, to put by an antidote to the poison that is filtering through the mail, the airwaves and the streets these days.

My friends know what I believe in my heart America is gradually learning. There is only one "us" and one "them." We who have a conscience. They who do not.

-- Gelareh Asayesh is the author of Saffron Sky: A Life Between Iran and America. She lives in St. Petersburg.

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