Australia – The Age, Jan. 04, 2026
When you’re a prisoner time passes differently to life outside. Individual days drag by, but the relentless monotony of it all dulls your ability to keep track of the months and years. That is, until holiday season arrives.
When I was first arrested in Iran and thrown into a solitary confinement cell in Evin prison I would carve a line for each day into the soft plaster of the wall and try to work backwards to figure out the date. Many months later, letting go of this habit was strangely empowering. Not knowing the day of the week or the month of the year represented a kind of surrender to the perpetual tedium of prison life, but there was also strength in no longer giving a damn.
Perhaps letting go of time was a survival instinct, too. I had received a 10-year prison sentence under wholly unsubstantiated charges, with no guarantee that the Australian government would come to my rescue (spoiler alert: they did). The only way to digest this was to numb myself to the days, months and years and dampen any thoughts of the life that I could have been leading outside.
The holidays were the greatest challenge to this cultivated indifference. Even in a country as insular as Iran, both my captors and my fellow prisoners were aware of Christmas. Nowruz, the Iranian new year, falls in March – yet everyone knew when 2018 became 2019, and somehow too quickly afterwards, became 2020.
Was I imagining the sarcasm when the prison guards wished me a Merry Christmas? I spent my first in Evin listening to the shrieks of a prisoner in a neighbouring cell and imagining the worst forms of torture (I later found out she was simply angry about being transferred from elsewhere, and screaming the place down was her form of protest). I was on hunger strike during my second Christmas, a joint effort with another prisoner who was also a foreign academic. We made grandiose statements about our innocence and the right to academic freedom. The pain in my body dulled the heart-pain of being kept apart from my loved ones for yet another set of holidays.
There is nothing like being able to celebrate the holidays and other family milestones as a free person, having had this taken away from you.
