Everybody is said to deserve the right to be happy in some occasions. One of these occasions is, perhaps, the time you hear that a work of yours is published – even as a translator.

This is exactly what happened to me the other day. One of my friends told me on the phone that my translation of Anthony Weston’s Creativity for Critical Thinkers into Persian was published. Such happiness will, undoubtedly, be augmented once a very good friend of mine tells me such news, and even more when this friend is talking to me right after the time he is released from an utterly unjustified imprisonment.  

The story is like this. This friend, a University Activist, who was imprisoned twice before, came out of his office to smoke a cigarette. He was then right in front of the office building. But the day was the “Iranian University Student Day”. In a street raid many people were arrested and he was one of them. 

He repeatedly said that he was innocent and was simply smoking.

But when he is taken to the police station and they see his background they do not believe his innocence; he was taken to the notorious Evin prison, kept in solitary confinement for more than two weeks and released on bail after 2 months! Without any accusation at all! He has lost a lot of weight: “I have done a lot of exercises.” He says, smiling.

He lost his job; the job for which they were supposed to pay him $300 a month, about the basic salary of the workers in Iran. It is noteworthy that he has his master’s degree from one of the best universities in the country.

Back to my happiness: you would be as happy as I would and even more in such an occasion. But this is not the whole story. This friend is a real bibliomaniac. After his two weeks in the solitary confinement, he was permitted to use the small library of the prison. But the books over there were all religious. He, a bibliomaniac, as I said, begins reading them one after another. Isn’t it great that you hear the news from such a person?

“The cover design was beautiful, and it was $2.” He says. “Once I was released, I went to bookstores.”

But when you hear from another friend, that he could not buy it because he simply did not have money, your eyes become full of tears.

You think: “Yes! He is no more in prison, and that is great, but how free is he in the real sense?”