Sarah Jafari’s “Nothing Remains” tells the story of the love of two Iranian British friends whom they first met in high school, the self-skeptical and pessimistic Shirin Bayat, and the traumatized Kian Rahimi.
Kian was 15 when his brother Mehadi was imprisoned and partially blamed himself for what happened. For her, Shirin is fighting anxiety and depression.
At high school in the northern English city of Hal, Shirin falls in love with her only close male friend, Kian, but she is not open to him about it. Kian feels the same about Shirin. He fantasizes her, imagining her lips on top of him, but quiets it.
Both Shirin and Kian went their separate after-school paths until they unexpectedly met again at a party of friends in London. They have a lot in common: they both face discrimination – they are the only two non-white students in their school, and now Sirim has found the same situation at work.
Shirin continued to think of Kian through a decade of separation. Shirin had kept in touch with a female friend from high school, but she always had a feeling of unfulfilledness, pessimism and skepticism. Her parents had broken up when she was in college.
“Sirin thinks there’s sometimes an ugly thing within her.
But her thoughts of Kian, and her desire to be together one day, give her a sense of hope and relief.
Shirin’s love for her old friend became resurfaces when the two meet again in London at their friend Millie’s 27th birthday party. But that’s a little too late: Salma, who Kian is watching now, is also at the party. Shirin even asks Kian to kiss her, but he doesn’t because she’s drunk.
These enthusiasts have one of the last meetings Kian lives in at a dinner party in New York in 2020. She confesses that she has many regrets and confesses that she was thinking about him during a decade of separation. Kian confesses that he imagined she would kiss him while they were at school.
“Why didn’t we make it work?” Kian asked, adding that he wanted it. Shirin replies with, “I want that too…”
Is this time the time they finally get together? Or did the bay develop between them?
A London-based British Iranian writer, Jafari, beautifully written in simple terms, takes over an uneasy readership and finds what Shirin and Kian crave for each other.
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