Dr Roghieh & Leila Dehghan

‘There was someone. There was no one…,’ is how Iranian folk tales begin. One way I like interpreting this is that identities are stories: who we are is a story we tell ourselves. In the same vein, Homa Zaklaki is a pseudonym, as everyone’s name is. Here comes the tale of my creation:

There was someone. There was no one. There were two sisters (Leila and Roghieh Dehghan Zaklaki) growing up in Tehran in a traditional middle-class family. Every so often, in their summer holidays, their parents took them to Zaklak, their village in Azerbaijan. At nights the two sisters, lying next two each other on the roof of their auntie’s house, gazed at the starry sky and threaded the beads of their hopes into their words. In the space between them, in their fables, in the angle of their yearning and the heaven I was born. They named me Homa, after their great-grandmother who used to say: ‘In Homa’s tribe the girls might not be beautiful, but they always have a charm.”

Later, during the Iran-Iraq war we moved with our family to Vienna where, with a cup of coffee glued to our hands, we did the rest of our growing up, the greasy metamorphosis of two teenage sisters into young women in a strange land. After graduating from the medical school in Vienna, we moved to the United Kingdom to complete our medical training. Our work as doctors has taken us on voluntary trips to various places in India and Bangladesh.

Currently, we are living and working in North London. Life outside of writing revolves around fitness coaching and animal welfare for Leila, while Roghieh, following her MA in Near and Middle Eastern Studies (SOAS), has been awarded a fellowship from the National Institute of Health Research to study issue concerning refugees.