Milad Saadat

Milad Saadat joined Telegram

For those of you who don’t know what Telegram is, it’s a very popular messenger app whose HQ is in Dubai now, but it was originally founded by Russian brothers Pavel and Nikolai Durov. Literally almost everybody uses it where I was born, in Iran, and it’s truly a work of art in terms of engineering and UX. Similar to other messengers, you set up your account with a phone number and off you go.

A few days ago, over the weekend, I was out, and when I got home, I saw this on my Telegram app:

A Telegram notification for Milad Saadat saying “Milad Saadat joined Telegram” at 02:08, beside an avatar with the initials MS.

I opened the contact, and yup, it was my main line from when I was in Iran. Literally the line I had since I was 18 or so. Suddenly a swirling wave of emotions flowed through me, but I could vividly categorize them into two.

I remembered my journey ever since I left Iran. I remembered all those squeaky apartments in Boston back when I was a Ph.D. student at Northeastern and seeing rats that bully cats was a normal sight. I remembered the moment I predicted the power-law response of a flow using PINNs when I had just joined Safa’s lab. I remembered all the amazing people I got to see and hug and dance with and pour drinks for at the parties and get-togethers. I remembered all the “spots” that we had in Boston. I remembered the loneliness that was waiting in the backyard, looking for a crack to crawl in, and if you were an immigrant at some point in your life, you probably know what type of “loneliness” I am talking about.

But then something pulled me even further back: I made so many memories with that phone number back in Iran.

I remembered when I was 19 or so, watching a theater show with my girlfriend at the time, when she suddenly held my hand and I felt like the entire stage was vibrating in front of me. I remembered all the nights that I was coming home late and my dad would use all his lexical prowess to invite/advise me to get home sooner. I remembered all those sleepless nights when I would be texting (I’m SMS-old) until my balance ran out and I had to “charge” my account. I remembered all the phones that SIM card had seen in its life. I remembered the heartaches after the breakups.1

My phone number had remained dormant for long enough that the carrier sold it to someone else. There are some relics of me using that line scattered across a few phones, in others’ phones, in some DBs. I left a country and my ties to it will fall apart from now on, one by one. If you were an immigrant at some point in your life, you probably know what I am talking about.

Footnotes

  1. This is my almost passive effort to remember things, and most of them are good things, despite Daniel Kahneman’s Peak-End Rule. ↩