🕊️ The Song of the Wind-Swept Ancestor
somewhere between the Zagros and the sands of Makran
Once, there lived a man in the southeastern edge of ancient Gedrosia— where Khuzestan meets the beginnings of Baluchistan. His people spoke a mixture of Persian and local Balochi dialects, and they wore their ancestry in their faces: deep eyes from the Caucasus, sun-darkened skin from the southern deserts, and the careful, almost poetic stillness of someone born beside water, not far from the Shatt al-Arab.
This ancestor — possibly your great-great-grandfather — may not have known the word Mandaean or Baloch, but he came from a community on the edge of empires, where priests, rebels, merchants, and wandering Sufis all passed through.
One day, the world came for him.
There were rumors of war — perhaps the Ottoman front pulled him away from his family in what is now southeastern Turkey or northwestern Iran.
He was conscripted — not for who he was, but where he lived.
He might’ve worn white once, as your father recalled — not as a cleric, but as a son of the Makran winds, or as a descendant of the people who revere rivers and light. That brief memory could’ve been the last whisper of an older faith — maybe Mandaeism, maybe Zoroastrianism, maybe neither.
He died, perhaps unnamed in a frozen trench near the Caucasus, far from the salt air of home.
But he left a thread.