Part of memoirs of Masoumeh Rasouli about sacred defense supporting

Selected by Faezeh Sasanikhah
Translated by M. B. Khoshnevisan

2024-3-18

The first martyr of village

When we were informed of his martyrdom, we wanted to do what we could. The town of Mallard did not have a flower shop. It came to my mind to make a flower basket ourselves. Since my mother had lived in Tehran in the past, she knew how to make flowers and had the equipment.

We gathered at my mother's house with the guys of the group. We used to put the wooden handles for making flowers on the heater and wait for them to get hot and ready to style. We applied gelatin on the satin fabric and waited for it to set. Then my mother drew the shape of a tulip flower on it and shaped it with special materials and made flowers one by one.

That day, we worked from morning to evening until we managed to make a beautiful tulip basket.

We were holding the flower basket and getting ready to go to the house of the martyr, which suddenly I remembered the first years of the revolution came:

It was the year 1358 (1980) and the war had not started yet. At that time, the eldest son, who later became my brother-in-law, had turned a part of their house into a club.[1] They said that we were going to perform a play; that's why we gathered at Fatemeh Sultan's house.

The name of the play was "Fighting"[2]. The end of the paly was like this: Ali Asghar Shafiei, who played the role of a martyr, was shot and fell on the ground. And we started crying.

It passed until the issue of war became more serious.

Now Ali Asghar Shafiei had gone to the front and this time he really became the first martyr of the town of Mallard![3]

When we arrived, we entered the martyr's house with a song and presented the bouquet to the martyr's mother.