“I do not simply want to see Buffalo; I want a part of my life to unfold there someday.”
17-year-old Aryan Vali Baharvandi wrote those words about Buffalo in an email from his home in Iran, thousands of miles away from the city he describes.
It is a strange kind of homesickness, and it sits at the center of everything Baharvandi writes. His novel “Kafir,” written in Persian, follows a man born inside a prison who refuses to stop chasing freedom.
Hussein Kafir, the titular character, runs through prisons real and imagined, from the fictional Nur Ghafel to Guantánamo Bay and Russia’s Black Dolphin Prison, and into North Korea, where he is not a prisoner but a citizen of a society so controlled that some people may never learn what they are missing. Near the end, Hussein writes to friends awaiting execution.
In Baharvandi’s preliminary English translation, the letter reads: “They never knew that Hussein would give his life just to breathe in, for a single moment, the air of freedom they enjoyed.”
Baharvandi knows Buffalo only from photographs, yet he can imagine its cold mornings, its quiet streets, its sky.
The interest began with a question about a name. Baharvandi wondered why a city is called Buffalo when the famous animal native to North America is the bison. That curiosity led him to the city’s history, including the different stories about how it got its name.
“Sometimes, a simple question is enough to turn a distant city into a place you wish you could visit, even if only to breathe its air once,” he wrote in an email.
What began as curiosity became something more personal. Through photographs and what he has learned, Baharvandi imagines a place where he might “find inspiration, experience a different environment and perhaps discover new possibilities for myself as a writer.” He pictures meeting people who care about creativity and literature, and “the possibility of finding solitude beneath its sky, alone with my thoughts.”
He is careful not to claim too much.
“I have never visited Buffalo, so I would not pretend to know what living there is truly like,” Baharvandi wrote. But he sees that as a part of what makes the connection unusual: “It began with a question about a city’s name and grew into a genuine wish to experience the place for myself.”
He is moved by 716 Day, the July 16 celebration of Western New York pride.
“To them, 716 is more than a number,” he wrote. “It represents belonging, pride and a bond with the place they call home.”
Belonging is not a small word for Baharvandi. It is the subject of his book after all.
When he was a child, a relative went to prison. Baharvandi watched the man’s phone calls with his mother shrink to a few minutes before the line went dead. He wondered “how something so simple — hearing one’s mother’s voice — could become an unattainable dream for a human being.”
The question never left.
“I could not put an end to all suffering,” Baharvandi wrote, “but I could create a character who would live amid that suffering, fight against it and search for the meaning of freedom.”
Getting the book into readers’ hands has been harder than writing it. For about two years, Baharvandi sent the manuscript to publishers in Iran. Some took nearly three months to respond and did not allow him to submit elsewhere in the meantime. The answer was often a short, impersonal note: “Mr. Vali Baharvandi, your work does not align with our publishing policies.”
“My heart was broken,” he wrote. “I sat on the floor and cried until I had nothing left.”
He kept going and found Bookmundo: a Dutch publisher that released “Kafir” in 2026 and gave him an ISBN at no charge.
As a child, he dreamed of becoming an astronaut and an inventor.
Now he dreams of writing for Hollywood.
“I could give them lives of their own through stories,” Baharvandi wrote.
For now, Baharvandi believes “some cities find their way into your heart long before you ever set foot in them.”
And maybe, once in a while, Buffalo writes back.
Alejandro Henry-Jackson is the assistant arts editor and can be reached at alejandro.jackson@ubspectrum.com.
