Toranj: Our Adventure Left Mid-Way | by Ali Reza MD | May, 2026 | MediumSitemapOpen in appSign up<br>Sign in

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Toranj: Our Adventure Left Mid-Way

Of lives lived quietly inside a loud and grieving Iran

Ali Reza MD

7 min read·<br>2 hours ago

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I read a tweet once about how programmers are, in their hearts, game developers who never quite found the time, or built the skill, to make the game they always dreamed of making. I felt it explained me better than I could.<br>From the first lines of code I ever typed, the possibility of creating a world of my own lived somewhere in the background. Growing up with computers and video games, the digital world settled into me so early that I stopped noticing it was there. It became part of the light by which I saw everything else. When I chose medicine, I chose it knowing something else would have to wait.

The game waited. Every few years I would return to it, downloading Unity or following tutorials, convincing myself that this time I might finally begin. I never crossed the invisible line between trying to learn and actually creating something.<br>What I didn’t know was that it was waiting for more than time and skill. It was waiting for a world to be set inside, and for someone worth building that world around.<br>It found both when it found Toranj .<br>She had a quality I never managed to explain properly to anyone who hadn’t met her. There was something drawn about her, almost as if she’d wandered out of an animated film and into ordinary life by mistake. Warm in a way that made the rest of the world feel like background scenery around her. I used to tell her that Disney ought to invest in her, that she was already a queen character waiting for her studio. She’d roll her eyes. Still, you could tell she liked hearing it.

In those years I would walk to her office after sunset with a medical podcast in my ears. I was preparing for my pre-internship exams then, and there was always another topic to revise, another question bank to finish, another test waiting somewhere ahead. I would stand outside her building listening to someone explain a diagnosis or a management plan I hoped I would remember on exam day.<br>Then I would see her come through the door.<br>I would take my earphones out. It felt like stepping out of the world of preparation I had been living in all day and into the one we were quietly building together. Then we would walk her home.<br>We talked about everything. She was thinking about immigration then, about leaving. She was not sure she could navigate all the steps that stood between her and the life she was imagining. We were living through some of the country’s worst years. Both of us believed that somewhere beyond it there might be a life we could build for ourselves. I listened while the city moved around us. Neither of us understood it at the time. But we were both trying, in our different ways, to find a future we could share.

During night shifts, I would stay awake through the rest periods and open my laptop. Usually I wrote code. Mostly web development. Small projects. Things medicine had no room for. The hospital would settle into its nighttime stillness, and for an hour or two I became someone simpler than the person I was during the day. Not a doctor in training. Not a man preparing for the next stage of his life. Just someone sitting with a screen, keeping a neglected part of himself from going out entirely. Those were the only hours that were truly mine.<br>The game was still there. By then it had found its world. And it had found its character. It had Toranj in it now. Her warmth. Her expressiveness. It had the streets we walked together. The shape of a small, self-contained world. The city around us as its backdrop in its most difficult years. A boy and a girl meeting somewhere in the middle of the road, trying to make sense of everything.

There were two scenes I always came back to. The first scene would take place in a park.<br>It was cold enough that I was wearing a green button-up jumper. I still own it. Sometimes I put it on and the evening comes back with unsettling clarity. She had cut her hair short not long before, and there was something playful in the way she looked at me that night, as though she knew a secret I hadn’t yet admitted to myself. I walked her around the park for more than an hour. I had come there intending to ask her to be my girlfriend, and every lap was another postponement. She told me we should sit. By the time we finally settled onto the bench there was only one question left that I had come there to ask. When she answered, I was so overwhelmed that I heard the wrong words. I genuinely thought she had said it was too soon for her to decide. So I began talking to fill the silence. She stared at me with increasing confusion before finally interrupting.<br>“I agreed,” she said. I looked at her.<br>“You agreed?” She laughed and said yes.<br>That night was the first time I held her...