South Harbors Secrets, A Journey From The Caspian Sea To Panbeh City In Mississippi

In 1950s, tiny Neek was living in a small, serene, but poor village by the Caspian Sea. He was blessed to have the love and blessing of his four angels: mom, grandma, and two aunties. He loved stories more than anything else. The unique and intact landscape of the North fueled his imagination and nurtured his eager for discoveries and adventures. His imagination took off when he read, for the very first time, the novels about the life and adventures of Oliver Twist, Tom Sawyer, and Huckleberry Finn. He could recite their stories by heart.

He was unaware that the ups and downs of his life could qualify as true adventures in their own right. He moved from his small village to the capital city of Tehran. He beat the odds and graduated from the medical school. He then moved to the United States and became a cancer specialist. He finally settled down in Panbeh City in the state of Mississippi. He pioneered a quiz show that offered tens of college scholarships to the talented but disadvantaged African-American students in this part of the South.

Quite accidentally, he was entangled with the family of Darius, the first champion of the game show. The scholarship was instrumental for Darius to become a prominent lawyer in Washington, D.C. and Virginia. It turned out that Darius’s family harbored deep and painful secrets from the past. The way those secrets unraveled were quite traumatic, taunting, agonizing, and deadly.

Meanwhile, two mothers, worlds apart, had an uncanny resemblance in their struggles and sacrifices to make a better future for their son. The parallel life of Soraya and South is a testimony that human spirit transcends all the artificial barriers like race, nationality, and religion.