It passed below us, mountains and valleys, deserts and seas all written, it seemed to me, with the stories of my ancestors, the whole country crisscrossed with our adventures, losses, passions and laughter. Up in the north-west province of Azerbaijan began my mother’s strand of my family’s story.
Ali was from a family who for generations farmed land outside Baku in the Azerbaijan region that historically belonged to Iran but, like a hyperactive pawn, changed hands between Russia and Iran repeatedly through the nineteenth century. Ali, after an argument with his brothers, took his family and quit Baku, moving down to the revolutionary hotbed of Tabriz in Iran in 1909. In those heady days of the Constitutional Revolution, Tabriz was a magnet for all sorts of Caucasian revolutionaries, and a man who considered himself Iranian may well have chosen to follow his ideals and help his countrymen in their struggle for freedom, going to Tabriz to join the mojaheds.
Ali’s son Abbas was not yet ten when he experienced the hunger and loneliness of those times, a city under siege, food becoming ever scarcer and the constant fear of attack by loyalist troops both outside and inside the town. Abbas would always bear inside him the hardship of that time and he developed a lifelong obsession with an overflowing sofra and multitudes to sit around it. Abbas Abbasian, as he was to become, was taken across the country to Esfahan where the family settled in the Armenian quarter of Jolfa but he was barely in his teens when he quit Esfahan’s turquoise domes and headed south to Abadan where he, with his quick wit and ability to work hard, prospered and made such a fortune that he was considered a suitable match for my grandmother Fatemeh Bibi, a khan’s only daughter.
I knew my grandfather Abbas for just the first year of my life, and since my other grandfather had passed away long before my birth, I was brought up in a large family headed by a matriarch. Tiny and beautiful as a jewel, Maman-joon held fast the family in her small hands. Maman-joon’s miniscule frame loomed large in my memory and I knew that she would be there when, after our time in Tehran, we finally alighted in Shiraz.
The other strand of my family were my father’s people who hail from the mountainous province of Kurdistan, the portion of a non-existent country that falls in Iran, and who made their home in Tehran. Legend has it that King Solomon banished five hundred mischievous djinns from his kingdom, flung by his wrath into the zigzag terrain of the Zagros mountains, a land so remote that the powerful king could forget all about the troublemakers. The crafty djinns, finding themselves lonely in the mountains, flew across into Europe where they chose five hundred beautiful virgins, with skin pale as alabaster and hair like flax, and transported them back to their new home where their union begat the Kurds, a people famed for their ferocity, their pale eyes and their hospitality; a race given to dancing and loving and fighting, as strong and stubborn as their beloved mountains. Legends and myths continue to cling to the slopes of the jagged peaks that form this land, and the Kurds wear their mythical status like a comfortable coat, always ready to slip on when the political climate demands.
My Kurdish family are nearly as prodigious as my Persian family but, compared to the noisy Abbasians, they are made of much quieter stuff. The glittering exceptions to this rule are my Kurdish cousins, the women who were like aunts to me as I was growing up: Mehry and Guity. They were my mother’s age but always also somehow felt like friends and contemporaries – this was their great gift. Guity always produced delicious food and loved a snowball fight more than even the hot sweet tea she was addicted to. And beautiful Mehry used to take me out to drink café glacé after school and has been there for me through all the worst points of my life.
She had come back to London – where she had completed her PhD – in our first few months there when we were all numb with the shock of exile, and she had turned up again some years later, materialised like an angel when I was bed-bound recovering from third-degree burns, missing sitting for university finals with my peers. I was twenty-one then and still in the throes of denying Iran, but she somehow managed to slip through the wall of Anglicisation I had built around me to fill me with her familiar, wry love. Seeing her sitting perched on the edge of my sickbed brandishing a pair of sharp tweezers, I had allowed her to pluck my eyebrows – though I had refused my mother access to them for years. Her legacies are with me to this day: a taste for good coffee and long sweeping eyebrows.
I knew they were down below, waiting for us and, all too soon, the lights of Tehran were blinking up at me. I shuffled behind my mother and stood on the steps leading down from the aeroplane. That’s when it hit me; the night air, autumnal, carrying a suggestion of reddened leaves, the rushing of mountain springs and the snows to come. I had forgotten. I wasn’t prepared for the smells of the town where I had grown up – Tehran. I burst into tears.
3
Tehran
My fears disappeared when the immigration official examined and then stamped my virgin Iranian passport without even looking up; he only addressed me when he said, ‘Welcome back to Iran, Khanoum Mohammadi.’
In the baggage hall, I took in the scene as my mother busied herself with trolleys and porters. The hall was busy, clamouring with chatter and movement. Watching over everything, mounted high up on a wall, were pictures of President Rafsanjani and the Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Khamenei. In the centre, the picture that dominated all others, the image that still dominated the country, the blank stare of the dead revolutionary leader, Imam Khomeini.
I looked through the glass wall and there they were, amongst the groups of excited families bearing bouquets of flowers: Mehry and Guity, so inescapably themselves that I was momentarily stopped in my tracks. Older certainly, the years having etched deeper furrows on Guity’s face than on Mehry’s beauty, but their eyes lit up like excited children’s when they saw us. We crossed the line and I fell into their arms, dwarfing them – it was the first time I had hugged Guity as a grown woman and she was so tiny that I could have put her in my pocket.
We drove to their flat and, after the customary tea was drunk, I retreated to bed, my stumbling Farsi exhausted, my heart wrung out. There I found my pillow scattered with jasmine flowers – Mehry and Guity had never forgotten how much I loved them.
The next morning the sunlight burnt through my eyelids, forcing my eyes open. I dressed and headed for the kitchen, where everyone was gathered waiting to make a fuss, give me tea, push on me flat bread sprinkled with sesame seeds and spread with white cheese, a jar of my childhood favourite – sour cherry jam – on the table. And best of all, I noticed as I took my seat at the table, there were the mountains. The Alborz framed in the window. Quite suddenly my heart soared. Of course I had remembered the mountains but I had forgotten their looming presence, so close, so vivid. We were in the north of the city, butting up to the mountains, and they were right outside the window, as they had seemed in my childhood home in Darrus, a part of Tehran that was then as far north as the city spread. In those days, opposite our rambling villa was a blank of wasteland, no houses or development yet, just orchards and, soaring up behind them, always capped by snow, the Alborz.
That was before the city exploded to its present size, before the population of Tehran grew to 14 million souls, before the Iranian love affair with the car made it necessary to embroider Tehran with a spaghetti of motorways, to join up its furthest reaches with miles of tarmac. Tehran contains almost one fifth of Iran’s total population and all those people with their thoughts and dreams and ambitions need somewhere to live, so the only surprise in seeing the soaring skyscrapers punching Tehran’s skyline was the unexpected modernity of it.
I had believed the Western media’s image of Iran as a land that had been taken back to the thirteenth century. But I soon found out that, while the Islamic Republic reverted to the Islamic calendar (on my first visit back in 1996 it was 1375 in Iran) and adopted Islamic law after the revolution, in reality Iran was a thoroughly modern country.
The Iranians’ delight in all things new includes a passion for building th
e highest towers in the region and Iran’s most distinguished architects had begun a race for the most high-rise, glossy, mixed-use skyscraper the city had seen, and residential buildings started to join in, with apartment blocks becoming the norm. Wonderful old Persian houses were deemed spatially too inefficient, and the old houses set behind walls circling large rambling gardens of fruit trees and shallow pools have become a rarity in Tehran. Even villas built by the New Iranians like my father, men who had made their money in the booming sixties and seventies in industries such as oil, were being knocked down to make room for soaring blocks containing multiple lives, while the new rich, the mullahs and their friends, have constructed ever more palatial villas further north. You have to venture further up the Alborz’s fanning skirt nowadays to be in the higher reaches of the city. Tehran continues to grow, snaking up the mountain, the flats and houses and palaces creeping upwards. The height of the mountain will contain Tehran one of these days, but who knows how soon Tehranis will find a way to build and live and breathe at 3,000 metres.
I spent those first days in Tehran not quite a tourist, not quite a local; neither British nor properly Iranian, but lost somewhere in the gap between the two, an empty space which was more dislocating than I had anticipated.
Nothing was easy those days. I was a foreigner, though nonetheless Iranian enough to be mortified by my own lack of appropriate manners and language. But the stream of visitors who came to see me didn’t care how bad my Farsi was or how clueless I was about everything. They wept over me, they turned to my mother and kissed her hands, saying, ‘You took away a girl and you have brought us back a beautiful woman. Dastet dard nakone.’ All this love was at once comforting and overwhelming – I had accustomed myself to life alone, my answer to exile being an overdependence on the independence that I could not have here in Iran. Suddenly I was joined to my mother by an invisible umbilical cord, the presence of which made me deeply uncomfortable. I chafed but I had no choice but to submit.
The rules of behaviour in this new Islamic Republic were so confusing to me that I learnt to hang back and be quiet and let others take the lead. I was trying to understand my own culture. It mortified me.
At the airport, one of my male cousins, Firooz, had accompanied Mehry and Guity, and, although my heart had skipped to see him, I hadn’t dared to kiss him until we got back to the flat. That was another thing to remember in the Islamic Republic – you must not touch men in public.
Actually, in the years to come, I was to discover this to be as relative as many other laws. There would be times when one of my uncles would take my hand as we walked down the street and not let it go. There would be times when they would clasp me in their arms at the airport, soaking my face in their tears. But whatever the rules governing these digressions from the law, I never fully understood them and so I pulled my scarf tightly over my hair, kept my face free of make-up, my coat loose and shoes flat – and I stood motionless in front of every man in my family, from teenager up, until their actions guided me.
I was swept off to palaces and museums. The city I had grown up in had become a confusion of crisscrossing motorways – everything had changed. Everywhere, looming on the sides of buildings and on giant billboards by the highways, were lurid representations of Imam Khomeini. When I was growing up, in Mohammad Reza Shah’s time, photographs, usually of him decked out in military uniform, hung at the top of every classroom I attended. After the revolution, the shah’s picture was replaced by Ayatollah Khomeini’s impassive stare and images of the ‘martyrs’ of the war with Iraq. Painted poster-style with beautifully calligraphed snatches of poetry or revolutionary slogans, the men were portrayed surrounded by doves or garlanded with roses, the Iranian love of nature transforming even these dubious works into a continuation of the delicate sensibility of Iranian art. This was a new phenomenon, the lavish poster art that covered the side of buildings, often accompanied by verses of poetry or sutras from the Qur’ān, and it was hard to escape the presence of the Islamic Republic and its values at every turn.
Thick smog hung over the city, the pollution choking my lungs. On the rare occasions that the smog would clear, the sight of Damavand on the horizon would transport me back to the city of my childhood. I loved walking down Tehran’s main thoroughfare, the wide and long Vali Asr – the new name for Pahlavi Boulevard – with its wide joobs gushing water and the plane trees stretched out overhead. Pahlavi was not the only street that had been renamed. The revolution and subsequent regime change had renamed many streets, squares and monuments, anything referring to the monarchy had been replaced by ‘Imam’ and many roads bore the names of the war’s most famous martyrs. Just to confuse matters further, some streets and areas were referred to by both their post and pre-revolutionary names. Navigating Tehran became, as so many things seemed to me on that first trip back, an exercise in confusion.
The most powerful part of that trip, the simplest thing of all, was the love that I rediscovered for my extended family. It went beyond houses or gardens, confusing laws or latent guilt, beyond even the deserts and mountains that I had imagined linked me to the past. The love of my family anchored me and I realised that, for me, Iran will always be about the people whom I love.
In Tehran there was my uncle’s family, and in the wild mountainous land of Kurdistan the rest of my father’s family, the women still wearing their multi-coloured long Kurdish dresses, like spangly birds of paradise. Kind, quiet people, characterised by wry humour and their teasing manner, the side of the family that produced our most brilliant academic achievers. My mother’s huge family is spread across the country now, some still in our native Khuzestan, in the hot and humid climes of Abadan and Ahvaz, while in Shiraz a selection of aunts, uncles and cousins from my mother’s side awaited me. So, after a week in Tehran and a whirlwind of the half-familiar faces of my father’s side of the family, my mother and I headed to Shiraz to be absorbed into the ample bosom that is the Abbasian family, my beloved Khaleh Mina among them, my mother’s sister and closest friend – and my favourite aunt.
4
Shiraz and the Abbasians
The city of poets and nightingales, Shiraz is famed for its gardens, the smell of orange blossom in the spring and the overwhelming sentimentality of its people’s souls. It lies towards the south of the country, in the province of Fars, the cradle of the Persian civilization. An hour or so out of town, deep in the scrub, lie the remains of Persepolis, and nearby stand the remains of the tented city of the shah’s extravagant celebration of Iran’s 2,500 year anniversary, a testament to the folly of this self-aggrandising man. Among the nightingales and the gardens of Shiraz lives Khaleh Mina, one of my mother’s older sisters. Khaleh Mina is like a second mother to me; she was always there with her patience when my mother’s hot temper got the better of her, and with her raucous laugh when my mother’s frowns would open for no one else. I hadn’t seen her for nearly twenty years but the brightness of her love was such that all my attempts to forget her had been useless.
And then there was my grandmother, Fatemeh Bibi Hayat Davoudy, or Maman-joon as we affectionately called her. As I sat on the plane and remembered her, a tiny sparrow of a woman, some inches short of five foot with jet-black hair, smooth white skin and green eyes, I had no doubt that she would still be a great beauty at the age of seventy-eight. What I had neglected to anticipate was how moved I would be to see her standing at the head of the family group that gathered at Shiraz to greet us. Doubled over and clinging to her as she hugged me, her tiny white arms encircled by gold, my face contorted with emotion as she reached up and patted my back, murmuring, ‘Hush my child, it’s OK, my child, it’s OK, my girl,’ just as she had when I had howled for my mother when she went away.
Fatemeh Bibi Hayat Davoudy was born into a family of khans from the south just before Europe heard the first shot of the First World War ring out and just a few years after Iran saw the coronation of Ahmad Shah Qajar, an ambivalent teenager prone to fat who would be the last s
hah of the Qajar dynasty. Her family were landowners whose properties bordered the Persian Gulf, the sea where legend tells us King Solomon’s pearl ring dropped off his finger to be swallowed by the waves. Their lands stretched west along the coast from the port of Bushehr, a region traditionally known as Hayat Davoudy, which, along with the fronds of palm plantations, included several ports as well as the small island of Kharg, an innocuous piece of land dropped like an afterthought into the Persian Gulf.
Fatemeh Bibi had been a longed-for daughter, a late addition to a family of three rambunctious boys. Her father, Mirza Esmael Khan Hayat Davoudy, had yearned for a baby girl. He had named her Bibi Bozorg and had loved her for the alabaster tones of her skin, the emerald green of her eyes and the raven black of her hair. But the indulgent khan’s happiness was short-lived and soon he was at the mosque begging on his knees for God to spare his daughter from the fever that threatened to carry her away. My grandmother’s fate seemed sealed until, as she often told me, there was a magical midnight visit to the baby’s sickroom by Hazrat Fatemeh, the blessed daughter of the Prophet, and Bibi Bozorg’s health was restored in exchange for the sight in her mother’s green eyes. And so my grandmother’s name was changed from Bibi Bozorg to Fatemeh Bibi to honour the saint, and her mother endured a period of blindness that lasted some months.
The Cypress Tree Page 2