The Cypress Tree

by Kamin Mohammadi

  Reza Shah had shown that he meant business by bringing Iranian women out of purdah – no matter that in many cases it was done forcibly – and announcing a formal name change from Persia to Iran. The orientalist dream is over, he seemed to say to the world, you too can get to know us as we are, the original Aryan nation. You can call us all Iranians and, multitudinous though we are, we will present one face to the world – we will now look just like you.

  Reza Shah fled to South Africa where he died within three years, and his son, who too stood tall and erect garbed in his military uniform and expensive Swiss education, shared his father’s nose but none of his forceful personality, took over at home. Mohammad Reza Shah cut from the first an acceptable figure to Western powers – he was the model New Iranian, educated abroad, dressed in suits and speaking several languages with ease. There was nothing uncomfortable or uncouth about him as there had been with Reza Shah; he was young, serious and ready to be guided.

  My grandmother, like the rest of the nation, did not mourn Reza Shah – by the time of his abdication he had been extremely unpopular, forcing the people to embrace customs and ways they were little used to and liked less. Reza Shah had shown no particular desire for the love of his subjects – his project was to modernise Iran, to make her independent and great, and he did not care to sweeten the bitter taste of the pills he forced his subjects to swallow.

  By contrast Mohammad Reza Shah from the first courted his subjects. He took the throne traumatised by the abrupt removal of the Strong Man and the shame of the crumbling of Reza Shah’s army in the face of the Allies’ invasion – this institution that had symbolised the power of the monarchy. Stripped of many of his powers he took instead to heart the adulation of the people who thronged to see him on his provincial tours and who seemed to find him easy to love.

  Fatemeh Bibi had arrived in the world a few months before the Great War and by just before the start of the Second World War she had given birth to her fourth child and third daughter, Mina. My grandmother, for all the calm of her disposition, could not stand the explosions that shook the walls of her house and left her shaking like a leaf and she was convinced that fortune would not smile on Mina. ‘Her step was unlucky,’ Maman-joon muttered darkly from time to time when they had bickered.

  Soon after Mina’s birth and the outbreak of the Second Word War, Abbas removed his family from Abadan and moved for a few years to Esfahan where he had a sister. Iran was once more occupied by foreign soldiers, the populace chafed under foreign control and soon Iranians were openly resisting the Allied occupation. Farmland was again laid to waste under the boots of farangi soldiers and hunger and poverty was spreading among the populace. Abbas had been asked to spy on the British for the resistance, but he had refused. A man of principle, he declared that after spending a lifetime breaking bread with these people, he would not spy on them now, and he chose to quit Abadan rather than go against his conscience. Maman-joon sighed when she told me this story and added, ‘Your grandfather was a stubborn man, when he had a principle nothing would change his mind.’ I thought about how difficult it must have been for her, newly delivered of a baby, to move her whole family and household to a strange town in the middle of war and occupation. In those days, before internal flights or fast trains, a journey from Abadan took days overland, through dangerous deserts and military lines. She must have wished he could overcome his principles, but although I never knew my grandfather Abbas, I knew well the iron will of his that he had bequeathed to his daughter Sedi, my mother. ‘But Naneh,’ Maman-joon continued, ‘whatever he was, your grandfather was always a man for living.’

  Esfahan, the Safavid jewel, a dream of Persian craftsmanship at its best, lies to the north of Shiraz. She rose to greatness when Shah Abbas I moved the capital to Esfahan and commenced a great building programme, and some of the most ebullient buildings man has ever produced were constructed there from 1598 onwards. The gardens and palaces that bloomed all over Safavid Esfahan turned it into an oriental dream, carried back to Europe in stories relayed by foreign ambassadors to the Safavid court. Shah Abbas may have felt his position so threatened that he gouged out the eyes of two of his own sons and put another to death, but all over Iran the splendid, rich motifs of Persian art flowered, on the famous silk and wool carpets, on printed fabrics, on wrought metalwork, on miniature paintings of lovers drinking wine and on the jigsaw of tiles that decorates mosques and palaces.

  The new energy apparent in Safavid Iran was Shiism. This dynasty forced the conversion of Iran to Shia Islam, the faith of the underdog, the branch of Islam whose followers believe that Ali was the rightful heir to the Prophet Mohammad and who went on to fight with the caliphate until a schism was created that forever separated Shia Islam from Sunni. The Safavid conversion could be brutal but nonetheless the Safavid shahs not only arrayed Iran in some of its most splendid attire, but they made her the only Islamic nation that follows Shiism.

  The family stayed in Esfahan and my mother was born there in 1943. Her name, according to Maman-joon, was given by a passing dervish who Abbas brought home for dinner. He told her that she would bring luck on their house and that she should give her a good Muslim name. Maman-joon had acquiesced and my mother was therefore called Sedigheh.

  In 1945, when Sedigheh Abbasian was two years old, the family moved back to Abadan. Word had reached them that with the war drawing to a close, Abbas’ troubles were over and he was now welcome to return. Fatemeh Bibi smiled in secret satisfaction; she had taken it upon herself to petition the young shah and, having written her petition with great care, Fatemeh Bibi had taken the opportunity of a visit by the shah’s Egyptian wife to a local school to push her way through the throng and, holding aloft her letter with one hand while the other clutched the flower-sprigged chador she always wore outdoors, she had approached the princess’ motorcar.

  Maman-joon told me that she had somehow shoved her way to the front of the crowd and called out to the princess, entreating her. Eventually a hand had emerged from deep within the luxurious interior of the car and had extended from the open window towards her. Fatemeh Bibi had stepped forward, pushing her letter in font of her. She told me the hand was beautiful, delicate, white with long painted fingernails and laden with jewels. She watched the fingers close around her letter and draw back inside the car. She never told Abbas, but she was convinced that their return to Abadan was the result of a direct intervention from the shah’s wife herself.

  5

  ‘I wish to go to Iran, to see my much-praised father’

  After my first trip back to Iran, I returned with some precious insights, bits and pieces of information that I been given by various relatives, on both sides of the family, that had illuminated my father’s background, and told me something new of those dark revolutionary days in which my father’s life was threatened.

  My father is a quiet man. He has always been quiet, as my garrulous mother will testify. He is also shy, a trait that belies the position he held at work in the oil company. I see pictures of him from the 1960s and 1970s, official black and white photos taken at important events, and I notice that although he looks relaxed and confident in his well-cut suits, meeting some dignitary or other, often one of his hands is clenched tight. This reserved man never spoke about himself and when I became curious about his side of my family, I had to put together many of the pieces from what relatives told me when I went back to Iran.

  I knew that my father had been well-loved by our extended family in Iran, that the Abbasians cherished him as much as his own brother, sister and nieces and nephews, and that Bagher’s coming into the Abbasian family had changed all their fortunes. The respect and love with which he was spoken of inspired me to find out more. Bagher himself had never been back to Iran and was living near me in London. I saw him every week, but I realised that to find the story of my father, to answer the questions I had, I would have to search in Iran, to find him refracted through those he loved, echoes of him still in the mounta
ins of Kurdistan, the deserts of Khuzestan, the streets of Tehran and in the hearts of his friends and family. Bagher may have left Iran but I found him still there in so many ways that my longing for Iran became also a longing to know him. In the words of Ferdowsi: ‘I wish to go to Iran, to see my much-praised father.’

  My father’s family’s roots lie deep in Kurdistan. His grandfather was a merchant who had, on completing the hajj to Mecca, endowed a mosque in Sanandaj. My father’s parents were both widowed, my grandmother Kowkab was raising two children from her first husband – a handsome tailor – who had died young. I once saw a faded photograph of the tailor, and even over the ages he struck me as remarkably handsome with his twinkling eyes and luxurious moustache. He had been the first in Sanandaj to make the new European style clothes and rumour had it that his death had been a plot by a disapproving ulama – or perhaps he was the victim of a husband who could no longer stand the twinkle in his eye. Kowkab was left widowed and before long, she consented to taking Shokrollah’s hand in marriage.

  My grandparents were living in a village called Ghaslan, some seventy kilometres away from Sanandaj, a simple village typical of the area, beautifully located in a plain fed by several streams banked by bamboo, cypress and fruit trees. Bagher’s father, Shokrollah, was the land agent of one of Kurdistan’s ruling families, the Asef, and had a broad honest streak, an incorruptibility and sense of fairness that he was to pass on to his only son.

  When, on a cold November night in 1925, Bagher was born, the entire village celebrated the birth of the land agent’s son. Shokrollah was, as the landowner’s representative, the head of the village. He was so well loved that, when the year before the order had come that family names had to be registered, and Shokrollah had chosen the surname Mohammadi, the whole village had registered the same name to show him respect – feudal ways were ingrained in the people. Bagher, a bright-eyed boy with curly black hair, was born in the village of Mohammadis and he entered a world where people died in the same class in which they were born. There was no middle class and no upward mobility and Shokrollah assumed that his son would see out his days in Kurdistan. But life had other plans for Bagher.

  Born at the same time as the new dynasty that was reshaping the ancient country into a new nation, Bagher Mohammadi was destined to be the one of the New Iranians who would help remake their country in the new century. Had he come into the world just a few years earlier, perhaps he could have shirked his destiny; he would have fallen on the other side of the line which divided the old Iran from the new Iran that Reza Shah’s ascension to the throne marked. But Bagher’s birth was sandwiched right between the majlis vote in the autumn of 1925, and Reza Shah’s coronation in the spring of 1926.

  The Strong Man had officially taken Iran back for the Iranians – in 1928 he denounced all treaties and agreements which gave special privileges to foreigners and the general consensus was that he was more or less independent of the foreign control. Filling the boots of a great dictator, Reza Shah was determined that the Pahlavi dynasty should be legitimate. He forcibly settled the nomadic tribes and his land reforms attempted to create modernity at the expense of the poor and peasant classes, now joined in rank by nomads whose enforced settlement turned them into impoverished farmers grazing their cattle on arid land. Trusted political advisors regularly fell from grace and opposition figures and intellectuals were killed or imprisoned while money was poured liberally into achieving the dream of the Trans-Iranian Railway, conceived to join the ports of the south with the shores of the Caspian in the north. By 1939, the railway project was completed and most of Iran’s towns and cities had electric light, power plants and some decent roads where asphalt hardened over the dust, stones and mud that the populace had worn out its shoes on before.

  The public health and hospitals were under the cloak of government too and so the growing civil service soon became the employment goal of young, educated men. Tehran’s dominion over all aspects of this emerging nation state allowed the Strong Man to keep all the threads of the country directly in his own hands and, in the meantime, become the biggest landowner in Iran. The elementary public school system was set up throughout the country and though less than 1 per cent of the population attended secondary school, Reza Shah had started the great steamroll of education that would finally truly change Iran. Feeling that he had to fight like with like in his quest to make a modern Iran that could be as good as its Western masters, Reza Shah instituted grants for Iran’s brightest students to send them abroad to study, to come back with the best farangi education with which they could serve their country and so the first state-sponsored students left for Europe in 1928. Some years later, in 1934, Tehran University was established. Women were free to attend the university too – which they freely did.

  Bagher’s education had started at the age of five when his father taught him to read with a copy of Sa’adi’s The Rose Garden, one of the masterpieces of medieval Persian poetry. At school Bagher, already in love with words, fell deeply in love with numbers too, with their order and logic, their lack of emotions and surprises. When his father removed him from their rural idyll to live in Sanandaj, the quiet boy said nothing. When Shokrollah abruptly and inexplicably divorced his wife, Kowkab, one day before the New Year festival of Nowruz, taking her to the clerical head of the town, Hojat-al Eslam, to pronounce them divorced while her clothes were still damp from the spring cleaning she was busy with, the ten-year-old boy bit his tongue and said nothing. When he had to learn to live with Shokrollah’s new wife Akhtar-khanoum, Bagher said nothing, putting silent effort instead into loving the woman who turned out to be kind and warm-hearted. But when Shokrollah suggested that Bagher had had enough education and should be taken from school, Bagher’s mettle showed itself. For the first time in his young life, he defied his father, and the shocked Shokrollah, not used to being answered back to, packed him off to Hojat-al Eslam to see the error of his ways. But even God’s representative on earth could not prevail upon Bagher to leave school and Shokrollah never tried to interfere in his son’s education again.

  Bagher’s love of reading even made him fearless in the face of the wrath of Sa’adat-khanoum, his older half-brother Ebrahim’s new wife. When Bagher was fourteen, Ebrahim remarried – he had been left widowed as a young man with a baby daughter. Sa’adat-khanoum was a teacher, one of the first female professionals out of Reza Shah’s training college, and a thoroughly modern woman, a new breed. Independent and well educated, she happily stepped out in her shapely two-piece suits, lips stained with dark lipstick, traditionally wrought Kurdish jewellery always hanging from her. Her thick black hair was worn in short bangs that framed a strong square face, her skin glowed and her smile carried a lust for life that floored the shy, sensitive Ebrahim. She exuded confidence and right up until the end of his life, my Amoo Ebrahim could not keep his eyes off her.

  Sa’adat-khanoum spread her protective wings over Ebrahim’s life and firmly tucked Bagher under them too as if he was her own little brother. She battled with him for reading at the sofra, confiscating one book only to find it replaced by another pulled swiftly out of his pocket. This dance continued for years, Bagher eventually taking three books with him to each meal.

  Bagher’s life was shaped by Reza Shah’s reforms as surely as Fatemeh Bibi’s. The education reforms had introduced a central syllabus that was followed in all secondary schools and Bagher’s final exams – which would give him a diploma – were set and marked by the Ministry of Education. Throughout Iran there was an educational standard and boys like my father, who previously would have continued his father’s profession, were emerging with a degree of instruction, knowledge and curiosity about the world that was unprecedented.

  One day, after taking his final school exams, Bagher happened to see a group of his friends who were lazing by the river in the heat of the summer of 1943. Someone had a newspaper from Tehran; the first few years of the new shah’s rule had seen newspapers flourish – there were fort
y-seven in Tehran alone – and though they generally took a couple of weeks to reach remote provinces such as Kurdistan, they were read by everyone. This particular newspaper carried a notice from the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company inviting students to apply for entrance exams to the Abadan Technical Institute where they would be trained to work for the Company, drawing a salary while studying. Bagher immediately wrote off an application.

  The Abadan Technical Institute had been established in 1942 to train students in chemical, electrical and mechanical engineering. With the oil industry growing so fast, the Institute had been set up along the same lines as British technical institutes, to search Iran for her top students and to educate them to become as good as their British counterparts working in the AIOC. The Anglo-Iranian Oil Company was filled with British workers – they took most of the positions of power and Iran had only very few men in top management roles. Unskilled labour was provided by ethnic Arabs who were the only ones capable of working the long hours in the cruel temperatures of Khuzestan.

  Bagher’s application to take the entrance exams was accepted by the Institute and he was requested to travel straight away – he was in danger of missing the exams. In a matter of days, the thin, quiet boy with his black curly hair found himself on the train heading to Khuzestan. He had broken the news to his father, unable to contain his own glee, and Shokrollah had quietly given his blessing. My father recalled his father as being as enthusiastic as himself in planning the journey, but elderly relatives in Kurdistan told me that when Bagher had left that day, Shokrollah had been desperate, running down the street and beating his head, crying that his only son was gone.