Bagher first travelled 150 kilometres south to Kermanshah where he was taken by oil tanker east across the country to Arak in central Iran, and from there he boarded one of Reza Shah’s beloved trains to go south to Ahvaz, the capital of Khuzestan and only 120 kilometres from Abadan, where his journey would end. It was a convoluted route but necessary given the limitations of transportation and the war. It was an epic expedition for the boy who had never left Kurdistan.
Reza Shah’s prized railway may have been built by the Germans but now it was the property of the Allies and Bagher squeezed on to a train teeming with British soldiers returning to their posts in the south. My father once told me that he would never forget that journey, the rumbling through the night then waking to a dawn so delicate it stained the scrub-tufted desert outside a soft shade of rose. He had pulled down the window to take a breath of air, and promptly drew his head back in as if slapped in the face. What greeted him outside the window did not seem like air at all to someone who had grown up in fresh mountain breezes. Moist and heavy with dust, it was so hot it burned his throat. Bagher had arrived in Khuzestan.
Abadan was a dusty, fly-blown town cut through by the deep waters of the river; its progress and rapid development into such an important city having outstripped the writing of geography books so no mention could be found in any reference books to its existence. Located on a triangle of land lurking in the delta of the Tigris and the Euphrates, some 45 kilometres from pearl-stitched waters of the Persian Gulf, Abadan sits on its own island, bounded on its west by the Shatt al-Arab and on the east by the Bahmanshir, an outlet of the river Karun. Having arrived in Abadan too late to take the entrance exams, the Institute waived the rules and Bagher started his studies, finding fascination in the mechanical engineering workshops. In 1944, the Institute had sent its first group of students to Birmingham University and Bagher had his sights now on bigger opportunities. Bagher was picked as one of ten further students to be sent to Birmingham, and in the summer of 1945, having paid a quick visit to Kurdistan to take leave of his father, he boarded a boat heading across the Shatt al Arab to Basra where they celebrated the surrender of Japan and the end of the Second World War. On they went from Basra to Baghdad, from Baghdad to Palestine, from Haifa to Cairo. There were endless delays as decommissioned soldiers tried to find their way home, exhausted and exhilarated, but Bagher didn’t mind. Like his grandfather before him, who made the arduous journey across mountains and deserts in a caravanserai to visit Mecca the century before, Bagher traversed strange new lands on his own pilgrimage, his quest for education. With each new city, each new country, his horizons grew ever wider until they came to encompass even the drizzly shores of England where, on landing at a blustery Liverpool, Bagher found that his carefully learnt English did not resemble at all what the natives seemed to speak.
Birmingham in the aftermath of the war was a dreary place of ration books, overlooked by a sky from which all light and colour had been sucked. But Bagher and his colleagues, salaried by the AIOC and dressed in smart suits, their black hair Brylcreemed slick, cut exotic figures through the university and the town and there was no end to their popularity with the local girls and the women who studied with them at the university.
Somehow my father thrived in this foggy land and it was the love of Britain formed in those post-war days that took us back there so many years later. From his first day in Birmingham, when he had been struck by how quiet the streets were compared to the cacophony of Iran, my father had loved British efficiency, the way the traffic moved in calm, quiet lines, the reserved fortitude of the people stoically standing in queues. Bagher remained in the UK for more than five years, spending holidays working in various placements arranged by the Company and visiting every corner of the green, misty country that he could. From the Yorkshire Dales to a Butlin’s Holiday Camp in Skegness, there was no place that was not attractive to this young Kurd; along the way he picked up a love of Western classical music to add to his proficiency in traditional Kurdish dancing, and a British wife to take back to Iran.
He met Audrey at university, a tall and blonde Brummie who impressed Bagher by her self-confidence and her intellect. British women like Audrey were an inspiration to Bagher. He recognised the same confident strength that characterised the Kurdish women he knew, but the British women were able to stride forward alongside the men without too much fuss. The importance my father placed on a university education – and a British one at that – can almost certainly be attributed to the influence of Audrey and women like her.
As well as falling in love in England, my father also initiated Iranian students’ societies and was presented to the young shah when he paid a visit to Britain. He even broadcast a message back to Iran via the BBC’s Persian Service each Iranian New Year, knowing that in Sanandaj Shokrollah would collect all their family, friends and acquaintances around the transistor radio to hear his voice crackle over the airwaves.
My father left the UK for Iran in January of 1951, a qualified mechanical engineer complete with a British wife, ready to go back home and take his place in the newest strata of Iranian society – the middle class. Bagher, with his acquired love of the West, and passion for his homeland, was just the sort of New Iranian that Reza Shah had had in mind when he had taken his limping, feudal country in hand the same year that Bagher was born. In the space of twenty-five years, it seemed that the seeds that the Strong Man had planted were already bearing fruit, their roots planted firmly in Iran while their branches spread across to the Western world. What none of the New Iranians travelling back on the plane with Bagher that January in 1951 knew was that the very soil out of which they had grown was to prove very shallow indeed.
6
The Family House in Abadan
The house in Abadan was a large corner house that occupied most of the two blocks it conjoined, its outer walls surrounded with shops which Abbas rented out. There were just three bedrooms and a large living room arranged around a central courtyard garden, a shallow pool set in the centre. In the garden there was a mulberry tree whose berries we ate greedily in the summer and whose spreading branches afforded us shade in the hot days, and there were pots of red geraniums all around the pool. The loo was the traditional sort, a tiled hole in the ground kept compulsively clean by Maman-joon’s servants, and outside, tucked into the corner of the yard by the stairs leading up to the roof, there was a large stone shower room where we children crowded in with our aunts to be scrubbed down by kisehs, silk mitts crocheted by Maman-joon and rubbed generously with a chalky white stone called sephidab which left our skin tingling and glowing clean, the heat and the dust of Abadan sloughed off. The pace of life in Maman-joon’s house was gentle and indulgent, lots of naps and playing; my mother relaxed among her family, and it was my favourite place to be.
When my mother was growing up in that house, the boys shared one room, the girls another and Fatemeh Bibi and Abbas had the final bedroom; in traditional families, the concept of personal space and privacy was as alien then as it is now. Their beds were a stack of mattresses that were kept in a corner and taken out at night as needed, and the Abbasian children learnt to live together in such a merry cacophony that, although as young adults they sometimes longed for peace and quiet and to be left alone, they were always happiest when part of a symphony of loud chatter. In the summer months when the heat and humidity threatened to overwhelm them, they moved up to the roof and in the spring and autumn they would often sleep out in the courtyard.
After the Second World War, Abadan was swarming with foreigners, and it was booming. Maman-joon told me that when they had moved back to Abadan after the war, she and Abbas had been shocked at how the population of the town had grown in a matter of a few years. In its social interactions there was a revolution taking place. There were parties where men and women mixed freely, the women wearing Western clothes and displaying a great deal too much flesh for a Muslim man’s comfort, and there were sports clubs, yacht clubs, tennis clubs
springing up all over for employees of the Company. Although most of the Company’s top brass were farangis, some Iranians were now in positions of power too and these slick, urbane Iranian men seemed just as dangerous to my grandfather as their foreign counterparts. Abbas was old-fashioned and Fatemeh Bibi, for all her easy ways, was traditional in her habits, so the Abbasian children were brought up with strict discipline and a strong sense of right and wrong, and, even more crucially, of what was proper.
Iranian society is based on values of honour and respect, and being seen to do the right thing is almost as important as actually doing it. While Islam preaches piety and charity, great store too is set by being honourable, and the honour of the family rests mostly in the hands of its women, dependent largely on their behaviour and propriety, their modesty and chastity. My grandparents instilled into their daughters in particular the values of correct behaviour, of the grace of always being appropriate, the charm of being elegant in manner and proper in action. Coupled with the Hayat Davoudy ease of being, sense of humour and beauty, the Abbasian girls – although they never went out unchaperoned – cut quite a dash through town.
Two years after Shapour was born, Fatemeh Bibi had given birth to her first daughter in 1937. Parivash was pretty as her mother but with Abbas’ brown eyes; her schooling had been limited to the maktab where she had learnt to read and write and recite the Qur’an. A determinedly jolly little girl, Parivash grew up to be a sweet, devout woman who laughed easily, especially at the absurdity of life, a trait that served her well through an adult life which has been dogged by persistent heart problems. Her heart, for all that it was already cracked, still managed to flow with love and laughter and to this day my Khaleh Parivash, who cannot walk up the stairs of her house without getting puffed out and whose arthritis won’t let her kneel at her prayer mat, has such a talent for hilarity that she is irresistible company.
Parivash, being the eldest daughter, was the first to get married in 1953. Jahanzadeh – no one, not even his wife, ever called him by anything but his surname – asked for Parivash’s hand from her father and, once accepted, he called round regularly to sit with and try to get to know the shy girl who would be his future wife. Parivash, even then a giggler, was mortified at first when this stranger sat in their house and everyone left the room. The first time that Jahanzadeh attempted to talk to her, Khaleh Parivash told me that she was so bewildered that, on the pretext of getting some more tea, she raced out of the room to laugh hysterically. Fatemeh Bibi had ticked her off and sent her back in saying, ‘Talk to the man! You are going to have a lifetime with him, better start getting to know him now.’ Fatemeh Bibi had no patience with her daughter’s protests; it was already radically modern of her and Abbas to allow their daughter the opportunity to get to know her future husband a little before being confronted by him at the sofra aghd.
All those years later, after a lifetime together, four children and open-heart surgery, my aunt told me that she was at first horrified by Jahanzadeh, and then she threw back her head and laughed at the idea. She was seventeen and happy at home with her family turning her talents as a seamstress to good use. But slowly she became accustomed to his presence and she even started to like their weekly outings to the cinema. Her father refused to let her go out with her fiancé unless they took all her siblings with them and Jahanzadeh dutifully took his future wife and her siblings and even some cousins to the cinema every Friday, the long line of scrapping Abbasian children – often in double figures – snaking round the building while he attempted to keep some semblance of control over the younger boys who were so naughty they would shoot straight up walls as soon as your back was turned.
After Parivash’s wedding she went to live with her husband’s family in Shiraz. Then beautiful and devout Khaleh Mahvash with her mellifluous voice had been next, happily married to her cousin Jamshid, a tall, gentle man with curling, waxed hair and the same dusky grey-blue eyes that he bequeathed his children. He was the son of Fatemeh Bibi’s brother and somehow the combined force of the Hayat Davoudy genes made their children exceptional in both beauty and brains. Mahvash and Jamshid had loved each other and their marriage, although arranged, was full of joy, and their children were born each prettier and cleverer than the other.
Fatemeh Bibi liked the idea of keeping marriage in the family and she had fixed another such match for her next daughter, the unlucky Mina. My khaleh Mina was then, as she was to remain, a nurturing creature, bubbling over with creative energy which she poured into the household chores, into cooking and caring for her siblings as if she was their second mother. Mina, like her mother, loved to sit and chat and laugh. She delighted in listening to music and although she was not allowed to dance – none of the Abbasian girls were, it was considered unseemly – her elegant hands were so expressive that each twirl of her long fingers seemed to contain all the rhythm that was not permitted to beat through her hips.
Close in age and similar in outlook, Sedigheh adored Mina, choosing her as her best friend, and when it was her older sister’s turn to be matched for marriage, she felt almost as bad as Mina did in accepting the match. Promised to a man twice her age, the only son of a distant relative, at sixteen Mina was interested in nothing so much as finishing high school and adjusting her beehive. But her father deemed school unnecessary and Fatemeh Bibi was deaf to the girl’s pleas – she saw that Mina’s great gift lay in the abundance of her love and she thought it better for her to be settled and start her family than to finish school. After all, what use would she have for all that education in her life? She was a woman and her life would be devoted to the care of others – her husband and the children she would have. Mina’s tears and obvious distaste for the match were ignored, and her marital status suddenly became the primary concern of all the older women of the family.
My mother told me that she watched her sister water unwashed herbs with her tears as they all sat in the courtyard and cleaned bunches of parsley, mint and coriander. She watched her try to reason with their mother, grandmother and aunts – ‘Akhe Maman-jan,’ Mina would sob through her tears, ‘I don’t want to get married now, I want to finish school, stay here …’ But to no avail. Her husband had been chosen: Abdolhossein Busheiry, one of Fatemeh Bibi’s own kinsmen. He was a kindly, scholarly man with Brylcreemed hair and a pencil moustache, as short as my grandmother and nearer her age than Mina’s.
Mina couldn’t cross her mother but she was horrified by the thought of marrying a man more than twice her own age. It was her most passionate wish to have her own family; her elder sisters had already started. No reason why not, my grandmother pointed out. Just because the man is mature, that’s no obstacle to love, she said; it hadn’t stopped her and Abbas. Mina’s silent tears fell into the basket of parsley in front of her; my mother told me she watched each drop fall, feeling sad for her sister, and so had ventured that Busheiry was rather handsome in his own way, rather like Clark Gable with that slim moustache. Mina smiled weakly and in the years to come it became one of their favourite jokes. Her stubbornness had added to Fatemeh Bibi’s insistence, Maman-joon claiming that her bad back and ill health were the result of worrying about Mina’s defiance. Many years later, after her lifetime with Busheiry was over and she finally had her independence, she scoffed at her mother’s methods as she told me the story. ‘Have you ever heard of such a thing?’ she declared as she pottered in her little apartment in Shiraz. ‘As if my marital status had anything to do with her health!’ She laughed then, the smallest pinch of bitterness creeping into her voice. ‘But you know, back then we believed such things. We obeyed our elders – we didn’t know any better. I didn’t know that my mother wouldn’t die of shame if I defied her – and I didn’t dare take the chance.’
It was impossible for Mina to defy them anyway – she was a respectable girl and she simply had no other choice, and no way of supporting herself should she flout their wishes and be cast out of the family. Even in Abadan in the late fifties, even with all Fateme
h Bibi’s progressive ideas and her daughters’ tight jumpers and kitten heels, it was unthinkable for Mina to risk being ousted from her family’s bosom and ultimately the fear of the consequences of such disobedience overrode all else. She capitulated.
Mina was married to Busheiry – she called him by his surname for the rest of their lives together – at seventeen in a strapless dress, looking in her wedding pictures like a fifties society debutante in lace, long gloves and a tiara. She had, in the end, given in with good grace, her temperament as soft as her mother’s if not quite as carefree, certainly not given to rebellion. As was to be her habit all through her life, she had not fought her destiny but instead had surrendered to it and made the best of her bad lot.
My mother and Mina, so alike in many ways, were different in one crucial respect. The fourth daughter of the family and the fifth child, Sedi bore Abbas’ strong nose, but also his even stronger will. Just as the nose had dominated Abbas’ face as a boy and had taken growing into, Sedi’s childlike face was also presided over by her nose. She had a thick fringe, jet-black hair whose heaviness made it hard to set in the bangs she tried to wear; she always followed the Western fashions she saw in the farangi magazines all over town. She was thin and graceful even as a teenager and she was very bright.
Although only six years younger than Parivash, the world was changing so quickly around them that Sedi had somehow managed to imbibe ideas that none of her sisters had dared to think of. My mother wanted to finish school, to go to university, to become a lawyer. She wanted to make a living, be independent, and fall in love. Somehow these ideas had settled so deep inside her that when Abbas wanted her to quit school at fourteen, Sedi had, to the shock of all, simply refused to obey. The night that she had faced down her father, suddenly unafraid to insist on what she so dearly wanted, she had discovered mettle in her soul, a strength and confidence in herself that began to blossom. Though as proper as all of her sisters, Sedigheh’s temperament burnt as hot and bright as her father’s, and the iron in her grandfather Ali’s spirit was suddenly apparent also in hers. Where Mina had conceded defeat when tears and fond appeals had not moved Abbas, Sedi not only stood firm in front of her father – never once forgetting to call him by the courteous title of ‘agha’ and looking down at all times out of respect – but she also recruited the headmaster to her cause who called round personally to reason with Abbas and even offer to waive the fees for the last two years of school.
The Cypress Tree Page 5