Perhaps my grandfather agreed simply because he was getting old and didn’t have the energy for an argument with the obstinate girl, but maybe it was also because her mother joined her cause too. The fickle Fatemeh Bibi had decided that Sedi should indeed complete her education – although just a few years before she had refused the unfortunate Mina the same privilege. Sedigheh was allowed to finish school and became the first Abbasian girl to graduate from high school, though her father would not countenance the girl’s leaving home to attend the university in Tehran as she wanted. Sedi found instead another purpose in the Technical Institute’s bilingual Pitman secretarial course.
Sedi had picked up English quickly and the accuracy of her typing and quality of her work made up for the boisterous nature which their British teacher, Miss Gentry, so miserably failed to contain. ‘Please Sedi, do be quiet!’ had been Miss Gentry’s constant refrain in the year she had been in her class, but Sedi was rarely quiet. Garrulous and enthusiastic, Sedi loved to laugh and sing at any given opportunity – being noisy and sociable is coded into the Abbasian genes and Sedi was no exception. But she was unique to the family, blazing a trail through her family that bridged the gap opening up between the traditional lives the Abbasians still lived, and the new life destiny had marked her for – as the elegant wife of a New Iranian.
After my mother, until the last of the Abbasian children, Khaleh Yassi, was born in 1956 thirteen years later, all of Abbas and Fatemeh Bibi’s children were boys. Two years after Sedi, Hossein entered the world, a handsome baby from the first, and now the heartthrob of all the Abbasian boys with looks worthy of a matinee idol. After Hossein there was Pardis, so like Abbas in looks with the prominent Abbasian nose and skinny form that he was nicknamed mahi kharoo – fish bones – by the others. Pardis was always a special friend of my mother’s, they were so close in age, looks and temperament, and they had a wicked sense of humour in common too. Then came Mostafa in whom Abbas saw no resemblance to himself at all and in his irascible old age, Abbas’ punishing iron rod found the innocent Mostafa’s back more often than it did the real perpetrators of whichever horror he was being punished for, usually the twins Ahmad and Reza who came next in the family, or the youngest son and the leader of all nefarious plots and mischievous undertakings, Mohammad, known as Mamaly. Last of all was Yassaman who, with her willowy figure and unusual height seemed proof of evolution in action.
These aunts and uncles, khalehs and daieys, are the characters whose presence coloured my early life and on that first trip back, the overpowering joy of rediscovering my family blew open my shutdown heart. In Shiraz – where the majority now lived, having fled Khuzestan during the Iraqi invasion – we gathered every night, and those who were not in Shiraz managed to take a few days to come and see us.
Surrounded by such love, here within the throngs of aunts, uncles and cousins I found finally some of the context I had been looking for. Bits of myself surfaced in unexpected places – the way an uncle crossed his legs, the way Maman-joon sat on the floor, the long fingers of Khaleh Mina’s dancing hands, the way all my khalehs laughed covering their mouths as if trying to keep in the hilarity bubbling out of them. Sometimes I would catch them, my mother and my aunts, all lined up in a row, their legs crossed the same way, their heads held up, bearing the same proud expression, all variations on a theme. My Abbasian aunts and uncles had all grown older and morphed into each other.
We gathered together and threw down a sofra that ran from one end of the room to the other to accommodate us all. On any given night, our numbers would total at least thirty, sometimes more, and in the middle of all this activity sat Fatemeh Bibi, small and sparrow-like, grown skinny in old age, no longer with a round, fecund belly and plump, white arms. She dyed her hair jet black and her green eyes still shone out of her once-beautiful face, but her voice, once so rich and deep, had grown husky after an operation on her larynx to cure a lifetime of puffing on the ghalyoun. She sat cross-legged on the floor and watched these family scenes with relish, this small woman who was the originator of all those flitting around her, from my oldest aunt already in her sixties to the babies being carried by her grandchildren; the matriarch of our clan. She joked and laughed with us, clapping her hands along to the music to encourage us to dance, the louder the noise of our fun the better for her, and she insisted on playing hostess, regardless of whose house we were in. She stroked my hair and I caught her looking at me with delight, her large eyes drinking me in as she told me that she never felt complete with any of her brood missing.
Yet no matter how many of us gathered and how delighted Maman-joon was by our presence, we were missing some crucial characters. In the years that had passed since the family gatherings of my childhood, through revolution and war and the ongoing strictures of the Islamic Republic, we had lost some family members along the way, and our sofra could never be complete again.
7
New Beginnings
In the modern history of my country, one man looms large: Mossadegh, the prime minister who nationalised Iran’s oil industry, the first leader in the Middle East to claim sovereignty over the country’s resources, the first to begin to loosen the quasi-colonial rule of the region by the West. Dr Mossadegh is still revered by Iranians and his removal from power by the CIA and MI6 is remembered bitterly more than half a century later. But the man who has shaped modern Iran as surely as Reza Shah or his son, the man who still symbolises Iran’s unfulfilled desires for sovereignty and democracy, is not officially remembered anywhere in Iran itself. There is no memorial to him, no streets named after him and no murals of his long, bald head gracing the side of Tehran’s tall buildings. In a country so given to honouring those it holds dear, Dr Mossadegh’s image is conspicuously missing.
On returning to Iran from Britain, Bagher had been invited to the majlis to hear the oil nationalisation bill being debated by a relative and had heard Dr Mossadegh deliver the bill which proposed to turn the oil industry and its profits over to Iran, the country claiming sovereignty over her own resources. Mossadegh was already an old man, his balding head ringed by a halo of white hair, a prominent nose jutting out of paper-thin skin. He argued that Iran had no chance of being politically independent of foreign powers while Britain continued its economic exploitation of Iran and he sought to put an end to 150 years of British meddling in Iran’s affairs. Ever since Winston Churchill had ensured Britain’s dominant share in the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company, Iran had received just 16 per cent of the profits of her own oil. In 1950 alone, Britain’s profits for the year were more than what it had paid to Iran in the whole of the previous half-century – and Iranian resentment was running at an all-time high. ‘The moral aspect of oil nationalisation is more important than its economic aspect,’ Mossadegh had insisted, and Bagher had been so rapt by the powerfully emotive speech that he had missed his train to Abadan.
In Abadan something similar to an apartheid barred ordinary Iranian workers from occupying high management positions and from entering Braim, the area the British had built to house their own people, an enclave of sprawling suburban villas set behind barriers, with its own shops, sports clubs, and cinemas. Iranian workers were given their own housing estates and the large number of skilled Indian workers that the British had also brought with them lived in their own quarters near the refinery, known as Sikh Lane. Abadan was booming but it was also effectively segregated.
When finally, late in 1951, the bill was pushed through and ratified, the British who ran the AIOC in Abadan were barred from their offices. Bagher was one of three men appointed to keep the power station supplying the refinery working when the British departed. A responsibility to his country was born in my father at that moment and, although he had been friendly with the British, had gone to wave off British colleagues as they were evacuated for Basra and even agreed to take in one of his friends’ dogs, he was nevertheless gripped by the sense that now Iranians had a chance to prove themselves, and it was crucial they shouldn’t fa
il.
The British refused to recognise the bill and Mossadegh argued Iran’s case in The Hague and at the United Nations, mocked by the British media who called him ‘Mossyface’ and ignored by the US, who found his eccentric personality – with his habit of openly weeping as sentiment overtook him – odd but interesting. Not interesting enough to risk their own stake in the region, however – America was a new world power and hardly wanted its own regional oil partners to start declaring sovereignty over their oil. The British piled on sanctions, restricted trade, put pressure on anyone wanting to buy oil from the newly formed NIOC (National Iranian Oil Company) and even intercepted a shipment of crude oil, but the Iranians grew to love their prime minister even more, seeing in him the saviour we are apt as a nation to look for. The shah’s father had been unpopular but he had at least been strong. The new shah was young and ineffectual and growing resentful of his prime minister and he left the country when an attempt to arrest Mossadegh resulted in the prime minister dismissing the messenger without bothering to leave his house.
Mohammad Reza Shah did not have the look of the father that the nation longed for. Mossadegh, however, with his raw emotion and propensity to appear on his balcony in pyjamas, was exactly the sort of father that Iran wanted – a peculiarly Persian creature whose refinement and sophistication sat easily alongside his love for his country and desire to serve. Dr Mossadegh was more than a match for the shah but in the end he could not win against the might of the British Empire and the tough guy tactics of the Americans.
The CIA and MI6 hatched a plot to overthrow Mossadegh and bring back the shah. An American agent named Kermit Roosevelt was armed with quantities of bank notes and gold and rounded up a paid mob calling for the return of the shah and the resignation of Mossadegh. With four out of five newspapers in Tehran controlled by the CIA, soon the prime minister had no choice but to step down. The shah came back to Iran with a renewed sense of destiny. Meanwhile, in Qom, a little-known cleric who had been paid to denounce Mossadegh found himself with a taste for power. The cleric was called Ruhollah Khomeini and by the time the shah sent him into exile in 1964, he was already known by the title the world would come to learn years later: Ayatollah Khomeini.
Just as with the Constitutional Revolution, a democratically elected Iranian leader striving for Iranian democracy and sovereignty was toppled by foreign powers who preferred a malleable shah to serve their interests instead. Iran was too rich in natural resources, too important geographically, to be allowed to run herself. The Iranian people, who had lately loved this urbane, eccentric father of theirs, were so easily blown by the prevailing wind that they stood back and watched his home be ransacked, his followers rounded up and beaten, his foreign minister stabbed and executed by firing squad, while the old man was put on trial as a traitor in a military court.
The wave of nationalisations that followed in the region can be attributed to Mossadegh’s legacy – the Suez Crisis of 1956 is just one such instance. But he was to remain in the mass memory of Iran as the ideal father the nation was never allowed to have.
After the departure of the British, the houses of Braim were allocated to Iranian managers. Bagher and his wife Audrey moved into a large house and employed a cook, Karim, who was expert at cooking English food but had to be taught by Bagher how to sift and steam Iranian rice and how to mix the herbs, meat and vegetables that made up his favourite khoreshts. The Company looked after its employees with the same sort of care and dedication that landlords had traditionally given to the workers on the land, international flights were now landing at Abadan airport and the town which had so recently just been an island in a marsh was thriving.
The British had built Braim for themselves and the manicured lawns and ordered gardens recalled a suburbia with a paler sky many thousands of miles away. They stopped short of the mock-Tudor facades and double or triple storeys standard in Surbiton – these houses were mostly bungalows and though the population of Abadan thought that this was exactly like England, an Englishman, confronted by date palms soaring into the firmaments in the garden and walls of tumbling bougainvillea against a humid blue sky, would certainly not have agreed.
They were nothing like traditional Abadani houses, with their desire to hide the family’s lives away behind tall walls. Instead the new houses turned this traditional model inside out. What these houses in Braim had imported from the West was the openness, the yard and garden in the front of the house so that anyone strolling casually by had an unimpeded view of the garden and the front door and even into the windows of the house itself. Once they were occupied by the New Iranians, these houses seemed to promise that those who dwelt in them were living different lives, living by different values, inhabiting open, transparent spaces in which everything was out on show. Thousands of years of culture and personal impulse were swept unceremoniously away by these houses and the New Iranians that occupied them, those men and, more importantly, their women, who were not afraid to show their faces – literally – to the world. Less than thirty years after their grandmothers had refused to leave their homes uncovered or died from the shame when forcibly unveiled in the street, this generation, this enclave of New Iranian women had not only uncovered themselves – their hair, their arms, their legs, as they strutted around in the latest fashion from the catwalks of Paris, Milan and London – but their houses and by extension their lives too.
It was a shock many of the traditional people – who usually served them as housekeepers, cooks, cleaners, maids – never got over. The cultural chasm that started to yawn open between the old, traditional classes and the modern middle class proved – in the years to come – not only unbridgeable, but in part the instigator of the horrors of the revolution.
The shah had spent the rest of the fifties consolidating his own power. Mossadegh’s downfall had led to an oil deal in which Iran’s oil profits where to be shared 50/50 with a new oil consortium of which British Petroleum owned 40 per cent, the rest being divided up between American and European companies. While this was hardly the vision that Mossadegh had had for the NIOC, it did signify the end of British dominion in Iran. The American era had now officially begun.
After returning to Iran, spurred on by his new puppet masters and his own fear of the Red Menace, the Shah increased his military spending, encouraged along the way by America. The new world may have been nominally at peace, but the Cold War had begun in earnest and the importance of Iran’s position as a Western-friendly regime holding back communism’s spread into the rest of the Middle East and to Europe was played up by the shah. The shah established SAVAK – its operatives trained by the CIA and Mossad – to gather intelligence on everything as he became increasingly autocratic and paranoid. SAVAK’s spectral existence began to cast a shadow that extended over all aspects of Iranian life, and the Iranian mind, long sensitive to conspiracies and plots, soon had all its nightmarish paranoia fed by the activities of the organisation. In the years to come, as the shah’s dictatorial tendencies grew ever stronger, the Iranian people felt it unsafe to speak frankly even in their own homes while they were in company.
The shah’s secret service was so feared and had so penetrated the Iranian consciousness that even as a small child growing up in the seventies, I was aware of certain associations around that word, SAVAK. The word stank of fear, of silence and wariness, of conversations cloaked in allegory. The poetry of the Persian language and the indirectness of the culture suited such subterfuge – after all the Iranian mind has been shaped for centuries around intrigue, mistrust and insecurity.
After thousands of years of being conquered and subjugated to the whims of invaders and their own despotic kings, the Iranian mind was already ripe for the sort of insecurity that the presence of SAVAK in potentially every aspect of society engendered. Indeed, Iranian manners and codes of courtesy were already well made for the sort of dissembling that now once again became a national art.
Nonetheless, my father prospered. Pictures from the
late fifties taken on Shokrollah and Akhtar-khanoum’s only month-long visit to Abadan show them standing among the roses in the garden at Braim, their faces lifted to Bagher’s camera, their backs straight, pride etched deep in their faces. Akhtar-khanoum wore a delighted expression, decked out in the long, flowing Kurdish robes of Sanandaj, her hair pulled back under the headscarf she always wore, and Shokrollah as an old man looked jolly, his head bald, his eyes round, wearing a suit just like the one that the unfortunate tailor Esmael had made for him in Sanandaj back in the twenties. Not only had a lifetime passed, but a whole world too, and Shokrollah looked like a relic from another age, standing in his old-fashioned suit in Bagher’s modern Iranian garden.
The newly confident shah entered the sixties with a pretty new wife – having dispatched two others along the way it was hoped that Farah Diba would finally give him a son and heir – and renewed belief in his own divine purpose. Maman-joon, whose crush on the shah had never waned, prayed fervently for him to finally be given an heir which, to her joy, he soon was with the birth of his first son later that year.
The Cypress Tree Page 6