My mother kept our sofra as Iranian as she could, given what was available to her. In the days before multiculturalism, the ingredients for our feasts were often impossible to find and there was still an austerity in Britain that made food not only meagre but also tasteless and somehow antiseptic. We made do and tried not to mind too much, not complain too much to Sedi who was, we could see, doing her best.
In Iran, fighting had broken out among leftists and ethnic separatists who realised that Khomeini’s rule was not going to be what they had been promised. In Kurdistan something approaching civil war broke out when, in August, Khomeini declared a jihad – a holy war – on all those groups who were at odds with his central government, including the Kurdish groups who had helped him come to power. God’s government could countenance no opposition and the Revolutionary Courts had become expert in holding trials which were little more than brief preludes to execution. There was no legal representation or proper legal process – the accused had no rights at all and thousands were sent to their deaths. A round, jovial-looking little mullah, Ayatollah Khalkhali, became famous for the sheer numbers of those he sentenced to death, and the apparent relish with which he did so. The Hanging Judge was said, at the height of the suppression of Kurdistan, to have dispatched up to sixty Kurds a day.
Men like Khalkhali, whose loyalty was with Islam rather than with Iran, were now in charge. They wanted to tear down Persepolis and denounced Cyrus the Great as a homosexual; Khalkhali even went so far as to go to Persepolis and, in a fiery speech, try to rally people into destroying the ancient ruins themselves. But the Shirazis in the crowd, sentimental to the last and protective of their region’s great history and artefacts, managed to disperse the Hanging Judge’s band of thugs by pelting them with stones. All around the country, Iran’s greatest achievements in art and architecture were being defaced by Islamic fundamentalists who broke into places such as the exquisite Safavid palaces of Esfahan and defaced the magnificent murals that showed women’s faces. Women, who finally could see what was coming, took to the streets in their droves, Mehry among them, chanting, ‘Without women’s liberation, revolution does not make sense.’
But sense had long left the country and the revolution was now an Islamic one, and it was deadly serious about everything. ‘There is no fun in Islam,’ declared Khomeini and the Iranian character, that has always encompassed both a profound sense of the devout and a love of more earthly delights, simply bent itself to this latest dictate in order to survive. Praying, which in the shah’s time had been a private affair, now became a public act of loyalty to the regime, while partying, which previously had been very much on show, moved strictly behind closed doors. The twin strands of the Persian soul merely reknitted in a different way, they did not snap apart.
Still in Iran, my father watched developments and later told me that he slowly realised that this Iran – in which people could be prevailed on to destroy its glorious pre-Islamic past – had no place for him; it wanted nothing of his experience and expertise, or pride in his nationality, in his country. This Iran which had thrown itself willingly into the fire, had faced the guns of the shah’s forces to fight for freedom was now ruled by a man who denounced the term ‘democracy’ as a Western concept and banned its use in Iran. The country’s decades-long struggle for democracy had been hijacked by something altogether darker. It wasn’t yet clear quite what – Khomeini’s main purpose was still not entirely clear, but the signs were not promising.
My father remained in Tehran, his nieces and nephews around to help, Sa’adat-khanoum making sure he was well fed, while he arranged for the sale of the house in Darrus and put his passport in order. Every day more names of people who should report for questioning were announced by the Revolutionary Court, and every day Bagher and his devoted kin would scan the newspapers in dread of seeing his name appear. It did not happen in the three months he was in Tehran but they all knew it was a race against time.
Finally, carrying whatever he could and entrusting the rest to Kaka Ali and the Kurdish couple, Bagher bought the only ticket he could find out of the country – bound for Kuwait. The scenes he saw at Mehrabad airport were, if anything, even more chaotic than the one that had greeted us at the beginning of the summer. But, finally, as the plane lifted off the earth which he so loved, Bagher felt a lightening of the fearful burden he had been carrying for the last year.
A few days later, my father’s name appeared on the dreaded list.
In August of 1979, just before Bagher left, more than forty newspapers were shut down, leaving only those who would spread the new Islamist message. A constitution was drawn up although any debate on it was declared ‘treacherous’, and elections for the majlis were disregarded when the representative of the Democratic Party of Kurdistan – so active during the revolution in supporting Khomeini – was stopped from taking his seat in parliament. The peculiar new system that makes up the Islamic Republic’s current political structure was born, a mixture of democracy, which saw the people voting for members of parliament and the president who had a range of overseeing committees, and the councils appointed by the Supreme Leader, who controlled the judiciary, the military and had the final say on everything. The constitution declared that the Supreme Leader was accountable only to God and so Khomeini became, to all intents and purposes and despite the legislative machinery underneath him, the new ruler of Iran.
Although ‘Death to America’ was one of the more popular revolutionary chants, the new Islamic regime had been engaged with the US in making rapprochements until America decided to allow the shah to enter the country for cancer treatment. Anti-Americanism now ran riot, the United States not yet forgiven for overthrowing Mossadegh in 1953 and for interfering so heavy-handedly in Iran’s affairs ever since. In November 1979, the US Embassy was overrun by a militant Islamic student group who took everyone working there that day hostage. The long siege that obliterated all Iran–US relations began and Khomeini, who had moved to end an earlier storming of the embassy, this time threw his weight behind the hostage-taking, spotting in his canny way that it could be used to unify the people behind him and eliminate opposition to Islamic rule. The priest proved himself a consummate politician, expert at turning events to his own advantage, increasing his own power all the while. He tightened his grip in other ways too, and the purge of the military and even of schools and universities turned into a Cultural Revolution when, in the spring of 1980, universities were closed down so that books could be rewritten and any staff not on message could be dismissed. Piles of books considered un-Islamic were burnt in conflagrations that recalled the Nazis’ act of vandalism and intellectual control in the thirties. Many more books, including innocuous classics by Jane Austen, were banned and 20,000 teachers lost their jobs, prompting another mass exodus of Iran’s finest brains to the West.
In London we were visited that first year by Khaleh Mina, Daiey Pardis and his family and Mehry. Their visits made a semblance of normality for us, for although our surroundings were so different, there were at least the same voices talking in the sitting room, the same delicious smells issuing from the tiny kitchen. Shell-shocked and grief-stricken as we were, my family still managed to laugh its way through, my mother and Khaleh Mina tricking Shirin into entering a porn shop in Soho and dissolving into floods of laughter when she looked about her and realised the nature of the merchandise that surrounded her. ‘Khoda margam bede!’ – May God strike me dead! – Shirin had exclaimed, wide-eyed, slapping one hand on top of the other, while Sedi and Mina clutched at each other, tears of laughter coursing down their faces. ‘Who knew such things existed!’
I remember another day, Angela Baker called round to meet my mother’s family and, sniffing the unusual smells drifting from the kitchen she had asked what they were cooking. Khaleh Mina and my mother had explained that it was aash, a sort of broth and detailed the ingredients, adding that it would be missing the mint which was crucial as they had not been able to find any in the supermark
et. At that point, Angela Baker clapped her long-fingered hands in delight and said, ‘Oh, I have mint from my garden in the country, do let me bring you some.’ With that she disappeared downstairs only to reappear a few minutes later with two sprigs of mint, tied prettily together with a fine red ribbon, which she presented proudly to my dumbstruck mother and aunts. They exchanged the subtlest of glances, accepted the gift with much thanks and managed to contain their mirth until the Englishwoman had gone. I had found them all shaking with laughter later, clutching the beautifully presented mint, unable to believe that anyone could imagine that a broth which filled the vast pan on the cooker could be flavoured by two such small sprigs. Everything in our world was so much bigger, larger, more abundant and, in comparison, England seemed so small, pale and controlled.
But England was also safe and we carved a little routine for ourselves. Narmin and I attended a language school which was filled with other Iranian kids, so we learnt little English outside of Angela Baker’s flat, and I tried to fill the place left empty by my lamb’s death with a new passion for ponies. We found a riding stable behind Hyde Park Corner where Sedi would take me once a week. While I learnt to walk and trot around the park, she retreated to a park bench where, in a rare moment of solitude, unbeknown to me at the time, she would sit down and cry for the full hour I was gone.
The rhythm of the Iranian year continued to beat through me in England where I learnt that early spring does not necessarily warm the days or bring the blossoms out on the trees. Perhaps the thing that unites Iranians above all else is our passion for our New Year, the festival of Nowruz, meaning New Day. In London we went about our lives alongside the millions of other Londoners, there were no coloured lights festooning the streets, no special decorations for the New Year table or rows of goldfish bowls outside the shops along with makeshift tanks of small, sparkling, red fish as there would be in Iran. Despite the indifference of our surroundings, we nonetheless fussed and planned the New Year table, laid it with symbolic objects, the goldfish representing life, coins representing wealth and a mirror representing light – as it has been for thousands of years. Nowruz ties us to our past and for us in London it was always the one inviolable occasion which could not be missed. Although there were no other family members to celebrate with, to go out and visit and wish happy New Year to – a custom that would take most of the two-week holidays that followed Nowruz in Iran – we still gathered around my mother’s lavishly laid table at the exact moment of the vernal equinox, even when that meant getting up in the early hours to dress in our new clothes. We circled the table, my father tuning into an Iranian radio station which would pip the last moments till tahvil-e sal – the changing of the year – and we watched the goldfish to see if they did indeed jump at the exact moment of the equinox as legend has it that they did. This we would do every year, the four of us in London; we sat down to the traditional meals and we were jolly and full of New Year cheer although, in reality, it threw into relief our isolation. We are proud of this tradition and we regaled our English friends with its meanings and rites, inviting them round to see the table for the two weeks it was on show, but we never invited anyone to join us for the tahvil-e sal itself, keeping it close to us, protected, our little piece of Iran in exile.
My parents kept up appearances, even for us, and we never mentioned or talked about what had happened and whether we would go back. My mother had discovered Abba and their melodious songs; ‘Winner takes it all,’ she would sing mournfully as she moved about the brown flat, the song providing the soundtrack to this depressing period.
My father’s permission to stay in the country excluded him from work and so he was at home most of the time. I had never seen him so much and I was rather intimidated by this brooding, silent figure who had been such a vital and busy man in Iran. Just as it extinguished the Pahlavi sun that shone on the nation of Iran, the revolution took away my father’s aura of power and strength, and this man who had been the centre of our world, around whom we all orbited and who I was convinced knew everything, was suddenly helpless. He had been unable to protect us and our lives and sitting here in the brown flat in Notting Hill, I realised that we were not only homeless but also helpless. It was the first time in my life that I had brushed up against such concepts and the feeling of defencelessness dug deep.
Every time we had to leave the country to re-enter, and every time in the coming years after we requested asylum that we had to travel to the Home Office in Croydon for interviews and applications, the whole edifice of normality and security that my parents managed to build up around us in England would be shattered, and our official status – as political refugees – made me permanently anxious. Iran was every day being shrouded in more black, more madness and chaos radiating from it, this new Islamic regime unlike anything the world had seen and so easy to fear and loathe. The US Embassy siege did nothing to help the Western world understand Iran and what it was going through, my country seemed to embody just one emotion towards the rest of the world – hate – and there was no room for analysing why Iran and her people had come to this place, whether the West had anything to answer for in helping it reach this dark destination.
All I knew was that now the world was one in which I might, at any moment, have to run for my life. My greatest fear was, if I had to leave England too – which was strange for sure but at least had given us shelter – where else could I possibly go? After growing up in a large family, being cradled throughout my young life by so many loving arms, the extreme dependency I felt on my parents – suddenly the only two people in this country that we belonged to – was very frightening indeed.
The first thing I learned in England was shame. The second was shyness. I was ashamed of my inability to understand what people were saying to me and shamed by the stare of the cashier when I, as a nine-year-old who was large for my age, bought English books in large print, intended for children half my age. On my second day at the language school, having already learnt that no one had the slightest idea how to say my name, when the teacher taking the class register stumbled on a name beginning with ‘K’, I assumed he was trying to say Kamin and so I raised my hand helpfully and said it for him. It turned out he was butchering some other poor kid’s name. He fixed me with a baleful glare, his cropped red hair clashing with his fast-reddening skin. He refused to let me answer to my own name when he came to it, declaring, ‘As you clearly don’t know your own name, you shall have to go unregistered today.’ I sat in the class, rendered nameless, and shame swallowed me up.
As I left school that day, I wet myself on the street and thought I would die of shame until a Spanish girl offered to take me to her house, which was nearby, and let me change so my parents did not have to know. She was called Patrizia and she was my first friend. But even with her I learnt to be quiet, to hold back, to be shy, because it seemed that when I wasn’t, I committed some unknown crime that resulted in my humiliation. I had never before met adults who were as cold and unkind as the ones in the supermarket, bookshop, the school or the local library, where I was constantly being told off for touching the books too much. My personality began to warp and I, who had once been so gregarious and chatty, took to spending long hours at the window of the little brown flat silently watching a Scottie dog who was walked by its owner several times a day.
One night my parents told us that our Armenian neighbours from Ahvaz were in London and we were going to have dinner with them. They expected us to be happy but all the joy had gone out of us, so we merely nodded and went back to watching the television. We met them in a restaurant where all of us kids were on our best behaviour and after dinner we all went back to our flat, our parents expecting us all to run to the room my sister and I shared to play as we had done every day in Ahvaz. But we all silently elected to stay with the adults, looking down at our toes and unable to connect, saying nothing. The evening was tense and sad and became deeply awkward. It was already too late, too much had passed and we had all become too
self-conscious and too scared of life to leave our parents’ sides for even a few minutes. We children had all retreated into the new shells we had acquired and there was no way to reach out. When they left that night, promising to write and stay in touch from whichever corner of the globe they were bound for, we knew we would never see them again. They were relics of a life that was too painful to remember.
Most of all I learnt to be ashamed of my country, this Iran which everyone I encountered in England was so horrified by. My country was now known only as a place of fury and death, the scenes on television reducing our millennia of history and culture to a bunch of wild-eyed youths burning the American flag, chanting slogans against Israel, holding hostage American diplomats in the embassy. I didn’t recognise this place, despite having been there so recently, because my Iran was not one of mullahs and fundamentalism, but a place of kindness and love, an abundant paradise of mountains and deserts and turquoise seas and trees from which we would pluck cherries as we hiked in the cool hills. My Iran was not populated by implacable priests and unshaven blood-hungry young men, it was the home of Fatemeh Bibi with her shuffling gait, my khaleh Mina with her raucous laugh and ready embrace, of Mehry with her ability to bring to life complicated ideas. It was where I had hoards of cousins and playmates and where the language even of strangers was affectionate and poetic.
I could not relate the two Irans to each other and I had no ability to explain to those shocked and disgusted by the actions of the new Islamic regime that this was not Iran, that there was another Iran lurking unseen behind the slogans and the black flags, the Iran I had grown up in and loved so deeply. I could not explain and I could not reconcile the two Irans in my heart. I turned my face away from my country and wished, yearned, to be from anywhere else, to make my skin white and my hair blonde and to fit in. I wanted desperately to be ordinary but for all of my efforts to integrate, my colouring, my name and my accent as I hesitantly spoke English gave me away every time.
The Cypress Tree Page 15