Early in 1980, my mother made a return visit to Iran to try to collect the scattered remains of our belongings and, if truth be known, to curl up in the bosom of her family. Standing strong as she had for all of us in London, Sedi allowed herself to fall apart a little on her return to Iran. In Tehran, she visited Bagher’s family, my amoo, and the formidable Sa’adat-khanoum, flanked as always by Guity and Mehry. Bagher’s nieces and nephews flocked around her and they sat, night after night, with the vast Persian carpets we had not been able to take with us and tried to work out what to do with them.
In the end, the carpets and my father’s large library of books – in both Farsi and English – stayed at Amoo’s house in Tehran Pars where, nearly thirty years later, Mehry and Guity were finally forced to sort through them before the old house was razed to the ground. On one of my visits back to Iran, we found them packing up the old house, preparing to move into the heart of the city and into an apartment, unable to resist the growth of Tehran any longer, having capitulated to the insatiable thirst for erecting tower blocks on the site of old houses and villas. They presented me with a handful of my father’s books they thought I might like to keep.
My mother was with me on that trip and they started to talk about that visit she had made in 1980, the first after the revolution, so many years ago. At first they all chimed in, recalling their conferences about the fate of our belongings, but eventually my mother’s story took over and Mehry, Guity and I sat and listened quietly as my mother recalled those days, for the first time in my hearing. She told us that after a couple of weeks in Tehran, her heart lurching every time she drove by our old house in Darrus – the place behind the walls with a rose garden and swimming pools in which her daughters had learnt to swim – she kissed Bagher’s brother’s family goodbye and boarded a flight to Abadan.
Back in Abadan she had retreated to Fatemeh Bibi’s house and found that suddenly she didn’t much want to get out of bed. Fatemeh Bibi had let her be for a while, allowed the family to come and buzz around her. Mina had come to stay too, leaving Busheiry to his own devices and throwing a mattress on the floor next to Sedi’s so they could talk all night, Sedi crying all those tears that had been unshed in London, and then falling asleep in her sister’s arms when the tears exhausted her. Pardis and Shirin had brought little Cyrus to cheer her up from Ahvaz on the weekends, and all her other brothers and sisters had fluttered around her like ministering angels. She had found, after some time of this, after those noisy family meals gathered around the sofra in Fatemeh Bibi’s courtyard (for it was now late spring), that she was beginning to feel better.
Fatemeh Bibi watched this and she let her daughter be, she let her pour out her heart to Mina and Pardis and Shirin and let her hear them tell her of what they had seen in the year that she had been gone, the arrests, the disappearances, the blood being spilt every day in the name of this revolution that was supposed to bring justice to the people. ‘Sedi-joon, bavaret nemishe, you won’t believe it,’ Shirin confided. ‘But now, if you say something your cleaning lady doesn’t like, she goes to the Komiteh and reports you. And tomorrow they turn up and arrest you for being against the revolution.’
‘It’s true,’ Mina agreed. ‘No one now dares say to anyone, bala cheshmet abroo – there are eyebrows above your eyes – in case they offend someone and they get reported.’
‘And think, Pardis was even the head of the Komiteh in Ahvaz at the beginning …’ Shirin stopped. ‘Well, you know, azizam. But now everything has broken down. We don’t know who’s who or what’s what any more.’
But for all the horrors she was hearing, Sedi could not believe that anything could be worse than being stuck in London so far away from her family. Loneliness was new to her – even when she had lived in Tehran, there had been Mehry and Guity, my amoo and his wife, and Mina, Fatemeh Bibi, Yassaman, all of them, had come to stay for months on end, and she had visited Abadan regularly. There had been no real distance between them, she saw that now. How far she had thought herself from them then, just a few hundred miles away in Tehran! Now, thousands of miles stretched between them and the rapidly devaluing toman meant that soon no one would be able to afford to come and see her. And all the time, this unknowable ideology that had taken over the country looked like it may be there to stay for at least a little longer.
But with us, her daughters, away at boarding school, she was bereft in London and she kept talking of staying, of making her home back in Iran. ‘The girls can come back in their holidays,’ she said brightly, ‘and I am sure all this will blow over soon and Bagher will be able to come back.’
She saw Pardis and Shirin exchange glances.
‘OK, let’s say this isn’t over soon,’ she assented. ‘But surely it won’t be long before they realise that Bagher is innocent of whatever it is they think he has done. He has done nothing but serve his country for the last thirty years. He never took a backhander, he wasn’t corrupt, he wasn’t a politician … what could they possibly want with him?’
Pardis took her hands. ‘Sedi-joon,’ he said with infinite gentleness, ‘Sedi-joon, just after he left, Bagher’s name appeared on a list of people who should present themselves to the Revolutionary Court.’ He stopped to light a cigarette and dragged deeply on it; Sedi had not known, Bagher had managed to protect her from this piece of information. ‘Sedi-joon, azizam, jigaram, do you not know what that means? Not many people who have had to present themselves to the Revolutionary Court have ever reappeared. And Bagher is not here. Well, that means they will want him even more, he will be an even bigger prize.’
Sedi was deflated. She had no idea what to think. There was no logic, no possible reason, everything in her wanted to cry out – he had done nothing wrong and so he should be safe. But she had seen enough of the revolution, had felt enough of the charged and dangerous atmosphere on the streets on the rare occasions she now went out to know that this Iran was one she did not understand. It was governed by things other than a logic she could comprehend. But still she dithered and drew out her visit on excuses and none of her brothers or her sisters pushed her to decide, glad as they were to have her back among them. And they gathered every night together and they laughed and sang and spent all night confiding in each other. Mina always stayed and sometimes some of the others did too, and they would throw down a row of mattresses and lie together as they had when they were children, and laugh and tease each other into the night.
It was Fatemeh Bibi who decided it. One day, after Sedi had been there a month, she called her daughter to come and help her clean some herbs in the courtyard. The others were out and she had engineered a rare moment with Sedi alone. As they sat cross-legged on the carpet and sorted through the bundles of herbs, throwing out little stones, plucking out the yellowing leaves, chatting about the quality of the produce in the bazaar these days, Fatemeh Bibi quietly regarded her daughter.
‘And when do you plan to see your children again, be salaamati?’ she asked, her green eyes fixed on Sedi’s face.
‘Maman-jan, I don’t know. They are at school and, well, they are probably settled and happy …’ Sedi knew she was lying to herself as a guilty vision of my sister and me in floods of tears at the airport crossed her mind. But she was always good at seeing what she wanted to, and she pushed the image away.
‘Sedigheh, listen to me.’ Fatemeh Bibi spoke in the low voice that Sedi knew to take seriously. ‘Sedigheh, this is harj-o-marj. It is not going to get better, it is going to get worse. Trust me, I have seen a lot more of life than you. Your husband is not safe here and your place is with him and your children.’
‘But Maman—’
‘Listen to me, Sedigheh-joonam.’ Fatemeh Bibi softened her tone but carried on regardless. ‘My daughter, listen to me. This is harj-o-marj, and there is going to be a war, at least here in Khuzestan. I can feel it. You are a mother and a wife. Your place is with your family.’
‘But you are my family.’ Sedi was crying now.
Fat
emeh Bibi got up, hands pressing on her knees to raise herself, and crossed over to squat by her daughter, taking her head in her hands.
‘They are your family, my girl. You are a wife and a mother and you are their family. And there is going to be a war. This is no place for you. You must go back to England.’
And she sat by her daughter and stroked her hair and let her sob until Sedi’s breathing calmed and became softer.
Three days later my mother returned to London. She did not go back to Iran or see her family again for fifteen years.
16
An English Boarding School
One autumn day in 1980 we drove to a picturesque East Sussex village to start school at Wadhurst College. For my parents it was to be the beginning of the legendary British education they had so keenly anticipated, an education that would make us ready for a new life, as my father’s years at Birmingham had transformed him. What none of us knew was that we were no longer rooted enough in our own culture for the change to be anything other than a transfiguration. After all, Khomeini had come along to start changing the soil in which our roots grew even before we left. Hadn’t he dug up the earth in which we thrived and condemned the nutrients that fed our beings as unhealthy, corrupt and un-Islamic?
After a two-hour drive from London, we arrived in the village of Wadhurst where my parents dropped off first my sister and then me at our respective boarding houses. My sister entered Wadhurst College at secondary level while I, starting at the bottom of the school, entered Beech Hill, the junior house. Wadhurst College was a Church of England school with a strongly evangelical flavour, a favoured repository of the children of Christian missionaries – the sort of people who at the other end of the century had taken their Christian zeal to the Iranian province of Azerbaijan and set up mission schools, had helped educate Iranians and had even joined the forces of the Constitutional Revolution at the same time that the original Abbasian family had migrated from Baku to join the revolutionary movement.
Arriving at the school, I was shown up to my dormitory. I clung to my mother but the minutes passed in a blur and suddenly I was alone, stunned. My brain was working hard at trying to take in this new world with its schedules for bathing, eating, waking and sleeping; there were even timetables for praying and writing letters to parents – life was neatly segmented so that there was little time that was left free for us to let our minds – and hands – drift in ungodly ways.
Soon we were herded into the dining room, a plain room at the front of the house looking out over rolling lawns. We were all given set places, and that first night I was sitting on the table of Miss Pottinger, the Deputy Head of House, a woman who exemplified the type of teacher to be found living-in at the school; unmarried women of indeterminate age with solidly set hair in a style still favoured by the queen, all committed Christians of the old school, their lives revolving around the Church and the Christian calendar in a way that actually, had I paused to think about it, was quite similar to the rhythm of life in my grandmother’s house which pulsated with the beat of Shiite festivals, commemorating the births and deaths of our various imams.
But our religious festivals, whether they were based in mourning or celebration, all came with a flurry of activity and life force. They involved giant pots of thick soups full of beans and herbs bubbling on gas hobs out in the courtyard, the women staying up all night to stir, muttering prayers over the food to fill it with blessings while giggling in asides as they told their dirty jokes, folding into the aash their humour and energy, their hopes and devotion to the divine before taking the food to mosques strung bright with coloured lights and busy with human traffic to distribute it to the poor and anyone else who wanted it. In comparison, the religion practised by these women seemed as dry to me as they appeared themselves.
Sitting neatly at the head of the table, her hands folded in her lap, Miss Pottinger quietly bowed her head as grace was said, and I silently copied everything that she did while trying to absorb the peculiar rules of meal times. The food was of a sort I had never experienced before: powdered soup for starters, some kind of reconstituted protein and two veg for mains and usually tinned fruit or packet crumble with congealing custard for dessert. It was a world away from the fresh Iranian meals that I was used to. Instead of handfuls of fresh herbs to accompany the main meal, now there were watery vegetables that had been boiled out of all recognition (perhaps a merciful fate for rubbery tinned carrots and peas), and instead of baskets piled high with fruit, tinned peaches or pineapples would have to suffice. Here at Miss Pottinger’s table there was no choice about the food on offer, our only allowed preference was for portion sizes, and the rule was for plates to be cleaned.
All this I learnt that first night and, being naturally eager to please, well-mannered by upbringing and dazed by my situation, I kept my mouth shut and reached the end of that first meal without incident. Later, after our introduction to Beech Hill and its ways, I retired to my dormitory where I got ready for bed, washed my face and teeth in the draughty washroom with its row of sinks and slid into my bottom bunk bed as early as I was allowed. I was the only one without a menagerie of soft toys – in Iran our toys were for playing with during the day and at night we simply went to bed, there were no soft bears or fluffy wool dogs to cosy up to. I didn’t really understand this custom and the nearest approximation of it that I could bring to mind was when I used to sneak out of our house in Ahvaz late at night to go and cuddle my Baboo in the yard.
I didn’t say anything and, as the other girls flounced around bouncing on each other’s beds, I wormed my way into my bed and lay as flat and still as possible and finally let the tears fall silently down my face.
The morning brought no relief to my mortification and every day, from the moment we were woken by a loud bell until the moment I slid back into bed, I was trapped in a sort of nightmare world where nothing made any sense. I was careful not to be the first at anything so I could follow the other girls’ leads. I had my first bath that second night – I had never filled a tub with water and lain down in it and to my Iranian sensibility, our culture so conscious of bodily hygiene and fond of elaborate showers, it seemed the filthiest of habits to soak in water you had just washed in. I didn’t say this to anyone, I would never have dreamed of being so rude as to point out that something they all so clearly thought was normal was in fact disgusting. But no one extended the same courtesy to me and so many of my Iranian ways and habits were frowned on as transgressions that I soon learnt to abandon them in order to save myself from the teachers’ frowns.
The first days passed and somehow I made it to Friday evening. I almost choked with relief when I saw my mother. Back at home in the brown flat, no matter how much I begged my parents not to send me back, they counselled me to be brave and think of the education I would get, of how good my English would become and how well I would fit in. I was silently furious at their decision – helplessness was now becoming the distinguishing feature of life after Iran but I still found it hard to capitulate.
The following Sunday there were no brave faces for me. I sobbed and clung on to my mother and dramatically begged her not to go. She settled me in my dorm and helped me unpack all the new things I had returned with, including a white furry toy Scottie dog with long white fur and a tartan ribbon around its neck, chosen by me (from Harrods, of course) in honour of the dog I had spent the first year of my life in England watching from the window. I threw it on my bed, uninterested, although my mother scolded me for that. But I was interested in nothing other than persuading my mother not to leave me in that house, with its squeaky floorboards and the awful smell of its inedible cooking, its pale green walls and unsympathetic spinsters. Despite my entreaties she left, promising to phone me later that night when she got back to London even though phone calls were against the rules.
Eventually my overwhelming sadness carried me downstairs where I knocked on the door of the staff sitting room to beg a bemused Miss Pottinger to let me ring my mot
her, tears coursing down my face as I pleaded with her. The answer was an implacable no, though she tried to be kind about it, promising me that if my mother rang as promised she would come upstairs and tell me all about their conversation.
Finally I gave up and dragged my unwilling feet back up to my dormitory. I was accompanied by Miss Pottinger who turned to another girl idling by her bed and suggested to her that I could use some company. I lay disconsolately in my bed, depressed beyond reason, feeling totally abandoned, and this girl came and sat on the floor by my bed. With some instinctual wisdom beyond her ten years, she started to talk to me, picking up my new Scottie dog and asking his name and his history, as if he were a real animal. I slowly began to answer her, and as we talked, I grew calmer. Together we worked out a story for Scottie and I learnt to cuddle the toy and treat it as if it was a thing made of flesh with the ability to love me. I cherished the girl then, for reaching out and pulling me out of my loneliness and grief. She was called Jane and she became my best friend.
* * *
On Friday afternoons we were allowed to pick a book from the assortment that weighed down the bookcase in the back corner of the classroom and sit quietly and do nothing but read for pleasure. That double period every week was my haven, an hour and twenty minutes in which I was freed from the intense vigilance to nuance and form that preoccupied me. Those Friday afternoons were spent lost instead in books, in words and pictures that demanded nothing of me other than my imagination, unshackled and borderless. Books transcended everything and my love of stories made my imagination the only place that was safe, unchanging and consistent.
Buoyed one day by a reading session, I had taken part in a conversation in class between our form teacher and some of the other girls and had confessed that my birthday was the following week. The next Wednesday, after lunch, one of my classmates, already the lucky recipient of a nickname – Frog – led me up to the dorm ostensibly to ask me something, and then insistently led me back down to the common room a few minutes later. Her peculiar behaviour didn’t alert me to what was coming next. As we opened the door, I saw, standing in front of me, a crowd of all the other Beech Hillites. Frog skipped off ahead of me and everyone started to sing Happy Birthday.
The Cypress Tree Page 16