The Cypress Tree

by Kamin Mohammadi

  I was not quite subjugated to the rules to the point that I eschewed the pleasures of being a teenager in London, but I was sufficiently conditioned into making an internal schism, splitting up my life into two distinct parts – and lying to my parents and torturing myself with my wrongdoing in the process. I lost years of my life to being dishonest which, unlike most of the other Middle Eastern and Asian kids I knew who moved smoothly between the two realities of their lives, made me intensely uncomfortable. My parents managed to fill us with their values even though we lived mostly at school – six years of boarding school where I effectively grew up, living there for eight months of the year. But now I think I underestimated my mother. Had I told her the truth about my life as I partied and smoked my way through London’s hippest nightclubs, her reaction would probably have been as cool and unexpected as it was when she discovered I had started smoking at sixteen.

  She took me and my friend Jenny out to tea at Barkers, and pulled a packet of cigarettes out of her bag and placed it on the table. In those days she sometimes smoked socially and I thought nothing of it as she reached for a cigarette, but then, in a stroke of genius, she offered the packet to Jenny. Jenny had been my partner in sneaking smokes behind the pet shed at school and now she looked confused, her eyes darting from the proffered packet of cigarettes to my mother, then to me, and back to my mother again. She eventually reached forward and pulled out a cigarette with a muttered thanks. My mother calmly lit it for her before offering me the packet and, encouraged by her non-reaction to Jenny’s acceptance, I also accepted one. Had she offered me the packet first I would have whipped myself up into a state of fake indignation at being accused of smoking. We sat there and went on with our tea, Jenny and I puffing selfconsciously, all smoking together. As time went on it was also silently accepted that I could occasionally smoke in my room and while my parents let me know they didn’t like the habit, they did not try to force me into stopping. They preferred the openness but I was too dumb perhaps to give them the opportunity to know me fully by being open about my other life, my British life, until much later on.

  My parents wore their exoticism like a cloak, enhancing them in and also obscuring them from foreign eyes. When we brought home friends from school, my mother was invariably so glamorous and exotic that my friends were stunned into silence. Bagher was always formal, dressed in suits and perfectly mannered, but quiet, distant and remote, not trying to engage in conversation. Sedi was invariably dressed to go out, to a party or a lunch, and whether smart or formal, her designer outfits and perfectly coiffed hair set her apart from the mothers of my friends, who were so cosy and plain in comparison. Sedi exuded charm but her warmth battled with her command of the language – my mother has always been convinced, despite all evidence to the contrary, that she can barely speak English. So in interactions with our friends, she preferred always to rely on my sister and me to be the bridges between her and them, their language, their culture. My parents inhabited a different planet to that of my friends’ parents. They were formal and ritualistic in their social interactions in a way that in modern Britain was just not the norm. My sister and I delighted in laughing at them in private, especially at my mother’s occasional English malapropisms, but we were fiercely protective of them – and their exoticism – in public.

  As a teenager I regularly needled my father to apply for our British passports, many years after we had been resident in the UK long enough to qualify. For fifteen years after leaving Iran and applying for asylum in the UK, we had made do with Travel Documents, temporary papers that allowed us to travel anywhere in the world in the same way as a British passport – except back to Iran. Although after four years in Britain we were eligible for citizenship, my father never applied and I, in moments of heightened teenage passion, called him lazy. I see now that it was a function of Bagher’s silent grief; he did not want to accept that we were really here, that we had left Iran for good. Britain had been the country that he had loved, he had so chimed with its reserved, quiet ways but nevertheless, something in Bagher was unwilling to take citizenship, to finally give up on Iran, even after everything that had happened to us and that continued to happen to the country after our departure.

  The Travel Document never gave me a sense of security and I hated feeling singled out by its flimsiness every time I had to use it. When I tried to join a school trip to Paris at seventeen and found myself barred from France because I was Iranian, my worst fears seemed realised. Supposedly the Travel Document was just a British passport in waiting, but in reality, after a spate of bombings in Paris that were attributed to an opposition Iranian group, France decided it would prefer not to welcome an Iranian teenager on to its soil and I was refused permission. I was furious and terrified all at the same time, and I longed for the sense of security that having a British passport – so civilised, so acceptable in the world – would give me.

  It took my father another five years after that to capitulate but, after another raft of nervous visits to the Home Office in Croydon, I finally got the small burgundy booklet that gave me my freedom, and peace of mind. Along with the British passport I got the right to possess once again my Iranian passport, and so, after so many years away, the ability to return home.

  My first visit back in 1996 only lasted three weeks, twenty-one precious, bewildering days that passed in a whirl. On my return to London after my first journey back I cried for a week and I couldn’t bear to return again until 1998. I found letting go of my newly discovered Iranian self extremely painful, and the impossibility of explaining everything I had experienced in my country to my friends made me feel alienated all over again. As time passed and my English persona slipped back on like a well-worn cloak, Iran receded and the distance between the two countries I am from created a gulf inside me that was hard to bridge. It was as if the only way I could live comfortably in London was to forget Iran; the coping strategy I had learnt as a child had soaked deep inside me and it was hard to change.

  Over the decade after my first trip, I made several journeys to Iran, soon travelling without my mother, going alone and my stays growing in length until I was staying a couple of months at a time. My visits spanned the two terms that President Khatami was in power, a period of greater social openness and debate in Iran, and I became more comfortable there, with my language improving daily, my English accent lost. I was beginning to like the Iranian me, a creature infinitely more polite and, when occasion demanded it, sharp-tongued than the girl who marched around London huffing at tourists on the underground. I had cracked the codes of ta’arof at last and had learnt to haggle, overcoming my reserve and feeling triumphant the first time I beat a carpet seller down to my price. My mother and Khaleh Mina were experts and I knew my father was a world champion – I had once watched him haggle down a second-hand car salesman so persistently and patiently that the man had nearly wept in relief when the deal had been concluded, turning watery eyes on me and declaring he had never met anyone like my father before. But of course, my father had taken the Iranian art of haggling on to a world stage when he had worked for the oil company, and the time he bought me that car was the first time I had seen him in action.

  In Shiraz I stayed with Khaleh Mina in her tiny flat. Recently bereaved – Busheiry had shuffled off this mortal coil the previous year – Mina was finally free to live her life as she chose. What she chose was to clean her flat every day, to pour her energy into making her small space as spotless and shiny as she could manage. Suffering from back trouble and all sorts of problems with her legs, she would hoover relentlessly even when she could barely stand. Her first act on getting up in the morning, after washing her face, was to apply her blusher and lipstick, laughing as I watched her. She told me she had latterly turned down a marriage proposal from an elderly relative of Maman-joon’s. She had been shocked to receive the offer from the white-haired man and she had turned him down in the politest terms, but she said to me as we drank Nescafé and blew smoke rings late into t
he night, ‘Va! Kamin-joon, imagine the cheek of it. That after a lifetime of being nursemaid to Clark Gable, I should choose now to marry another old man so I can nurse him through his last years!’ She puffed like a champion on her cigarette, her hands drawing arabesques through the air as she gesticulated. ‘No, azizam, I am finally free and I don’t fear being alone. I gave Busheiry my life, I was a good wife to him, discharged my obligation. Baste, enough!’

  Khaleh Mina was not alone. Two of Khaleh Yassi’s children belonged to her and they practically lived with her, moving with ease between their two homes and their two mothers. Khaleh Mina poured her immense energy into them now her husband was gone.

  Khaleh Yassi lived right in the heart of town with her beloved Seini and four children as well as Maman-joon. Having retired from IranAir after eighteen years of service, she had set up her own travel agency – no mean feat in this country in which more than 80 per cent of all industry is controlled by the government. We went to see her sitting behind her managing director’s desk, perfectly turned out in modest maghna’eh topped by a voluminous chador, her face caked in ‘no make-up’ make-up. She grinned as I proudly snapped pictures of her posing behind her desk, her employees rushing to bring us tea. One day, when Khaleh Mina and I dropped in to see her, we found the three women that worked for her sitting at their desks with newspapers piled high with mounds fresh herbs spread out in front of them. They were cleaning the herbs for the dinner Khaleh Yassi was planning to make that night. They looked up at us and smiled and when Khaleh Mina raised her eyebrows quizzically at her younger sister, Khaleh Yassi dropped her voice and said, ‘Well, it’s a quiet day and they have nothing else to do. I am paying them, they might as well help me.’ Khaleh Yassi had wanted to have it all and she had got it all, and the small matters of revolution, war and the Islamic Republic had not stopped her.

  For all that Khaleh Mina’s home was spotless and shiny, Khaleh Yassi’s home was chaotic, filled with children, the smell of cooking and Fatemeh Bibi’s scratchy-voiced outpourings. Yassi and her husband were still madly in love. When he got home from work or a basketball match, Khaleh Yassi, tripping girlishly around the flat in her tight sexy clothes, would wait on him hand and foot. The genial Seini was the only man who ever tried to explain the relationship between the sexes in Iran to me. One night, as I sat and practised English conversation with one of his sons, he came and joined us, and as our talk turned general, he tried to explain to me the mentality of Iranian men. ‘Look, Kamin-jan, we Iranian men are gheiraty – possessive,’ he said with his customary friendly tone. ‘I love my wife and I enjoy her body. I like nothing better than to see her dressed like this.’ He indicated Khaleh Yassi who was skipping around the flat in a negligée. ‘But she is my wife. And her body is for my enjoyment – I don’t want other men looking at her the way I do.’

  Perhaps the most gheiraty man in Iran’s history was Ayatollah Khomeini himself. After all, did he too not try to enforce all our women to cover themselves from the prying eyes of ‘strange’ men? But Iranian men’s mixture of Persian sensuality and Islamic prudery has not confused our women at all; Iranian women are a tantalising combination of the sacred and the profane. They can be seen dancing the night away at parties in décolleté dresses and made up like supermodels, and the next morning found at the mosque covered in a chador weeping for one of our imams, their faces washed by genuine tears. It was like this in my mother’s time and, I soon discovered, it is like this in Iran now. The outfits the women wear on the street are different but underneath they are the same as they have always been. This duality presents no problem to Iranian women, whose natures easily encompass the two seemingly opposed desires – to party and to pray – but the men of Iran, long privy to the best-kept secret of the country – the incredible calibre of its women – have always been jealous of their womenfolk, scared of their strength and too enamoured of the quality of their loving and caring to want them to have too much freedom. Iranian men have tried, ever since Islam gave them a legitimate excuse, to keep us at home for their own enjoyment, knowing as they do that, should Iranian women be given a free reign and not hampered with negative conditioning about themselves, they would march out of the kitchen and rule the world.

  Whatever else the shah did to Iran, he undoubtedly gave women more freedom than ever. At the time of the revolution, Iranian women were marching around the country – the world – holding jobs and university positions and they could choose whether they wore high heels or chadors. Iranian men, gheiraty till the last, panicked, worried they were going to lose us to careers, modernity and freedom, stricken with the unthinkable notion that their elaborate dinners would not be waiting for them when they got home, that there would be no feline creature attendant to soothe their brows and help solve the issues of their day and raise their children. Sometimes I think that the whole revolution was just a reaction by Iran’s men, an attempt to stop women shedding their traditional roles and that Ayatollah Khomeini, with his insistence that women should embrace the ‘feminine’ values of housework and childbearing, helped our men find a reason within Islam to usher us back into the home.

  It didn’t work. Now over thirty years after the revolution, Iranian women are more visible in public life than ever. Economic necessity has driven this as much as anything else – the war decimated Iran’s economy and the mullahs’ mismanagement of the oil wealth and tough new sanctions imposed by the West means that only the very wealthy can afford to have their wives sit at home waiting to stroke their brows when they get in at the end of the day. The gap between rich and poor yawns wider than ever, and into this chasm have tumbled the middle class, whose members have found their standards of living slipping every year since the revolution until they now can barely manage to survive.

  Many of my cousins – all educated and professional people – have at some point held two jobs to make ends meet, and most still do. The girls in my generation of my family have all been to university and have all worked, many after having children. What Iranian women snatched out of the jaws of the repression was education, and 65 per cent of university entrants are now women. So alarmed are the gheiraty men who run the country that they have had to pass a law to equalise the numbers of the sexes that enter university. Thirty years after the revolution tried to take away so many of Iranian women’s rights, the Islamic Republic is having to positively discriminate in favour of the men to make sure they are not left trailing behind the girls as they stride forward.

  After the revolution, many devout traditional families who had refused in the shah’s time to send their daughters out to school or college in the miniskirted, liberal, and – to them – decadent and permissive society of the time, felt safe in sending their girls out into a covered-up and segregated Islamic world where the school books had been thoroughly revised by the Islamic regime during the Cultural Revolution. Universities sprang up where there had been none before, as Iran’s population became more literate – now at 89 per cent, the highest literacy rate in the Middle East. The baby boom of the revolution and war years has given Iran an overwhelmingly youthful population and these young people – Khomeini’s armies for Islam – have needed facilities.

  What the Islamic regime has given them is lots of new universities to go to, and for those who are not successful in the country’s notoriously difficult and stressful university entrance exams, there are ‘open’ universities which have less exacting criteria and higher fees. Universities are scattered all over the country and Iranian students have no choice over where they attend – their grades dictate which universities offer them places – so young Iranians are, for the first time, living away from home in residential dorms en masse, girls leaving home before marriage – unheard of in my mother’s time under the shah, when a girl only left her father’s house to move into her husband’s. Now almost all girls, from the lower-middle classes upwards, can expect their education to take them all the way into their early twenties. Of course, there are still traditional
and conservative fathers who believe that too much education will spoil a girl for marriage – still regarded as the main objective of a woman’s life – but they are not as numerous as they were.

  * * *

  My cousin Noosheen always travelled to Shiraz to see me when she could. She was a true child of the revolution, born in the first years of the war to the comedian half of my twin uncles, Daiey Reza. Unlike my other female cousins and her contemporaries, Noosheen did not have a face vividly and expertly painted with make-up, she had not plucked her eyebrows into the latest fashionable shape and she showed no great interest in clothes or pop music and dancing. A modest Iranian girl, Noosheen was possessed of a quiet humour and a lively mind that I adored and we became firm friends.

  My daiey Reza is a man of modest means, living with his family of four children in just three rooms, his wife Leila a broad-hipped woman of deep affections who is constantly busy in the kitchen. A generation ago Noosheen would have been married off to some distant cousin in her teens, but the last time I saw her she was headed to university far from home where she lived first in a dorm and then in a shared flat with other girlfriends. She is now a graduate with a good job – but her job in the university town is too far to allow her to commute from her parent’s small flat in Esfahan, so she lives in a flat of her own with another girlfriend. Thirty years after the revolution sought to shut women back up in the home, ordinary girls like Noosheen are leading independent lives of financial autonomy away from their family homes, living alone – something that my mother and her sisters didn’t dare dream of.

  Noosheen and her ilk are my great hope for Iran’s future, the women jumping forward through loopholes in the system. Only one thing can still set them back inexorably – another war.

  Noosheen lives her independent single life in Natanz, now notorious in the West as the site of one of Iran’s nuclear reactors and likely candidate for Israeli or American bombing with nuclear-tipped weapons. Should those bombs one day fall, they will wipe out not just the fabled domes of Esfahan and poison the land for thousands of years to come, they will also obliterate my sweet modest cousin and her quietly modern life.