20
Returning
My only trip back to Khuzestan was for Ebby’s funeral. I joined the other Abadanis heading to the graveyard; they had come bearing flasks of rose-water for washing the graves and boxes of sweets to hand around to other mourners. The graves were raised stone platforms topped by a gravestone or, more often, a picture of the deceased set in a glass case.
It was January and rain had turned the marshland into fields of mud, palm trees swaying in the breeze. I stood by my other cousins, Ebby’s brother and his sisters, holding the trays of homemade halva, honey biscuits, and fruit we had brought. In the martyrs’ section of the cemetery there were special prayers taking place, the flags placed above each grave flapping in the wind that circulated the scent of the rose-water. But we were not in the martyrs’ section, because, although Ebby was a veteran of the war, he died not on the battlefield, but over a decade later in an abandoned slum in Abadan, a homeless heroin addict with AIDS and hepatitis.
His sisters – my cousins – leapt sobbing into my arms when I arrived and his wife, a moon-faced woman in a voluminous black chador, muttered quiet words of gratitude for my presence. After years of feeling alone in their struggle with Ebby and his addiction, they were touched that I had made the journey from England. Neither Ebby’s sisters, his wife nor his brother had seen Ebby for years before his death, his addiction had tried all their love and patience and even his wife, who had stayed with him through everything else, had finally had to listen to her parents and move out for the sake of their children. She told me that she had always loved him, they had all always loved him and, even though Maman-joon had never judged Ebby for his drug addiction and had still wanted him included, there was a sense of anger and recrimination by the time everyone abandoned him to his fate. Now they could lay aside their anger and grieve. Not just for his death, but also for his young life which was destroyed by the war.
I crouched in the mud by the grave, washed off the dust of Abadan and set a table like at a party: white gladioli in the centre surrounded by dishes of dates, halva, fruit, sweets dripping with honey. I ate some obligatory halva, and passed on the sweets to other mourners at other graves. No one talked about Ebby’s ignominious death, the drug addiction that soared out of control after he came home from the front line and which took his family and everything he had before taking his life.
Khuzestan had never recovered its pre-war importance and Abadan was no longer the sophisticated city of pre-revolutionary days. The grand Abadan Hotel where my parents had danced the night away was a broken-down shell of a building. The oil refinery was still at work – in 1997 it had reached the same rate of production as before the war – and the waters of the Shatt still flowed gently between the town and Iraq’s palm fields – but the main town was a dusty relic of its former self, the pavements broken and streets with their neon shop fronts a mix of new buildings, shambolic old buildings, and gaping holes where bombed-out ruins had not been rebuilt. Ebby had died in one of these, down the street from Fatemeh Bibi and Abbas’ old house, where his father had grown up. That night I strolled through town with my cousins, who pointed out the old Cinema Rex, scene of the horrific fire. Recently there had been another fire on the site and now it was being prepared to become a new shopping mall, selling shoes. They told me that several sets of bones had been unearthed since the work started but the regime’s new gift to the people – consumerism – was quickly replacing such relics, driving them from people’s minds.
The next day I boarded a bus for Ahvaz. It was 2003 and at the grand age of thirty-three I had screwed up enough courage to go back to the last place we lived before the revolution drove us out. Approaching the city from Abadan, through the expanse of desert still mined in some areas, I recognised the road we had been driving along when I had first seen Baboo. The scenary brought back memories which I had long kept suppressed.
Hiding behind large sunglasses, I alighted nervously from the bus in Ahvaz and fell into the arms of my cousin Mahnaz, one of Khaleh Mahvash’s daughters and one of my particular childhood friends. Mahnaz was no longer the teenager I had remembered, but a middle-aged woman with two children of her own. Nonetheless, the Hayat Davoudy grey-green eyes were the same, the beaming smile wide and she held me tight to her and then held my hand affectionately, never letting go until we reached her home.
I settled into Mahnaz’s family – she had taken a few days off work, and we went everywhere together, her children soon calling me ‘Khaleh Kamin’, much to my delight. Mahnaz was, like Khaleh Mahvash’s other children, academically brilliant, but the revolution and war had thwarted her ambitions. Mahnaz graduated from high school just after the revolution but, instead of going to university as planned, thanks to Khomeini’s Cultural Revolution, she found herself cooling her heels at home for two years. ‘We had nothing to do,’ she told me, ‘nothing at all. Every day we sat at home with nothing to do. We could barely go out – all the hassle over the hejab and what you could wear was too much – and so we sat at home with nothing to do.’
Mahnaz had eventually returned to studying and had become a high school physics teacher. Alongside her fulltime job and looking after her two children and husband, Mahnaz was now studying for a PhD at Tehran University, making the long journey once a week to Tehran for two days of tutorials. Transport connections were not what they had been, planes were often cancelled and the journey to Tehran could be arduous. Perhaps it was the early exclusion from the realms of the intellect that had driven her back to the classroom, but Mahnaz’s determination to complete her studies grew with each difficulty and she never missed a class, even when it meant going cross-country on an overnight bus. Her husband supported her, although it meant that for two days of the week he was left to his own devices with the children, but he bore it to make his wife happy.
Mahnaz had not grown up in Khuzestan – her parents had moved away soon after getting married – but the pull of her Abbasian roots had made her feel instantly at home when she had moved there with her husband for his work. ‘It was supposed to be for a year,’ she confided, ‘but you know what they say, Kamin-joon, Khuzestan has this habit of getting under your skin. We have been here fourteen years now.’ The land of her ancestors had not only claimed Mahnaz back but had given her two Khuzestani kids; both Mahnaz’s children were born in Ahvaz and, unlike their mother, they had the sparkling black eyes and thick black hair of natives of the region.
It was Mahnaz who accompanied me to find our old house, who insisted when I prevaricated and who pushed me when I had procrastinated until I was nearly out of time. On a moonlit night, on our way to the airport, we drove into the Company’s compound, circling the streets until we found the right one. It took a while but we eventually located our house, there in its cul-de-sac opposite the house where the Armenian boys had lived. As we parked in the drive and got out, a young guard approached us, and Mahnaz explained that this had once been my house, that after more than twenty years away I had come to see it again. The guard, regarding me with curiosity, explained that the house was empty and, suspicious, suggested we should probably leave. I would not have argued but Mahnaz sprang into action, all her Hayat Davoudy charm and her Abbasian quick-wittedness coming to the fore as she persuaded the guard to let us stay a while. I chimed in, walking around and describing what had changed. I pointed at the little booth that had housed our Arab guards which now stood at the end of the driveway, rather than up by the gates of the wall of the house as it once had done.
With this a light came into the guard’s eyes. ‘You are right!’ he declared. ‘It did used to be there. It was moved a few years ago …’ And with that, convinced that we were not thieves, he took out a key and opened the gate for us. ‘I don’t have keys to the house,’ he called out over our shoulders, ‘but you can look around the garden.’
The garden was enough. I stepped in gingerly, comforted by Mahnaz’s hand that was clutching mine once more. And there it was, bathed in moonlight, the garden
with its tall palm tree, the stump where we used to tie Baboo, the fragrant flowers of Khuzestan releasing their scent into the night, the walls we had scaled tumbling with bougainvillea and the rooftops we had raced over. I walked around, holding Mahnaz’s hand, telling her stories, leading her here and there to show her where we had skateboarded and where the fluffy chicks had turned into the hens that laid our eggs. Together we peered through the curtainless windows at the parquet-floored rooms; they seemed so vast now I was used to the small proportions of London flats. Mahnaz never let go of my hand.
As we stood back by the gate, inside the tall walls that had enclosed our own private paradise, she smiled at me and said, ‘You know, Kamin-joon, your memories are of your games, all the mischief you got into, all the fun you had.’ I loved her for reminding me that beyond what had happened here, there had been fun and laughter. My childhood, I remembered, had been very special and the revolution had not changed that.
She took me to the airport after that, collecting a flask of tea on the way ‘just in case’. Sure enough, Mahnaz, a veteran of Khuzestan’s internal flights was well-prepared; my flight was cancelled and we were obliged to sit out the night in the provincial airport that had not so much as a teashop open. We retreated to her car and drank the tea and talked all night. We spoke of our family, our mutual aunts and uncles and cousins and of how life had been for them, why they were so often in ghahr with one another and how the hardships of war had split them into factions.
The Abbasian children were always close, even though that closeness and love was as often as not expressed by fighting, squabbling and bickering. It’s been a hard habit to shake, just as they can’t resist talking over each other, each raising their voices higher and higher to be heard without slowing down or missing a beat. They were all – with the exception of the sweet-tempered Pardis – capable of unleashing their tongues with a vengeance if they were crossed and, even now, as my aunts and uncles grow old in Iran, they fill their time with fighting and falling out. Having watched them now on my trips back over the years, I have realised that this is a sort of hobby for them and I have spent uncomfortable hours in the midst of family arguments, trying desperately not to catch someone’s eye when my aunts and uncles are airing decades of hurts and slights. Every time I visit, I have to acquaint myself with who is talking to whom and who is in ghahr with whom.
Ghahr is a word that I have long sought to translate into English, and failed. Its closest meaning is ‘sulking’ but that implies altogether too petty and childish a thing, whereas ghahr is a formalised ritual that is so much a part of the honour-bound and proud Iranian system of interaction that it carries a kind of epic quality. We Iranians are a thin-skinned lot, we hold our honour dear and are sensitive to it being slighted. I was at first alarmed by such disharmony in my family, until I realised that it was something that existed alongside and quite apart from their love for each other. In the last few years, for example, my oldest khaleh Parivash and youngest khaleh Yassi have been in ghahr with each other and so they won’t visit each other’s houses. With immense tact, Khaleh Yassi would sidestep all the gatherings at Khaleh Pari’s house and I found out that it was because Khaleh Parivash had hosted a religious party at her home (with so many imams whose births and deaths must be commemorated, religious holidays and parties proliferate in the Islamic Republic) and had not invited Khaleh Yassi. Probably this was in retaliation for some kind of slight from Yassi towards one of Parivash’s children, but its origin is not important and nor is it remembered; Khaleh Yassi was offended and therefore refused to visit her oldest sister. It made the logistics of my visits more complicated as it obliged me to go and stay with everyone in turn (in order not to offend them). But I soon noticed that it did not in any way indicate a cooling of the feeling between these two sisters: they spoke on the phone for at least an hour every day, Khaleh Parivash giggling uncontrollably at Khaleh Yassi’s irreverent humour and they were the first to ring to enquire after the health of the other when there was heart trouble (as Khaleh Parivash was prone to having) or a slipped disk (with which Khaleh Yassi suffered for a while). I was tempted to put this all down to the peculiar mix of impertinence and formality that characterised my mother’s side of the family, this bickering love they had developed in that house in Abadan, until on my visits to Tehran I heard also of many different varieties of ghahr that bounced between the branches of my Kurdish family, those people I had considered always so reasonable and logical.
But reason and logic have nothing to do with it. So formalised are Iranian interactions, so highly developed and refined the culture in this respect that you are obliged to react with ghahr should someone insult you in a certain way. My relations no longer take a gun to shoot those that have shown them disrespect, as a great-aunt of mine did many years ago when the Hayat Davoudy still had their lands in Bushehr and a servant served her tea with a teaspoon standing up in the glass (terribly disrespectful, I was assured. What choice did she have? my mother still shrugs), but they do enthusiastically practice their ghahr. We laughed about it now, Mahnaz and I, as we talked under the Ahvaz sky.
I realised I had always felt that no one in Iran could possibly appreciate my experience of exile, so slight did it seem compared to everything they had lived through, and so I never tried to talk about it. But Mahnaz’s cleverness was matched by her sensitivity and she turned to me, fixing me with the same green gaze of our grandmother, and gently said, ‘It wasn’t the same you know. After you left. It wasn’t the same. Everything changed, the revolution and the war, they changed us. We,’ she indicated sweepingly, meaning the generations of cousins our age, ‘we were lucky. We had amazing childhoods, we were close, although we lived all over the place. Remember all those family parties? I learnt to swim in your pool in Tehran … That all stopped. The war scattered us and it made everyone a little crazy. Look at our new cousins,’ she meant the generation born after I had left, the children of the revolution, ‘they didn’t have the same kind of upbringing we had, belonging to everyone in the family. They are not bonded to each other – to the family – like we are.’ Fat tears rolled down my face as she took my head in her hands, kissing my cheeks. ‘Iran changed then, it became a different country. Don’t think that you missed out on anything.’
21
Saying Goodbye
Maman-joon was dying and her last wish was to see Pardis again. He had not returned since leaving for America during the war with Iraq and she would throw up her skinny hands and, in her scratchy voice when she could catch her breath enough, say, ‘I want Pardis, bring me Pardis, naneh.’
In January 2004, I found myself back in Iran accompanying my mother and her two American-based brothers for this journey to say goodbye.
We found the family in disarray, at war with each other now that Fatemeh Bibi, the glue that kept them together, was so unwell. Recriminations and accusations had taken the place of parties and jokes, the stress of watching their mother dying turning in on the family, eating it from inside. They had settled into factions and although they tried to pull together for Pardis’ first visit to Iran in more than a decade, the tension often boiled over into ugly fights and confrontations which had me and my cousins cowering.
The war had not only dislocated the Abbasians physically, it had gone deep to the heart of the unit. Perhaps it was because Maman-joon no longer had her own house and there was nowhere for Fatemeh Bibi’s children to gather without the hierarchies of the family getting in the way. Khaleh Yassi’s modest apartment could not be expected to house the Abbasian hordes and while Maman-joon’s love bore no difference for one member of the family to the next, her heart refusing to love even one iota less just because of personal failings, my uncles and aunts, with the wellbeing of their own children to think about, were much quicker to judge. And so the factions formed during the war had hardened and several sets of the Abbasians were at war with the others.
Maman-joon had become a slip of a thing; tiny and skeletal, unable to wa
lk and hardly able to breathe, but still possessed of bright green eyes and all her faculties. She lay on a small mattress in the corner of the one bedroom in Khaleh Mina’s flat – where we were all staying – and she tried to catch her breath. Sedi and I shared that bedroom with her while we were there and Maman-joon spent the majority of her time lying there, though more in that world than this. When she was awake, she fought so hard for each breath that she constantly emitted a small noise – ‘enk’ – which Yassi’s kids, who loved her and played with her as if she was just a little girl, imitated when they came to visit, teasing her in a way none of the rest of us would have dared. She brightened and laughed girlishly at their teasing, at Amin – Khaleh Yassi’s youngest – who sat with her, now a tall twinkling teenager, and said, ‘Maman-joon, enk enk!’ until she dissolved in giggles.
Fatemeh Bibi, always so jolly and courteous throughout her life, had given up all pretence of caring for others’ opinions of her in deaf old age. At family parties and gatherings she would loudly pass comment on those around her, saving her most virulent criticism for her daughters-in-law. ‘Va!’ she would say to Ali, Khaleh Yassi’s other son, ‘what’s she done to her hair? It’s ugly. And just look at her, why does she look so like a man?’ Ali told me that he would shrink in his seat, mortified. When it fell, as it inevitably did, to Mina to scold her – ‘Maman, baste – enough. Zeshteh, khanoum – it’s not appropriate!’ – Fatemeh Bibi would raise her chin defiantly and answer in the loudest voice she could manage, ‘Why not let them hear? I am only telling the truth after all.’ She could not resist arguing with Mina till the last.
The Cypress Tree Page 21