The Cypress Tree

by Kamin Mohammadi

  His efforts were to prove unsuccessful, and Iran’s complicated political system, which encompasses democratic elements with autocratic controls, made sure that Khatami’s attempts at reform were blocked. The Supreme Leader holds the real power in the country and so the people grew disillusioned, and all those young people who had worked so tirelessly to canvas for Khatami and the reformers, turned their backs on the political process so determinedly that the next presidential election was won by a surprising candidate – Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the anorak-wearing former Revolutionary Guard and war veteran who, despite his conservative policies, was favoured by those who voted for him because, ironically, he was not a mullah in religious robes.

  Whatever else he failed in, Khatami’s era did usher in greater social freedoms. My own journeys to Iran over the years bore witness to this. Blanketed in a baggy black manteau reaching almost to the ground, with a black headscarf and a constant nervous twitch adjusting it during my first few visits, my manteaus too gradually got shorter and tighter, and my headscarves became more colourful and slipped further back, my hand no longer flying up to push away stray hair every few minutes. I learnt from my young cousins not to treat the hejab as outerwear, as I had been doing, but instead to build it in as part of my outfit – the key to being as stylish as these exotic colourful creatures that fluttered around Tehran looking so chic. They schooled me in the fashions of each season, pointing out that since what was in vogue changed almost monthly, there was no point in my investing money in my own manteaus and headscarves when I could just borrow theirs. I would arrive every time from London in a long baggy coat and black cotton headscarf and, once home, my teenage second cousins would lay out all their manteaus and scarves on their beds, and help me pick a few for my trip, explaining to me that the twenties drop-waisted style was acceptable now but on its way out, to be replaced by the nipped in waists and full skirts of manteaus inspired by Christian Dior’s New Look of the late forties. My scarves went from plain black squares knotted under my chin to fine wool shawls in pastel paisley patterns picked out with elaborate embroidery, to Hermès-inspired silk squares with bold patterns, to chiffons splashed with bright flowers. I too finished off the look with the obligatory pair of outsize designer sunglasses perched on my head, the logo prominent, and I tripped around town with this new species of butterflies flitting through Tehran.

  Thirty years after my mother and her sisters marched through the bazaar in their miniskirts and Biba eyeshadows, coming home ‘pinched black and blue’ as they told me, I accompanied my young cousins to parties and movies in tight Capri pants topped by figure-hugging manteaus and rainbow scarves, our lips glossy and eyelashes curled and lengthened by mascara, followed as we went by a convoy of admiring men. The colour is back in Iran.

  The taxi driving me through the surreal landscape of modern Tehran with its contrasting billboards urging both consumerism and the values of ‘martyrdom’, drops me at a soaring tower block in the north of the city. For a few weeks now, I have been living alone in one of Tehran’s most distinguished tower blocks. With its doorman, 24-hour security, tinkling fountains in the front garden and clocks announcing the time in Tehran, London and New York in the lobby, it is clear this skyscraper’s spiritual home is Manhattan. However, unlike the Park Towers of Manhattan our Tehrani towers are not just known by their street numbers. The delicacy of the Iranian sensibility is evident even in the midst of these most modern of edifices: our towers are called things like ‘Tower of Light’, ‘Tower of Shadow’, ‘The White Tower’, ‘Tower of Rain’ and most common of all are names of flowers. All over the north of Tehran bloom skyscrapers such as ‘Lily Tower’, ‘Tower of Poppies’, ‘Tulip Towers’ and my current favourite, ‘The Fragrance of Roses Tower’. Most famous of all is the Koh-i-noor Tower, ‘The Mountain of Light Tower’, named after the famous Iranian diamond the Koh-i-noor which now resides in the Tower of London as part of the British Crown Jewels.

  Life in my tower is comfortable. Living in Tehran is not exactly like living in London, where I have a variety of ways to entertain myself any given minute of the day. It may be that a simple desire to go for a swim on a hot day here is attended by the hassle of finding a pool which allows women to swim on the day and time I wish to go (swimming pools are strictly segregated); and going out to the latest hot restaurant, movie or concert may mean having to stay dressed in my manteau and headscarf throughout the evening, but at least there are some options. At least, of an evening when my date comes to pick me up to escort me to a party, I feel safe in the knowledge that the doorman of my very posh tower block is not going to ring the religious police to report me for being alone with a man, and as for his opinion of me – this foreign Iranian who has gentleman callers – I care not a jot.

  The cultural life of Tehran is rich, with private art viewings, secret screenings of controversial documentaries and movies, underground rock concerts, officially sanctioned classical concerts, and even illegal fashion shows on offer almost every night, as long as you know the right people. Alternatively there is the party circuit with Tehran’s rich and beautiful, those expensively suited men and their glossy, whippet-thin wives who live in penthouse suites of marble towers or behind the walls of sprawling villas in the north of Tehran, right in the lap of the mountains. Although I have been a guest at one or two of these parties with one of my well-to-do cousins, I am much more comfortable in the circle of foreign journalists, diplomats and NGO workers who observe life in the city with a wry detachment, always amusing when I am missing the dry British sense of humour and longing to party in jeans with a face bare of the thick make-up that is de rigueur in society here.

  When I get bored during the day, I slick on some lipstick and ring my most glamorous cousin who screeches up at the gates in her huge white SUV, a pair of massive Chanel sunglasses perched atop expensively streaked hair and the season’s latest silk headscarf knotted loosely at her throat. She takes me off to a number of very shiny shopping malls in the north of Tehran where we browse designer boutiques and drink coffee in wannabe coffee shops. We swap gossip about the family, discuss the best shape for me to train my eyebrows into and laugh at the fashionistas who have taken the summer’s tanned look a little too far and are glowing bright orange. She drops me off when she has to pick up her son from his round of classes, always leaving me with a party invite. I love my cousin and I enjoy dipping into her yummy mummy routine once in a while, but after attending several of her parties, I feel life is too short for the vapid conversation and hot competition that characterises the interaction of these women when they are gathered together with their husbands. With a sinking heart I realise it reminds me of the lives of the yummy mummies of Notting Hill.

  Most of all, I like spending time with my family, with Mehry and Guity, who live close by. Although I have learnt to acclimatise to life in Iran and in Tehran I could almost pass for one of the chi-chi ladies whose concerns stop at owning the latest espresso machine and having the best taichi teacher, the reason I am in Iran is because, after all these years, I am still crazy in love with my family. In Shiraz I live with Khaleh Mina, the two of us squeezed into her little flat laughing and gossiping into the night. Khaleh Yassi’s kids are grown-up now and no longer stay with her – Ali is at medical school and Yassi’s eldest daughter is now married and living in Tehran where she works during the day and works out in the gym on the evenings her husband is out of town.

  After so many years of confusion about my identity, with the twin blessings of getting older and increasing familiarity with and ease in my homeland, I realised then that the mask had been shed – in both Iran and London, I wore the same face, just one that spoke different languages. My Farsi now fluent and my manners playful, I was, if anything, enjoying life in Iran more than my life in London. Increasingly the siren call of Iran was getting harder to ignore and so, here I was again, this time for six months.

  Tehran had changed too since my first visit ten years ago. With a huge population, the
city had exploded, inching up the skirts of the Alborz more and more every year. Our old house in Darrus, which had once had nothing in front of it, was now practically in the centre of town. All over Tehran, skyscrapers and tower blocks rose with alarming alacrity, replacing lovely old houses built behind brick walls which harboured nightingales and rose gardens. Even new-build villas like ours at Darrus were being razed and replaced, or having floors added to them – land was scarce and Iranians, so used to living in large proportions, were now squeezing themselves into tiny apartments with small dimensions, their rose gardens reduced to a few flower pots on high-rise balconies.

  Mehry never got her wish to travel. Iran was refashioned but not in the shape she had imagined in 1978. Concern for her parents kept her in Iran long enough for it to become impossible for her to leave the new Islamic Republic that was unwilling to give her – an unmarried woman – any independent rights without the guardianship of her male relatives, so she established herself instead in a career as a scientist. Through those hard first years of the new Islamic regime when women were being intimidated back into the home, she held fast to her job and eventually, with the war taking so many men away, her talent was allowed to shine despite her gender and she rose through the ranks. From the first time I returned to Tehran, I would spend hours sitting with Mehry, talking to her of my travels, pouring over maps and planning the journeys we would go on when she took early retirement.

  Mehry and Guity had resisted the onslaught of the exploding city as long as they could. Every year more of the houses that surrounded theirs were knocked down and replaced by blocks of flats. Their house was not an old Persian house but representative of the modernity of another era, with two storeys and the garden in the back set behind a long stone patio and they were determined to hold on to it. Behrooz and his family had still lived upstairs and Mehry and Guity had cared for their mother, Mehry working while Guity took care of the house and fed all the stray cats of the neighbourhood as was her wont. Slowly they were surrounded, besieged by the buildings rising around them every few months, blocking their view of the sky and casting their garden, once so verdant and filled with fruit trees and bushes of bright flowers, the patio lined by pots of jasmine that I would find scattered over my pillow at night, into shadow. The fruit trees suffered, the flowers no longer bloomed as bright and Guity would say to me sadly every time I visited, ‘Look, they have taken our sun …’

  Eventually they gave in and sold their land to one of the many developers that had been aggressively pursuing them for the past few years. Clearing out the old house took months, and they held long conferences with my parents on the phone about what to do with our Persian carpets which had been with them since the revolution. Too large for any house we were likely to inhabit in London, my father asked Mehry and Guity to do with them as they would, and their soft hearts, still so hopeful of one day seeing their beloved uncle again, could not bear to let them go, just in case. So as well as having to move fifty years of their own possessions, they also moved some of the relics of our old life. Somehow they managed too to transport Sa’adat-khanoum, who was now entirely reliant on them for getting around, unable to walk even to the bathroom by herself.

  The last house of my childhood had finally disappeared, razed to the ground to accommodate modern Iran. By the time I returned for my long stay, Mehry and Guity and Sa’adat-khanoum were installed on the fourth floor of a modern apartment block in a busy neighbourhood in the northern reaches of Tehran. Their kitchen was open-plan and their living room windows gave views of the hills that were pretty at night, when the lights lining the mountain roads lit up, but they had no jasmine pots and Guity stood disconsolately by the windows, scattering stale bread and seeds down on to the street for the birds, no longer able to feed the cats she so loved.

  By the time Mehry was retired, her father, my amoo, had died and her mother, the redoubtable Sa’adat-khanoum, had buckled under her bereavement. She practically lost the use of her legs overnight and for the next decade she gradually lost the use of her faculties as well. Mehry and Guity’s life became an unrelenting round of nursing their mother, their freedom eroded from year to year as their mother slowly got worse. Sa’adat-khanoum, who had been so hale and hearty and had loved to hike out into the countryside dragging us all in her wake, became virtually housebound, so difficult was it for her daughters – themselves now in their sixties – to manoeuvre her down the stairs and into the car. Mehry, despite her growing weariness, submitted herself to her fate with some grace, but it cost her dear, I could see that. We nonetheless continued to spread out the map of the world and enthusiastically planned epic overland journeys that we now knew we would never go on.

  I had stayed with them for months, skipping off on my travels to visit the Abbasian clan who were now scattered all over the country, and striding off on my own to Kurdistan, unable to have Mehry join me. Unbeknown to my mother and her worries, I lived an independent life in Tehran, moving into my own flat when a friend leaving for Europe gave me her keys. While Khaleh Mina and the other Abbasians still tried to protect me as if I was a lone child, Mehry and Guity, seeing my discomfort in living with them, giving them so much more trouble than they could really cope with, let me go. After years of being trapped inside family homes, I was living in Iran as I chose.

  * * *

  One cold February night, I donned my most conservative hejab and piled into a car with one of my Kurdish cousins, grandson of Sa’adat-khanoum, alongside some friends, other British-Iranians who were living in Tehran, and we headed downtown to Javadieh, a neighbourhood in conservative southern Tehran. It was the night before Ashura and we wanted to see the religious festival firsthand in a traditional area.

  Ashura marks the moment that the two main sects in Islam irretrievably broke apart, a chasm that had opened after the Prophet’s death when disagreement about who should succeed him had split his followers. There were those who believed that the Prophet’s cousin and son-in-law Ali was his rightful heir, and those who believed that the new leader should be elected from those companions of the Prophet most capable of the job. The Prophet Mohammad’s first successor was Abu Bakr, his close friend and father of his wife Aisha. He became the first caliph and his followers adopted the word Sunni – meaning ‘one who follows the traditions of the Prophet’ in Arabic. Those however who believed that the leadership should stay within the Prophet’s own family (he had no sons) became known as Shia, an abbreviation from the historical ‘Shia-t-Ali’, or ‘the Party of Ali’. Imam Ali, the first Imam – or saint – of Shia Islam’s Twelve Imams, was eventually given the leadership of the caliphate, becoming the fourth caliph.

  In the endless series of battles and struggles that followed between these two sects, Imam Ali had been killed by one of his own followers for murky political reasons – and when his grandson Hossein, the third Shia Imam, had taken on the powerful army of the Caliph Yazid with a small band of hopelessly outnumbered men at Kerbala in AD 680, facing certain death, the gruesome slaughter that ensued gave Shiism its first martyr and set the two sects apart for good.

  As Catholicism is to Christianity, so Shiism in to Islam, a cult of devotion in which pain and passion opens a way to connect with God, its rituals based on mourning, its genesis a rebellion against the established order.

  I had seen images of Ashura in the Islamic Republic where it was marked lavishly, with its long processions of black-clad men flagellating themselves with chains and beating their chests. In some places, the chains wore little spikes that tore through the flesh, mortifying the body, as the chants rose rhythmically. I expected it to be a time of heightened fervour and zealotry but, of course, I was wrong again. In the week leading up to the day of Ashura itself, I saw many processions as they snaked out of mosques, the chants and sounds of the chest-beating echoing through Tehran’s noisy streets. I saw people gathered around the processions, crying with great emotion, ostensibly mourning the loss of Imam Hossein all those hundreds of years ago. I
saw friends in some of these gatherings, weeping openly when, only the night before, they had been partying with great passion. This was all accompanied by an unexpectedly giddy holiday atmosphere – Iran was on vacation and the streets of Tehran were clear of heavy traffic.

  Everywhere we drove there were roadside stalls giving away steaming hot cups of tea and the various traditional sweets that are distributed at religious festivals. Mosques handed out free food, and we took to joining any queues that we passed just to see what was on offer. That night in Javadieh, the atmosphere and the processions seemed to me something like a carnival, the rhythm and the beat reminding me of hip-hop, and in the melee of bodies and the sizzling feeling of anticipation, it was all I could do not to dance. Even in the conservative neighbourhoods of south Tehran, boys and girls were busy using the freedom that Ashura gave them to be on the streets all together to flirt and have fun.

  It is tempting to see this seamless combination of Islam and flirting as a symptom of the Islamic Republic, but Mehry told me later that Ashura in her day was the same. Iranians have always had an irrepressible sense of fun, and growing up in sixties Iran girls were sheltered, and they too took advantage of religious festivals to flirt with boys. She told me that, if eye contact was made with a handsome boy in the procession and smiles were returned, then the boy would announce the digits of his phone number in between the chanting and chest beating, so that she could memorise it and call him later. It would go something like this: ‘Ya Hossein – 7 – Ya Ali – 6.’ In those heady days of the shah’s supremacy, women had little more freedom than they do now and the necessities of chastity and modesty that haunt women still were just as strong in pre-Islamic Republic Iran.