*
The next time Khosro came to visit Dad was the worst possible time. That morning, Dad was beside himself with fury after reading about the disappearance of several politically active university students, the disappearance of twenty thousand pages from a criminal file, and a corrupt judge presiding over a murder case. His rage was just waiting to explode on someone. And so, when Dad saw the book Khosro was holding, he completely lost his temper, snarling at his brother, “What good is this mysticism bullshit in the real world?” Taken aback by the question and tone, Khosro didn’t say anything. The Golden Future by Osho8 was open in his hands. He closed it calmly, sat down and looked hard at Dad, waiting till his anger had cooled. Seeing his silence, Dad became even more heated and said in a louder voice, “When my Sohrab was executed for no reason, when they burned my daughter, and when my wife lost her mind and left, what help was your mystical bullshit then?” Deeply saddened again by these tragedies, Khosro remained silent.
Dad continued, “When all those innocent political prisoners were executed, when all those young men were killed in a delusory war, when all those rights were revoked, what good did this mysticism game of yours do?” Khosro sighed, let his head fall to his chest and said reproachfully, “Truly nothing!”
Dad’s voice rose to a yell, “The world is consumed by murder, injustice, and suffering and smart people like you go and hide in the safety of temples instead of doing something to fight the corruption and injustice!” Then suddenly his shoulders shook, and he began to sob loudly. Years of smothered tears poured out of him, soaking the books and carpets. As warm tears flowed down his cheeks, wetting his shirt, all he wanted was to drown in a river of his own tears and die. He couldn’t see any reason to continue living. Everything that he once had and had loved with all his heart, had been taken from him in the worst possible way. His tars, his home in Tehran, Roza, Sohrab, Beeta, me, and worst of all, our aspirations. And they were even going to destroy this Qajar house which has documents to prove it has belonged to the family for two hundred years. What more could they possibly want? Sitting there, tears rolling down his cheeks, his head sunk onto his arms, he wished he had just been buried by the black snow.
Khosro wanted to get up and take his brother’s hunched shoulders in his arms and apologise for the fact that mysticism didn’t offer any simple solutions to murder, plunder, poverty or human injustice. But instead he paused, then left the room so Dad could cry in peace. Just before leaving he stopped a moment as he walked past Dad and squeezed his brother’s shoulder.
That night when he let himself into the library again, he saw Dad leaning against a chair reading as usual. It was only then that he allowed himself to sit down in his usual chair and say, quietly, “Most people see the world as a dangerous and threatening place they have to arm themselves against, fight with, protect themselves or run away from. That’s why, when faced with them, the world turns into a menacing, harmful, aggressive creature. But the world is something one needs a lifetime just to know.”
Seeing that Dad was still silent, he shook his head remorsefully, and continued, “You say that the world has become crazy and ask what can I do for it. My answer is this: all I can do is not get caught up in the madness.” Uncle Khosro went on, “You can only know swimming by swimming, love by loving and meditation by meditating. There’s no other way. The mind opens outward and meditation inward. That’s the difference between your world and mine.”
He looked uncertainly at Dad, unsure if he was still listening or not, and cautiously continued, “I don’t blame you. Time is in transition and everything we loved is being destroyed. Look around you. These books, these manuscripts, this calligraphy; illumination, architecture, landscaping; these miniatures—they don’t exist anywhere anymore. Instead of these carpets with meaningful thousand-year-old motifs, they sell factory-made rugs featuring Mickey Mouse; and instead of one telephone occasionally ringing from a corner of every house, every five-year-old has a mobile phone. All the old gardens, historical houses, ancient artifacts, handicrafts, national treasures, and everything else that was a product of thousands of years of Iranian civilization, and culture and thought, has been destroyed or is today in the process of being destroyed and looted. In this savage onslaught, where people have lost their identity and their past, leaving them alienated them from each other, do you think anyone will be able to do anything on their own? Perhaps the only solution would be a united mass movement, but where is the unity in these people? We need unity to destroy, and unity to construct.” He paused, then went on, “With all this destruction, all I can do is not become tainted by something I don’t believe in. Alas, if only I could do more!” Dad didn’t look up from his book— as though he hadn’t heard—perhaps because, although he understood, he couldn’t console himself with Khosro’s words. His whole being was bursting with the suffering that a swayed society had unleashed. Reading history books and listening to the news didn’t lessen all the pain and rage within, but just added to it. He felt desperate and distressed. He loathed cruelty, war, and injustice; at the same time, he couldn’t comprehend the silence in the face of it all. Like an unknown quote whispering over and over in his ear he heard: the future generation will ask itself why they were obliged to spend their lives in darkness after morning had dawned once again. But what he said was, “Tomorrow I’m going out”.
The next day he went out. Pulling on an ironed shirt and pair of slacks, he stood for a while in front of the mirror deliberating whether or not to put on a tie, eventually deciding to put one on. A navy-blue tie with a white shirt and a pair of black dress pants. He slowly opened the rusty courtyard door and, standing in its frame he looked left and right down the street, unaware that his parents and grandfather were witnesses to his hesitation, each from behind a different window. In all the years since fleeing Tehran, he had only set foot there several times out of necessity, and he had always avoided walking around outside in the city. Even after selling the antiquities when he wanted to replenish his library after the mullah had looted and burned his books, he didn’t go to Enghelab Street. Instead, he bought books from private libraries that had been advertised in the newspaper and took them back to Razan.
Today, now for the first time, several decades after the Islamic Revolution, he wanted to go out into the streets and see the city: the people, the new roads, alleys, new stores with neon lights, and fast-walking women in black mantos, manghna’es9 and headscarves. He wanted to get a closer look at the new apartment blocks he had been told were built where once old gardens had flourished. He wanted to see the types of creatures Tehran and its inhabitants had now become. He thought to himself, I don’t want to reconcile with these people and the thousand-headed viper of a regime. I just want to see what’s left of society’s battered corpse.
Walking towards Tajrish Square, he tried not to stare at the people but look, instead, at the buildings and streets. After several hundred metres, he felt his body contract and the veins in his neck swell. He consoled himself by saying he was now an old man. Then he tried to ease his fear of people; people who not so long ago had so savagely burnt his daughter, his tars and his home.
The further along he walked, the more crowded the streets and stores became. He couldn’t remember how many decades had passed since he’d gone to Shahanshahi Park, now called Mellat. There were big billboards, boutiques large and small with foreign clothing, iron railings lining the footpaths, large, double-length buses tooting horns, and taxi drivers calling out to people on the footpaths. “Ma’am! Resalat?” “Sir! Sayed Khandan?”
He was feeling tired but was determined to walk down to Shah Reza Street, now Enghelab. The city appeared calm as though there were no longer any atrocities or crimes taking place quietly locked away behind prison doors. Walking towards him was a young couple holding hands. However, as the young man cast a sideways glance at the street, they let go abruptly and went pale. Dad followed their gaze. A green Patrol with the words “Morality Police”10 was d
riving past. Inside sat two chador-clad women and two men in military uniforms, driving slowly along the side of the street, carefully inspecting pedestrians. Once the Morality Police had passed, the couple began holding hands again. Dad looked at their faces as they got nearer. It seemed as though their reaction to the Morality Police had been the most normal thing imaginable; more normal than fear or surrender. This upset for him greatly, and again a wave of negative thoughts flooded his mind. He had reached Pahlavi intersection, now called Vali ’Asr. When several people bumped into him and continued without apologising, he felt alien in his own country, as if nowhere was his home. He was not at ease in Razan, and in Tehran he was a stranger. He harangued himself for not seeing the positive things; there was still the University of Tehran, the City Theatre, there were buttonwood trees and ravens, and despite the suffocating atmosphere of terror, there were people who still held hands away from “their” eyes, as if to say, “Don’t worry, my love! These difficult times will pass.”
He was walking from the University of Tehran toward Esfand 24th Square—now called Enghelab—when, from a distance, he caught sight of a group of people dressed in black. Yesterday in the news he hadn’t heard about any demonstration; if he had, he would never have ventured out. Worried, he decided to turn around, but noticed that people continued to walk in the opposite direction, oblivious of the gathering. He went several steps, but he despised himself. He was embarrassed by his fear and worry and hate. If seventy-five million people could witness demonstrations, poverty, corruption, public executions, and arrests on a daily basis, why couldn’t he? If Beeta was able to live with these people and empathise with them, why shouldn’t he? Of all these people walking towards Esfand 24th, surely I’m not the only one who has suffered. My children were, of course, not the only ones killed, he thought to himself. He recalled reading recently that fifteen thousand people were killed for their political beliefs in the 1980s, alone. Therefore, there were others, too. Others who continue to survive, struggling between sorrow and joy, hope and despair. Perhaps with hope. Hope for change. Fundamental change.
He looked down at his feet. They were still retreating; moving him away from the group of people dressed in black. A very beautiful, lone, rose bush on the side of the road caught his eye; a defenceless rose bush; innocently alien, all alone in all that noise and smoke, the blackness and grey. All these years he’d sought beauty: beauty that had yet to be born, and beauty that had passed away a hundred years ago. He recalled how dazed and frightened he had been fleeing the assault of new revolutionaries, fleeing Tehran. His search for beauty and tranquility had led him to Razan; but it wasn’t long before “they” also arrived. It didn’t matter how far you ran. They would always find you in the end and pull you down with them, he thought. Now he found himself in Tehran once again, with legs still on the run. As his feet were taking slow, steady steps in flight, he lifted his head to look at people’s faces all around; at passers-by, at street vendors, at booksellers. He looked at drug addicts asleep in corners of old buildings and at people who, hunched over but with rapid steps, were coming and going without even taking notice of the group in black, as though each was living on his own planet.
He thought Tehran was also like an addict. A city addicted to smoke, to humiliation, to poverty and torpor whose slightest effort to sober up gave rise to panic. Tehran was an addict that wanted to get clean but lacked the will, and after several days of sobriety would begin using again with even greater intensity. It was an addiction to oppression, an addiction to poverty, and an addiction to inhibition and nostalgia.
As he fled further from the crowd in black, he thought of years past; years that came to be known as the Student Movement of 1999 and the Green Movement of 2009, which he had only read about in the paper and heard about from Beeta. Although those who helped perpetuate the Revolution and the war may not want to admit it, he thought to himself, the political movements that arose every few years after the war and came to be known as the Periods of Construction, Reform, Prudence, and the Return to the Golden Age of the Islamic Revolution, etcetera, though nothing more than a means to stabilise and entrench the regime’s power, had all in fact been born of small revolts against the government. He realised that this regime was able to absorb every revolt against it, into the regime itself.
Again, he looked at his feet. They were still carrying him in the opposite direction. He had to do something. Somehow, he had to stop himself from fleeing. He paused in front of a music store. Entering for no reason, he looked at the rows of CDs. He didn’t know what he was doing there, but he needed time to make the right decision. Finally, he turned to the shop assistant and said, “I haven’t been here for ages. I’m looking for unique a singer: someone with a good voice and good music who has something new to say.”
Glancing around at the other customers to make sure there was no one who looked suspicious, the young sales assistant reached under the counter and pulled out two CDs. “Homay and Mohsen Namjoo,” he said, then added, “But of course there are others, too”. Up until now, Dad’s hands had been in his pockets—as if to keep them untainted by the city’s sins. Now, he pulled them out and touched the two CDs hesitantly. He asked if he could listen to some songs on them. The sales assistant indicated that Dad should join him in the back room where he inserted Namjoo’s CD into a stereo.
Ours is the pirated copy of the Godfather
Ours is the ashamed government
Ours is the inflated file
Ours is the loser wearing the national colours
Ours is the constructive criticism
So perhaps will ours be the future.
Dad was delighted with the bitter satire. Then the sales assistant put on part of one of Homay’s songs.
What kind of world is this where drinking wine is wrong?
What kind of heaven is this where eating wheat is wrong?11
Tell the truth, tell the truth, the truth
Where is your lofty Paradise?
By the way,
Where, too, is everyone and the ignoble one God?
Dad’s eyes twinkled with joy. Yes! They are still alive and reacting, he thought; and asked, “Are women singing, too?” “Yes, they are,” the young sales assistant assured him. “And very well, too, but underground.” Then he pulled out two more CDs of secret concerts and handed them to Dad. Dad eagerly purchased all four of them, and thanking the young man, left. He had made up his mind: he was going back to Enghelab Square. Carrying the four CDs in a small plastic bag, he took long strides back towards the group in black. The closer he got, the less he feared. The demonstrators were thrusting their fists into the air and chanting, just like at the beginning of the Revolution. But these fists weren’t like those fists—those fists were firm and powerful, with the confidence of people who could easily kill out of conviction, or at least betray or imprison a neighbour, a colleague or even their own children to be executed. These fists, in contrast, were bowed and limp, as if raised out of a sense of duty. There was no confidence or ideology behind these fists. These fists were being paid peanuts. A trivial attempt to consolidate a small corner of the wretched, narrow, abject power.
Despite their small numbers, the demonstrators had blocked the main road and stopped the flow of traffic. One hundred people at most. Everyone else was standing on the footpath either talking quietly among themselves, or standing, hands tucked under their armpits in an unconscious effort to maintain an inner distance, silently watching the listless, black-clad crowd. He stopped too. He realised that his tie and ironed, white shirt stood out, but didn’t care. One demonstrator, reading from a piece of paper, chanted, “Death to England!” Then the rest of the crowd, mostly old men or youngsters with sparse beards, repeated after him, “Death to England!” Dad stood off to one side until he finally mustered the courage to ask someone standing nearby, “What’s the occasion?” The middle-aged owner of a nearby bookstore answered, “Apparently, they’re protesting against a caricature of the Leade
r that was drawn in England”. Then he gave a smirk and added, “Every once in a while, these baby Hezbollahis find an excuse to show off.”
The demonstrators’ listless chanting continued until suddenly, several people started shouting. A group of men wearing shrouds12 on which was written, I obey you, o Khamene’i. I melt in Your rule, my life a sacrifice to the Leader, and holding large posters of Ali Khamene’i13, got out of several white Peykan sedans. Together with some angry and excited mullahs, they moved to the front of the protesters. Their faces were swollen with rage as they roared and beat themselves over the head, chanting, “Death to those against the Supreme Leader! … Death to England’s slave! … Death to America’s slave!” And, “Obedience to the Leader guarantees our victory!”
The crowd of people on the footpaths watching them had become denser. Several shopkeepers anxiously began to pull down the metal shutters on their shops. The atmosphere had become very volatile. The middle-aged man whispered to Dad, “These guys are dangerous. It’s best we go inside.” But at that very moment, the eyes of one of the shrouded men fell on Dad’s tie. He lunged forward wildly and hurled himself at Dad, yanking on his tie and bringing his face so close to Dad’s that he was sprayed in spittle. “You put on a tie to show you’re a slave to Britain, did you?” he yelled. “Ties belong to asses! To spies! Get the spy!” The words hadn’t even fully left his mouth before three others assaulted Dad. He couldn’t believe how fast it had all happened. The people in the sheets surrounded him, pushing him, spraying him with their spittle, and pulling him towards them, screaming, “Spy! … It’s these guys who are threatening the Revolution! … Get him! … Take him!”
Several people on the footpath tried to intervene, and the bookseller took him firmly by the hand and yelled at the abusers, “You should be ashamed of yourselves! What has this man done? Leave him alone!”
The Enlightenment of the Greengage Tree Page 20