Stranger to History

by Aatish Taseer

  It was disturbing to hear Desiré speak this way. There was something hard and desensitised about her. She seemed to boast, her voice full of bluster; her eyes were frazzled and glassy.

  ‘What did they want?’ I asked, hoping to ground her story a little.

  ‘It was a football thing,’ she answered. ‘Everyone was celebrating in the streets. There were so many people in the street and, oh, I think it was the time the Americans came into Iraq and TV programmes started to say something.’ She meant the American-based Iranian TV channels that broadcast anti-regime propaganda to the Islamic Republic. ‘And they [the regime] said, “Fine. Wherever we go, we’re going to do this.” And that was one night in Shemshak that they did this.

  ‘They knew that Shemshak was an easy pick-up for them. Anyway, Nargis ran away, I don’t know, but she ran away. Me, I was getting beaten because I made her run away. They beat the shit out of me. I was numb. I said to myself, “Just cover your face and head.” Their boss was down there and they were taking all the young people and they were beating them. They beat so many people that night, it was like, I can’t tell you, it was like a disaster! They would scream, “Whore, you mother-fucker whore,” and I was saying, “Oh, I get it, it’s because your mother was a whore that you think I’m a whore. Don’t fucking beat the shit out of me.” And he would beat the shit out of me.’ She laughed uproariously.

  ‘I said to one of them who was beating me so hard, “Do you have a mother? Do you have a sister? Do you know that beating a woman like this hurts so much? Don’t, please, have mercy on me!” And he wouldn’t have mercy. I was bloody and down on the floor.’

  ‘They must have given some reason? What do you think was their reason?’

  ‘Nothing. They didn’t have any excuse. They never have any excuse.’

  ‘If you had to say . . .’

  ‘They just wanted to show, “What’s going on here? It’s like Europe here? What is it? What is this? Girls and boys walking in the street, very cool, it’s not possible here. You’re not allowed to have fun. You have to always cry, beat the shit out of yourself and be in misery so they would love you.” You’re not even allowed to look nice. I had a nice picture of myself, I gave it for my passport. They gave it back! They said, “This picture looks nice, we don’t take it.” And they took such an ugly picture and they put it in!’ Desiré laughed.

  The regime was the biggest figure in Desiré’s life; it seemed to consume her.

  ‘I tell you,’ she said, ‘when they beat me, they pulled me on the floor because I couldn’t walk any more. They dragged me by the hand and put me in the car. It was a bus full of young people crying.’

  They had put up roadblocks and were stopping cars, making people get out. They went from door to door, raiding chalets.

  Nargis and Desiré said the police took thirty busloads of people to Tehran that night. Influence in Shemshak got Desiré off the bus, and one other thing, the horror of which must have registered on my face, because she said, with some anger, ‘I am not a young person. Why? What did you think?’

  I tried in the half-light to see her face more clearly. I had put her age somewhere in the late twenties, perhaps early thirites. But now as I looked closer, I could see that her skin was slacker than I first thought, and lined. She was forty with a son of twenty. It was not that she looked young; it was that her growth was stunted. She was an absurdity. She dressed and behaved like a teenager. Her whole life had been given to fighting for the right to party.

  Coming back to her original story, I asked her what happened after the gun was removed from her head. ‘Did they take you to prison?’

  ‘No,’ she answered. ‘They told me to give names of people. And they had this electric thing, this shocking thing. They would put it to me and ask me to give names. I would say I don’t know any names. They would say, “No?” and shock me. “If you want us to free you, you have to give somebody’s name.”’ Desiré claimed she gave no names so they took her to her house and searched it.

  ‘Did they find anything?’

  ‘Of course, of course,’ she smiled, more sedate now, ‘grass, drink, satellite. Whatever’s good in life is not good here in Iran, man. My house was not good! When I was in court, the guy was saying to the judge, “Judge, you have to see her house. I have to go and film her house and show you. If you see her house, you will give her six months in Evin.”’

  She was referring to Evin Prison, renowned for its cruelty both under the Shah and during the Islamic Republic. A trial of sorts followed, in which Desiré was allowed neither lawyers nor family. When her father came looking for her, he was told falsely that the trial was over and that his daughter had been given six months in Evin.

  In the courtroom, Desiré was accused of making pornography and of living as a kept woman. Her accusers’ vendetta was so obvious that the judge became suspicious. ‘What do you want?’ the judge finally said. ‘Do you want me to stone her? Do you hate her so much?’

  Five minutes later, Desiré’s father walked through the door, furious at having been lied to. By this point Desiré had already spent four days in jail.

  ‘They didn’t try to get you out earlier?’

  ‘You can’t,’ she said. ‘Four days is nothing. That’s the preprison. The real prison is Evin.’

  ‘What were the four days like?’

  ‘Oh, fine,’ she said. ‘It was dirty, there were druggy people, heroin people, vomiting everywhere. We were all in a small room, we slept together. The sheets were smelly and dirty, everyone was smelly and dirty. I was able to take a hijab, which was like a kimono, and I would crawl into that at night so that nothing would touch me.’

  When she came out of prison none of her old friends would see her. They hung up the phone when she called.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘They were scared.’

  ‘Of what?’

  ‘That I would give their names. And because my best friend told everybody that I had given her name. She wanted to run away from Iran and needed an excuse. Afterwards I said to her, “What were you thinking? How could you do this to me?” She said, “I thought your ass was on it so a little bit more wouldn’t matter.”

  ‘“What?” I shouted. “Do you know that little bit more was the worst part? You have to take pain away from me, not give me more!”

  ‘So I stayed home. I started not to call people. I started not going anywhere because I would go places and people would be uncomfortable. They would think I was working for the government. Because most of the time when they take you, if your punishment is a lot, they make you work for them instead. In this way you never know if your friend is an informer or not. Everybody becomes an informer. You have to be scared of everybody.’

  I believed Desiré when she described this as the worst part, and yet I couldn’t help but feel sympathy for her friends too. Not everyone was capable of Desiré’s heroism, and one of the most treasured aspects of a state that didn’t brutalise and spy on its own people was that it allowed people without a hero’s courage to live with dignity, without the guilt of having betrayed friends from fear. Heroes, then, were saved for when they were needed, for truly heroic acts, and Desiré’s heroism, if it was real, would not have been squandered on the freedom to ‘party’.

  ‘Why do you stay?’

  ‘My land,’ Desiré muttered. ‘I don’t know. It attracts me wherever I go. I speak French, I speak English. I am an English resident. I had a husband, my son is in England, some of my family is there. Everyone asks me, “Why are you here?” I go there, I spend time there.’ Then, as if telling me a great secret, she whispered, ‘But then I want to come back. Krishna always says, “Wherever you were born is your root, and wherever else you might go, you always come back.’ She stopped, and those frazzled eyes glistened with a few stray tears. ‘I don’t know why. Shit, I hate it. But I’m comfortable here.’ Then, choking with fresh laughter, she added, ‘And it’s not comfortable.’

  Desiré mentioned the word ‘Isla
m’ only once to me. At her trial she had asked, ‘You don’t know anything about me so how can you judge me? Is Islam something that has to judge people like this?’ Houshmand also differentiated between the ‘real Islam’ and the Islam of the Islamic Republic. It was true that, as I encountered the Islamic Republic in the lives of its people, I made no separation between the republic’s Islam and the ‘real faith’. Did it really matter whether the Islam of the Islamic Republic was the ‘real Islam’ or not? Did it matter whether the socialism of Stalin or Mao was the real socialism?

  The rush of sudden oil wealth, ‘the country moving too fast’, unstable, undemocratic governments interfered with by foreign powers: these were the components of the Islamic Revolution. This was what had mattered before the society was put through the Islamic filter. It was a distortion of the faith’s rule now, always happier dealing with trifles, to shut out those questions and to choose instead to harass Desiré.

  Even as I heard these stories, my own luck was running out. It was as if tales of this unseen regime made certain our meeting.

  Phone Booth

  I didn’t try to contact my father again until I was seventeen. I was in my last year of boarding-school in the hills of south India and about to go to college in America. The school had been started by American missionaries in the early part of the last century and grew into a ‘Christian international school’, drawing a bizarre mixture of Midwestern missionaries and hippies who wanted to spend time in India. The school therapist was an old American hippie who had set up a peer-counselling programme that I joined. She trained us in one-to-one meetings in her sunny office near the chapel. Together, we would invent hypothetical problems and work through them, employing the methods of parroting, paraphrasing and open-ended questions to arrive at a made-up solution. She was a large, blonde woman, with protruding blue eyes and thick spectacles. She listened carefully to everything I said, her lips adjusting themselves over the braces she had recently started wearing to take in an overbite. ‘I’m sorry, they still cut my mouth a bit,’ she would say, if she saw that I was distracted by the movement.

  On one of these afternoons, playing shrink and patient, I found myself recounting the real facts of my life to the therapist. I suddenly felt awkward, but found it comforting to talk to someone so removed from my life. I also liked showing off my surprising indifference to my father.

  ‘But wasn’t it difficult for your mother to marry a Pakistani?’ the therapist asked.

  ‘Oh, yes, it really was. She was a total outcast,’ I exaggerated.

  ‘That must have been hard for you to handle those social pressures at such a young age.’

  ‘Well, yes, but I had a lot of support. You know, the Indian family system, so strong, so inclusive.’

  ‘And what was it like to grow up in Indian society without a father?’

  ‘Well, as my mother always says, it was the biggest favour he could have done me.’

  ‘Who? Your father? Why does she say that?’

  ‘She’s only joking.’

  ‘Oh, I see. Do you have any memory of him?’

  ‘No, none at all. He jumped ship when I was two.’

  ‘When you were two? And you never heard from him, no letters, no phone calls?’

  ‘I think he wanted it to be a very clean separation.’

  ‘And how does that work for you?’

  ‘It’s fine. See, the thing is that while a lot of children get messed up because of fathers that are there and then not there, for me the idea of a father never took root at all. And since these things are all social constructs, it’s possible to do without them just as long as you get love and attention from somewhere else.’

  ‘Uh-huh. And who were those people in your life?’

  ‘Oh, lots.’

  ‘Grandparents?’

  ‘Yes. Grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins. You’re never alone.’

  ‘Uh-huh. And now?’

  ‘Now what?’

  ‘How do you feel about your father today?’

  ‘Nothing. I mean, the man is obviously a shit. He abandoned my mother with a baby to bring up on her own in India. Everyone gets shitty people in their lives. Some have shitty mothers or grandmothers, some even have shitty children. You take advantage of the good ones and let the bad ones find each other.’

  ‘You seem to be very decided about it. How did you come to feel this way?’

  The therapist had an awful way of depriving any experience of its uniqueness. I felt threatened by the equalising character of her questions. I realised then that the particularity of my story had been a refuge and that much of what I told her was related to the peace my mother had found, derived in part from the thrill of the cross-border romance, the love-child, the challenge and excitement of an unconventional life. These things could get her through, but they would never have been enough for me because they were not of my making. Rather than comfort me, they made me feel the absence in my life more acutely, as though someone else had lived and I hadn’t.

  The therapist’s technique prevailed; the seclusion of her office was too great; for once I shrugged off my stock answers.

  ‘And why,’ she continued, ‘leaving your mother’s problem with him aside, have you not tried to contact him?’

  ‘I honestly don’t think my mother would like that.’

  ‘Yes, but, Aatish—’ She stopped.

  ‘What?’

  ‘No, I shouldn’t. It’s not for me to disturb whatever equilibrium you have come to. It’s really moving to hear you talk with this resolve about what must have been such a painful side of your life, but I feel you must also consider yourself when you make this decision about your father. It is your right to know him. It is your right not to have to live with his ghost.’

  The therapist chewed her braces for a moment. ‘You are not betraying your mother by seeking out your father.’

  ‘Oh, please, stop it. This isn’t America. What am I going to do after all these years? Just call him and say, “Hello, Abba, this is Aatish”?’

  ‘No, deciding the best approach is another matter. First, you have to be willing to address the subject.’

  That day as I left her office I knew I would do it. Her words had binding force; it was harder not to act.

  I took advantage of the free period after my meeting with her to go back to my dormitory. Everything felt vivid and new: the wooded road leading up to the dormitory, the occasional views of blue eucalyptus hills, the old colonial club where retired army officers gathered in the evening to play bingo. Why should this hill station in deepest south India, full of hippies and Christians, be the setting for one of the most important decisions of my life?

  I slipped into the dormitory building without my housemistress noticing and went into my room. Leafing through my address book, I already felt a tinge of guilt. I was looking for the number of an old friend of my mother, an ex-friend, really, because he had remained friends with my father after the split. He was the friend who had asked my mother to leave the Baker Street flat. I chose him because my mother wouldn’t find out. I found the number and scribbled it on to a phone pass. Then, to avoid coming back for another, I changed the ‘number of calls’ from one to two, and in place of my father’s telephone number, I put the country code for Pakistan. It was all I knew of his whereabouts. I approached my housemistress who spent several minutes searching for her spectacles, then examined the pass closely.

  ‘First call, England. And second to which country, please?’ she asked.

  ‘Ma’am, to my mother’s mobile phone.’

  ‘Mobile phone?’

  ‘Yes, ma’am.’

  ‘Mobile phones require international standard dialling?’

  ‘Yes, ma’am,’ I lied.

  ‘Oh, God, please save us from this new technology,’ she said, and signed the slip.

  I made my way along the uphill road, past the chapel and the therapist’s office to the telephone operator in the main administrative section of the
school. There was a ten o’clock assembly and a degree of commotion in the normally quiet corridors. There were two phone booths: a cramped wooden one with graffitied walls and a naked yellow lightbulb, and a newer one with a window and stool.

  I handed the signed phone pass to the operator and asked for the wooden booth. I was reading the graffiti when the phone started ringing. I answered it and the operator’s voice bellowed, ‘Trunk call from India. Mr Nath? Mr Nath?’

  A sleepy voice answered, ‘Yes.’ I realised that in my excitement I hadn’t taken into account the time difference.

  The man, though surprised to hear from me, was friendly and gave me my father’s number so quickly and with so few questions that it felt as though he had been expecting my call for years. I wrote down the numbers and apologised for waking him up.

  The assembly was still going on when I left the phone booth. I walked in its direction hoping to find the therapist. I caught sight of her in a far corner, leaning against a pillar. When the assembly was over, I rushed up to her and asked if I could see her in the next class period. I would have to miss Hindi, but was sure I could get away with it. We agreed to meet back in her office in ten minutes.

  Sitting again on the sofa in her office, I asked, with new purpose, the same question: ‘So what am I going to do? Just call him and say, “Hello, Abba, this is Aatish”?’

  ‘Well, first,’ she began, ‘it’s important to establish that he’s in a position where he can speak to you. He has a new wife and more children, right?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Do they know about you?’ she asked.

  The question stung, but I could see that she hadn’t intended it to. ‘I don’t know. Maybe.’

  ‘Well, then, you’re going to want to make sure it’s a good time. You don’t want to phone him just after he’s had a big fight with his wife and suddenly say, “Hello, it’s me, your long-lost son.”’