Searching for Hassan

by Terence Ward

  At night, under the stars, Hassan used to tell us how his village was protected by mud walls fifteen feet high, pierced with holes for lookouts. At sunset, all the sheep and camels were herded inside and the gate was closed. But everyone knew it was their hero, the crack shot Haj Ali Jamail, and not the high walls that kept the roving Qashqai raiding parties at bay. So sneaky were the Qashqai that they would strap bits of carpet on their horses’ hooves to quiet their advance in the dead of night. Each evening, as Hassan drifted off to sleep as a young boy, two guards on watch would cry out to each other, “Be ready there!” and “Hey you, pay attention!”

  Armed with British-issue rifles and riding on horseback, Qashqai tribesmen would burst into sleeping villages in search of booty: bronze plates, carpets, dishes, money, sheep, anything of value. When the raiding season began, Hassan hid the family’s bronze tray inside a hole in their mud wall. It was the only valuable possession they owned. “Thank God for Haj Ali Jamail,” he would tell us. Once a notorious bandit, Haj Ali later in life went to Mecca on pilgrimage and found redemption and God. Upon his return, Haj Ali offered his marksmanship to his defenseless village. Qashqai raiders knew of his keen eye and rifle, so they left Tudeshk in peace. And each night, the voices on the ramparts echoed in little Hassan’s ears: “You there, stay awake.” “Hey you, don’t fall asleep.”

  Under the Qajars, the British armed the tribes, and the Germans funneled in weapons too. The logic was simple: the stronger the tribes, the weaker the Shah. The great chieftains of the Qashqai and the Bakhtiari hosted diplomatic emissaries from Britain in their mountain grazing grounds under royal red tents, feasting on roasted mutton, watching feats of bravery and horsemanship. Agreements were signed. Treaties forged. The Shahs seated in Tehran could do nothing to prevent these independent tribal leaders or Khans from doing whatever they wished, even becoming pawns of British agents in the struggle for power. But that all changed when Reza Shah Pahlavi took the throne in 1925. From then on, a ruthless pattern emerged. The Shah invited tribal leaders to the capital and later did away with them, emasculating the great families of their anarchic chieftains. Then he unleashed his troops. Hassan remembered those days well. “One night, from my village, we saw two hundred soldiers. So we killed four goats for them. Praise God, they were chasing the Turki.”

  The banditry and mayhem of the Qashqai and Bakhtiari subsided and their weapons were confiscated. Forced settlements locked them in place on the land under the close watch of the army, and the lawless tribes were decimated in attacks by armored cars and planes.

  Only years later, well after Hassan came to work in Tehran at the age of seven, did Tudeshk’s mud towers and high walls come tumbling down. They were dismantled by hands that knew that the marauding days of the raiders were finally over. Slowly, all over Iran, villagers and townspeople poked their heads out of their homes and tasted the forbidden view of the horizon.

  * * *

  The sun beat overhead as I thought of Hassan’s old nemesis, the Qashqai, trekking in the hills beyond us. Not slowed down by police checkpoints, they moved faster here than any truck on the road.

  I heard a groan behind me. Kevin, in the back of the van with a splitting headache, had covered his eyes with a black scarf, and my mother dabbed his forehead with a moist cloth.

  “On journeys like this,” Rich explained to Akbar matter-of-factly, “odds are someone always has to fall.” My father nodded while I passed him some water. Moaning quietly, Kev was our sacrificial lamb for the long drive that lay ahead, across the desert in the direction of Hassan’s Tudeshk.

  A passing truck sprayed a cloud of diesel fumes that snuffed out our view, spilling its petro-stench through our windows. When the gray fog lifted, an overloaded bus packed with passengers roared past, tilting heavily on its right side. On the back window were bold English words in red: Don’t Forget God.

  “Glad we aren’t riding on that bus,” said Mom, covering Kevin’s face with her scarf.

  “Al-hamdulillah, praise God,” Akbar said.

  “Al-hamdulillah,” I instinctively echoed.

  “Why is it written in English?” Chris wondered.

  “That driver’s just trying to be chic,” answered Vaz.

  Although the message felt old-fashioned, the font was decidedly modern: a spiritual billboard for the new theocracy and a reminder of the Almighty.

  In the past few days, I had noticed that God—Allah in Arabic, Khoda in Farsi—was never far from people’s tongues. “By God,” Be Khoda; “Praise God,” Al-hamdulillah; “If God wills,” Insha’allah; “God protect you,” Khoda hafez—these phrases are sprinkled into conversations with the same frequency that Americans use “Have a nice day.” They are common forms of speech in ancient cultures with strong traditions. Throughout Asia, whether in Iran, India or Indonesia, God is continually evoked in daily life. And for travelers, these expressions serve as a gentle form of insurance. After all, only that morning, in Shiraz, the concierge of the Apadana had waved us off with the classic Persian saying Mosafer aziz Khodast, “The traveler is beloved by God.”

  Each of us was uniquely suited for this journey: fellow travelers. Chris flashed lightning strokes of fear at the oddest moments with his high-pitched confused questions. His confidence was frayed, pulled tight like piano wire. Kev chose to counter Chris’s shrill outbursts with a Zen-like silence, as if patient observation were the only antidote. Unruffled Rich was neither silent nor anxious. Overly concerned with detail, our younger brother meticulously tracked our slow, plodding, step-by-step advance. My mother’s mending ankle had been strengthened by the unusual reunion with her four sons. And Pat, ever the patriarch, kept firing one-liners just to keep us straight and Vaz off guard.

  At the roadside village of Sarmaq, stunning swatches of sprouting green wheat fields added a brief flash of life to the bleached landscape. Just as I spied a forlorn dirt road heading into the distance, Nasrollah wrenched his wheel to the right, and we spun off the comfortably paved north–south highway and rumbled into the desert. A dense cloud of dust billowed around us. We quickly lost sight of what lay behind. Our direction now pointed east, to the ancient Zoroastrian stronghold of Yazd, a city in the geographic heart of Iran.

  Omnipresence en route.

  The van bounced along the rutted waves of packed clay that rolled before us. We flew into air: I cracked my head on the roof, Chris ended up in Richard’s lap, Vaz lost his glasses, Kev slid onto the floor. The van filled with a chorus of instant howls. Startled, Nasrollah pulled his heavy foot off the gas pedal. He turned around and offered his profuse apologies to one and all. When he saw my father, he put special emotion in his “bebakhsheed.” Dad was dripping wet, liberally doused by my flying bottle of water, but he took it in stride, laughing at the chaos.

  “It’s OK, agha!” he said. “It really woke me up.”

  “And your wet shirt should cool you down, dear,” my mother said.

  She gently dabbed his neck and ears with a dry cloth. His eyes gleamed as if he had been anointed by an archbishop’s sprinkle of holy water. A boyish smile crossed his face. Flushed from the high altitude, his apple-rosy cheeks had already caught enough of the sun’s rays to turn a color that was naturally Irish—bright red. He turned to look at my mother with tenderness.

  Anarchy en route. Donna’s question stumps Vaz. Pat and Chris’s yelling prevails.

  “We must travel,” John Berryman once advised, “in the direction of our fear.” But I could see that my parents carried none. Together they stared ahead with wonder.

  * * *

  A hellish drive faced us: ten hours across a wasteland and over two mountain passes to reach the grim Dasht-e Lut, a desert that blankets the center of the country in chilling silence. There, our path east would end abruptly at Yazd. Beyond this city, the hostile terrain competed with Saudi Arabia’s Empty Quarter, China’s Gobi Desert and the Libyan Sahara as the most terrifying land on earth. This desert supported no life. And no illusions. It was, qui
te simply, impassable.

  On my map, I studied our route. It was a thin red line, faint and fragile—not that healthy thick blue line that we had just abandoned. It traversed mountains that appeared to rise out of no-man’s-land. Only one village, the map predicted, lay astride this road. Broken lines of dry riverbeds and creatively colored elevation zones filled large empty spaces. A rumpled backbone of an alpine ridge cut north to south across our path. The highest peak was Sher Kuh, Lion Mountain, elevation 13,036 feet.

  Our gait slowed to a teeth-rattling pace until the road began to flatten out and the blacktop unfolded like a welcome mat before us. Shark-tooth ranges tipped with ice loomed in the distance. A debate on the color white began.

  “Beautiful snow,” said Rich.

  “What do you mean?” asked Vaz.

  “What do I mean? It’s snow.” Rich pointed at the towering peaks to the west.

  “That’s not snow.”

  “Of course it is.”

  “It can’t be,” said Vaz. “It’s too dry here.”

  “So then what is it?”

  Vaz thought for a moment. “Salt.”

  “You can’t have a salt deposit on a mountaintop.”

  “Why not?”

  “Geologically, it’s impossible.”

  “You know, Richard, in Iran many things are possible.”

  Rich threw up his hands. “You’re crazy.”

  “I may not be that smart,” Vaz said, “but I’m not that stupid. You see, I work a little bit in between.”

  “Convenient,” muttered Kev under his scarf. “The world according to Vaz.”

  Over millennia, the snow has helped Iran to survive. Cursed with little rain—only a few inches annually—the countryside’s water source lies in the last place you’d look. Cloaked each winter with snowfall, the high mountain summits act like giant reservoirs. During the hottest months of summer, slow dripping snowmelt filters through the bedrock. Trickles of the precious liquid are coaxed by gravity through ingenious man-made underground canals called qanats into desert cities, towns and farms miles away. When the ice caps disappear, everyone fears the drought.

  Kevin wasn’t enjoying the view. He was still groaning, defeated by a bug that had gripped his throat all the way from New York. He lay sprawled across the back seat, our first casualty.

  “Ahriman’s got me,” he muttered, cursing the Zoroastrian god of evil. Mom’s scarf shielded his eyes from the sun’s glare. She took my bottle and nursed him with the little water we had left. Yes, our spirits were willing, but our bodies were still learning how to travel.

  With each passing hour, the desert unfolded with sand-swept monotony. Unexpectedly, I thrilled to see this landscape. Nasrollah’s erratic driving shook loose more recollections. Adrenaline staved off sleep amid the engine’s roar. Long-forgotten images flashed by. A lone hut with a sleek poplar. Warm smells of dry land. The raw beauty of desolation, so welcome in its bleakness, so firm in its severity. And so liberating, with no billboards, motels or shopping malls.

  The pre-revolutionary “Mad Max” driving frenzy that we remembered so well had been truly calmed. Apart from a few close calls, the roads had been quiet, orderly and well paved. The hulks of cars that I remember rusting at the bottom of chasms and riverbeds were no more. Draconian laws and checkpoints had tamed flamboyant driving habits.

  My mother recalled a brush with death that almost hurled her and her boys over a cliff after an afternoon of skiing, thirty-five years ago in the mountains above Tehran.

  “Remember coming back from the Noor Club by Ab Ali, when we almost ended up in the valley below?” she asked.

  How could we forget? I shivered at the memory of her driving along those switchback alpine roads above the yawning chasms that dropped thousands of feet.

  That afternoon, an out-of-control truck skidding on ice careened around a corner and toward us. My mother pulled over to the asphalt’s edge as the truck fishtailed. Pressing our noses to the window, Rich and I helplessly watched. Its bumper missed our left door by inches. After the danger had passed and the truck gained control again, we all jumped out and stared at each other as if a true miracle had spared us. My mother was shaking. Our right wheels clung to the farthest edge of the pavement, inches from a sheer drop. One gentle nudge and we would have been killed.

  * * *

  “After Abarqu, there is nothing,” Akbar reminded us, “between us and Yazd.” A quick cup of coffee was not an option. Nor was a glass of water. “The desert is an ocean on which we can walk,” wrote Napoleon. “It is the image of immensity.” If he had tried to march his army across these limitless wastes to India, it certainly would have been swallowed up more completely than in Moscow’s snows.

  Yet Marco Polo had passed this way seven hundred years ago. After tromping over this forbidding land, the wandering Venetian must have been exhilarated to reach utterly remote Yazd and find sprouting wind towers, fire temples and a cool bazaar with honey-dripping sweets. The remoteness had always been the city’s protective barrier. Lonely Yazd was one of the few Persian cities spared by the galloping Mongol hordes. Genghis Khan simply couldn’t find it.

  Richard’s curiosity about Yazd’s Zoroastrian heritage had sealed our route. In any case, no one else in the family had taken the time to study the map. With an Irish fatalism, they surrendered to the road ahead. Only I knew the precise details. One hundred thirty miles beyond Yazd lay Tudeshk, Hassan’s village.

  Italo Calvino described the curious effect of travel on memory: “Arriving at each new city, the traveler finds again a past of his that he did not know he had: the foreignness of what you no longer are or no longer possess lies in wait for you in foreign, unpossessed places.” What were we going to find in the end? A past we didn’t know we had?

  * * *

  Abarqu was a half-abandoned mud-brick town in pitiless solitude. We drove into it at midday. Camouflaged by sand, the empty streets showed no signs of life. But just south of town we came upon a cypress tree that stood like a wondrous minaret. Towering like an ancient redwood, its massive trunk was as thick as the tropical banyan, which the Balinese wrap with sacred cloth and worship as an abode of the spirits. Branching out with needle-clad arms, reaching vertically to the sky, it soared alone. Akbar told us that this immense tree had first shaded migrating Aryans from the northern steppes. With her bright saffron parasol, my mother also sought shelter under its welcoming branches.

  John Berger, the English writer, wrote of origins spawned by such trees. “Long before any numerals or mathematics, when human language was first naming the world, trees offered their measures—of distance, of height, of diameter, of space. They were taller than anything else alive, their roots went deeper than any creature; they grazed the sky and sounded the underworld. From them was born the idea of the pillar, the column.”

  A pitted, rusty turquoise sign hoped to explain the tree’s long pedigree in Farsi and English, but the sand-scoured lettering left me guessing. This sacred cypress of Abarqu was some sort of monument, but there was more.

  “Look at this design,” Akbar said, pointing to the paisley pattern on his scarf. “It’s a cypress, the symbol of my country. And why do you think it is bending?” he asked rhetorically. “From the weight of Arab invaders. It’s bending, but never broken.”

  “A silent witness,” my mother said from the shade. “Imagine how many invasions it has seen.”

  “Too many, Mrs. Ward.”

  So the famed paisley, synonymous with Indian prints, was actually a drooping Persian cypress from Iran. Perhaps the pattern had come to India with the invading Farsi-speaking Central Asian warriors who founded the Mughal Empire. Or even earlier, with the Parsees of Bombay, who had fled Muslim persecution and carried Zoroaster’s fire into exile with them. Whoever carried the cypress to the banks of the Ganges, the symbol was a protest. Woven and sewn into carpets and fabrics, the paisley served as a silent reminder of Persian suffering under Arab subjugation. Bent, but not broken.


  * * *

  Arabia Deserta, the historic name for Saudi Arabia, had always been a parched, marginalized land, a depressed cultural backwater in antiquity. Along the Red Sea coast stood a few ramshackle trading towns dotted with palms. In the scorched interior, Bedouin tribes fought, raided and squabbled over camels, possessions and women. At night, tales were spun over campfires in the poetic tradition of their fathers and the fathers before them.

  But in the year 610, the life of these Arabic-speaking desert nomads forever changed. In Mecca on a humid night, a pious forty-year-old spice merchant retreated to a cave outside the city to meditate. There, while in prayer, a ball of fire came to him. From this fiery vision he heard the word “Recite.” Mohammad was stunned. Then the voice spoke again: “Recite!” Mohammad’s encounter with the archangel Gabriel was his first divine revelation.

  Soon, jealous rumors threatened Mohammad, forcing him to flee Mecca with his small group of followers and take refuge in nearby Medina. This flight, known as Hegira, marked the first year of the Muslim calendar, 622. The literal meaning of the word for the new faith, Islam, is “submission,” to the one and only God, Allah. Believers were called Muslims. Mohammad was viewed as the last prophet of the long biblical line that included Abraham, Moses and Jesus. God’s very words, revealed and transmitted to his chosen messenger, later gave birth to the holy Koran.

  The Prophet died in 632 without appointing a successor. Soon after, Islam was ripped apart by a central question. Who was his rightful heir? Who should become caliph, defender of the faithful?

  Mohammad had only one child, his beloved daughter, Fatimeh. She had married Ali, the Prophet’s first follower, and gave Mohammad two grandchildren, Hassan and Hussein. For many Muslims, the Prophet’s lineage was clear.