The Cypress Tree

by Kamin Mohammadi

  But the shah feared discontent. The coming of age of those who had been politicised and educated through Reza Shah’s reforms had resulted in civil unrest and so, in order to stop a revolution from below, he decided to implement one from above, incorporating socialist language which was designed to please all those whose travels abroad had introduced them to the student politics of the West. He instigated the White Revolution in 1963 – a system of land reforms that were meant to set free those virtually enslaved on the land working for the few families that held the wealth of Iran. At the turn of the century just 150 families held all the power and influence in Iran, and 20,000 villages were owned by a mere 27 families; Mehdi Batmanghelij, one of the richest landlords in the country, boasted that his holdings were as large as Switzerland.

  Among the six points of the White Revolution one gave women the vote. The ulama were incensed by the whole package and Ayatollah Khomeini was now making waves denouncing land reform as un-Islamic and unconstitutional and objecting most vociferously to the idea of women being given the vote. Ayatollah Khomeini’s outspokenness, so rare in the society haunted by SAVAK, won him supporters and got him placed under house arrest for six months.

  In his rampant opposition to women getting the vote, Khomeini represented those patriarchal Iranians who did not wish their women to leave the home, who feared their wives would no longer have the time to cook and clean for them or present them with a delicious dinner and soothe their brows at the end of the day. Iranian men have always been fiercely jealous of their women, wanting to enjoy their delights privately, wanting their figures only uncovered for their eyes, their hair only to shine for them. Iranian men adore their women and want more than anything to keep them dependent and subjugated – out of an intensity of love, an exaggerated sense of protectiveness. They know how incredible their women are and this mix of love, devotion and fear makes them determined to keep their women under their control, only for themselves.

  My mother has always seemed to me to be the epitome of a grown-up woman, a lady. In love with fashion, she had an ever changing range of hairstyles and colours but she was always stylish, whatever the trend. She wore heels without exception, and so she walked slowly; in Iran we drove everywhere so it was only once we were in London using public transport to get around that I noticed how slowly she walked. She walked tall, head held high, her heels clicking and I, who always hurtled as a girl and strode as a young woman, imagined that I too, once I became a grown-up woman, would have to slow my walk down to this stately progress. My mother is not tall, I reached and overtook her height when I was fourteen, but she has presence. She still exudes glamour and self-possession, her figure slim and her hair unfailingly styled, an instant icon in her later years to the gay boys she worked with in London. I am unlike her in style, having always been altogether too sloppy and tomboyish to achieve true elegance, but nonetheless my mother remains the model of feminine self-possession that I aspire to grow into.

  Sedi’s transformation from the skinny teenager with the prominent nose to the self-possessed lady came when she started work. My mother loved her job and she took her role seriously. Had she been born to a less traditional father, she might have fulfilled her dreams of university and an illustrious career, but as it was she cherished the brief moment she had as a working woman in Abadan. After graduating from the Technical Institute, she started working at the Company as a secretary and her efficiency soon saw her promoted to work for one of the directors. She told me she had been so excited to start work, she had even had her eyebrows shaped before her first day. In those days, tradition dictated that a girl remain untouched until her wedding day, when she would then submit herself to the hours of threading and plucking that marked her entry into the world of women. Portraits of Qajar women at court showed that, even a hundred years ago, Iranians were obsessed with their eyebrows and that the shape of a woman’s eyebrows had long been subject to the vagaries of fashion. During that era, it was the height of beauty to train the brows to loop over the eyes and meet in the middle. But in 1964 Abadan it was Gina Lollobrigida and Sophia Loren’s eyebrows that were being copied. The beauty of the eyes could not be properly beheld without the eyebrows being cleverly shaped – this was always the case in Iran and, like other Middle Eastern women blessed with quantities of hair, Iranian women had long been preoccupied with finding the best way of getting rid of it.

  All Sedi’s older sisters had been married at much younger ages than she was now; Sedigheh was pushing twenty-two and, in her mother’s day, she would have been teased as being pickled. Fatemeh Bibi’s own marriage at the age of eighteen had been seen as radical, but now here was Sedi, setting off to have her face done, not for a husband but for a job.

  On the day in 1964 that Bagher Mohammadi walked into a colleague’s office to be greeted politely by a new secretary called Sedigheh Abbasian, he had been mulling over his plans to divorce Audrey. She had been living in Abadan with him for more than a decade then, but they had failed to have children and the couple had agreed to part. This was all my father would ever say on his marriage to Audrey and so this is all I have ever known of it, their fifteen years together reduced to those few bare words.

  My father once told me that after meeting Sedigheh that day, he found himself increasingly making excuses to visit this colleague. Sedi sat at her desk, her thick hair arranged on top of her head in a little beehive, black kohl on her eyes as was the fashion, and he told me that he noticed the generosity of her lips and the timbre of her voice. My mother had finally grown into her nose, the piled-up hair certainly helped, but it was her high, chiselled cheekbones that really framed her face and contextualised that nose so that now it seemed regal and proud.

  She grew more appealing with each visit, her brown eyes alive with intelligence and her form all elegant efficiency, and before long, Bagher took a chance with her that surprised even himself. One day he wandered in with a rose in his hand, a fragrant damask rose known in Iran as the Mohammadi flower, and he casually placed it on her desk as he passed by with a nod. At first Sedi sat and just looked at the flower. She didn’t know what to do with it – what could it mean? – and she acted on her first instinct: she grabbed it and threw it into the bin, pretending it had never been there. When Bagher came out, he left the office with no word to her and she didn’t know if he had noticed the flower was not on her desk.

  Bagher certainly had noticed and at first he was taken aback – in England he had gone out with English girls whose ways were altogether more direct and less complicated than Persian ones. But on brief reflection it was of course what he would expect from a well-raised Persian girl, so he grew unabashed, and a few days later, he repeated the gesture. Sedi threw the flower away again, but she smiled a little to herself this time, and it had become kind of a game between them, him dropping a Mohammadi flower on her desk several times a week, and her disposing of it without saying anything. One day, when he came out of her boss’ office, he saw instead on her desk a tiny vase and in it the small pink rose he had delivered that morning. He stopped to take it in, then he smiled at her. Nothing was said, but she looked right up at him and smiled back, and with that began their courtship.

  Recalling this to me after a turbulent lifetime together, my mother still grows a little dreamy. Bagher was handsome and mature, his black hair slicked back and a moustache framing his mouth. There was a whiff of a Kurdish accent as he spoke to her, the Raybans permanently fixed on his nose or carried in his hand marked his out as an inhabitant of Abadan – they were famed for compulsively wearing Ray-Bans. Bagher gave her the perfect courtship, one in keeping with her romantic ideas, and my mother was charmed. When eventually he suggested that she accompany him to a dance at the yacht club, Sedi was ready to say yes, despite the subterfuge it would involve.

  My khaleh Mina told me that on the days she saw Bagher, they would race up to the roof where they could be sure of a little privacy and she would confide in her older sister that she was falling in l
ove. She felt Bagher would be her protector, her rock to cling to in hard times, a man who had seen the world and who would always be able to look after her. Sedigheh had found her fairy-tale prince, the man she wanted to be with, and she was already firmly stuck into her own particular version of the fairy tale, the one in which she married for love and lived happily ever after. Quite where Sedi had got hold of these ideas is a mystery – she was used to seeing her sisters marry men picked by their parents and it was not so long since she had watched Mina be forced to marry Busheiry against her will – but these modern ideas of romantic love leading to marriage refused to be budged.

  Sedi set about making a new dress in the latest style for the dance and told her parents that she had to attend a work event that night and would be home early. Sometimes, when my mother I argue and she tries to make me feel guilty for being a disobedient daughter, trying to bend me to her will, I remind her that she herself hardly listened to or obeyed her parents. This shatters the myth she tries to present of herself as a paragon of filial virtue and obligation, and it makes her cross. But there is no denying the fact that my mother’s father hadn’t liked my mother’s trips out in the evenings at all, and that in careless moments she had told me of his opposition to her romance with Bagher. He did not like his daughters to leave the house unchaperoned, and though a decade had passed since he had forced Jahanzadeh to take the whole brood out on his dates with Parivash, he would have preferred to do the same with Sedi. It was Fatemeh Bibi who prevailed on her husband again, reminding him that the times had changed, that Sedi already went unaccompanied to work every day and that in this new world, it was impossible for Abbas to expect his daughter to live her life in the same way she had done at her age. When Abbas grumbled and his frown set in obstinate lines, Fatemeh Bibi also reminded him that Sedigheh was a good girl, a good old-fashioned girl who gave her father her wages every week – out of which he gave her a small personal allowance for clothes and other such fripperies that he didn’t understand – and that she could be trusted.

  The well-loved and -trusted Sedi managed to get what she wanted and for the next year, she dated Bagher as if she was an independent Western girl, going to dinner at the Hotel Abadan, dancing at the Yacht Club and strolling together in the cool evening breezes of the velvety Abadan nights. But wherever she went, she was always home at the appointed hour. Bagher told her of his life, of the golden mountains of Kurdistan and the cold rivers he had learnt to swim in, of his journey to the other side of the world and what he had seen and learnt in Britain. He also told her right from the start about Audrey and of his plans to divorce, and Sedi, oblivious to the potential controversy of her actions – after all, she herself knew that she was not acting in any improper way, just sharing meals and conversations with this man in his sharp suits – was swept along by his intelligence, experience, glamour and good looks.

  Both Bagher and Sedigheh, although their actions would have been seen as highly improper by Abbas, were in fact rooted enough in the traditional culture of Iran to know that their relationship needed official sanction, that they could not continue to date in secret, that if Sedi was found out she would lose her good reputation – the worst fate that could befall an unmarried woman in a country where a girl’s behaviour, especially when it came to her chastity, directly affected the honour of her whole family. Perhaps this was why the likes of Ayatollah Khomeini were so keen to keep Iran’s women under wraps and at home, where they could be safely monitored and not allowed to risk acting on their own desires, where they could be controlled to safeguard the honour of the family. Indeed, although Sedi was not compromising her chastity by going out with Bagher, they both knew that they could not go on like this for too long.

  Sedi fell deliriously in love with Bagher and the day soon came when Bagher declared his intentions and a delighted Sedi gave him permission to call on her father. She ran to Mina and the two of them danced excitedly around Mina’s pristine sitting room, Mina finally able to set free the rhythm in her hips in the privacy of her own home in celebration of her sister’s luck in love. Sedi was getting her heart’s desire. And Bagher was what her heart wanted, of this she was sure. Sedi had always been gifted a strong sixth sense and she knew this was the man of her life. This is how my mother always told me the story of her meeting and marrying my father, idealised and nostalgic, her own version of the fairy tale in which she continues still to believe.

  8

  Bending on the Branch

  After the revolution, when the name of Ayatollah Khomeini became suddenly so familiar to me, my parents told me how, in the year they were engaged, his name had first come to prominence. That year the shah had given in to American demands that all their personnel who were in Iran – who numbered in the thousands – should be immune from prosecution in Iranian courts for any crimes committed on Iranian soil. Very soon after, America gave Iran a $200 million loan with which it could buy arms – from the US.

  Ayatollah Khomeini had denounced the shah vociferously from Qom, saying that the monarch had sold Iran’s independence, recalling the bad old days of capitulations. Indeed, he pointed out that if an American ran over an Iranian, he would be safe from prosecution while an Iranian enjoyed no such privilege in his own country. Khomeini stoked the resentment of the people with fiery rhetoric; the shah had reduced the Iranian people to a level lower than that of an American dog, he said, and many people were inclined to agree with him all the way.

  This outspokenness led to Khomeini’s exile – the shah could countenance no such opposition. He was now ruling without any real pretence of submission to the will of the majlis, which he entirely controlled, and with SAVAK roaming the country eager to weed out any dissent, Khomeini’s forthright views and subsequent exile to Iraq transformed him from a little-known provincial priest to a national political leader. And he rose to the role, announcing with what seems now almost preternatural foresight: ‘My soldiers are at the moment either in cradles or playing in the streets.’ With that he declared his place as their potential political leader.

  The wedding took place in my father’s house in Braim in Abadan. The large bungalow where Bagher lived sat squat in the middle of a garden that continued round the back – the diametric opposite of the Iranian house where the house surrounded the garden, the inner courtyard, the family’s own bit of paradise protected from jealous eyes. Along the front of the house was a wide porch at one end of which sat a long, metal, swinging bench – a feature of my childhood, we liked nothing better than to sit on the taab and gently swing back and forth in the shade of the porch or, more to my taste, in the warm Khuzestani nights.

  The wedding was a small family affair. Both Shokrollah and Kowkab had died by the time my parents met but the rest of Bagher’s family had come to attend, his sister from Kurdistan and his brother Ebrahim, my amoo, with his family from Tehran. Amoo Ebrahim adored Bagher and felt somehow responsible for the boy who had lost the comforting presence of his mother so early on in his life. The redoubtable Sa’adat-khanoum had sized up my mother and found nothing wanting and, although she kept pictures of Audrey in her family photo albums long after Bagher had cut her out of his, my mother’s respectful behaviour, her deferment to Sa’adat-khanoum’s superior judgement in everything would win the older woman over, and Sa’adat-khanoum took to bringing Sedi traditional costumes every time she visited Kurdistan, encouraging Sedi to wear Kurdish dress at special celebrations, the highest compliment.

  By contrast to her careful relationship with Sa’adat khanoum, Sedi’s developing friendship with her daughters, Guity and Mehry, could not have been warmer had they been sisters.

  Sedi was in a wedding dress, one of her own choosing. She and Mina had poured over the farangi magazines and Burda to find a design and pattern they liked. It was 1966 and everything was being worn short. Sedi was a modern girl and she wanted a modern dress and, after much deliberation with Mina she had found a pattern in Burda that she thought would fulfil both her father’s rejoi
nder that she should not forget her modesty (‘Va!’ Mina exclaimed. ‘As if you would do that, Sedi-joon; we are the daughters of Hayat Davoudy after all!’) as well as her own thirst for fashion. Her dress was duly made by the dressmaker, a white lace hourglass number that followed her curves without clinging too much, the skirt ending just short of her knees, the long, tight sleeves unlined so the lace drew delicate patterns down her slim arms. Her black hair, bobbed to her chin with thick bangs, was piled up at the back behind a tiara of white flowers that held the net train cascading behind her, the neck scooped to show her beautiful clavicle but not so low as to reveal any cleavage.

  Bagher’s tailored suit was a distinguished dark grey. He wore a silk tie patterned with polka dots and a matching silk handkerchief peeked out precisely an inch from the top left-hand pocket. Bagher exuded confidence and happiness, his thin moustache trimmed, his black hair slicked back, his cuffs protruding from his jacket sleeves by just the right amount. He was civility and generosity itself, my mother told me, the very model of modernity in his new-style house with his dog and his beloved cook, Karim. Any worries Fatemeh Bibi and Abbas had had about this alien breed of New Iranian dissolved in the old-fashioned Iranian courtesy he extended to them all, and the presence of his brother and sister who had come with their spouses and broods, the women wearing their striking Kurdish outfits topped off by hats made of solid gold coins, looking to the Abadani Abbasians in their kitten heels and zoot suits like unimaginably exotic creatures with their coins, sparkles and nets, strapping height and proud bearing. They were perfectly mannered, reserved in the most courteous way like Bagher himself and kind and witty and sweet, their devotion to Bagher was as evident as the sequins sewn by hand on to their long shimmering dresses. Bagher had now officially arrived into the Abbasian family and his arrival would transform the fortunes of the Abbasian children.