Perched as they had been on the very cusp of the country’s heaving shift into modernity, many girls of Mina’s generation had suffered the same fate as her – traditional fathers saw education as useful for girls only in so far as it would teach them to read and write and follow the teachings of the Qur’an. What else did they need to be educated for, these fathers asked when challenged (which they rarely were by obedient daughters bred to hold these men in the highest esteem, little kings of their little castles, never to be questioned or crossed, only to be obeyed) – an over-educated girl was a recipe for lifelong unhappiness and shame for the whole family. No man would wish to marry a woman who knew more than him, had been educated to a higher standard than him, and if a girl went all the way through high school and got her diploma, then chances were she would remain on her father’s hands for the rest of her life, giving him another mouth to feed when in fact she should be the one providing for him in his old age. No, it was not natural and gave these girls notions that were ajib-gharib – strange ideas of working and earning money and something called independence. Some women had even been known to go to university and there they were, striding all over Abadan like a bunch of men, uncovered and shameless, looking everyone in the eye, working at the Company in positions that were equal to men’s – some even higher – and living in little boxes called apartments on their own.
The conservative fathers of Abadan had shuddered. It was horrific and against the natural order of things. No, a woman should know enough so she could stop her husband from becoming bored with her, and if it gave her the wherewithal to balance the household accounts, all the better. Frankly, these fathers already considered themselves entirely modern for even being prepared to let their daughters learn to read and write and this indeed was a leap in itself. Reza Shah’s laws had demanded everyone be educated to a certain standard, and his son, the current shah, continued legislation in this field; the Literacy Corps he had created as part of the White Revolution to go into the countryside and teach the workers on the land how to read and write had indeed given many ordinary Iranians access to schools and, although attitudes were hard to shift, particularly among the country people and peasant classes, within the new middle class literacy and education were now the norm.
With Khomeini – his most outspoken critic – now safely exiled in Najaf, the shah felt confident in his own rule and buoyed up by America and other Western powers who truly believed that the shah was busy creating an island of stability in the troubled region, a front of Western-friendly ideology to hold off the Red Menace. The shah bestowed on himself the title of Aryamehr on the occasion of his silver jubilee in 1965 and decided to publicise his greatness and legitimacy further by holding a coronation ceremony in which he also had Farah, his third and final wife, and mother of his children, crowned alongside him. Although the coronation was supposed to celebrate the unbroken tradition of Iran’s kings, designed to recall with each gesture the Achaemenid kings’ ancient Persia, the Pahlavi crown with which the shah crowned himself supposedly a replica of the traditional Sassanian crown, in fact, the coronation ceremony was a mixture of invented Persian tradition and British practices. A Foreign Office minister had been dispatched to the UK charged with discovering how a coronation ceremony was to be carried out and as for the rest, historians noted that there seemed to be a lot of Napoleonic traditions there, including the crowning of Farah as empress by his side. Farah’s coronation was touted as a sign of the progressiveness of the shah’s regime – Farah was a symbol of the emancipation of women that the shah imagined he had completed by giving them the vote in 1963.
Such pomp and ceremony had not been seen since Reza Shah’s coronation, and with mass media now in existence, the riches of the Pahlavi dynasty could be broadcast not only into every village in the country but to the whole world. My grandmother and Sa’adat-khanoum tuned in on their television sets – my grandmother’s had been a gift from my father – to see the shah draped in ermine and bedecked in priceless jewels, he and his Empress Farah the very model of modern monarchy, their glamour dazzling the elders of my family. The world too was impressed – here was a progressive king who combined over two thousand years of continual monarchy with a particularly modern sort of allure, ruling over a nation full of quaint costumes and diverse ethnicities that were nonetheless united in progressing into the modern world in a way that looked very familiar to Western eyes.
Iranians were dazzled by the shah and his family’s magnetism, although the many poor and illiterate, who were feeling increasingly disenfranchised and marginalised by the new world that the shah was creating in his own image in Iran, grumbled at the inequality even while they admired the monarch and lapped up magazine photos presenting a glittering image of the imperial family. The shah’s personality cult was now truly underway, and more statues of his royal person were erected around the country. Now that his coronation had been beamed into homes across the nation via the wonder of television, the image of the shah was set to become as familiar to his subjects as the reflection of their own faces in the mirror. What all the pageantry and opulence served to obscure – even from the shah himself – was that the modern society the shah had created in his own image, the new middle class and in particular the sector of New Iranians who were now living lives that were glossed with a Western patina, were in fact not integrating with an increasingly alienated and marginalised majority.
Unseen by families like mine, cushioned from the grim realities of political autocracy and economic deprivation, the vast majority of traditional Iranians – those peasants and workers who were now uprooted from their traditional livelihoods on the land – were looking with increasing resentment at not only the shah and the unspeakably rich elite that surrounded him, but also at the comfortable lives of corporate New Iranians such as my father. Khomeini’s speeches – taped in Najaf and smuggled into the country to be disseminated through the mosques, the only places safe from SAVAK’s sharply attuned ears – fanned the flames of discontent, but it would be yet another decade before this trickle of discontent would become a tsunami of disgust and dissatisfaction powerful enough to sweep away not only the shah himself but even families like mine who, for all their innocence, came to symbolise everything that the populace found uncomfortable about the shah’s vision of progress.
June is a sweltering month in Abadan with infernally hot, humid days giving way to sticky, oppressive nights. It was at this most stifling time of year that my sister decided to enter the world. A few days after midsummer in 1968, the heavily pregnant Sedi was admitted to the Company’s hospital in Abadan and, while Bagher paced the corridors nervously and Mina held her hand, Sedi pushed out her first-born in a matter of hours. The little girl was tiny and perfect and named Narmin – my soft one – because her arrival softened her parents’ hearts. Bagher was overjoyed, Sedi was proud and the whole of Abadan sent flowers. There were so many bouquets and gifts that the hospital not only ran out of vases but also space. Sedi’s room soon overflowed and before long the corridors were lined by bunches of magnolia, tuberose, gladioli and roses. The multitudes of Abbasians and Kurds that filled Sedi’s room from dawn till dusk jostled for space with a kaleidoscope of blooms, bursts of colours and wafts of fragrance that made Sedi’s head spin as she nursed her tiny new baby.
Narmin was beloved immediately, not only by her parents but also by the vast web of family of which she was now the newest member. Fatemeh Bibi cradled the little girl – who was destined to take after her grandmother in her petiteness – and soothed her with her vast experience of babies. Shapour, Parivash and Mahvash all had large families of their own eventually collecting between them fourteen children, but Bagher and Sedi, being thoroughly modern Iranians, had already decided that they would limit their family to two children, filled as they were with the latest notions of parenting, as espoused by Dr Spock whose words they had read avidly.
A mere fifteen months later, at the end of the West’s summer of love in September 196
9, Sedi, with her hair hanging long and straight from a centre parting, was admitted again to the Company hospital to give birth to me, my parents’ second and final child. Labour and delivery took a mere four hours – Sedi had inherited Abbas’ lack of patience and we, her children, must have sensed our mother’s short temper as we raced out of the womb, already unwilling to test her tolerance.
They tell me that I was born with a full head of thick, black hair, long eyelashes and red lips and Khaleh Mina spread the news by ringing the whole family and telling them: ‘Sedigheh-khanoum has given birth to a perfect baby girl, and she had her hair and make-up done before she came out.’ Having pored over baby name books to find something that sounded beautiful when said with Narmin – Persian is a poetic language and we Iranians love to make our children’s names rhyme – they had come up with Kamin, an unusual name which I am now convinced is unique having, in my travels around the Iranian diaspora, met with a blank even from Persian scholars whose job it is to know the meaning of everything. I understand it as something lyrical that expresses deep longing, and it was whispered in my ear by a mullah soon after my birth, along with my Islamic name, thus distinguishing me as a Shia Muslim rather than as a Sunni like my Kurdish father.
My birth completed the little Mohammadi family and again flowers filled the hospital rooms and the two clans that formed my large and boisterous extended family flocked to Abadan to celebrate. My first few days of life were marked by the scent of tuberose and the sound of laughter. I was held and handed from embrace to embrace, filled with the warmth and love of my many aunts, uncle and cousins, as well as my grandparents’ kisses, their whispered prayers caught in my curly black hair, their fond wishes for me absorbed somewhere so deep that when, many years later, I spent a lifetime being teased for the thickness of my hair, having my name mispronounced and ridiculed for its rhyming poetry with my sister’s name, I never quite lost the feeling that I was not so much an outsider – as I was wont to feel – as a link on a very long chain.
Before I was quite one year old, my father was given a new position in Tehran. For some years, he had been overseeing the building of a house on a plot of land he had bought in Tehran’s northern reaches. Not content with occupying the large house the Company had given him in Braim, Bagher was keen to own his own house; having come from a family so tied to the land, the belief was deep in him that true security came with property. Bagher had helped design the house and the villa that he built was modern – this was the age of modernity and progress after all, and our villa was typical of the sort of houses that were going up all around Tehran. A bungalow with sweepingly spacious rooms for entertaining, the villa was set behind walls which hid our lives from curious eyes, harbouring a large garden, our own private paradise where the rose garden was separated from the vegetable patch and the fruit trees bent their fecund boughs around the edge of the double swimming pool that Bagher made sure to include – a smaller, shallower one joined the big pool so that my sister and I – and indeed the other children of the family – would be able to paddle and swim until we were confident enough to graduate to the big pool.
The villa was in an area called Darrus, then on the edge of town, with a clear view north to the sharp peaks of the Alborz mountains, the massif that kept the rain of northern Iran up in the verdant north of the country and the land to the south as desert. The mountains provided a daily show of light and colour which formed the backdrop to my childhood. When we moved in there was nothing in front of the villa, the other side of the street was still a wilderness, biya-boon, a mixture of dust and stones that stretched on for miles, most of which ended up embedded in my knees as I learnt to walk and run and defy my mother to play outside the walls of our villa.
I must have felt the change of air as we arrived in Tehran from hot and humid Khuzestan and our air-conditioned house in Braim. Here the winters were cold, and snow – which my sister and I had never seen before – fell in soft flakes throughout the freezing months. Spring was a riot of new life, blossoms and flowers and the rush of melting snow becoming pure spring water, filling channels that ran down the edges of the roads, wide deep joobs which were bridged by little metal walkways from the roads to the pavements. The summers were hot but dry, nothing like the moist heat of Khuzestan, and autumn was painted in fiery hues, the air bearing a scent of the icy breezes to come, the first snows appearing on the peaks of the Alborz in October, just as the maple leaves turned the city into a blur of reds and yellows. The distinctness of Tehran’s four seasons never failed to thrill and amaze us Khuzestanis formed from the desert breezes. Tehran would be our new home, and in the seven years I lived there, she etched the outline of her majestic mountains indelibly in my heart. Tehran would always feel like home, even after thirty years away.
Settling into life in Tehran came with the same ease as everything seemed to then, in those days when political dissatisfactions with the shah’s tyrannical regime were papered over by the economic boom that the high oil prices were bringing even ordinary Iranians. The cost of living had not significantly risen and salaries had increased dramatically and while my own little nuclear family was basking in privilege and material comfort, even my relations in Abadan, who lived much more modestly, were finding their lives sweetened with the ready money jangling in their pockets.
My uncle Ebrahim and his family had lived in Tehran for some years, after his work took him out of Kurdistan and they left their beautiful old-fashioned house in Sanandaj. Now settled in a suburb to the east of the city centre called Tehran Pars, they lived in a two-storey house with large, open rooms, a walled-in yard at the back and large terrace running round the rooms on the top floor. Their children were all grown now – Firooz was working for the Company in Abadan and Guity spent large parts of the year living with him, looking after him, cooking and nurturing him as was her wont. Mehry had shone at high school and was at university in Tehran, beautiful and smart and filled with ideas about something called feminism, which her brothers laughed at. Behrooz too was setting out on a career at the Company and Parviz, the youngest and tallest of them all (although Firooz was so good-looking, with his sharp profile and seductive features that even Parviz in his prime could not really steal the most handsome accolade from him) was in the upper classes of high school.
In the absence of my real grandparents, my sweet amoo and his wife Sa’adat-khanoum, who had always considered Bagher as her eldest son, were for me and my sister the elders of my Kurdish family, always there with love and indulgence in the way that grandparents were supposed to be.
There were two family events that pulled us back to Abadan soon after we arrived in Tehran. The first was Daiey Pardis’ wedding, for which my mother undertook to supply from Tehran the finest quality of termeh – a traditional paisley cloth woven in Yazd, embroidered with gold thread and all sorts of lavish embellishments – for the wedding sofra. Pardis was marrying Shirin, a tiny, doe-eyed girl with a mass of thick, black hair who had an aversion to wearing any sort of make-up. When Maman-joon and Khaleh Mina had called on Shirin’s family just a few streets away to enquire for her hand, Shirin’s mother had apologetically told them that her daughter had always insisted on making her own choice about her husband. Thus Daiey Pardis and Shirin were allowed to date before she gave her consent, a radically modern state of events in Iran in 1970. Daiey Pardis told me that he had dressed up wildly for their dates, buying suits with wide lapels and flared trousers, the first in Abadan to sport the new look the Beatles had adopted. Skinny, with bushy hair springing around his collar and long sideburns, my uncle had been teased mercilessly by his brothers. Now, teasing his wife, he insists still that it was his stylish good looks that she fell for, and she, rolling her eyes but unable to stop herself from giggling, swats him away.
When Shirin was engaged to my uncle, she worked in a bank, and, on hearing of her engagement to Pardis Abbasian, her colleagues warned her with some alarm about those young terrors, Pardis’ younger brothers – did she know what
she was getting herself into marrying into the Abbasian family? Shirin had laughed then as she is still laughing now and, wearing a long white dress and flowers in her hair (and thick black kohl around her eyes at the insistence of my mother and Khaleh Mina), Shirin married Pardis and joined the Abbasian family. Her resilience and wicked sense of humour would help my family to keep laughing even in the days when there seemed to be nothing much to laugh about.
The Cypress Tree Page 9
