Since the fifties the shah had insisted that political freedom had to follow economic democracy but though Iran had enjoyed a decade of economic growth, by 1974 he was stating, ‘I think that the people of Iran respect their shah in the same way that children of Iranian families respect their fathers.’ With no more pretence at democracy, the shah showed his true paternalistic colours. Within Iran the very people that the shah wanted support from – the middle class of young educated Iranians such as my Abbasian uncles and Kurdish cousins – were joining two new political movements: mojahedeen-e khalgh and fedayin-e khalgh in droves. The educated young people were not interested in being children in an infantile relationship with the head of their country, they wanted to be citizens, equals with a stake in their own land. All those who had been convinced that the shah was, by necessity, a ‘transitional authoritarian’ until the country had stabilised economically, could see clearly now that he was, in fact, simply authoritarian.
The decade turned and, in spite of the dissatisfaction with the shah and his regime, my family, like so many other middle-class Iranians, was cushioned from the lack of political freedom by the ease of a life that was sweet and financed by the ready petrodollars pouring in. The shah had led the way in the quadrupling of oil prices that had taken place at the end of 1973 so oil prices were higher than ever before and he was feeling very important, having held the West to ransom.
My own nuclear family was without doubt privileged – we now all travelled every year to London, Europe and America with my father, and my sister and I were being brought up in a cosmopolitan manner. Bagher and Sedi had planned their family carefully and my mother and her other New Iranian friends had determined that their children should be brought up in the child-centric manner that was espoused by Western childcare experts, rather than in the traditional Iranian way that they had been – left to fend for themselves in multitudinous families. Narmin and I not only attended a French Catholic school run by nuns in Tehran (the best schools were those run by Westerners – there was an American school and a German school too), but alongside French lessons and suchlike offered at school, we had a busy weekly round of extracurricular activities such as piano lessons and ballet classes – the latter proving particularly irresistible fodder for my younger daieys’ jokes. The Abbasian men – my mother’s brothers – were all, in their different ways, great comedians and they never tired of making fun of our precocious life-style, and our ballet lessons were endlessly mocked by Daiey Reza – one of the twins and the Abbasian family’s most gifted comic – to the delight of the whole family.
Compared to their upbringing, my sister and I were spoilt, but within this child-centred world that my parents created for us, we were still instilled with traditional values – modesty, restraint, service, chastity, respect for our elders and gracious acceptance of our place at the bottom of the family’s hierarchical ladder which was headed by our father, the patriarch, residing over our world with my mother, his queen, majestically at his side.
I remember learning to read, write and do maths all year only to promptly forget how to do all the maths sums in the idyllically long summer holidays that seemed to go on forever. I never forgot the reading and writing because, like my father before me, I had fallen deeply in love with words and could not be parted from my books even at the sofra, not even by my mother’s threats. Our classrooms all had large pictures of the shah mounted on the wall above the blackboard, usually a picture of him looking resplendent in his military garb in front of a blue sky with wispy clouds haloing his proud head. The shah wanted to be the father of his people and, in making his image so omnipresent, we grew up almost as familiar with his face as with our own father’s.
One day Mehry came to collect me from school and, instead of taking me straight home, she drove me to downtown Tehran, where I followed her into the Café Naderi. This was Tehran’s oldest European style café where people sat, drinking coffee and talking with passion, their conversations wreathed in whirling cigarette smoke. Mehry, fresh from her day’s studies at Tehran University where she was now studying for her MSc, ordered herself a French coffee and me a café glacé – a tall white coffee heaped with vanilla ice cream. I sat opposite my pretty, intellectual cousin, her hair cut in bangs as her mother’s had been, and felt unutterably smart and sophisticated, drinking my sweet coffee and talking like a grown-up. From then on, Mehry and I went weekly to Café Naderi where she talked to me as if I was an adult about the day’s intellectual adventures, of her professors and their foibles, the places in the world she wished to see and of something called feminism. I learnt to love the taste of coffee – sweetened as it was for my juvenile taste buds – and longed to be as free and clever as her when I grew up. She was the only grown-up woman I knew who was independent and unmarried – although she must have only been in her late twenties then – and she was an inspiration to me.
In 1976 the shah celebrated fifty years of the Pahlavi dynasty and my father his fiftieth birthday. The shah imposed a new calendar on the country, while my father announced that we would be moving back to Khuzestan. The Imperial calendar was supposed to date from the reign of Cyrus the Great and suddenly we went from living in the year 1355/1976 to floundering in the twenty-sixth century in the year 2535 – regardless of the fact that, a mere five years before, the shah had celebrated the 2,500th anniversary of Cyrus’ reign. While Iranians attempted to get used to this new state of affairs my little family started to prepare for our move back south.
The next year, in time for the new school year, we were ensconced in our new life in Ahvaz, the capital of Khuzestan, another hot and humid city built on a river, this time the River Karun. We lived in a neat and artificially green Company compound as we had in Abadan, in another Type A house that was almost identical to the house in Braim. We had a large garden with a green lawn, the flowers of Khuzestan adding bursts of colour and heady perfume, blowsy opium poppies growing at will on the lawn and the tallest date palm tree I had ever seen soaring into the hazy blue sky, its trunk so straight and fine that I was always afraid that one of the cruel winds of winter would snap it in half. Fuchsia and scarlet bougainvillea tumbled down the walls which separated the back yard from the front of the house. We had a vegetable patch in the back for growing our own greens and a chicken run filled with fluffy yellow chicks. The back door opened from the kitchen into a walled-off yard which housed the staff quarters and a traditional outside loo – a hole in the ground set around with tiles and scrubbed clean everyday – which I often used when I was too busy playing to go in to use the farangi loo.
I soon started to lead the neighbourhood children on explorations of the street’s rooftops, scaling the bougainvillea-clad wall to land on the flat roofs that linked the houses. At school I amazed the Khuzestani kids with tales of snow and, when not playing in the yard, I pulled apart the fluffy blooms of cotton flowers that grew wild in the playground. I was still an irrepressible tomboy, my knees permanently scraped, and Sedi’s attempts to free my hair of its knots exasperated her so thoroughly that one day she swept me along to her hairdresser and had my hair cut as short as convention would allow.
My hair turned out to be the least of my mother’s worries with me. As a small child I would put anything that intrigued me, from cigarette butts to my mother’s favourite metallic green Biba stick eyeshadow, into my mouth, and on more than one occasion I had to have my stomach pumped clear. Later when I could walk and talk, I needled my mother with endless questions. Sedigheh, not the most patient of women at the best of times, usually fobbed me off with an impatient exclamation. Luckily for me there were so many other people in our lives that there was always an aunt or uncle around who had time to answer me.
One hot and humid day, as we drove along a country track, I saw an Arab peasant standing on the side of the road, next to him a straggle of little dusty lambs. My heart demanded one of the curly creatures and I begged my mother who decided to indulge me for once. We pulled up in our car and drove a
way with a tiny white lamb, leaving the bemused Ahwazi man behind on the side of the road, where he resumed his journey to market to sell the remainder. My pet lamb came with many conditions: he was to live outside, sleep at night in the outside loo, and be kept clean. I was to ask permission to touch and caress him. I named him Baboo and would sneak out to see him late at night when everyone else slept, running the risk of being caught by my mother as well as facing the scary cockroaches that swarmed around him. He would get up and approach me, his tail wagging frantically and I would give in to his insistent nuzzling and stay to pet him late into the night.
Khaleh Mina’s jasmine-scented yard in Khorramshahr was my second home. The first time I went home with Khaleh Mina alone, she came to pick me up from school in her beige VW Beetle and the two of us sang at the top of our voices the radio blasting out the latest hit from Googoosh. Googoosh, with her ever-changing hairstyles, melodious pop songs and pretty round face was the icon of my mother’s generation; her songs were always on, her petite figure dancing around on television. She was Iran’s first true pop star and she still symbolises the golden age for those who flock to see her concerts in America. Khaleh Mina was then still young and voluptuous, in her mid-thirties, her hair piled high and her eyes smudged with black. Her house had a courtyard and a flat roof where, in years to come, we would sit at night, my mother, Khaleh Yassi, my sister and myself, under a sky inlaid with stars. My sister and I would refuse to go to bed, drifting into a delicious semi-consciousness while the women chatted, gossiped and laughed and laughed. I had my first drag of the hubbly-bubbly pipe up there on that roof, at the age of five.
At my grandmother’s house the family would gather in the two weeks of holidays after Nowruz. During those holidays, Maman-joon engaged in all-night card games with her sons and sons-in-law, stopping at nothing to win a game, cheating as often as she thought she could get away with. In her later years, when she was living with Yassi and her family and had nothing left to gamble with, Fatemeh Bibi would keep Yassi’s children up half the night playing cards and would bet the washing up.
That summer we took our European trip as usual and before returning to Iran, we visited London. I liked London. On the two summers preceding the revolution, we stayed there for a few weeks in our summer holidays. It was a place of pale sunshine, big green parks and fancy restaurants. I fed the pigeons in Trafalgar Square and petted the goats in the children’s section of London Zoo. I twice got lost on its busy streets, wandering along Oxford Street in a daydream and failing to keep my mother in sight until, in a panic, I realised she was nowhere to be seen. Eventually I was found and she was angry, even slapped me once, then burst into hot, remorseful tears, clutching me to her in relief.
The tension that was already present in my mother that summer in London in 1978 only got worse over the coming months, as the demonstrations that had started in January and were now turning into street wars gained momentum. I was eight years old and oblivious to my country’s turbulent political problems. We were in London where my father had business; Mehry was also in town studying, and she accompanied us everywhere. More of my parents’ friends than ever were also in London – unbeknown to me part of the great exodus of the revolution that had already started – and we were busy. One day, Mehry arrived at the brown flat in Notting Hill where we were staying and asked my mother to tune in to an Iranian radio station. The programme reported on the demonstrations that had taken over Iran’s towns and now spread to the cities. The radio announcer gave details of a demonstration that would be taking place that afternoon in London, on Kensington High Street in front of the Bank Melli Iran – the National Bank of Iran. ‘Come on, Sedi,’ Mehry said, her eyes alive with excitement. ‘Let’s go and see what it’s like.’ We had duly taken a bus down Kensington Church Street, my mother decked out in designer gear, Mehry as always simply dressed in plain, good clothes, and my sister and I accompanying them.
The demonstration had been large but quiet – there were a few police around, the ones called bobbies with their tall black hats, but they had nothing to do. A whole mêlée of Iranians were gathered and I remember distinctly the black-clad women in their plain black coats and black headscarves, their faces shiny and plain, and the skinny students in their beige flares, all chanting for freedom and equality.
By the time we got back home to Iran just before my ninth birthday and the start of the new school year at the end of September, martial law had been imposed and the great massacre of Jaleh Square– a turning point in the struggle – had already taken place. Troops had shot into the massive crowd and the fatalities numbered hundreds – thousands according to the revolutionaries. Disgust with the regime infected everyone – not just those young people who formed the different factions that were coalescing under Ayatollah Khomeini’s leadership. The father of the nation was being rejected by his children in a way that had never been seen before in Iran, the Pahlavi imperial sun in threat of being eclipsed by the crescent moon of Islam.
Soon after we had returned to Iran in September 1978, Mehry, having finished her studies in London, also decided to return. She had a wanderlust that inspired her to buy a car and drive it back across Europe and through Turkey to Iran, a leisurely trip that she calculated would take her a few weeks. Guity had joined her for her last few weeks in London but her parents, not enamoured of the idea of their two single daughters driving themselves across continents, forbade them from doing any such thing. Mehry, with her customary charm, would not be moved and so Behrooz, her younger brother, was duly dispatched to London to fetch his errant sisters. Behrooz was a young father and he had no real desire to leave his little family, his six-year-old son and the wife he had met when a car accident had put him in hospital with an ear hanging off his head. Behrooz lost the ear but he found a wife in Firoozeh, the pretty nurse who was solicitous and kind and who laughed at his jokes. She was not Kurdish and though Sa’adat-khanoum would have preferred not to welcome another Persian bride into her family, Firoozeh proved herself to be such a sweet girl, such an obedient and respectful daughter-in-law and such a devoted wife to her son that, after living for several years under the same roof, my zan-amoo learnt to love Firoozeh as if she had been a Kurd after all.
Behrooz, mindful of his parents’ concerns, went to London where, not only did he not succeed in changing Mehry’s mind, but was instead persuaded to join his sisters on the drive back. Their arrival in Iran a few weeks later, full of tales of the beauty of the Alps and the shimmering Italian lakes, was such a relief that my amoo and zan-amoo forgave them their defiance for the sake of being able to clasp them safely to their breasts.
Martial law was already in force in Tehran and my gentle amoo and his formidable wife were happier having their brood close to them, although their blood ran cold every time Mehry, independent and headstrong in her smiling way, went out to the protests. Her friends and colleagues at the University of Tehran had kept her abreast of events while she was in London and, like so many educated women, Mehry was buzzing with excitement, her vision for a new and free Iran seemingly becoming a possibility, and she and so many of her female contemporaries joined the protests that women’s rights were presumed to be part of the revolutionary story. She longed to travel and see the world, but she planned to first remake her country before resuming her globetrotting. After all, the world was not going anywhere and there would be plenty of time for roaming after Iran was refashioned.
11
Revolution
Just as the fault lines that ran through the country and converged underneath the wide boulevards of Tehran were apt to shift suddenly, in an instant obliterating villages and settlements, lives and people, mountains and buildings, wiping them out with one heaving sigh from deep within, so the soul of Iran bore the tyranny and bore it until it could bear it no more, and with a pressure built up over years of repression, burst forth in an anger that could no longer be assuaged. Set off by a newspaper article denouncing Khomeini, the terrible wild-eyed fury
of the people, so long shoved down and stored up until it had choked them, suddenly found in the simple words of this implacable priest – ‘The shah must go’ – a release that was so gratifying that once they too opened their mouths to yell what had once been unthinkable they found they could not stop.
The chants became bolder – Marg bar shah – Death to the shah – and in the terrible, delicious anger of the protests, the adrenaline accompanying the street battles, the deaths and injuries that followed – the people of Iran found their thirst for venting their fury could not be slaked. With each protest, the troops sent in to control the crowds ended up shooting into the group, violence would follow and there would be fatalities. The dead would be buried and more demonstrations would follow to mark the ritual forty-day period of mourning. Each protest led to more fatalities and more protests, a chain of events that had stitched its way through the fabric of the last few months.
Banks, cinemas, off-licences and other symbols of Western cultural imperialism would be attacked and the soldiers would once again open fire on their own people and more deaths, more funerals, more mourning, more protests and more deaths would follow. This macabre ritual – a sort of gruesome relay game – fed the flames of the people’s wrath and spread through the main cities of the country like forest fires, devouring all reason and argument that stood before it, the people already addicted to the heady sense of liberation that came with finally throwing off the yoke of repression. After so many years of being fearful of what they said, where they said it and to whom, the spectre of SAVAK keeping them silent, the protestors were hooked on finally standing in the streets and complaining not just out loud, but at the tops of their voices, in plain terms and slogans that were easy to understand. Their energy united the disparate groups that were now joining together to make each protest bigger, stronger, more difficult to control.
The Cypress Tree Page 11
