Then one day we came home from school to find all the furniture in the front sitting room pushed to one side away from the windows. We started living in the back of the house, moving the television into the back sitting room. What I didn’t realise was that a firebomb had been lobbed at our neighbour’s house that day and that was why we had retreated. The New Iranian lifestyle, so confident and open and on display, was being defeated, and we withdrew to the part of the house that was protected, that could not be seen by the eyes of the hasood. Iran may have seemed to progress but this was proof that it was still the same old Iran where you needed high walls to protect yourself, your family and your life from the invader who could strike at any moment. We had nothing to be ashamed of, but fear taught us to hide and from then on, I gazed out across the scrub dirt of the desert across the wide British-built road from our house, unknowingly towards Iraq, and shuddered with a pervasive feeling of insecurity, of invasion. Fear became part of the daily fabric of life and my constant companion.
What I also didn’t know was that there were ugly rumours carrying my father’s name on this wind, rumours that he had been named by the mullah from the pulpit and that his name was now nailed to the door of the mosque. In this new world that was so precipitously coming into being, there was a pattern to the assassinations that were adding newly empty houses to the compound – first the victim’s name was announced by the mullah in the mosque, then it was pinned to the mosque door, and finally the name would be etched on a gravestone in the cemetery.
Bagher took no notice of what he heard, ignored his driver’s grumbling about having to come to work when soon he would be able to collect his wages without having to leave his home. It was only when a colleague, newly returned from Europe, phoned him to say that he had been in Paris and that they needed to speak that he took notice. The next day, sitting in his office in Tehran, Bagher had received this colleague who told him that while in Paris, he had gone to pay his respects at Khomeini’s rival court. ‘Bagher-jan,’ he warned, ‘your name was being bandied about. Is your passport in order? Do you have an exit visa?’ When my father had replied no, this man had ordered his driver to take Bagher’s passport and get it stamped. As soon as Bagher had his passport back, he returned to Ahvaz where we watched as, on 16 January 1979, the shah and his family left Iran.
The shah packed up his family and departed, just as he had done in 1953. But it was a very different Iran that he was leaving, one of his making, the place where he had managed so successfully to identify his own person with the institution of the monarchy itself that, once he stepped on to that plane in January 1979, supposedly bound for a holiday, his departure not only spelled the end to the brief Pahlavi dynasty but also over two millennia of monarchical rule. The shah, throughout his reign so paranoid about the threat of ‘the red and the black’ – socialists/communists and the ulama – had, as people are apt to do, made his own nightmares come true as a result of his own actions. Unparalleled jubilation followed his departure – millions of people were on the streets giddy with triumph, and the newspapers summed it up the next day when they printed, in towering letters, the simple headline – Shah raft – the shah is gone.
A wave of elation swept the country at this immense victory, this historic moment and even us children, locked up in the compound and not allowed to go to school, felt the change in the air.
Things were breaking up, people were leaving or disappearing overnight, we no longer went to school. My mother cried a lot, we had tense meetings with our friends in the yard and, very occasionally, on the rooftop. At night there were more power cuts and I buried myself in books, willing the comforting words to shut out the chaos that had encroached our haven. I knew that with shah gone we were threatened in some way and we all watched the implacable ayatollah come back to Iran, greeted by at least a million jubilant followers, the airport which had been shut exactly to avoid such an eventuality was kept open on this fateful day by airport technicians who had sworn allegiance to the priest.
The next day on the street corner we kids whispered his name to each other, all trying to imitate him, passing around the chador I had stolen from my mother’s drawer to don as his religious robes, those words he had spoken that had shocked us all so much – I feel nothing – always at the back of our minds. We couldn’t comprehend that he felt nothing on returning to Iran. Nothing. For all the slogans of the revolution that we had taken to chanting under our breaths on the rare occasions we managed to escape unseen to the roof to hold our own version of the revolutionary demonstrations, this one word had such power that it obliterated everything. He felt nothing and soon, that was what we would all be left with.
It took only ten days after the priest’s return for the army and the shah’s troops to swear allegiance to him and all the remaining apparatus of the shah’s regime to collapse. On his arrival, Khomeini had appointed his own prime minister and provisional government, simply ignoring the government of the shah and, just like that, he took over. The guerrilla forces of the revolution had overrun the army bases, factories, military academies, armouries and the TV station and we gathered that night to watch the revolutionaries display the torture chambers of SAVAK to the nation. Evin, the most notorious prison in the land, always bursting with the shah’s political prisoners, its walls thick with the cries of those tortured and killed by SAVAK’s agents, was stormed and its prisoners set free in the same way that the Bastille had been during that other revolution half a world away and two centuries before that had served as such inspiration to this revolution. Everyone was adopting an Islamic look now – clean-shaven faces were, along with ties and suits with collars, seen as symbols of Western decadence – and I watched the unshaven revolutionaries as they led the cameras through cell after cell, showing SAVAK’s horrors to the country.
We watched it all play out on our television sets in the back room, and the rest of the world watched too. The Iranian revolution – as even Khomeini was still calling it then, before it took on its Islamic shape – was the first revolution that the world had had beamed into their living rooms, and it left one overwhelming image of my country that would remain for the decades to come – one of terrifying rage.
The celebrations and jubilation soon turned into violence. The Komitehs which had started out by organising demos and co-ordinating strikes, had taken over from the disintegrating police and militias and were now running the show in every town and every neighbourhood. Comprised at first largely of revolutionaries of all colours, they increasingly took on an Islamic hue after Khomeini’s return.
On a rare trip through town with my mother driving the Paykan, I saw what looked like a cavalcade of these militants, heavily armed and riding spluttering motorbikes, unshaven and dressed in black as at Ashura, holding high the black flag of Shiism as they roared through the street. They made me shudder and sink back against the seat – although accustomed to seeing on television these young men who looked so radically different from the smartly suited, clean-shaven men in my own world, it was still a shock to see them in person. Such hungry power emanated from them and the firearms they brandished so carelessly terrified me. My own family who were involved in the revolution were socialists or Kurdish activists, not religious fundamentalists, but increasingly the more reasonable elements and groups that made up the myriad colours of the revolution were being obscured by these men who followed only black.
It didn’t take the Komitehs long to become drunk on their own power. Heavily armed with weapons take from all the police and military armouries that had been stormed, they took justice into their own hands and the justice they wielded was arbitrary, random and highly personal in nature. The violence began to spread and even Khomeini repeatedly called for calm in the days following the final capitulation of the shah’s regime, the official day of the revolution’s success commemorated hence as dah-e fajr – the tenth day of the new dawn.
The day after his friend’s warning, my father had gone to work as usual, the word
s ringing in his ears. But he could not believe that he, who had done nothing but serve his country’s most important industry faithfully for over thirty years, could seriously be in danger. When he arrived at his office, his secretary warned him that a list had been posted on the door with the names of those who would be barred from work should they bother to show up. Bagher’s name was on it.
A few hours later my mother answered the telephone at home to one of Bagher’s friends who was asking for his whereabouts. When Sedi replied that he was at work as usual, the friend hesitantly told her that he had heard that two senior managers had been arrested by the Revolutionary Committee and she would do well to locate her husband.
Sedi, already living with such a tight grip of panic about her heart, immediately phoned Bagher’s office and, when there was no answer, she called Daiey Pardis in tears. He reassured her as best he could and promised to come round as soon as he had some information.
A few hours later, my uncle arrived at our front door, pausing to let Bagher enter the house first, deferring in respect to the older man. What happened to my father in those intervening hours we never found out but Daiey Pardis stayed with us from then on, refusing to leave us alone and telling us not to leave the house.
Imprisoned within the walls of our own home, I soon grew bored of playing in my room and went to beg my mother to let me go out and pay a visit to my lamb. But my mother, exasperated with me for interrupting their hushed conversation, swiftly dispatched me back to my room with a sharp telling off. Bored and frustrated, I sulked alone until my uncle came and found me. Always so funny and patient, he explained to me that in the next few days we would all be taking a trip to visit Maman-joon in Abadan. I was thrilled, little knowing that the journey we were making was to usher my father to safety in Tehran.
Daiey Pardis, after visiting the Komiteh, had advised my parents that it would be safer for my father to leave Ahvaz. ‘Agha Mohammadi,’ he said, ‘this is a small town and it is a mad time. All sorts of people suddenly have power and there is no rule of law, so any petty jealousies or grudges are reason enough for executions and assassinations. Anyone can denounce you as being against the revolution for their own reasons. It is better to just go to Tehran where this kind of madness won’t touch you, and let things die down here. Then you can come back.’
My father agreed, the day’s experiences having at last impressed on him the danger he was in. He wrote a letter asking for a month’s leave from work and Daiey Pardis phoned my khaleh Yassi at the IranAir office and asked her to book a ticket to Tehran under his name. She confirmed we had a flight for the next day. I knew nothing of these plans being made in whispers, but I was delighted on this strange day to have my fun daiey to play with. And play he did. Pardis devoted himself to keeping us children amused, staying with us that night as he would in the months to come.
Restless and bored, I plagued my parents with questions, my endless curiosity not satisfied with their rote replies. Tired, tense and impatient, they flapped me out of the way, telling me nothing. But the pervasive atmosphere of fear had affected my sister and me too and later that night, we both crawled out of bed to find Daiey Pardis lying sleepless in the corridor. ‘Why are you sleeping here?’ I demanded and Daiey was clever enough to give me answers that for once, satisfied me and persuaded me that there was some great game afoot. I tucked myself into one side of him, both scared and excited, while my sister tucked herself into the other side and there, embraced by my skinny young uncle whose heart was more loyal to us than to his revolution, we slept in the parquet-floored corridor with a gun under our pillow.
The next day we were taken to Fatemeh Bibi’s house in Abadan where Khaleh Mina and Maman-joon awaited us. I was always happiest when sitting in my grandmother’s courtyard pretending to be one of the women helping with the chores of the day, and I waved off my father, Daiey Pardis and mother who was driving her Paykan. I cannot remember where they told us they were doing or whether we actually said goodbye to my father or not, but now I realise that they had as little idea as us kids as to whether he would be able to get to Tehran or not.
At the airport, the scene was one of disorder; members of the newly formed Revolutionary Guard (Pasdaran) – Khomeini’s politicised police force – had orders to let in only actual passengers. But my uncle’s revolutionary credentials and lifetime spent in Abadan saw them through – Daiey Pardis knew the Pasdars, and had been at school or on marches with most of them – and, with much reminiscing and joking, he persuaded them to let all three of them through to the departure lounge. Pardis phoned Khaleh Yassi from there and asked her to change the name on his ticket to my father’s name and, with no more scares or hold-ups, my father checked in and left for Tehran. Thirty-six years after he had arrived in Khuzestan, the arid land that had given him a career, a wife, children and a loyal extended family, Bagher looked down at the salt marshes for the last time as he flew away to safety.
13
God’s Government
My father’s arrival in Tehran was cushioned by our equally devoted Kurdish family. Firooz was there to meet him at the airport and Kaka Ali, one of his sister’s sons, installed a Kurdish couple in the house in Darrus ostensibly as housekeepers. In reality they were peshmarga – Kurdish guerrilla fighters – armed and ready to protect my father against anyone who might come looking for him. Ali, always addressed by the Kurdish title ‘Kaka’, was tall and balding like his father and he bore a fierce love of his land and culture. We saw a lot of him as I was growing up and I adored his wry manner and the way he perched me on his shoulders – he was so tall that I got giddy. And now, Kaka Ali whose nationalism was dovetailing with revolutionary aims, used all his revolutionary credentials to protect his uncle.
My mother, sister and I continued to live in Ahvaz, my parents insisting that we should finish the school year, still sure that everything would blow over, that normality would return and, in the way that the shipwrecked cling to any floating scrap, they held on tight to whatever routine they could salvage for us from the wreckage of those times, adamant that our education should not be interrupted.
Every morning we would wake to the news of more disappearances from our street, more neighbours and friends killed in their beds or hauled off to the Revolutionary Committee in the middle of the night, many never to be heard of again. We children continued to stand on the street and exchange any titbits we had found out and we would piece together the puzzle of who had been killed and who had merely gone. We worried constantly about our friends and vied for the best toys of those who were leaving in a hurry, wondering about such important questions as who would get whose dog to look after, what would happen to the shiny bicycle of another. We thought we were smart and sophisticated, but none of us had a clue that these disappearances, these hasty retreats were going to separate us all for ever. With the innocence of children, we waited for the chaos to be over so we could return to our rooftop games and normal lives.
Daiey Pardis stayed with us and, on weekends when we didn’t retreat to Maman-joon’s house or go to Khaleh Mina’s, we were joined by Shirin and their son who was so small and perfectly formed that we never called him anything but Koochooloo – Small One. We tended to stay in Ahvaz, my mother not feeling safe enough to leave the house unattended or drive the long dangerous road to Abadan through the scrub desert. Gunshots had replaced the night-time song of the cicadas and in town, harj-o-marj had taken over, with the Komitehs and Revolutionary Guards, Courts and Councils taking the law into their own rough hands. High on victory and armed to the teeth, these young people were now intoxicated by their own power, by this new order that had put them somehow at the top, and every disgruntled worker, maid, driver or labourer who had a grudge against their bosses could see vengeance served swiftly and mercilessly by merely whispering the words, ‘So and so is against the revolution’.
We went to join my father in Tehran for Nowruz at the end of March and, despite being in the city that I loved and in the house I
adored, I felt dislocated and sad. As was the custom, we helped clean the house, laid the beds with new sheets and dressed in our new clothes before gathering around the New Year table. But this year there was little joy in the ritual celebrations to mark the New Year that I ordinarily so loved. The city, while coming to life with bursts of blossoms and the appearance of red goldfish and fragrant hyacinths for the New Year table outside every shop as usual, was in mayhem. There were demonstrations and protests, this new habit of marching out their dissatisfaction was proving hard for the people to quit and the marches were now accompanied by violent looting and even attacks on private property – public property having long been appropriated by whichever group felt it had the most right or the biggest guns.
The Cypress Tree Page 13
