Soon they were stopped even from this small act of rebellion and the only acceptable uniform for working women who did not don the chador became a long, loose black coat reaching almost to the ground, topped off with something called a maghna’eh – a sort of black wimple that was elasticated around the back of the head and cupped the whole head and under the chin, with no danger of sliding off or allowing a stray hair to escape. Soon, Mehry told me, it became easier to comply than to face the endless harassment that not doing so entailed and so every day she left her house, filled with her multi-coloured cousins, and stepped out into the day shrouded in black. They wore black, she told me, ‘because we were mourning the death of our freedom’.
Colour had been bled from my land as had so many other pleasures, and Iran became a country of monochrome. Music and dancing were banned and all that could be heard above the din of the car horns and roar of planes flying overhead was the insistent and regular call to prayer and the mournful notes of religious songs invoking the glories of martyrdom.
In London I had fallen in love with British pop music. Something about the beats and rhythms, the careful coiffeurs (this was the early eighties after all) and the plaintive sometimes untuneful melodies captured me and soon I was living for my Saturday afternoon visits to the local record shop where I would pull out the allowance I had saved to buy a seven-inch single. Each weekend I bought a record and a copy of Smash Hits, a music magazine that gave me another world to be part of. I would pore over the reprinted lyrics of hit songs, learning them by heart, and the features with their in-jokes and irreverent attitude planted in me the seed of my love for magazines and pop-culture journalism. At school where television was strictly forbidden, we were allowed on alternate Thursdays to watch Top of the Pops, and I would excitedly spend all the homework time beforehand wondering which pop groups would be on and which videos I could sing along to. My greatest ambition was to be a pop star.
Despite my unhappy beginnings at boarding school, over the next few years I settled in and thrived. I shared my mother’s love of singing and at school I joined all the choirs and even sang solos in church. I wrote the school magazine and headed up the school debating team. I knew by then that if I didn’t get my big break as a pop star I would happily settle for journalism and I even managed to get myself two weeks’ work experience at the local newspaper – a heady fortnight of chasing police cars through the village and grappling with typewriters back at the office. Once released from boarding school and studying for my A levels in London, there was the lively underground of nightclubs blaring out the new beats of hip-hop and rap to be discovered. Every Friday and Saturday night, dressed in Levi 501s and a shiny bomber jacket like a fifties American teenager, my friends and I were at the front of every new hip nightclub queue.
At the same time, my cousin Ebby was at the front line, fighting for Iran along the border with Iraq, at Khuzestan’s notorious no-man’s-land called Shalamcheh which had once been an oasis of palm trees but was laid waste by the war. Ebby was Daiey Shapour’s son and had been my favourite running companion in the dusty back alleys of Abadan. He was just a few years older than me, but while I saved my money for my ever-growing record collection and lost myself in the dark thumping nightclubs of London, he was lying in rat-infested trenches near the border, the dark night thumping to the rhythm of guns and artillery fire. Ebby was not my only cousin to be conscripted to the war, but he was the only one who fought on the front line, spending the two last years of the war in the border areas.
Saddam Hussein’s decision to invade my country was intended to exploit Iran’s post-revolutionary vulnerability, as well as allay fears that Iran’s new Shia leadership would upset Iraq’s delicate Sunni-Shia balance and exploit Iraq’s geostrategic weaknesses – Iraq’s only access to the Persian Gulf is via the Shatt al-Arab. The historic animosity between the two countries had only worsened with Ayatollah Khomeini’s ascent to power in 1979 and his vow to avenge Iraqi Shia victims of Baathist repression. Baghdad planned a swift victory, expecting the native population of ethnic Arabs living in Khuzestan to rise against the new Islamic regime. Saddam also knew that despite the Shah’s stockpiled arsenal of the latest weapons, Iran had just executed or lost to exile all its top military personnel – some 12,000 senior officers were purged during the revolution, a purge that only stopped with Iraq’s invasion. The Iranian air force was only able to fly half of its aircraft by the start of the war. The Revolutionary Guard was led by clerics with little or no military experience and often armed only with light infantry weapons and Molotov cocktails.
But the Arab minority remained loyal to Iran and the war dragged on for eight long years, the longest war of the last century, a war in which trench warfare was seen for the first time since the First World War and a heinous cocktail of chemical weapons was used by Iraq in combat operations for the first time ever, in direct contravention of international law. This was allowed to pass unpunished by a world which wanted to castigate this frightening new Islamic Republic, no matter that it was not the aggressor.
What Saddam underestimated was the passion of his opponents for their land alongside the strength of Khomeini’s ideology and propaganda – and the usefulness of war in helping the regime entrench itself in power. Iraqi forces were repulsed from Abadan by a small unit aided by its fierce inhabitants – including my daieys – and Khorramshahr was only captured after a house-to-house fight so brutal that it earned the town its bloody nickname of khunistan. Seven thousand Iranians died or were seriously wounded in the battle for Khorramshahr.
Another unforeseen factor was the Basij, the people’s militia, the force Ayatollah Khomeini called the ‘Army of Twenty Million’. The regime used aggressive recruiting techniques, particularly in mosques and schools in lower income urban and rural areas. Iranian television broadcast round-the-clock pictures of young men – boys – with their red Basij headbands and guns, telling viewers how wonderful it was to be a soldier for Islam. Women were shown declaring pride that their sons had died martyrs for the cause. By the end of November 1980, some 200,000 new Pasdars were sent to the front, accompanied by the Basij, troops so ideologically committed that some carried their own shrouds in expectation of impending martyrdom along with plastic keys worn around their necks – issued by the regime for entry to paradise.
In July 1982, after two years of fighting and after Iraq had been repulsed from Iranian soil and Saddam proposed a ceasefire, the clerics instead decided they would not stop until they had taken Baghdad. Iran launched Operation Ramadan on Iraqi territory, near Basra. Although Basra was within range of Iranian artillery, the clergy – who had taken charge of operations earlier that year – used human-wave attacks against the city in one of the biggest land battles since 1945. Ranging in age from boys of only nine to men over fifty, these eager soldiers swept over minefields and fortifications to clear safe paths for the tanks, using their own bodies and sacrificing their own lives to explode the mines. Chanting Allah-o akbar, these ecstatic young soldiers for Islam were so fired up with zeal – and many said drugged into such a state – that terrified Iraqi soldiers trembled with fear and tried to run away from their stations.
It was my cousin Ebby who described these human-wave attacks to me, when we met again as adults. I saw Ebby just once; when I first returned, he had come to Shiraz to visit us and when he had walked into Khaleh Mina’s tiny flat, it was as if my daiey Shapour had come to life in front of me. After leaving Iran in 1979, I never saw Daiey Shapour again. He survived the war working in Abadan, but he didn’t survive the sudden death of his seventeen-year-old son Abbas (named, of course, after our grandfather) in a car accident. After that he got cancer and literally wasted away. Khaleh Mina once told me that Abadan had never seen anything like Shapour’s funeral, ‘Vaaay, it was like a national holiday, Kamin-joon. We couldn’t cope with the crowds who came to give their condolences to Ashraf-khanoum and Maman-joon. We were like slaves in the kitchen making sure the sholeh zard and halva d
idn’t run out.’
But Ebby’s face, unlike my uncle’s, was stamped with hardship. That night we sat up late, fogging the room with the smoke of our cigarettes. Ebby was in his thirties, no longer the snotty-nosed kid of my memories but a man with a family and a job. He told me about the war and that he still had nightmares about his time in Shalamcheh: the chanting, the horror of the attacks, of seeing the children running towards Iraqi tanks in waves, their white shrouds flapping behind them.
‘There were the Iraqis, large men you know, much bigger than us, and they had the latest arms, brand-new Kalashnikovs, shiny tanks.’ Ebby took a deep drag of his cigarette. ‘There were bigger powers against us – the West was standing behind Iraq, giving them weapons – and we were so disorganised and poor.’ He shook his head, the deeply etched lines dragging down his mouth testifying that he saw no glory in this. ‘In the end, it was just stalemate.’ He advised me to go and see Shalamcheh with a bitter laugh, ‘It’s still full of trenches and burnt-out tanks. It’s mined to hell but they are making it a tourist attraction now, well, you know, a place of pilgrimage for all the martyrs …’
Ebby was still living in Abadan but he wanted to leave. Since the war two members of our family had died of cancer and Ebby fretted about the water, the soil, the health of his children; his brow was never unfurrowed. It was sadly clear to me that he was one of Iran’s growing army of heroin addicts. In the morning Ebby kissed me fondly as we said goodbye, pasting on a wide smile for my benefit, but I am still haunted by his hollow eyes.
The war claimed a million casualties before it was over, and still more over the years that followed.
18
Displaced
In the early 1980s, Shiraz, capital of the province of Fars – the cradle of the Persian race – saw its numbers swelling with refugees every day. This beautiful city, with its gardens and poets and famously romantic inhabitants, could hardly cope with the Khuzestanis arriving in droves every day. Shiraz, where the grape was transmuted into wine long before being transported to the soils of Australia and California, long before Iran became the teetotal Islamic Republic, was now struggling to feed and house the shell-shocked refugees thronging there. Luckily for my family, Khaleh Parivash had a large house and she turned over the top storey to her siblings and their families. They were overcrowded and tempers were short, but at night, when they threw down a row of mattresses on the floor to sleep side by side, Parivash would come up and join them and they would gossip into the night like they had as children. But before too long, the rations that Parivash was eeking out to feed them fell short and the tension that sprang from so many families piled in together overflowed. As good as the Abbasians are at loving, they are even better at fighting and when the men visited from Abadan on the weekends, exhausted and wrung out with working every day in a war zone, they found their women caught in their own private wars.
The government had set up refugee reception areas in the cities and eventually all the refugees were registered and given ration books and accommodation. Yassaman and her fiancé had been officially transferred to Shiraz to work and the Company provided them both with rooms in the airline’s hotel – the Homa, the smartest in town. Mina’s very sensibility was insulted by the idea of moving into a refugee camp – ‘Akhe, Kamin-joon,’ she explained to me years later. ‘Your daiey Shapour insisted on taking his family there, but they were awful places, and we counselled him against it. But you know Ashraf-khanoum, well, it was her idea and you know she had a different, er, culture to us …’ So Mina went with Yassaman to the Hotel Homa, and she insisted on being accompanied by Shirin and Cyrus, and of course Busheiry came too. In the suite provided by IranAir, Yassaman made a temporary home for her sister and her brother’s wife, and they were relieved and happy to be in such comfortable, relatively luxurious lodgings.
Somehow a letter reached us in England at this time, bearing the news of Khaleh Yassaman’s marriage, along with two photos of the happy couple. It was not so long since we had left Iran, perhaps two years, but Khaleh Yassi already looked different from the girl I had known. Her once-straight hair was now styled back in flicks, her eyebrows, once so bushy, were narrow and long, and she was wearing scarlet lipstick. My mother framed both these pictures and put them on a side table in the sitting room. For Sedi it was the first time she had not been present at the wedding of one of her siblings, and this impossible separation that she endured, unable even to visit her country for her sister’s wedding in these days of war and the Islamic Republic, sat heavy on her heart. She was relieved at least to see signs that her family were not just unsettled and in despair, but going on with their lives, falling in love, marrying, celebrating. But the evidence that life went on without her saddened her as much as the pictures gladdened her, and the reality of our exile hit her with a thud.
Khaleh Mina told me the story of how, in those early days of war and displacement, the first thing they had done was plan Yassaman and Seini’s wedding. Mina, Shirin and Fatemeh Bibi set about spiriting up a beautiful sofra aghd from their pooled rations, dieting for weeks so that could spend their rations buying the symbolic sweets for the sofra. They found Yassaman a white dress with tiers of lace falling to the floor and a delicate net to cover her head, and she was dispatched as was customary on the morning of the wedding to the beauty parlour.
Seini wore a dark brown suit and looked so handsome sitting at the top of the sofra that Khaleh Yassi told me years later, with a wink, that she thought her heart would stop. Sitting under the canopy of netting held at each corner by a female member of the family, Mina rubbing over the top the two large sugar cones, the two of them grinned at each other as the mullah asked the customary questions. Finally they were married and the two lovebirds fed each other honey from their fingertips and Seini gave Yassi gifts of gold and eventually, after much celebration and posing for photos and eating of shirin polo – the rice dish sweetened with sugar syrup and layered with orange zest, slivers of green pistachio nuts and saffron-infused chicken – Yassi and Seini retired to their first home together, a modest double room in the Hotel Homa in refugee-stricken Shiraz.
That first year in Shiraz was tough for my family. The Shirazis were growing impatient with the new mouths they had to feed, with their city being overrun by destitute Khuzestanis, and they started to grumble. Shirin, whose worry for her husband Pardis knew no bounds, found herself fighting in the ration queues with the Shirazis when she heard them complaining about the refugees. When she heard them wonder out loud what a war that was being fought over in Khuzestan had to do with them, her blood boiled and she gave them all a tongue-lashing which struck the whole queue dumb. ‘You should be welcoming us,’ she screamed. ‘Our men are fighting for you too and all you can do is begrudge us a piece of bread, when we have lost everything. Tof be roo’etoon, I spit in your faces, khejalat bekeshin, you should be ashamed of yourselves.’ With that she had resolved to leave Shiraz and join her husband back in Abadan just as soon as she could. ‘He needed me,’ she explained to me simply many years later, ‘and I was busy, I was the only woman in Abadan. I had all the men to cook for! Everyone had sent their wives away. They couldn’t fight a war on an empty stomach.’
New Year came round and Shiraz burst into flower. After a winter that was colder than any of my Khuzestani family had ever known, Shiraz’s spring garb was so beautiful that even their war-ravaged eyes could only behold the blossoms and flowers in wonder. The town was filled with orange trees and the blossom that now bloomed on every tree sent out a scent so sweet, so heady, that their senses reeled. Mina, Shirin and Yassaman, drinking in the all-pervading aroma of the flowers, scrabbled around town to lay the best Nowruz table they could manage. They did their best to have fun, as Shirin told me later, ‘Oh, how we laughed. Those days were difficult but we tried to be happy.’
Laughing became a little easier when one day Mina discovered her friend Haydeh was also in Shiraz. Haydeh’s husband, being a military man, had been in and out of jai
l since the revolution, but now that his services were needed in the war, he had been restored to his rank and he had moved his family too to Shiraz. The two women resumed their daily coffee drinking routine, joined by Haydeh’s mother, Maman Doh, and it was on a tip from Haydeh that Khaleh Mina got her new apartment. One day she had rung Mina excitedly. ‘Khanoum Busheiry, they are holding lotteries for new apartments that are being built,’ she had explained. ‘You should see what you can get, you are homeless after all.’
It was around this time in 1981 that a law requiring every woman over the age of nine to comply with the Islamic hejab was passed and, since there was a war and since the Islamic regime now had a firm grip on power, Iran’s women could no longer refuse. Protests were no longer countenanced and all dissent was labelled not just un-Islamic but also against national security, against the war effort and against all those being martyred for the cause every day. Soon women were shrouded in black and the Revolutionary Guard enforced the law. Khaleh Mina told me how one day, going about her business in Shiraz accompanied by Busheiry, clad in a long, loose coat and with a black headscarf knotted at her chin, cursing the outfit in the heat, she was stopped by one such Pasdar, who told her in no uncertain terms that she was failing in her hejab and that she should go home and change immediately. Mina looked down – she was wearing open-toed sandals and her long, painted toenails could clearly be seen.
‘Khahar, sister,’ he said, not looking her in the eye as was the proper Islamic way, ‘you can wear those shoes but you should be wearing thick black socks. I can see your ankles and your toes and that is forbidden.’
My khaleh Mina, always so elegant, always so polite and so effusive with her courtesies, suddenly snapped. Who was this boy who was young enough to be her son? How dare he tell her what to wear, she who had lost everything, her precious home filled with all her household goods. She heard her own voice rising to a shout as she told him in no uncertain terms that she was a refugee and had nothing, that she had only narrowly escaped death by the grace of God and that, having survived all that, having complied with the dress regulations as best as she could, she was certainly not going to spend her meagre rations on socks so she could sweat even more. ‘If it is such a problem for you to see my ankles and my toes,’ I imagined her pulling herself upright, ‘then may I suggest, baradar – brother – that you simply don’t look.’
The Cypress Tree Page 18
