There were punishments for such things and women had been carted off to the Komiteh and flogged for less. Busheiry who, much to her exasperation, was always with Mina these days, stepped forward as if he really was Clark Gable and, pulling his wife away, explained to the astonished Pasdar that they were displaced, they were traumatised, they were upset and yes, of course she would comply, he would take her to the bazaar right away. Regaining his authority a little, the Pasdar looked down at the dapper little man with his Brylcreemed hair and pencil-thin moustache and waved them on, muttering, ‘Baradar, you should control your wife. You are the man after all, and the boss of her.’
The Pasdar probably heard Busheiry chuckle at that as he led Mina away.
By the time Khorramshahr was liberated in 1982, little was left of Mina’s house. The windows had been shattered and everything inside it had been looted. There was a huge family of Khuzestani Arabs squatting inside and their goats were roaming the courtyard. With a heavy heart, Mina accepted that she could not go back there and put her name down for the lottery for a new housing estate being built on the edge of Shiraz. When she found out that she had won a one-bed apartment the size of her living room in Khorramshahr, she had already learnt to be grateful for what fortune had decided to bestow on her. Once the buildings were complete, she and Busheiry moved into their new home and Mina set about rebuilding her life.
Yassaman and Seini had rented an apartment in town and Khaleh Yassi had already given birth to a baby girl, one of the first generation of my new cousins, members of a huge club – the children of the revolution – who were born around that time. Khomeini had urged the people to procreate, to create armies for Islam, knowing that in order to strengthen and spread his ideology he needed numbers more than anything else. With the withdrawal of the family planning facilities that were available in the shah’s time, and despite the vast numbers who had fled the country and the even greater numbers being mowed down daily by the war, Iran’s population exploded. The war had now come to the cities and Shirazis who had been so sceptical of the war’s threat were now getting used to nightly blackouts and bomb shelters, as they were in Tehran and other cities.
Life had started to settle for my family. Shirin had decided that she would rather be in Abadan with her husband despite the war, and she had scooped up Koochooloo and they had moved back home to Khuzestan. Everyone else, including Fatemeh Bibi, stayed in Shiraz. She had been living in the Hotel Homa with Mina and Yassi and now she moved with Yassi into the small downtown flat she rented for her growing family. There, apart from the regular journeys she made to visit her other children, Maman-joon stayed until her dying day, moving only when Yassi and Seini moved to a bigger apartment, Yassi’s children her last true great loves. She never tried to move back to Abadan and the house that had held the heart of the Abbasian family was lost.
Haydeh bought a rambling house just a few minutes away from Mina’s new apartment. Here the women learnt to live with not only the war, but also the regime which was now interested not just in what they wore outside the house, but also what they did inside it. Haydeh, who refused to give up her social life, had many parties that were raided and was carted off to prison overnight and more than once was fined and threatened with flogging for being caught in mixed company and playing music. The punishments for drinking alcohol or even being found with some in the house were heavy, but none of this stopped Iranians from doing as they wished. They brewed liquor at home and learnt who to pay off to have their parties ignored. Ideological though the morality police were, they were fond of money, and the war and its attendant economic hardship meant everyone had a price. Nonetheless, the intrusion and sense of invasion followed the women home every day and they had to learn to live with the constant lack of safety that had become their reality, with these new laws from which they were not even safe inside their own homes.
The horrors of the Iran–Iraq war burst their way through my teenage Western concerns when Daiey Pardis and Shirin came to stay with us on their way to make a new life in North America. I didn’t really want to hear anything about the war, but I loved my uncle and his small, sweet wife, and so I sat at my mother’s sofra night after night and listened to them tell their story.
Shirin told us that she and Pardis had decided, after enduring six years of war, that they could not stay for the sake of their children. She had an exquisite little girl now, Nazanin – the delicate one – whom I sat cuddling as Shirin talked. Cyrus was growing up and she had noticed that, although he tried to be brave during the air raids and bombings, every time there was a loud noise, he would make as if to run, his eyes searching out the nearest table that could be propped against the wall and crawled under for shelter. He was in secondary school now and he often came home and told them that the teachers had asked them if their parents prayed, if they spoke well or badly of Imam Khomeini and whether they supported the war. They knew they could trust Koochooloo to say what was expedient but it sat heavy on her heart that her little boy was being used to spy on his parents, that he had to learn duplicity and dissembling at such a young age. But the day he had come home to report on the mullahs that had visited the school and spoken so passionately of the glories of war, of the honour of fighting for your country, of the way that martyrdom guaranteed entry into paradise, that day was the day she and Pardis had decided the line had been crossed. It was too much to recruit children for their unholy war, this war which should have finished four years ago when the Iraqis had been chased from Khuzestan but which had ground relentlessly on. And knowing that the children would be used in human-wave attacks, used to walk over minefields, giving their lives for Khomeini, brainwashed into thinking that it was sweeter to die, to reach that place beyond death than to live. ‘Va!’ she exclaimed to herself, still unable to believe such things were going on all around her. The regime had made life difficult but she was still sure that life was for living and no amount of promises of paradise could convince her otherwise. Cyrus was coming to an age when, if the war dragged on as it seemed it would, he would soon be drafted to the front and she and Pardis owed their children a life. They loved Iran and everyone they cherished was there in Khuzestan, but Iran was now in love with blood, with mourning, with death. It seemed the only thing their land now offered was for their children to die and they were not prepared for that. They would have to go to another place where they could be sure that life, not death, was their inalienable right.
She had explained to us that in Iran now people were too scared to say anything to anyone that could be misconstrued and avoided conversation with casual acquaintances, shunned the sorts of interactions that had always made going about daily chores so pleasurable. The obligatory headscarf made it impossible to swing your hair as you ran your errands. She had seen so much in those last few years in Iran – with the war and the reverberations of the revolution that seemed to go on and on, the way it had changed society and people, her friends even, but one brief visit from one of the Islamic brothers still haunted her. He had walked into her garden, opened the gate and let himself in as if it was not her house but his, not her private property but common land, as if he had a right to everything that he beheld, and a person could no longer have any entitlement to privacy of any sort, whether made of bricks and mud and water or made of beliefs and ideas and thoughts, the old customs of courtesy and manners swept away by this new regime. He had told her, bold as you like, ‘Sister, it is better that you cover yourself. A chador would be best.’
She had been heavily pregnant, the baby was pressing on her bladder and she was hot and uncomfortable. The doctor had told her to walk as much as she could and she was doing just that, in the privacy of her own garden. She could hardly control herself. She nearly swore at him, but forbore, merely pointing out that she was in her own house and perhaps he had failed to notice that she was heavily pregnant. He had repeated his request, his eyes averted so pointedly that she thought, Maybe he doesn’t see that I am pregnant? Maybe these new men, t
hese Basijis, these young boys burning with zealotry for God are so obsessed with the shine on our hair, the turn of our ankles, the line of our necks that they see nothing else, not even the walls of our houses. Not even that we too are human and deserving of some peace and quiet. Just to be left alone, that was what she wanted. She had wanted to scream at him, ‘Ever since you people came you have been obsessed with us women, covering us up, shutting us away. “Wear this, don’t do that, look like this, don’t look like that.” Just leave us alone, can’t you, just, in the name of God, leave me alone to be pregnant in my own garden.’
But no matter what she said to him, he insisted that she needed to cover herself. In the end she stopped arguing and from then on, she paced about in the house, confined to the hallway, chafing at the confinement. Now her garden no longer felt like the sanctuary it had always been, and the vulnerability she felt as a woman on the streets of this newly Islamic state had snaked its way into her home. Now the only chance she had of rebuilding her home, now that even the walls could no longer keep them safe, was to build a new life in another land.
Khomeini finally accepted a ceasefire in 1988 when he could no longer refute the fact that his war was bankrupting the country. The cost was estimated by Iranian officials to be $300 billion – money that the illiterate masses that had brought the ayatollah to power had expected to come to them, not be spent on killing their young. The priest who had wanted to topple Saddam and raise the black flag of Shiism over Baghdad’s domes, ‘drank the cup of poison’ and accepted the truce and finally hostilities between the two neighbours ceased. Khomeini was unrepentant, however, writing, ‘We do not repent, nor are we sorry for even a single moment for our performance during the war. Have we forgotten that we fought to fulfill our religious duty and that the result is a marginal issue?’
Although Khomeini declared the stalemate as a victory for Islam and for Iran, after eight years of such horrors the people could no longer be fooled into seeing this inglorious episode in their country’s history as anything other than an atrocious mistake.
An old man with heart trouble and plagued by illness, Khomeini held on long enough to see the war end. Six months after the truce was accepted, after an unsuccessful operation to stop internal bleeding, Ayatollah Khomeini died of a heart attack on 3 June 1989, exactly ten years to the day after we had landed in London to start the exile he had forced on us. He was in his late eighties.
People poured on to the streets, beating their chests in unison, pounding their heads to a deadly rhythm, dressed in black and bearing large posters of the dead leader’s face, implacable to the last. It was a mass outpouring of grief that soon became a bacchanal of mourning, the people storming the funeral procession and grabbing at the shrouded body to pay their last respects, to tear off a piece of the shroud which was now considered holy. Nearly destroying his coffin in the process, the people reached for him in a mass frenzy, carried away by the electric energy of the day, just as during the revolution they had been inspired by this same energy to commit unthinkable acts of defiance and bravery. The dead man’s body nearly fell to the ground and eventually Revolutionary Guards managed to disperse the crowd, the funeral hastily cancelled to give officials time to rethink.
A few days later, encased in a steel casket and surrounded by heavily armed security, Khomeini’s body was once again paraded through the streets. Iranians again spilt into the streets, making this the biggest funeral in recorded history with eleven million people washing the streets in a sea of black, undeterred by the searing hundred degree temperatures of midsummer, beating their chests and heads, jumping up and down in a delirium of grief. The whole country filled with the sound of wailing, of religious mourning songs and the frantic chanting that Khomeini always inspired. Fire trucks sprayed water on the crowds to stop them fainting in the heat and helicopters had to swoop down to collect more than 400 people who were injured in the crush. Eight people died.
Khomeini’s body was eventually taken to a purpose-built mausoleum on the edge of Tehran’s huge Behesht Zahra cemetery, an outsize complex of gold domes and minarets intended to accommodate thousands of pilgrims. Fast food joints and souvenir stalls proliferate here now, an Iranian version of the sort of consumerist Western culture that Khomeini so frowned upon. In the cemetery itself, which I visit on every trip to pay respects at my amoo’s grave, there are acres of land devoted to the boys and young men ‘martyred’ in Khomeini’s war, the tricoloured flag of my country flapping above thousands of graves in the shadow of the gold minarets of Khomeini’s shrine.
In the struggle for power that followed Khomeini’s death, Ayatollah Khamenei was finally chosen by the mullahs of the Guardian Council as the country’s new Supreme Leader. More of a career politician than a revered spiritual leader, Ali Khamenei brought neither Khomeini’s peculiar charisma nor his spiritual authority to the role, and he failed to inspire the sort of devotion in the people that kept them allied to Khomeini throughout his bloody reign. Nonetheless, he still holds the final reigns of power in Iran.
Ten years after stepping forward to lead my people’s anguished struggle for freedom, democracy and autonomy from Western powers, Ayatollah Khomeini, who promised the poverty-stricken masses of Iran oil wells in their back garden, had failed to bring them either freedom, equality or economic prosperity. Instead of delivering them a paradise on earth, he instead made their lives such hell that thousands preferred to die as ‘martyrs’ to reach that other paradise instead.
‘We do not worship Iran, we worship Allah. For patriotism is another name for paganism. I say let this land [Iran] burn. I say let this land go up in smoke, provided Islam emerges triumphant in the rest of the world,’ declared Khomeini in a speech he gave in Qom in 1980. While his brand of Islam has failed to emerge triumphant in the rest of the world, he did succeed in letting our land of Iran burn. In the process, he managed to drive the children of his revolution – the new generation born since his ascent to power – away from Islam in droves.
19
The Mask of Englishness
Growing up in Britain in the eighties, I had slipped on the mask of Englishness, had declared Britain my country, had stuck my flag in her soil and given myself to her, denying Iran at every turn, refusing to speak Farsi until I had forgotten my language, and rejecting my relations every time they rang, not knowing how to speak to them, what to say, how to carry out ta’ arof. I ran away from my parents’ parties, from the tight community of Iranian friends they had gathered about them in London and spurned any advances of friendship from their kids. I wasn’t looking for people who had shared my experiences, who were also expert at navigating the vastly different cultures we all inhabited, the one at home and the one outside our homes, cultures so opposed to each other that we had all become masters of disguise, brilliant chameleons able to change colour and even shift shape as we moved between our two worlds. I only wanted friends from my new life, only wanted to speak English, as if with every word swearing my allegiance to the country that had taken me in, that had given me sanctuary and allowed me to be safe. My parents’ efforts to stop my sister and me from forgetting our culture and language were also summarily dismissed: they would speak to us in Farsi only to have us reply in English, they would try to enrol us at Farsi Saturday school only to have us flat refuse to go. Over the years, I became so good at wearing the mask that eventually, the mask became my face.
No matter how hard I tried, and how many times I was given the dubious honour by my British friends of not being considered Middle Eastern but ‘one of us’, inside our home there was no getting away from my roots. We lived in a distinctly Iranian environment, Persian carpets covering the floors, Persian miniatures decorating the walls and Persian smells issuing from the kitchen. I hesitated always to take friends home – I was too embarrassed by the gap in culture between their behaviour, their casual and informal manners, and what my parents considered correct comportment. Bagher and Sedi were breathtakingly liberal and modern compa
red to their parents and their own upbringing, but compared to the parents of my British peers, they were old-fashioned and strict. At seventeen, while my best friend was taking boyfriends home to spend the night in her bedroom, I was haggling my midnight curfew and conducting clandestine afternoon meetings with boys in Holland Park.
As a teenager in London I walked the tightrope between my two cultures – entirely Iranian and Muslim at home and outside, where I spent the greater part of my time, British and growing up in the age of Thatcher. I was sucking up ideas of equality and sexual liberation while at home I waited on my parents’ friends and pretended I had never kissed a boy. I couldn’t imagine telling my mother that I was interested in boys now that I was a teenager and I had left behind my passion for ponies. I wanted to indulge my desires, be like everyone else, but not telling Sedi was probably my failing rather than hers. I don’t know what I thought she would do, I couldn’t contemplate broaching the subject of sex before marriage, a great taboo in my respectable Iranian family – I was as surely held in place by these strong social conventions as if I had been living in Iran.
The Cypress Tree Page 19
