Maman-joon lay on her bed on the floor in the corner of the room and received us as we sat with her one by one and stroked her hair and kissed her hands. I would often catch her with a faraway look in her eyes, but I soon realised she was not contemplating higher things – she was looking at her left wrist which she was holding aloft, and jingling her gold bracelets. She had no other possessions except her well-guarded stack of photographs, and she made sure to tell all her daughters that after her death they were to have two of her bracelets each. She seemed often on the edge of death – one night her breathing became so laboured, her struggle to catch another breath so intense, that I could feel her slipping away. My mother got out of bed and went and sat by her mother, stroking her hair and raising her up a little so the fluid that collected on her lungs had a chance to disperse. Fatemeh Bibi would hate to go while her children were still around her, Sedi knew. She was not ready yet to leave the party and Sedi stayed up all night with Maman-joon, helping her to grasp at each breath until the danger was past.
Eventually we left Iran and Fatemeh Bibi, having got her last wish to lay eyes on her beloved Pardis one last time, to see with her own eyes that he was fine in the new life he had chosen, only managed another two months, and I am sure that those were only for the love of Khaleh Yassi’s children, who kept her laughing until the end. After our departure she had moved back to Yassi’s, where she had been looked after and cared for by a hired nurse, a sweet girl also called Fatemeh, Khaleh Yassi herself now in bed with a slipped disk. One morning in March just two weeks before Nowruz, Khaleh Yassi rose before the rest of the house, as was her habit, and she went to take tea to her mother. Fatemeh Bibi looked her in the eye and cupped her cheek. ‘Khodahafez, azizam,’ she said – goodbye, my darling. She then closed her eyes, and with a last ‘enk’ let go of life. I imagine that she was satisfied with her lot.
Sedi was bereft and jumped on the first plane to Iran, arriving in time to help her brothers and sisters make the funeral arrangements, buy and cook all the food that would be needed to feed the many people who would come in the following week to pay their respects. They wailed and wept and beat themselves when the pain got too much, releasing their grief in the way that Shia Islam gifts its followers – blessed relief. My cousin Alireza’s eldest daughter Maryam – Maman-joon’s first great-grandchild – was chosen to lead the prayers at her funeral. A sweet, moon-faced girl who looked like her mother Shahnaz, and who had grown up with the same firm faith in the divine, she chanted the verses from the Qur’an beautifully.
Maman-joon, had always been concerned with the appearance of things – she always said that she did not care what people said behind her back as long as they were charming to her face – and had often said in those last months to anyone who would listen, ‘When I die, I expect you all to cry a lot. I don’t want any dry eyes or brave faces. I want rivers of tears, ghorbonetam, and don’t think I won’t be watching …’
Fatemeh Bibi’s funeral was all she could have wished for, the last big party that she attended. And attend she did – at the end of the first week of mourning, she appeared to Maryam in a dream, young and beautiful, her figure full and her white arms chubby and she said in the rich voice that had been hers before the operation on her larynx, ‘Maryam-joon, you have done well. You prayed beautifully and everything was perfect. Go and tell the others that I am pleased. But you have all cried enough now, baste, it’s time to get on with your lives.’
When Sedi arrived back at Heathrow, dressed in black and her hair striped by dark roots, we all rushed at her, taking her in our collective arms. She was crying, her face bare of make-up as was the custom, her hair undyed. She was still in mourning for her mother and tradition dictated that she wear black and eschew make-up and hair dye for another year. We all knew Sedi would never see out the year in black, she found it too depressing, and it had been she who, on our first visit together back to Tehran, had urged Mehry and Guity to quit mourning their father after three months, and had harried them into putting on lipstick again and doing their hair. She kept to her mourning uniform for another week, which she marked by receiving her friends who came to pay condolences. She gave me Maman-joon’s bracelets and they joined the six gold bracelets that I was given as a child and I still wear. Sometimes, in a distracted moment, I find myself holding aloft my left wrist and jangling the bracelets; it’s a strangely comforting gesture.
For Maman-joon’s wake in London, I drove Sedi one morning to New Covent Garden flower market where we arrived late and bought up all the white flowers still left. We decked out the flat in with vases of white blooms and made the traditional dishes of halva and sholeh-zard and for the next week, all Sedi’s friends came to cry with her, including her British boss Cherie, a woman with whom she became lifelong friends. She didn’t have her family around her, but the collection of Iranian friends – and Cherie – she had in London flocked around her like her sisters and gave her comfort.
My parents had not prospered in Britain. They had lived at first as if they were still in Iran, seeing the same people they had known there, moving in the same circles and rarely coming out of their Iranian bubble. My mother devoted herself to us and she continued to be a consummate hostess and the life and soul of all parties, her kitchen producing all the elaborate and delicious dishes we had been used to in Iran, her table always overflowing with the wealth of the choices on offer.
But as the years wore on, my father’s age excluded him from work and he was increasingly a fixture on the sofa, where his piles of newspapers and stacks of books caused my mother no end of annoyance. The changes that had started in Iran did not stop over the next decades in Britain and they required my parents to change too, and, in order to survive, they too bent to the wind, reshaping themselves. My father officially retired and my mother instead started to work and so, late in her life, she got all the financial independence and autonomy she had craved in her youth. It required her to give up her carefully constructed image of herself, the status and respect she had enjoyed in Iran because of my father’s job, and to finally accept her new life in Britain, a decade after we had arrived, to integrate into British society.
My mother integrated but she has never lost her Iranian ways. English friends of mine get confused when, on seeing them, she enquires after the health of every family member by name, and she treats authority in such a deferential way that it used to make me cross, this constant effacing of herself, calling people ‘sir’ in English, as if they were the king and she was so much less. As I grew up I realised that she was just being Iranian, translating literally into English the consummate Iranian art of humbling oneself, of treating others with such elaborate respect that every phrase that we utter that is not to do with sacrificing yourself for the beloved, is about denigrating yourself in front of the other.
When I started to have my own friends in Iran outside the family, this was one of our favourite games, the exaggerated niceties and ta’arofs of our culture, and with men, it was our favourite way to flirt. It would go something like this:
Me, answering the phone: ‘Hello, where are you?’
Him: ‘Look at the ground, Kamin-khanoum. I am there, the dust beneath your feet.’
It was not just amusing, but also breathtakingly romantic, a return to the sort of courting language not used in the West for centuries. I have never so often been referred to as a lady and never before or since has my beauty been compared to the rose and the nightingale. The more I occupied my culture, the more I liked it, the more it amused me, such a playful language made so absolutely for amusement and love.
After being so disappointed by my rejection of Iran as a child, my parents were at first thrilled that I wanted to rediscover my roots and reconnect with my family. But after I started travelling back to Iran on my own for work, they were less thrilled. They were uncomfortable with me writing about Iran, even when those articles were printed in the travel section, and they hated that my name accompanied these articles. They hav
e never lost their suspicion of the regime and, being Iranian through and through, reasoned that to be known was to be, sooner or later, in trouble and that the only way to survive unscathed is to stay anonymous, unknown.
Every time I boarded the plane for Iran alone, my mother rang every one of my relations to give them strict instructions to never leave me alone, let me go anywhere alone, or in fact, to let me out of their sights. Luckily, Mehry and Guity had grown too practical to chaperone me thus – their gruelling daily life gave them no choice but to leave me to my own devices, and Mehry would reassure my mother on the phone while waving me off as I skipped out of the door. Sedi and Bagher had not reconciled themselves to the Islamic Republic; my father has never been back and my mother’s own visits are made, she repeatedly assures me, purely for the sake of her family.
I, however, had other ideas. By the end of Khatami’s second term in 2005, I wanted nothing more than to move back home. It became my battle cry, one that I repeated often to anyone who would listen. Sitting in the car with Mehry in Tehran, I would glance up at the sunny winter skies, and declare that I had spent long enough under England’s drizzle and it was time for me to come home. Sitting at Khaleh Mina’s kitchen table chewing over the possibility, I promised her that I would soon be back. So determined was I that I left my own slippers in the houses I considered home: Khaleh Mina’s in Shiraz and Mehry’s in Tehran.
I was not the only one. In my travels back and forth to Iran, I had made some friends, other Iranians my age who had been brought up either in America or Britain, and they too declared the same thing. We were all pulled back to our homeland, intoxicated by the rediscovery of our country and our Iranian selves, and desperate to have a stake in Iran again, to feel in some way involved in its present and in planning its future. Some made it back, buoyed by Khatami’s victory and the promise of better times and more openness, and there was some effort to lure us back too.
One day I had gone to visit to the press attaché of the Iranian Embassy in London. I was involved in writing a radio documentary that people at the BBC were interested in commissioning, but before they would take it further, they wanted to know that we would be given visas and permissions. The press attaché, a particular friend of President Khatami, could not have been more charming, offering me tea and chatting easily, erudite and refined. It was like sitting in an elegant drawing room in Tehran with aromatic tea and a fine Persian carpet under our feet. He assured me that of course we would have permission and soon moved on to talking about me, enquiring about my work and praising my loyalty to Iran.
‘An educated lady like you, Khanoum Mohammadi,’ he said, ‘you could have chosen to do anything. And it is a matter of pride to us that you have chosen to write about your country. There are so many misunderstandings about Iran, and we need people like you, Khanoum Mohammadi, who are well educated and know how to communicate, to help explain.’
I never made the radio documentary and so I never went back to see the press attaché nor took him up on pitching the various subjects he had suggested the BBC might be interested in. I stuck to uncontroversial topics because, while I too wanted to explain Iran, I really didn’t know how I could explain the Islamic Republic in a way that he would find praiseworthy – charming as he was, he was in any case a scion of the regime.
I found myself finally in a community of Iranians who, like me, had spent their lives split between two places. They also passionately wanted to bridge the gap between their two cultures. We engaged with the Islamic Republic because we love Iran and our families, and so we all found ways to reconcile ourselves to the mullahs in order to be part of our country. My Iranian being no longer stayed in Iran when I flew away, and I felt much more whole not having to endlessly explain one or the other of my worlds.
We all had grand plans to move back to Iran, to set up projects, to discover our families, our country, to transmit our privileged education to our countrymen. But then later that year, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was elected president and once again, all our plans changed.
22
Back Home
I am sitting alone in a taxi, sweeping over the futuristic loop of highways that encircle Tehran. Everywhere around me are massive billboards bearing the faces of Ayatollah Khomeini and current Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei. The sides of Tehran’s ever-taller buildings are painted with huge images of the ‘martyrs’ of the war, but they now compete with billboards advertising home-grown movies, mobile phones and leather jackets worn by the male heartthrobs of Iranian cinema. The north of the city is packed with glossy shopping malls filled with shops selling glossy goods – from the latest BlackBerries to the hottest fashion in head-scarves and manteaus. The brands are familiar – Zara, Mango and Benetton are just three of the fashion retailers I know so well from Europe, and electronic goods are stamped with the insignias of Toshiba, Sony and the like. In the malls, there are New York-style coffee shops with sofas to lounge on and an array of coffees with flavoured syrups on offer. The girls and boys who frequent these places are like creatures from another world – young, beautiful and fashionable, their hair coiffed and styled, the girls wearing tons of make-up, their haircuts expertly cut to fall forward out of the scraps of silk scarves that flutter off the back of their heads, their manteaus, which barely skim their bottoms, so short and tight that it is clear they are wearing nothing underneath. Boys wear aviator shades, their hair gelled into the kind of styles that trendy Western advertising executives can only dream of. These are the wealthy young people who live in the north of the city, frequenting the new cafés and chic restaurants with minimalist interiors that would be equally at home in Paris, New York or London.
As I am driven through the city’s mesh of motorways, I reflect on the last six months that I have been living in Iran and I feel that I am in a science fiction novel. These have been the first six months of Ahmadinejad’s presidency and, despite all our reservations, there have, as yet, been no real changes. This society, so young – 70 per cent of the population is under thirty-five – and so lively, so modern and forward-thinking no matter whether in Tehran, Shiraz or Sanandaj, so overwhelmingly itching for change, controlled by men such as the two whose images puncture the skyline so frequently, dressed in robes and turbans, their beards white, their shrewd eyes cold, from a different world from the one occupied by the young people. I cannot reconcile the two, despite my frequent trips back over the past ten years, despite the six months I have spent living here, travelling the country, staying in different provinces, taking in the most deprived villages in Kurdistan as well as the most privileged lifestyles in the breezy north of Tehran. My overwhelming sense is of a ruling regime madly out of step with society, of a country in which the culture has evolved far beyond the structures of the law, and of a system defunct and irrelevant but determined to hold on to power at all cost.
So much so that they are willing to turn a blind eye to the transgressions that are almost unavoidable if you wish to lead a normal life in Iran. Go to a party and you have broken the law – unless that party is full of only your close relations, and both men and women are correctly attired in Islamic dress – even the husband of an aunt is counted a ‘stranger’ when it comes to Islamic modesty. If that party has alcohol, mixed company and thumping pop beats, you have broken several more laws. Go out in a tight, short manteau with your hair spilling out of your headscarf and you have transgressed. Walk down the street with a man not your husband, brother or uncle, and you have violated another rule and so on until even I, with my careful and paranoid Western ways, soon stop bothering to toe the line and do as my friends and relations do – just as I please.
There are at least two societies operating concurrently in Iran at any given moment – the one papering the surface, which complies to rules and laws, and then the one hiding beneath, what actually happens. In between there are a multitude of nuances and subtleties, and the way people negotiate all these different realities with such ease fascinates me. Everyone wears so many
masks – the regime forces them to – that it can be hard to know who anyone really is, and I now understand the old adage I was brought up with: ‘Never trust anyone except your family’. The paranoia and distrust that has always existed in Iranian society has made us Iranians masters of dissembling, our very genes encoded with the ability to appear to say one thing while meaning something completely other. The response to the Islamic regime is, sadly, nothing new.
Nonetheless, the culture has evolved and continues to do so, no matter how much the regime tries to control and direct that evolution. In the information age, it is hard to keep the veil over the face of Iran, and no matter how many Internet sites are banned, there is always a clever hacker who will break the codes and post the information somewhere easy for others to find. Mobile phones are ubiquitous and vital now not just in the ever increasing hook-ups between the sexes, but for planning parties, underground gigs, fashion shows, film screenings and private views that are so easy to tune into in Tehran.
Life, I have found throughout my years of returning to Iran, always goes on. The Iran that I am living in now is a different place to the shell-shocked Iran that I returned to ten years ago. Reformist President Khatami’s overwhelming sweep to power in 1997 and his re-election for a second term was a sure indication of the people’s desire for change. Seen as a liberal, Khatami was carried to the presidential position on the crest of a wave made up of young people and women; he spoke of reform and liberalisation, although he is also a mullah and at no point suggested any change to the system of Islamic rule. But he did point out that ‘whenever in history a religion has faced freedom, it has been the religion which has sustained damage,’ understanding in his canny way that the rule of the mullahs was turning a whole generation – nay a whole nation – off religion en masse. Indeed, the Iran he inherited had the lowest mosque attendance of any Muslim country in the world.
The Cypress Tree Page 22
