I knew very little about his student years when I met him on one of my first days in Tehran. The building he owned, in a stylish section of town, and the dark, wood-panelled boardroom where I waited for him, showed signs of his prosperity. At even intervals, there were framed photographs of ricefields in Bali, desert sunsets in Arizona and other natural vistas. Muhammad came in wearing a tan linen jacket over a blue shirt. He was large and pale, with a goatee and a warm, jovial manner. His easy self-confidence and personal style, the finely made gold glasses he wore and his diving Breitling spoke of his success. I had known him as a child in India, and his warmth and laughter were what I remembered about him.
I had barely reintroduced myself when the conversation turned to politics, and the summer crackdown on women’s dress. He screwed up his face and became serious: ‘We were more moderate before, under the Shah, but it is still a moderate country and will be again when this regime is gone.’ To hear him speak in this way, knowing he had supported the revolution, brought an unsettling personal note to the remark, like listening to someone you hardly know speak of a family feud.
‘I hear this a lot,’ I said, ‘talk of when the regime is gone. Do you think it will happen soon?’
‘It is the younger generation who will change it,’ Muhammad said, ‘and they could do it very soon, even in, say, one or two years. But the foreign powers mustn’t intervene. If they don’t, it will happen very soon. If they get involved, these guys will stay because they will be able to unite the people. They mustn’t do here what they did in Iraq.’
There was a strong air of the self-made man about Muhammad and perhaps this, along with his political past, reminded me of my father. He spoke in a lecturing way, a little pleased with himself, certain of all that he said. The conversation created a premature intimacy between us. Then he seemed embarrassed to have begun on so serious a note. He suggested we walk to a restaurant for lunch and ushered me out of the boardroom. The quiet side-street where he had his office led on to the city’s main avenue, Vali Asr – where I would find myself again for less appetising reasons, in the days to come. For now it was painted in the spring sunlight that came in patches through the chenars, the Oriental plane, a magnificent tree, redolent of the Kashmir Valley, with a broad canopy and leaves like the hands of a child. At one end of Vali Asr were the mountains, so close that morning that they seemed part of a film set. The avenue was lined with coffee shops, women’s clothing stores, small businesses, hotels and embassies. It also housed the Discplinary (sic) Force of the Islamic Republic of Iran. On certain nights cars would collect in a line along the avenue and car-flirting would begin. It was a Tehrani activity in which carfuls of boys rolled past carfuls of girls, looks were exchanged, smiles, paper chits, and if the bearded men showed up, the scene scattered.
The restaurant was called Bistango. It was down a short flight of stairs, a smart, well-lit place, with crisp white tablecloths, heavy glasses and peach-coloured wallpaper. The manager knew Muhammad and, greeting him warmly, seated us at a table in the centre of the room. Muhammad scanned the other tables quickly, as people do when they’re having lunch at a place where they’re used to running into people they know. The other diners were mostly older men in dark suits and I could almost have felt I was in a corporate lunch place in mid-town Manhattan. It seemed natural to reach for a wine list.
I hadn’t seen Muhammad since I was a small boy in India, but when he said he had returned to Iran in 1980, between revolution and war, I realised I must have known him as a visitor to India, and not when he was living there. In 1980, the entire Muslim world was in spate: events from the year before – the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, the attack on the Grand Mosque in Mecca and the execution of Zulfikar Ali Bhutto – would bring a decade of political Islam sponsored by the Saudis, Pakistani intelligence and the CIA.
‘So, right in the middle of things?’
‘Yes.’ He smiled, as if surprised himself by what an eventful year it was. ‘Seven days after I came back the war started.’
The war with Iraq became the instrument by which Khomeini was to enforce the Islamic Republic, eliminate all opposition and extend the war into the carnage it became. Half a million Iranians died. It was started by Saddam Hussein and prolonged by Khomeini. The Iraqis, backed by the Americans, lost half a million people too. Those numbers, and so recently, had to be remembered; it was the event that touched people’s lives even more than the revolution.
But 1980 was still a year of possibility in Iran: the Shah and Savak, his vindictive secret service, had gone the year before; a wide political spectrum was still in play; the religious regime had not begun in force and some even believed that Khomeini might step down now that the revolution had come.
‘If I had entered politics at that time,’ Muhammad smiled again, as if withholding a secret, ‘I could be at the level of a minister now, you know. The guy who’s the foreign minister today was also Indian-educated, but I realised from an early age that politics was a very dirty business and I never wanted to enter it.’
Muhammad returned to Iran with an Indian wife and a small child. The foreground of his young life mapped perfectly on to the drama of Iran’s revolution and war. But despite his own success, financial and personal, against the toughest odds, he became disenchanted with the revolution he had proclaimed in India. Looking at me from deep within his finely made glasses, he said, ‘You know why we had the revolution?’
‘Why?’ I asked, after some silence, in which his mood seemed to change from combative to maudlin.
‘Because the people had nothing else to do,’ he said. ‘There was so much money from oil that even a teacher could take his family on a tour of Europe. The people had everything. Every one of us students had scholarships to go abroad for university. We didn’t understand the meaning of any of it! The Shah was introducing democracy. We thought democracy meant standing outside his palace yelling, “Down with the Shah!” We were moving too fast. The Shah considered himself a modern man and he was moving the country too fast with President Carter behind him, yelling at him to go faster.’ Muhammad had been one of the people outside the palace, yelling, ‘Down with the Shah!’
‘You know I spent forty-five days in prison here under the Shah?’ He grinned, relishing the surprise it caused. ‘Yes – because we stormed the Iranian Embassy in India and took the ambassador hostage. There was a student demonstrator who had come from Iran to India. The Iranian government wanted him and had asked the Indian government to extradite him to Iran. So we broke into the embassy and took the ambassador hostage in his office.
‘The ambassador swore to us,’ Muhammad went on, after a dramatic pause, ‘in this fatherly voice, on his dignity and honour, that it was not him who had issued the extradition order. He said it in such a nice and fatherly voice that we believed him. We let him go. There was nothing we could have done anyway. We didn’t have any guns or knives or anything. Only after we had let him go did we get hold of the records of who had issued the order.’ He paused again. ‘It was him!
‘Some time later, I was at a celebration in Tehran and I saw him. He saw me too and sent for me. When I went up to him, I reminded him that it had been me in the embassy that day. He said, “I know.”
‘“Why did you swear on your integrity and lie?” I asked him. And, do you know what he told me?’
‘What?’
‘He said, “Politics does not understand integrity. Take my word for it, you have a bright future ahead of you. Stay out of politics.” Before I left, he said to me, “If you’re ever in the same situation as me, please remember my words.”
‘I was so angry!’ Muhammad cried, reliving the feeling from that time. ‘I went around saying, “Our leaders are terrible.”
‘It was only later,’ he said, a touch of sadness entering his voice, ‘when the revolution happened and we stormed the Iranian Embassy . . . It was me who suggested we do it, by the way, and declare the revolution. You know we held the embassy the entire nigh
t until the Indian government recognised the Iranian revolution. That night I was around people who were drinking and partying; the next day they stood at a formal ceremony in front of the embassy reading the Koran! It was then that I remembered what the ambassador had said to me.’
He stopped to gauge my reaction and, perhaps feeling I had misunderstood him, glowered at me. ‘I have nothing against drinking – but then to stand there and read the Koran! I didn’t stay. I told them that my university was very hard and that I had to go back. It was then that I decided to stay away from politics.’
Muhammad was shocked that the religious revolution had been a cover for something else. I was less surprised. Before the revolution, Iran was bombarded with a wide distillation of foreign influences, the onslaught of the world beyond. Very quickly that world came to be linked with Tehran nightclubs, half-dressed women on television and the excesses of the Shah and the wealthy Westernised circle around him. It was oil money that brought the sudden wealth to Iran, and yet Iran was not Saudi Arabia; it had a significant educated and professional middle class; its collapse was not easily explained. Neither, once the old system was dismantled, were the religious ecstasies and retreat that followed.
But hearing the innocence of Muhammad’s story, it was possible to believe his description of the almost childish wilfulness with which the world was taken apart. I was not nearly as appalled as Muhammad by his fellow revolutionaries drinking at night and reading the Koran the next day. But for Muhammad, who might truly have believed in the faith as providing the guidelines for a new world, this was the first wrong step. It was as if what had been rejected would always have been more powerful than what was meant to supplant it. But could any Islamic Utopia have been pure enough? His idealism, his religious idealism increased my eagerness to see the country the revolution had created.
In Muhammad, that idealism had been replaced with a kind of Islamic doubt, a world of cobwebs, oil companies and the foreign hand; a suspicion about the work of men. The Iranian Revolution happened in part as a response to this meddling foreign hand, but even now, after the country’s closing off, he felt it had not been complete enough; he still felt his country was being played with.
‘You know,’ he said, ‘we had everything, but I sometimes wish we hadn’t had oil because that brought all the attention from outside. Even now with this atomic-energy business, the Chinese and Russians support the government because they want oil. The Americans have put up with this Ahmadinejad because he makes it possible for them to play a role in the region.’
‘You think he’s their guy?’ I asked, with some wonder how Muhammad could believe that the Iranian president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the man who with every passing day came to seem like America’s nemesis, was an American stooge?
‘One hundred per cent,’ Muhammad replied. ‘You have to look at his political career. Where did this guy come from? Nowhere. Nobody supports what he says. Wipe Israel off the map? Who are we to wipe Israel off the map when even the Palestinians haven’t been able to do it?’
Seeing the scepticism form in my face, Muhammad said, ‘It’s like when I was sixteen and in love with a Christian girl. I wanted to get to know her so I arranged with my friend that he would push her. The plan was that when I saw this I would slap him, and like that I’d be able to get close to her. So, when the moment came I really slapped him hard and the girl and I became friends.’
The friend in the story stood for Ahmadinejad, Muhammad for America and the girl for Iran.
‘This is how it is with America,’ Muhammad went on. ‘They need a problem in the country so that they can get involved.’
‘But isn’t the president in Iran just a puppet of the mullahs?’ I said, playing along.
‘Yes, but they’re in with the Americans too,’ Muhammad returned.
‘You think Khomeini was?’
‘Absolutely. Otherwise, how did he fly into the country on a private plane from Paris? We have such a great country,’ he spat, ‘but it’s just this bloody politics.’ It was remarks like these that could make conversations in the Islamic world seem to contain an element of fantasy.
Then, with no warning, Muhammad asked me if I knew who Cyrus, the classical Persian king, was. It was a shift in conversation that reflected the extent to which the new regime was a reminder of old, historical wounds.
‘The Achaemenian king? Yes.’ Cyrus the Great in the sixth century BC founded what became a vast global empire, the first of its kind, and whose further expansion led to the legendary wars with Greece.
‘Cyrus two thousand five hundred years ago had laws that today are displayed in the United Nations!’ Muhammad exploded. ‘He set out human rights and said that no human being has the right to enslave other beings. This was two thousand five hundred years ago! And these mullahs try and tell us that if the Arabs hadn’t come and saved us we’d be eating ants now.’
Muhammad was talking about much more than politics now. I was amazed by the freshness of this fifteen-hundred-year-old history, resurrected by the Islamic Revolution in Iran. The awareness Iranian Muslims had of the time before Islam, and their conversion, didn’t exist among the sub-continent’s Muslims, most of whom believed they came with the Muslim invader.
Muhammad spoke with such passion about distant history that it seemed his words contained some other, hidden meaning. In Bistango’s air-conditioned seclusion his tone, and not his actual words, seemed to speak of a more real and closer threat.
‘And you know what’s worst?’ Mohammad cried. ‘They burnt our libraries and books. They tried to kill Farsi!’ he ranted. ‘Avicenna was a Persian writing in Arabic!’
Returning finally to the regime, he said that in textbooks they were shortening the country’s pre-Islamic history. ‘And this is what I always say,’ he continued, his voice dropping. ‘The youth of today are strangers to their history. I met one of the people from the regime the other day – they had invited me to represent the private sector – and I told him that you can’t make the youth strangers to their history. You can’t build a country like that.’
In the end, he came full circle back to despair. But his earlier urgency and the hint of hysteria in his voice lingered. They took hold of this last idea of his, haunting as it was, of being estranged from history. And from this big, jovial man I had not expected so abstract, and shrill, a cry of loss.
Rupture
A pact of secrecy had made my parents’ relationship possible, but soon after they went to Dubai, leaving me with my grandparents in Delhi, this pact began to unravel. News of my birth was travelling.
In Dubai, there was a false alarm. My father was cooking dinner when his sister’s husband walked up to him and said, ‘How’s Aatish?’ My father dropped the pan he was holding and recovered himself only when he realised that his brother-in-law didn’t in fact know of my existence, but was using my name – not normally used to mean ‘fire’ in a banal sense – to check the stove’s fire.
But soon after, real transfers of information began. Uncles of my mother who had been at the reception in Delhi went to Lahore for a rare school reunion at Aitchison College where they made enquiries about the Pakistani she was said to have married. My father’s eldest daughter, a teenager by then, heard about me from an aunt and confronted him. Until that point, my father might have believed he could lead two lives. He had said to my mother – in that time before mobile phones and email – that there had been no contact between the two countries for so long, why should there be any now? But as news spread, my father, more determined than ever to be in politics in Pakistan and knowing it would be impossible with an Indian wife and half-Indian son, began to lose his nerve; and, as secrecy unravelled, so did my parents’ relationship.
After they had spent a short time apart, my mother rejoined my father in London, bringing me with her. She found him changed. He was colder, more aloof, and as she walked about their flat off Baker Street, she saw from the long, black hairs strewn around the place that he had
had an affair. It was a public affair with a well-known Indian actress, and my mother felt sure that he had wanted her to find out about it so that she would end their relationship. Many years later, my father’s sister told me he had written to the papers himself to publicise the affair. He wanted his relationship with my mother to seem like part of the excesses of a Pakistani playboy, rather than a serious involvement with an Indian woman. He calculated correctly: his affair with the Indian actress ended their relationship.
My father left, and my mother and I stayed on for a few months at the Baker Street flat. They saw each other only a few times after that, once formally to decide what would be done with me. My father’s approach was ‘Either you take him or I do, but it must be a clean separation.’ My mother was clear that she would have me, but she hadn’t anticipated how ugly things would become over money. My father had given her a thousand pounds, but when she wrote to him asking for more, he accused her of being a ‘bottomless pit’.
By 1982 my mother, still in London, was borrowing from friends. She sold the diamond earrings her grandmother had given her – one of the few family heirlooms to survive that sudden departure in 1947 – at a shop off Bond Street. In the spring of that year, my father let her know through a mutual friend that she had to leave the Baker Street flat. ‘Where should I go?’ she asked.
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