‘I don’t know,’ the friend replied, ‘but you have to go.’
My father had told her that the flat had been bought for me, and at first she resisted leaving, even changing the locks, but when he threatened to inform British Immigration of irregularities in her visa, she gave in.
By the summer, she had moved back to Delhi and my father to Pakistan. Soon after, he was married again, and the following year he had the first of three more children. What I heard of my father over the next two decades came from my mother. She supported us with her career as a political reporter in India, covering secessionist movements and terrorism, first in Punjab and later in Kashmir. Because she was a political journalist we followed my father’s progress across the border closely, through multiple imprisonments in the 1980s, to the restoration of democracy and Benazir Bhutto’s landslide victory in 1988, to the failed governments of the 1990s and his eventual exit from politics. His fears of being politically harmed by his connection to me were perhaps real, and despite our separation, his opponents would distribute copies of my birth certificate to undermine his bid for election.
It was during the years that I was growing up in Delhi that I had my first questions about my father, but like so much else about that early absence, they were lost in confusion and laughter. One day, my second-year teacher telephoned my mother, concerned that I was suffering from some kind of emotional disturbance. When my mother asked her why she felt this, she said I showed a tendency to tell wild, obviously untrue stories. My mother pressed her and she said she had asked the class what their fathers did for a living and I replied, ‘My father is in jail.’
‘It’s absolutely true,’ my mother said, and left it at that.
Then, aged seven, I met a friend of my mother’s, and discovering his name was Salman, asked him, to my mother’s great embarrassment, whether he was Salmaan, my father.
We lived at first on our own in a small terrace flat, for which my grandmother paid the rent, and later with my grandparents in the small house, past the flyover, from which I would go to the Lutyens bungalow on the neem-lined avenue.
When I was very young, my mother explained her separation from my father in terms of a fight with a friend, not unlike those I had routinely with my friends. When my questions became more sophisticated, she told me about his political career and how it would have been impossible if we had been in his life. And though I didn’t have a good impression of my father, I don’t think I had a bad one either. My mother was always very clear about who he was. She supported my interest in meeting him, and made sure that I saw the Pakistani friends they had in common whenever any came to India. She seemed also for many years, and I don’t know how I know this, still to be in love with him, or at least thought of their relationship, as the big love affair of her life. She often said, ‘Sometimes people come together for a reason, to create something or someone, and then they go their own ways.’ This made me think, at least when I was child, of my father’s departure as something unavoidable for which no one was to blame. My grandfather, of course, made it seem like just one more chapter in the Partition saga he had lived through.
When I was eight or nine, I wrote my father a letter, expressing my desire to see him, which I sent with my mother to Pakistan where she was covering the election. ‘If I see him, I’ll give it to him,’ she said, ‘but be prepared that he may not reply. What will you do if he doesn’t?’
‘I’ll leave it and never get in touch with him again.’
As it happened, with my mother covering the election and my father contesting it, they did run into each other. My mother gave him my letter. He took it and told her he would reply, but never did. And for years I made no effort to contact him again.
The Tyranny of Trifles
At the start of my third week in Iran, I sat with Muhammad’s son, Payam, in the food court of a mall. The regime had taken away a friend of his.
‘Disappeared?’
‘Yes, for one year.’
The mall had been shut down by the government for promoting ‘mingling’, but had recently reopened. Its top floor had brightly painted walls and brushed-steel chairs and overlooked a park. It seemed to commit no more offence than offering bad world cuisine, but I soon saw that it attracted undesirables in the Islamic Republic. As we came in, an effeminate boy in low jeans and a black tank top, with spiky hair, dozens of earrings and glittering blue mascara kissed three times a more discreetly dressed figure with greasy coils. They giggled at the entrance for some minutes, then vanished into an alcove. The Islamic Republic had put homosexuals to death and it was in little glimpses like this – from a yellow and black polka-dot scarf to my driver, Hussein, insisting I play ‘Like A Prayer’ from my iPod at top volume as he rolled down his windows – that I saw gestures of dissent every day in Tehran.
‘Yes, there was a student demonstration,’ Payam continued, ‘and he just happened to be in the area. He wasn’t taking part, just buying something nearby. They started rounding up students and they took him along because he was there. His family, his friends, no one knew where he was.’ Payam was an industrial-engineering student in his early twenties. Unlike his father, he was quiet and soft-spoken. He had large, sorrowful eyes and dark skin, inherited from his Indian mother. He seemed protected and young.
‘And then, a year later, they just released him on a road somewhere. He’s so scaredy now, he doesn’t go out after seven. He’s scaredy of everything. He told us what they did with him.’
‘What?’
‘They would make him and the other guys stand in a half-filled pool of water up to their waists. Then they would put on a cooler, an air-conditioner, over them and if they moved out from under it, they would hit them . . .’ His English wasn’t good and he reached for the word. ‘With cables,’ he said unsurely.
‘Where is he now?’
‘He’s in Tabriz. He’s so scaredy of everything. He came back really thin. He used to have perfect eyesight. Now, he wears glass that are this thick.’
Payam left half an inch between his thumb and index finger. I asked if I could meet his friend and he said he would speak to him, but he thought there was little chance; he had become paranoid. Listening to Payam, I was struck by how unlikely a character he was to be near a story like this. In another country, it would be possible to describe him as a nerd or even a mama’s boy, but in the Islamic Republic, no one’s innocence was spared. Everyone had stories like this.
In Syria, I felt that when the faith was made to explain aspects of the world beyond its circle of completeness, such as how rights and judiciaries worked in a modern society, it could force the faith into trifles. I also felt that it could force the faith into hypocrisy. But I was really saying the same thing: that when the faith was made to understand a world that was beyond its grasp, a world that could feel like an affront, for reasons other than faith, it could end up, as it imposed its simplicities, in doing the little right at the cost of committing a greater wrong.
But while Abdullah in Turkey was just one man, and Abu Nour in Syria just one mosque, the Islamic Republic was an entire country that had been passed through an Islamic filter. The emphasis on trifles, and the hypocrisies that came with it, had been institutionalised, turned into a form of control over the people who posed the greatest threat to the republic: its young.
In my optimism, I had missed something important. When I saw that Iranians were no longer looking to religion to solve their problems, I concluded that they were on a healthier path than other Muslim countries I had visited. But though the mosques were empty in Tehran, though I hardly ever heard the call to prayer, never saw a woman fully veiled or a man with a beard, unless he was a government man, the revolution had not been kind; it had brutalised its children. And where religious feeling had departed, new psychoses had crept in. People had been twisted. There were small signs of this as I made my way up from the south, but it was only after seeing Tehran and the shrill panic it could awaken, that it was possible to kno
w how bad the revolution had been.
Amir only ever wore black. He wore loose black trousers with a collarless black shirt. His hair was long, as was his beard, and he wandered about barefoot. We shared a taxi one day and the driver asked why he was wearing black.
‘For me, every day is Ashura,’ he replied, referring to the tenth and most bloody day of the Shia mourning.
Amir was a film director and lived with his beautiful actress wife, Anahita, in a small house in a residential colony in northern Tehran. The couple were part of the country’s loudest collective dissenting voice: its film industry. Over the past two decades, it had produced some of the strongest films anywhere in the world. But the industry, which grew in the brief spring it had been allowed under President Khatami, was now being suppressed. Ahmadinejad’s government had given permission for no more than two or three films in the last year and Anahita’s most recent film had been shot without permission, secretly, in Kurdistan. ‘I feel as if I’m starting to censor myself,’ she said, her almond-shaped eyes widening. ‘My thinking is changing. I don’t think of things outside the censorship because I know it won’t be possible. It’s terrible because I know that this is what they want.’ We sat in their small, cluttered kitchen. Its colourful cabinets, little stove, solitary table and weak light from bulbs and candles gave it a protected atmosphere. A big spring night came in through an open door that led onto a paved veranda. Anahita, her thick black hair in a plait, talked between preparing yoghurt, kebabs, salad and Iranian smoked rice.
Amir poured us red wine and a newly invented cocktail called Whisky Albaloo. Alcohol was banned in the Islamic Republic, but could be bought fairly easily through bootleggers and in grocery shops once they knew you. ‘The people suffer from a kind of schizophrenia,’ Amir said, ‘because in the day even a little girl has her head covered in school and has to learn about religion, but when she comes back there’s no religion and she takes her headscarf off.’ I realised I had heard the same words in reverse from Abdullah in Istanbul. ‘For example,’ he had said, ‘I would go to school, and Atatürk was in school, just in school. Outside there was no Atatürk.’
‘Have you seen the mosques?’ Amir said. ‘They’re empty except for a few people and Basiji. People use them as bathrooms!’ The Basiji were a militia of young Iranian men whom the regime allowed to enforce religious morality. ‘They’re like a different species of people,’ Amir said. ‘If you look in their eyes, they seem like a different species. We call them Homo Islamicos.’
Anahita’s father was a theatre director whose plays the regime suppressed. On one occasion the censors showed up three hours before his play was to go on and made him perform the play, itself three hours long. When it was over, they proposed cuts and revisions. He said he couldn’t possibly introduce them at this late stage. They said he would have to or they would stop the performance. The actors did the best they could, but the regime’s inspectors were not pleased and during the interval, the theatre owner appeared to say that there had been a power cut. The director turned to his audience and asked if they would mind the actors performing the rest of the play in the dark, using light from candles and torches. There was a roar of approval. But the owner declined, stating a security risk. He turned them out on to the street where they saw that the entire neighbourhood, but for the little theatre, had lights.
Amir told the story not to show artistic repression in the Islamic Republic but to point out the sophistication of the regime’s methods. ‘You say Syria is a police state,’ he said. ‘In Iran, they’ve planted the police state in our heads.’
A candlelit sadness lingered in the kitchen as Amir and Anahita spoke. My heart went out to the young Iranians I met. Anahita described Iran as a place where she felt she kept hitting her head as she tried to grow: ‘There is no appreciation for what I do here, no appreciation, and that’s why I’ll have to leave one day.’
I didn’t think she would. Her resistance was like a kind of addiction. It would be difficult to feel as worthwhile elsewhere. And, besides, there must have been some appreciation because everyone knew her name. For people with no outlet, it was a different matter.
In Tehran, I reconnected with Reza, a young vet I had met on my journey north. He was a light, jovial character with floppy black hair and teeth that clambered over one another, but when he spoke of the Islamic regime, his lightness vanished. ‘It’ll be the death of this religion at least in Iran. Seriously, if they continue like this, religion in this country is finished. Do you know how many spiritual groups are cropping up now? There are Hare Krishnas, a man who teaches the Mahabharata, three hundred followers of the Sai Baba. People understand they need spirituality, but they are sick of this religion.’
Hare Krishnas in Tehran! I couldn’t believe it. In the Islamic Republic, and in Islam, to convert out of the religion was apostasy, for which the sentence is death. I couldn’t believe people would take risks like that. What interested me was not the rejection of faith – I had met many Muslims without faith – but the potential rejection of its political and historical character.
Reza roared with laughter when I said I wanted to meet the Hare Krishnas, making me think I had fallen for an elaborate joke. But then he assured me that the Hare Krishnas did exist and said he would speak to his friend, Nargis. He warned me that he thought her teacher, Gulbadi, was a fraud. ‘He teaches celibacy!’ Reza cried. ‘The whole country is exploding with sexual frustration and he teaches celibacy!’ A few minutes later he rang again with Nargis’s number, saying she was expecting my call.
The voice on the telephone seemed much older. It was slow, languid, and though the words came, there were no extra words, no colloquialisms, to iron out the discomfort of a first conversation. Nargis wanted to know what my project was, and though I was happy to tell her, I was nervous for her sake and mine about speaking on the telephone. We arranged finally to meet at her flat early the next morning. She said she would speak to the taxi-driver and explain where to come.
For the rest of that day a sly, superstitious uneasiness crept up on me, as if I had been right to be nervous about talking to Nargis on the telephone. It began at a lunch appointment with Violet, a half-German, half-Iranian ex-journalist who came to me through the Rahimis. I had found no equivalent in Iran of Eyup and Nedal, the students who helped me in Turkey and Syria, and I was beginning to need help, especially as I planned to travel to the religious cities of Qom and Mashhad in the next few weeks. Violet had been a reporter in Iran for a major Western news agency for many years and I thought she might be able to suggest someone safe and reliable.
I met her at her house in a dim room with heavy carpets. She was a pale, watchful girl, who had spent the last few years surrounded by sickness and death. She and her German mother had nursed her Iranian father who, after many months of illness, had just died. Violet was still finding her feet, still seeming to take solace from the endless duties that arise when someone dies. She had quit her job in the hope of writing a book, but found herself too tired and ‘burnt out’ to begin. The story she wanted to tell was semi-autobiographical and linked to other Iranian women’s stories, but the material was sensitive and she didn’t have the strength for it. The other reason she had left her job was because after 9/11 her employers pressured her to come up with certain angles and stories that amplified the dangers of radical Islam. It had been too much of a strain. I felt more than her fatigue in her: in that low, dark room, still heavy with the late presence of death, I felt her disturbance.
In the taxi on the way to lunch she asked me not to talk because it made her feel sick. She rolled down her window and looked out. We passed Vanak Square, at this hour crowded with buses, taxis and pedestrians. Even in bright sunshine, Tehran had a vertical, gassy quality; the light didn’t burn away the city’s black edges, or its fever. Violet stared at a green patch in the middle of the square, then turned to me and said she could recall when public floggings happened there; they had stopped under Khatami. It was hard to gra
ft that image onto the square: it was so ordinary and congested, like a bus terminal. There was special menace in thinking of that desert cruelty transposed to the drab, municipal atmosphere of Vanak Square, with its crowds and traffic.
We went to an air-conditioned windowless restaurant decorated with mirrors and Persian scenes of banquets and the hunt. Once we sat down, Violet became more relaxed. She said she knew a few people she could call about my work in Tehran. She suggested Jasib, a young Iranian who had worked with her at the press agency. She said that when he arrived he had been very religious and conservative, but had opened up at work and improved his English. He was now working night shifts at another news agency and she thought he would be an ideal guide for me.
As she described her work as a journalist in Iran, I began to feel that Violet, with a foot in and a foot out of the Islamic Republic, was even more damaged than the people whose stories she recorded. She was over-exposed. I could see why she was having trouble with her writing. She was like an artist who had begun a creative work that took more and more out of her until she was too implicated in it to continue. She covered the 1999 student protests, which had led to a severe crackdown from the regime. Earlier that morning I had driven past the dormitories where it had taken place. I had wanted to stop but it was forbidden. The regime’s men had forced students to jump from their windows and the site had become an unmarked memorial to those who died. ‘They had thought a revolution would happen,’ Violet said, ‘and basically it didn’t. They counted on Khatami coming out in support of them, but there was just a neutral statement from his office. It was very disappointing.’ Violet added that though many felt Khatami hadn’t gone far enough, a great deal was accomplished in those years, especially in the area of press and individual freedom.
Stranger to History Page 13
