Strangers in a foreign land

I don't remember what kind of day it was in September 1979 when we returned home from the park to find my father waiting for us, whether the sun was shining or if it was raining. I do remember that it was before my 10th birthday, so it was early in the month. But that, I had already learned, was no guarantee of the weather. This refusal of the weather to reflect the season was one of the many things I had discovered about London in the three months we had been there alone: my mother, sister and me.

My father was still in Iran, putting our affairs in order, guarded by Kurdish peshmerga in our house in Tehran. They had been put there by one of his nephews – a revolutionary but more loyal to the blood ties with his uncle than to the nascent revolution. Every day, my father had to dance a complicated dance to stay one step ahead of the vigilantes of the newly born Islamic republic who he knew would soon come looking for him. My father had got out just in time, taking a series of flights in a convoluted itinerary that got him safely out of Iran and over to us in Britain. Uncharacteristically, my sister and I threw ourselves into his arms and he, also uncharacteristically, embraced us back.

The revolution had changed everything. Not just the very structure of our lives – we no longer lived in Iran surrounded by family, I no longer understood the language surrounding me, we no longer lived in a roomy house with a large garden – it also changed my parents. My mother went about the daily chores as normally as possible, seeking out Middle Eastern markets in London to buy ingredients then not available in supermarkets – coriander, mint, parsley, fenugreek – to make us feel at home. Our first visit to the supermarket together had been disappointing: this was London before shelves of foreign food and exotic fruit became commonplace. We were used to cornucopian markets where we bought fruit, herbs and meat in kilos, not ones and twos. Our fruit baskets, which were always proudly displayed on the table, groaned under the weight and variety of fruit on offer – pomegranates, pears, peaches, tiny green grapes as sweet as honey, small delicious cucumbers, which we would peel and eat sprinkled with salt. Yoghurt, which we ate with every meal and made at home, was different in England – it came in tiny cartons and was mixed with fruit and an unbearable quantity of sugar. It was all disturbing in a subtle, visceral way, a constant drip-drip of unfamiliarity that underlined for us at every mealtime the constant and indigestible truth – we were no longer allowed to live at home, in the country that we loved.

My mother did her best to cushion this blow and, though she couldn't reproduce the noisy mealtimes in Iran when we sat down to eat with a bevy of cousins and aunts, she could at least reproduce some of the food we were familiar with. I later found out that she wept at leaving home and family only in the rare moments when there was no one to see her crumble. To us she seemed strong and upright, more or less herself, marching me off once a week to the stables in Hyde Park where I was learning to ride and losing herself on a park bench for an hour of uninterrupted grieving while I was trotting around the park, out of sight.

My mother may have done everything in her power to protect us from the trauma of leaving home by maintaining a routine, but my father was nothing like the man I had known in Iran. Suddenly he was a brooding presence around the small flat we had rented in Notting Hill. In Iran, he had been a director of the national oil company, his status and position assured, a particular coup for a man who had come from the remote province of Kurdistan, a boy with no powerful family or connections who had risen from nowhere to be selected by the state to go to university in Britain – and bring his education back to serve his country, a true symbol of the meritocracy that Reza Shah tried to impose to help modernise Iran.

In the heady days of Iran's Opec power, my father travelled the world, and sometimes we went with him, feeding the pigeons in Trafalgar Square, sampling giant steaks in Texas, walking the Golden Gate bridge. We trailed in his wake like comets, he shining bright and as powerful as the sun. He was remote but seemingly omniscient, and I craved his approval.

But in London, my father was diminished. We were political refugees in Britain, so my father could not work; he was unable to go out into the world with the status to which he had become accustomed and which had defined him. He was at home all the time, sitting on the sofa, searching for news, either in the papers, on the World Service or on television. He had a small transistor radio and spent much time fiddling with the dial until he found a station broadcasting from Iran, the crackling words reaching us from what felt like light years away; another world in which the sound of the azan (the call to prayer) had become the only music ever heard and instead of world news, what was broadcast was hours of prayers and sermons by the newly appointed Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Khomeini.

Around this time, my father started to smoke and the fog surrounding him made the atmosphere in the small flat even more claustrophobic. We would arrive home from school to the tiny flat and try to occupy ourselves without lamenting the big house we had left, our big garden where I had climbed the tall, straight palm tree that shot up from the front lawn, where I had led the neighbourhood kids on expeditions up the bougainvillea-covered walls and across the flat roofs of the houses on our street.

In London we were closed in. There were no neighbourhoods to explore or kids to lead on missions of mischief. Here it was forbidden to go out without my parents. I still didn't speak the language and spent most of my days in a cloud of mortification, understanding nothing.

After a few weeks of this claustrophobia, my father started to go out in the evenings, alone. He would not come home until after I was asleep, but the rows between him and my mother when he did come home often woke me. One day, I came back from school to find his moustache shaved off, leaving him disconcertingly clean-faced, his top lip thin and unfamiliar. He sat across the room holding a cigarette, and waited for me to greet him with kisses. I stood at the door, unable to do so, even when my mother called out to prompt me. I ran to my room instead, upset beyond words. It was the first time I disrespected my father. It was not to be the last.

Eventually we moved from that flat, I learned enough English not to feel mortified at school and my father got involved in a new business. Life opened up around us again and we learned to live a semblance of normality in our new home. My father stopped smoking one day, as suddenly as he had started, but he never grew his moustache back and our relationship was to remained strained for years, the silences mostly only broken by a terrible cacophony of fighting as my teenage hormones and British education loosened my tongue in violent verbal attacks against him. Because there, at the age of 10, started my rebellion against my father, that year when both the Shah and he fell from grace.

As I grew up, however, as surely as I came to terms with the loss of my country, I also began to realise a little of what my father must have suffered in that first year, how shattering the experience of the revolution had been for him. Although he has still never spoken of his feelings, or of that time, I have matured enough to understand him for his depression and anger then; my feelings for him softened and the cloud that had hung over us in London began to clear until finally, and unequivocally, I came to respect my father anew. Even more so, in fact, once I realised all he had gained through his hard work, and all that he had subsequently lost.

Source: The Guardian