The Six Sisters
Like Wilma in "The Simpsons" and her two sisters .... my father had six of them .....
Only two of the six sisters had gotten round their father and had managed to get married . It was probably because of the "Partition" of India and Pakistan. This historical event changed everything they knew . They managed to survive the changes and they became independent through their "sisterhood". Fortunately they found work in the new country as english speakers and made it in the old Homeland ie Persia .
They had left India during the Partitian , because my grandfather feared for his daughters life and security. The changes took a lot of the family to Pakistan. My father had been in the Indian Army and had opted out and had joined the Pakistani side. He and some others in the family had been serving the British army and there had been colleagues of his who had spent time in Europe during the II WW. He had told the family living in sleepy Indian towns , about what was happening in Europe.
It seemed unbelievable that anything similar to the second world war could happen in India .... no one hardly believed him when he told them of the changes about to take place ...
For many years I couldnt understand why my grandfather had left such a good position at work and his life style and respectability in the Persian comunity in Mysore and Banglore . He had disrupted the life of his young daughters. Now i do comprehend ..... Leaving India and making the effort was a huge risk and he was enterprising enough to take the leap. While other people in the Persian community stayed on and adapted .....
some of them had already achieved very high positions as one Sir Mirza who was devan to the Maharajah and who had friendship and affection for people of the family who exibited talent . His own great grand child would become a diplomat and ambassador for India.
Mr Shushtari Mehrin was a sort of Patriarch and i used to call him "a self made man" but now i realize he was "a God made man" ((Victoria Osteen) was part of a group of priviledged courtisans . By leaving India he would loose out on his life style and a lot of other priviledges, but he would reach his own personal dream of going back to the Homeland which his forefathers had left. He had always thought of rediscovering it . Perhaps you could see that he had chosen the right moment even if the task of moving was very difficult; The family would have to lower their living standards and make an effort to adapt to new ways. There is a film called "Train to Pakistan " which paints a believable picture of what went on back then .... it made me realize that sometimes you need to make a big decision !
My grandfather had had a very adventurous life in his youth .... the merchant ship had taken him to Japan and Europe and then to the US where he stayed for some years , studying at university. He had returned to India to marry his first cousin.
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Mr Shushtari's wife who was called by a persian name "Monireh", was from a very traditional family , but there was a lot of love and affection between them when they got married . Infact my grandfather would complain that he had not wanted to have nine children at all , but there had been no birth controle to help them keep the numbers down. He recomended a smaller family to his grandchildren .
Monireh had been born in Iraq in a wealthy merchant family and she had seen her husband to be in the courtyard of their residence in the city of Basra one hot summer afternoon . She had been watching the stranger from behind the curtains of her windows. She lived a very protected life and hardly ever met anyone who wasnt from their family or acquintances. The young man had just arrived at their door and out of the blue presenting himself as a relative. and a cousin No one had believed him at first because he had looked like a poor disheveled man with no one to prove who he was.
He had . come back from his travels which had taken him to the united states and having arrived in India he had travelled to Iraq in a carriage, but had had to walk across the desert where their carriage had broken down. He had only managed to save himself from various difficult situations and had arrived at his uncles place . He had finally convinced his relatives that he was really who he said he was .
He had started to travel out when he was eighteen and had spent some years working on a cargo ship which belonged to his relatives and he had travelled in the south east of asia. There had been a jappanese lady in his life but then he had gone out to europe and then to the United States where he had lived through and survived the earthquake of 1906 in San francisco .
Wki says ; Despite the utter devastation, San Francisco quickly recovered from the earthquake, and the destruction actually allowed planners to create a new and improved city. A classic Western boomtown, San Francisco had grown in a haphazard manner since the Gold Rush of 1849. Working from a nearly clean slate, San Franciscans were able to rebuild the city with a more logical and elegant structure.
He had lived and studied there for several years and had he stayed on ... he would have been an American ! Infact it was because of the advice of his professor at the university where he was studying that he left and came back to the middle east. He had been told to "Follow his heart".
He told me that he had gone to the university to ask how to enroll and telling the man he met there that he didnt have much money to pay towards the fees , this person who was the professor and the teacher had given him the broom he had been sweeping with and had said ; "we can exchange work for the tuition fees" ..... After some time spent going to the school he was invited to the teachers house for sunday lunch and during the dinner table conversations he had told the hosting family at the table , that he loved the King of Persia which was and that he loved the history of his country more than anything else.
It was a sort of pre arranged marriage and his wife had been a woman who wore the veil and liked to remain in the home . It was difficult for her to adapt to her husbands travelling life and she had had to go to live in India and follow him where his carreer took him . She had never been interested in her husbands social life at the university or at court. That was why Sharbanoo their second eldest daughter accompanied her father on social occasions and acted as his secretary.
When she was married Sharbanoo always stood next to her indian husband and her father in the annual family pictures . She had married at a very late age of thirty She told me that she had had a glamorous sort of life at court because she had been the companion of the Maharajas daughters . However even if she had a full social life at court and even played the piano and played tennis , her father would not allow her to get married to people who he didnt consider to be from the right . background . He was adamant that her daughters should marry into shiite families. That was the reason why she had had to wait for him to decide who she was to marry
My fathers sisters had had a privileged life style since Mr Shushtari was working as a Professor at the University of Mysore . He had a big house and a carriage at his disposal
Sharbanoo had grown up in a western school because she was a friend and a companion of the Maharajas daughters .... "a lady in waiting " and she went to an english missionary school and wore modern clothes .
Sharbanoos eldest sister Mah bajee had been lucky because being the first child she had had the opportunity to choose her own partner . She was called Mahrokh ( face similar to the Moon) much beloved by their father because she benefited from a friendly communicative and artistic disposition. She was nicknamed shaftaloo (peaches) because of her lovely complection . She had decided to marry for love when she was eighteen quite ignoring her fathers advice about her second cousin and had left the nest early . She was very religious and had made up her mind to follow what she felt was her own path . She eventually had had a happy marriage and a house full of children. She told me about this house in the vicinity of the river she loved where she lived with her husband and family. She lived there even when she lost two of her sons under Saddam' s regime and only left in the seventies when the regime sent a lot of people with persian names walking back through the desert to Iran. .
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Sharbanoo's husband Mr Parvaneh was working for the Anglo-Iranian oil company as a tecnitian and engineer and had a good position.
( Many people in the family started to work for the Anglo -Iranian Oil company which was then called the NIOC when it was nationalized. This nationalisation came about due to the efforts of a polititian called Mossaddegh ]
He was tall for a Pakistani and had an elongated face , and long limbs. I knew him to be a very silent gardener . For many years he had cultivated the fruit trees in his garden as a hobby . When he was a pensioner he pottered around in the land infront of his villa type house . It was an exclusive area built by the Anglo Iranian oil company called Teransar which has now become a overcrowded satelite just outside of Tehran . We all enjoyed going to their place and sitting around among the trees and on the grass , while we chatted and picnicked around his flowers and fruits .
My aunt would always be talking about people and very often about her husband .... she really was in love . She would particularly tell us about her life at the court of the Maharajah , and how her husband cured her of her memories. She was fond of a particular anecdote about how he sat her down one day in the kitchen and he talked to her . What is probably called a very effective pep talk. " I guess it must have been difficult for him to say all he said because he was such a softspoken and silent man. He had noticed how high flying she had been in the past. what he told her would prepare her for her future life. He said:" since we are now married, you have to adapt to a new life style" .
He meant to say that she had to forget the past glamour of the court and live in the present. "We can build a life together if we are a team ! It sounded reasonable enough and since she was willing to learn , she followed him in his plans. Mr parvaneh cultivated his garden for many years but when he was in his sixties one day we had gone to visit the family and we noticed he had a sort of yellowish colour all over .... and since no one ever heard him say anything i was surprised out of my mind when he awnsered my childish question . "why are you yellow?" and he probably said those few last words to me about his illness ... he didnt live to see the revolution happen . He left four children for my aunt to take care of . Lucky for him , his wife had sisters to help her out !
Mr Parveneh my aunt's husband died all of a sudden .... i mean we knew he had yellow fever because he had turned yellow , but since he lived a very healthy and sane life with no bad habits , we thought it was impossible that he should exit the scene so early in life. His children who had never showed great signs of affection certainly bore the loss with difficulty. Infact my cousin Farang who had been the only cousin to play with me when i was a child , totally changed.
My cousin Farangis ( the name of a female epic figure from the Shahnameh ie The Book of Kings) had been a very intelligent student of mathematics at school and there had been talk of a real future talent . Even tho she was sickly and "annorexic looking" and too pale and thin for comfort ..... as a child i was in love with her. She never hesitated to play at dressing up and doing theater and dance with me. She had a suitcase full of clothes with shinny decorations and extravagant looking things like tiaras , Sarees and pieces of cloth. We just had to use our imagination to make up costumes with whatever we found in her box . Later on she went to a painter's atelier and was creating oil paintings with the help of the artist who gave her and Sharzad lessons. This is probably where i received my first obsession with becoming a painter and a creative . . I was about ten years younger and about eight or nine when she was eighteen, but we were on the same page
. It was just before her final collage exams that she lost her father. She had been an angelic young teenager , but after her loss she suddenly changed and became interested in wearing fashinable clothes and going out to restraunts and dancing and to places where good girls usually wouldnt be going on their own. She had become interested in life with a capitle L and having finished college , she was worrying everybody with her female adulthood . it would have been different if she had lived in the west where women had more freedom to live their life . Even my cousin Ameneh who lived in the UK was restrained by family , but since Ameneh 's father was now our uncle Ismile who was a substitute father for my widowed aunts children and he was very much a leftist , she was free from restrictions and even went to live on campus .... in the UK ... it would not affect her reputation. Fortunately my aunt Sharbanoo was able to communicate with her children and to get them to a good place even when they were having their issues.
Farang and Kamran , both entered a crisis and they didnt manage to get over it on their own . My cousin Kamran was at University and into maths and he had to drop out. He was the same age or younger than my brother Taher , but while my brother continued to study and finished his BA in electronics , Kamran had to take pills and stronger stuff to controle his moods. My brother too felt worried and affected because these cousins were very close important childhood friends for him and he was emotionally involved with them . In the good times they had had parties and danced the twist listening to the Beatles and all the bands which were in vogue in the 60's , but now no one was ready for what was happening to these two young people. It was almost unbelievable ! I was a child and didn't know that things happen to people and that they dont remain at the same point .
These were the years when we were watching Peyton Place on TV . Later on during the revolution and after it too Iranians were watching Korean soap operas instead of American ones and Oshin was the story of a girl who people could connect with ..... What was really the problem for the family was that my parents had already had to cope with my eldest brother Dara ailment on their own . At the bottom of all this was the fact that having mental problems was a tabu subject in the 50's and the 60's. It is probably still a dark cloud that casts its shadow on people and families in most of the third world. If some members of the family suffered from "psycological disfunction " then in those years people didnt know how to cope and how to behave . And this shadow hung about the whole family. It meant that not only did we have aunty Parveen who was not "normal" and suffered from autism , but now we had two youngsters going in the same direction of disfunction .... . It was true that Parveens parents had been first cousins , but Sharbanoos's husband was not a relative so his children had had a breakdown purely because of their loss of a parent (even tho they were adults).
Mr Parvaneh was not vociferous and never threw his weight around as the breadwinner of the family. This trauma was amazing , i mean that his children suffered so much after his death . His silent gardening all those years had generated a lot of feelings of love and security in his family. He had been a very important "sane" person , even if he didnt drive a car or do other things men usually liked to do. Meaning to say that people don't have to be achieving anything special .... but their presence and their attitude in a group situation , can influence everyone around them.
My aunt Sharbanoo,had been widowed now but she had a bit of luck because one of her daughters found a distant relative of the Indian family side, who asked for her hand. It was a very positive thing when Sharzad who was a very pretty and gracious 20 year old was married off ( to the disappointment of my brother who was about the same age as her) . Her husband was thirty years old and had money and whisked her off to the UK and then to Spain. She was not to be seen by her mother or siblings again . She had a child called Setareh who then became a researcher at university and now has two children with her spanish husband .
Farang too found a cousin from her father's family who was interested in her even tho he knew she had some issues. My aunt who had been a talented pianist had had her wits about her when she wrote certain sentimental letters to the young man. I think of Jane Austin novels when my thoughts turn to Aunt Sharbanoo. She had been trained to play Chopin and Beethoven and all the classical composers , but she had burried her ambitions when she got married and dedicated the energies and talents to her family. (Typically a male sciovanist ; my brother Taher thought i should have followed her awsome example of serving her husband and her family!)
In order to encourage the groom to be into her family. He too was interested in mathematics and had a master's degree in the subject. She invited him to come and stay with her family for a while, and finally being very able and dedicated to her children's wellbeing she managed to get Farang to marry her cousin . This too was very positive since it brought the good vibes to a situation which could have looked a bit hopeless f if things had been left to run their course . Farang recovered by taking her pills and worked as a secretary for some years in the Oil company where her father had worked when he had first moved to the country. She eventually bought a house together with he husband and had two sons.
What my aunt achieved was important because my mother didn't manage to do the same , even tho she had two sane children who did't create any issues for her . What i think is that she was simply not interested in us that much . We were our father's children .... in the islamic tradition. She thought a woman brings up a man's children for him and they dont really belong to her ... but they belong to their father ..... in this tradition a wife is just a sort of custodian and she has to be paid for her work .
Ofcourse real mothers dont look at things in this light
I am trying to point out that some times God gives you certain things which hinder you , but then you come out the winner of the game anyway , and this is what happened with my cousin Kamran. He had been seriously ill after his father passed and could only stay at home . My uncle Ali who was a writer was interested in helping him and introduced him to his own profession of translations (persian to English and vice versa).
Fortunately Kamran got married to an understanding woman and lived in a lovely place which was the house he had grown up in ..... it was a villa type house with a big garden of a thousand square meters. Later on they had to sell it and move into an appartment . This was the garden that Mr Parvaneh had cultivated and the family sat out in it during the warmer months.
Many times my brother was involved in bringing Farang and her brother in and out of hospital and the situation didnt look good .
After some years for some reason my cousin Kamran had started to say his prayers and became a staunch believer in religious practice .... this perhaps was the best medicine he could have taken in order to gain controle of his life .
One of his ambitions was to get married .... we all would wonder which girl would want to take so much responsability and more than her , which family would want a groom who wasnt working and was having medical treatment ? He wanted to get married because he thought it was his God given right and incredible but true …… soon one of his sister's friend' s accepted to marry him ! Rudabeh the eldest sister was now working at the Post office and she was the only one who had been a tower of strenght for her mother and very supportive of her family . She herself dedicated all her energies to her mother's health.
Kamran and his wife Parvaneh were now bride and groomand both very sociable and knew a lot of their neighbours from old times who had lived in the area like them …… and a lot of people came to visit them .
Parvaneh was very likeable and was Rudabeh’s old friend who was very talkative they loved socializing and since their families knew each other .... they accepted his illness and made allowences for it . It was a miracle that her father allowed the knot to be tied . A child was born of this marriage and that confirmed Kamran as an accepted member of society because he was now a father !
This was an unexpected victory for my cousin !
(This story reminds me of some of Joel Osteens sermons where he talks about God making the negative situation work for your benefit and where you walk into victory even when you have done nothing much to deserve it, it is simply God who makes it all work out for you .. "who would have thought ? " asks Joel in one of his sermons ) that Kamran or Farang would have turned out to be very respectable members of society ? which they did even tho they didnt have much money left to them by their father (because my aunt spent all the money he had left his family on health issues ) ...... Kamran would not have been considered to be an able bodied man in other societies, infact he didn't serve in the army during the war between Iran and Iraq (which was also lucky) .... but since he was now living in a new islamic regime .... he was considered socially on a higher level than my brother Taher who never got married and didnt have any children because he didnt make any money . Taher made some appartments during the very difficult years of the war and then gave them to my mother …. And she didnt give him any money because she had invested in the buildings . His hard work went unpaid because he had worked for his own mother !
Infact my brother and i were both traumatized by my mother who wanted to keep the properties she had and only allow us to inherit them . My mother thought we should be going out and making money like she had done …. But these years were not as lucky as the years she had lived in . We also were affected by the revolution years …. Unfair for both of us because even tho we had been english speakers we were considered to be the Iranians of the Anti Us climate and not getting any good breaks like our parents . In any case who wanted to have a child when we knew very well that Dara the first born had been mentally retarded. This child had been a healthy child in the begining for some years but he began to show signs of mental handicap when he was older .... Both of us thought that it had something to do with genetics because our parents were first cousins .
So hats off to Kamran's prayers because they worked for him .... while my brother was secular and believing in achievements (but he always kept fast during the month of Ramadan) he lived alone for many years until he came back to my parents home. After having lived in LA for seven years and he drove vans for a living , he had to come back to live in the caos of Tehran Traffic because my parents needed him . But even tho he was a sort of ladies man and he tried to be charming and women liked him, he never could make the connection . .... He lived with my parents happily for some years . Then he had an opportunity because one of his friends who was living in the US but had a wife in Shiraz , got seperated from his wife , and even tho this lady was willing to marry him, he didnt pursue the issue because he thought it would look very tacky for him to marry a friends ex wife and he didnt act to achieve his own happiness ( just because he cared about what people would say and their opinions of him were all important. I think this was a silly reason. , because he died in 2005 of a heart attack all alone in his room . While having to look after our mother who was suffering from dementia ....
Taher was now fifty years old and had tried his luck in the US. For many years he had worked at various jobs there and had come back after seven years on my request. I knew that he was missing my parents and that they needed him to be around. My father had tried to make him understand that he had to try to live an independant life ie to get married and to settle down. Those were social rules in consevative Iran and everybody was wondering why he wasnt making the decision. He had loved the years in the USA because he felt the solidarity . He liked the fact that people felt they were part of something that seemed to give respect to individual people . He had wanted to stay on because things had begun to fall into place for him . However now the reality was that he was the only one who could take responsability for my parents and all of our elderly relatives. He was giving up his dream of making it in the US in order to look after the elders and this was a very Asian way of living a family life . Traditions were like time capsules in the DNA and since he had done what was required of him , he was happy even when he said he missed his life in the States ..... in his heart he knew he had done his duty,and the right thing by going back to the people who needed him most ....... in any case his dreams had been partly fulfilled !
The Partition of India was the division of British India[a] in 1947 which accompanied the creation of two independent dominions, India and Pakistan.[1] The Dominion of India is today the Republic of India, and the Dominion of Pakistan is today the Islamic Republic of Pakistan and the People's Republic of Bangladesh. The partition involved the division of three provinces, Assam, Bengal and the Punjab, based on district-wide Hindu or Muslim majorities. The boundary demarcating India and Pakistan became known as the Radcliffe Line. It also involved the division of the British Indian Army, the Royal Indian Navy, the Indian Civil Service, the railways, and the central treasury, between the two new dominions. The partition was set forth in the Indian Independence Act 1947 and resulted in the dissolution of the British Raj, as the British government there was called. The two self-governing countries of Pakistan and India legally came into existence at midnight on 14–15 August 1947.[2]
The partition displaced over 14 million people along religious lines, creating overwhelming refugee crises in the newly constituted dominions; there was large-scale violence, with estimates of loss of life accompanying or preceding the partition disputed and varying between several hundred thousand and two million.[3][b] The violent nature of the partition created an atmosphere of hostility and suspicion between India and Pakistan thatplagues their relationship to the present.
Both my grandfather and his son Mehrdad had been for a free India !. Infact my grandfather had acted on his ideas and had been a bit of a revolutionary in his youth . Initially he had been against the Raj. Later on when i watched the film Mangal Panday . I could imagine what he was thinking . However having spent some time in Britain in the begining of the 1900s . he had changed his mind. My Uncle Ali told me about the idealist Tipu Sultan who tried to do his best to gain freedom .
This didnt mean that all was well with other members of Mr Mehrin's (my father's father) family . One of his sisters meanwhile was living in poverty with her husband and five children . Mr Namazie was not a healthy man and run his family only because he had charitable relatives (1930/1940)
He was my grandfather on my mothers side .and my mother was his eldest daughter who managed to go to university. Not because of any favoritism. Her uncle Mr Mehrin was teaching there .
Mr Namazie was buisiness man who had arrived in India with his brother . They had been Persians who lived in Egypt and they had both been married , but they had survived their wives and were looking for a new life in Banglore . That was when my grandfather Mr Namazie married his second wife that is Sahib Soltan .
My grandmother on my mother's side had given up on having children but my mother came into the world after seven years of childless marriage , and then there was my uncle Joon , uncle Ali Mohammad and my aunt jahan and my uncle Ismile .
Saheb soltan as her sisters, had been educated at home and knew how to read and write and insisted that their children; girls and boys would be educated and all given the opportunity to go to school. Infact she made her husband allow their eldest daughter ie Mirza Beygum to go to university . This was the first girl in the family to get a university Masters degree in english literature. Most families at the time believed that girls didnt need an education since there would always be some one to look after them.
Mr Namazie my mother's father was a good hearted man and in his generosity had taken yet another sister of Mr Mehrin 's who had been widowed under his wing . They all lived in an extended family style together . Even tho Mr Mehrin was rich , he had his sister with her three children , living under some one elses protection and in poverty.
Fortunately there was love which saved the day and all of the children benefited from the solidarity of Mr Namazie and they turned out very well . Some times i heard my uncle Ismile , my youngest uncle and child of the family, rail against his father Mr Namazie because he was always reading the holy book of Islam and not making money to feed his family ...... his sons and daughters would complain later on that there wasnt any sort of paternal contribution or enough to eat under his roof .
Even so all the children were sent to school and their education saved them . Mr Namazie and his wife both died in their forties , and their children had to stick together and move to Pakistan . They all managed to cope without the help of their rich uncle .
My aunts living together in their fathers mansion had been brought up differently .... they had been prohibited to socialize with their less fortunate cousins and they were very individualistic. Even so they had a feeling of sisterhood between them.. One of the sisters Parveen had a mental disability , perhaps today she would be diagnosed as autistic .
I have this idea of her because of the film "Temple Grandin" . It made me realize that a mental situation can be treated. For years my family lived in apprehension and shame because of various members of the family having issues ...; which today are diagnosed as official illness.... and cured . In the fifties mental issues were like a dark cloud which would shadow the whole family ; and quite similar to a physical disability.
I knew my aunt Parveen because we visited her frequently and my mother was kind to her. For many years she was living with my aunt Homa and she died at seventy. She was peculiar because she loved to go on walking trips for hours and knew all the streets in the city .... she would have made a good taxi driver . Miraculously no one bothered her and nothing happened during these walks. My aunt Homa who was in the nursing profession and worked in a hospital lived with her and looked after her.
Parveen would be locked into herself and her own world but would become untreatable and out of controle when she had her"moods ". Most of the time she was quiet as a lamb..... Their father had made a deal with Homa that he would give her a house if she promised to look after her sister .
My aunt Homa had been to a nursing school in the Uk in the 50's .... she agreed to look after her sister and their brother who was a writer Mr Mehrdad Mehrin decided to live with them on the top floor of a three storied house. They lived together in a house off Eskandari square in Tehran. Their brother was called Ali at home but was well known as a writer who wrote about travelling and health . He was away most of the time . The times he was at home he spent many hours writing his books even when there were visiters. He and my aunt Homa would order chelo Kabab a typically traditional dish of white rice with barbecued meat . We would listen to his stories while eating and he had many interesting anecdotes about travelling in Italy or in Japan . He would also rave about his hero Tipu Sultan ; Wiki Says
This style of living together in an extended family went on for some years until the partition.
. Parveen had been a beautiful girl with ruddy complection and piles of beautiful auburn hair. No one knew what had happened to her but at some point she had lost it .... or perhaps it was a genetic ailment and she never had it together evn when she looked Ok ..... perhaps it was because of the close blood ties of her parents .
. Two of the sisters had been painting seriously, Aunty Mahin who had become a librarian and lived on her own , worked in Shiraz . It was also the city where mr Namazie my mothers father had all his relatives .The people of Shiraz were well known for their progressive ideas . the Namazies and relatives had travelled to and setteled down in India and had become wealthy through trade . They had many charities and were famous for their public services.
some info about this beautiful city ;
The earliest reference to the city, as Tiraziš, is on Elamite clay tablets dated to 2000 BC.[3] In the 13th century, Shiraz became a leading center of the arts and letters, due to the encouragement of its ruler and the presence of many Persian scholars and artists. It was the capital of Persia during the Zand dynasty from 1750 until 1800. Two famous poets of Iran, Hafez and Saadi, are from Shiraz, whose tombs are on the north side of the current city boundaries.
Who knows how and why she had gone there . She didnt belong to the sisterhood and was doing her own thing . For years she would contact the family by phone to say hello but she had a high and dry attitude and would never reveal much about her real life. No one really knew her well .
I would look at her picture and wonder why an attractive intelligent woman like her was so aloof even with her own sisters. Apparently there was some sibling rivalry and she had her emotional issues. She had been lucky in that she had found a very good position and had managed to support herslf all those years without ever asking for help. Years had gone by and i had been living and studying in Florence Italy, only travelling back to Iran because of my father's health issues. In 2002 i had gone to visit my family during the persian New Year .....
One day she called my aunt out of the blue . It was not the usual "how are you doing" call. She was now in her 80's and she was saying ;" i dont know how to get back home to my house .... can you help me ? " I had been sitting with my parents in my aunty Homas house off Eskandari square. Fortunately for her my brother Taher had friends in Shiraz . Mahsheed was a woman who was a professional pysiotherapist and had her practice in the city . She was asked to help find my aunt and to bring her home . She looked after her until we arrived.
Mahsheed had a charming bed side manner and was able to connect with my aunt and to take her home . She was Taher's best friends wife . Taher and Ismail had been childhood friends and had met up again in LA . Ismail was from a rich family and had been living in California for years. He had married a chinese lwoman and having separated had married Mahsheed . For some reason he refused to take her with him to the US . This was our lucky star shining on us because Mahsheed was living in Shiraz and was there to save my aunt Mahin. There wasnt much anything anyone else could do for her .... it was the month of April and all the flowers and trees were in bloom , and my aunt was still managing to go out on her walks on her own. She had found her guardian angel and Mahsheed was there for her until her last days.
My aunt Mahin had studied in the UK and had intellectual interests and had been living away from the family in Abadan and Shiraz for many years. It was the Persian new year and Shiraz was breathtakingly beautiful . i decided to accompany my aunt Tahmin and we went to visit Mahin together . My father was in bed and under medical treatment in Tehran but at least he had people around him . In Shiraz Tahmin needed to see what we could do for her.elder sister Mahin who seemed to be on her way out. She had been living in a sunny appartment which to our surprise was full of her miniature paintings. It was also full of diaries written by hand in a tiny handwriting which was difficult to decifer . She told us that she had a helper , a girl who would come in to do errands and to clean, but she was wondering if it was her who took her things . She was worried about her missing items . It was obvious to everyone that she was now unable to cope on her own and needed to get back home to people she knew and trusted . However she had made her decision to stay on. It wasnt possible to convince her to leave . We left Mahsheed in charge of her and heard the news that she had passed away in the hospital soon after we left.
It was Tahmin who took care of all her belongings and the papers she left I was very upset when i heard that she had thrown away all the prescious diaries .... it was the real life she had been living day after day, and i was interested in knowing how she had coped all those years on her own with all the male sciovanistic attitudes . She seemed to have done very well in a new country . She had survived through the revolution and all of the changes that it brought with it.
Having lived through this experience and having seen her life , i was very happy about my decision to go to Italy in 82 . I wasnt for the revolution at all . It came and blew away all the good things in my life. My relatives had been against my going to Italy and infact my aunt Sharbanoo had taken it on her to write to the iranian consolate in Milan and to ask them to send me back to my parents who she claimed ,"needed me" to look after them. My having gone to live in Italy was seen as an unbelievable act of ribellion against our traditions . But i was of the opinion that they were all wrong because they were staying on in a country which had overthrown a good man. I loved the cosmopolitan London i had lived in and wanted the "international" "good" embrasing everything and rather feared the "nationalistic" mood.
. My aunt Tahmin had been talking about her life on our journey .... she had been a pillar of stregnth all through her life and had looked after her father the writer Mr Shushtari Mehrin , and had contributed to the wellbeing of her sister Sharbanoos family enormously. It was as if she was a sort of hand maid to her elder sister, always there to run errands and solve issues . She said that she had had a promise from her elder sister when she was a child , that she would have had a mother in Sharbanoo when her own mother passed away . She had been nine years old , and now as a seventy year old she looked back at her life and wondered why her sister had been so "unhelpful" . Infact she had feared her more than anyone else. It is true that as a young woman she had her chance to leave the nest at the age of twenty one when a respectable foreigner they knew had asked for her hand . She had been afraid of her sister and hadnt made a decision out of the "fear of the unknown".
Tahmin had believed in and had stuck to the family and had now taken the responsability to look after everyone. She was grateful that she had had no problems at work .... she had been a secretary in big companies and had made friends through her work . I thought her to be an awsome woman because she managed to buy her first house on her own and obviously chose to be close to her sister and lived there with her father. All the family went to visit her every friday. Her loyalty should have set a good example for some one like myself , but eventho i appreciated her , my mouth said the words out loud ; "i dont want to be like you !" ... for some reason she hadnt liked to hear me say that i would rather "do it my way" ! When i said those words .... she had told me to leave her place ... which was rather unhospitable of her but it was OK ! I understood that she was in pain because she knew that she had been dedicated to her family more out of fear of the unknown rather than because of real love. How could she be so insecure ? she had done the right thing and had everybody's respect .
I didnt tell her that i only respected one story that she had to tell .... that was because i wanted to keep the peace! The second hand , cream coloured Volksswagen which she drove around Tehran was usually giving service to friends and family . She said that in one of her missions to serve Sharbanoo she had been naged because she was still single and criticized about various things. Her sister was sitting in the back seat and one of her daughters infront. At one point Tahmin was very upset about having to hear all the negativity coming out of her sisters mouth and she came out with her first disrespectful phrase ; "if you dont shut up , i'll run the car straight into this pole " .... it was an amazing moment of liberation and independance ! She said that it had been enough to get some respect and cure everyone of their freedon of negative speech !
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The Three kings ruling Iran during this time
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Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi, (born October 26, 1919, Tehrān, Iran—died July 27, 1980,
Under Mohammad Reza, the nationalization of the oil industry was nominally maintained, although in 1954 Iran entered into an agreement to split revenues with a newly formed international consortium that was responsible for managing production. With U.S. assistance Mohammad Reza then proceeded to carry out a national development program, called the White Revolution, that included construction of an expanded road, rail, and air network, a number of dam and irrigation projects, the eradication of diseases such as malaria, the encouragement and support of industrial growth, and land reform. He also established a literacy corps and a health corps for the large but isolated rural population. In the 1960s and ’70s the shah sought to develop a more independent foreign policy and established working relationships with the Soviet Union and eastern European nations.
The White Revolution solidified domestic support for the shah, but he faced continuing political criticism from those who felt that the reforms did not move far or fast enough and religious criticism from those who believed westernization to be antithetical to Islam. Opposition to the shah himself was based upon his autocratic rule, corruption in his government, the unequal distribution of oil wealth, forced westernization, and the activities of Savak (the secret police) in suppressing dissent and opposition to his rule. These negative aspects of the shah’s rule became markedly accentuated after Iran began to reap greater revenues from its petroleum exports beginning in 1973. Widespread dissatisfaction among the lower classes, the Shīʿite clergy, the bazaar merchants, and students led in 1978 to the growth of support for the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, a Shīʿite religious leader living in exile in Paris. Rioting and turmoil in Iran’s major cities brought down four successive governments; on January 16, 1979, the shah left the country, and Khomeini assumed control. Although the shah did not abdicate, a referendum resulted in the declaration on April 1, 1979, of an Islamic republic in Iran. The shah traveled to Egypt, Morocco, The Bahamas, and Mexico before entering the United States on October 22, 1979, for medical treatment of lymphatic cancer. Two weeks later Iranian militants seized the U.S. embassy in Tehrān and took hostage more than 50 Americans, demanding the extradition of the shah in return for the hostages’ release. Extradition was refused, but the shah later left for Panama and then Cairo, where he was granted asylum by President Anwar el-Sadat.
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