Stranger to History (17 page)
‘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.
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.
‘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.
A
t 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 know how bad the revolution had been.