The Alley of Love and Yellow Jasmines (3 page)

By the age of ten, I understood that our government suffered from a dictatorship under Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi’s regime, but I innocently admired him. Since I couldn’t see it unfolding on the streets in the small world that I lived in, going to these political sessions was an eye-opener for me, even if I didn’t understand everything that they discussed.

Each time upon arrival, we were taken to the professor’s huge library/home office. Grandpa and the professor were both pro Mosaddegh, the deposed prime minister of Iran who was then under house arrest. Although my youthful memories are murky, I feel they are important to set up the current history of Iran.

The Iranian Parliament voted unanimously in 1951 to nationalize the Iranian oil industry, which meant the government of Iran would keep the country’s oil under its control and have the power to sell it to whomever they chose. This was all masterminded by the democratically elected nationalist movement and its prime minister, Dr. Mohammad Mosaddegh.

Nationalizing Iranian oil resulted in an annulment of the British and Iranian oil treaty. The Anglo-Iranian oil company had been under British control since 1913, with Iran earning only a small fraction of the revenue—even though the oil belonged to Iran. It was enormously beneficial to Britain’s economy and political influence in the Middle East. Depriving Britain of its hugely profitable share of Iranian oil prompted the British to ask the Shah of Iran to remove Mosaddegh.

Even if it lasted less than a year, the nationalization of the oil industry was a sacred and popular act for the majority of Iranians. Only monarchists or pro-Shah followers were against it. (The Shah believed the oil made him popular with the Western world.) Nationalization put an end to hundreds of years of Iranian-oil exploitation by foreign powers. Removing its curator, Prime Minister Mosaddegh, would not be an easy task.

The Shah didn’t have the backbone to remove the popular Mosaddegh in 1952. The British, with the Shah’s knowledge, requested the help of America’s CIA. Kermit Roosevelt Jr., an officer in the CIA and also a grandson of Theodore Roosevelt, was to carry out a coup in Iran code-named Operation Ajax. The plot was to overthrow Mosaddegh as prime minister and replace him with General Fazlollah Zahedi—who had previously been dismissed by Mosaddegh following a brutal attack on pro-nationalization protesters—by the order of the Shah and in agreement with both America and Britain. Despite careful planning, the first attempt failed, and the Shah had to flee Iran.

Mosaddegh was removed from power in 1953 by a second coup, planned and carried out by the CIA at the appeal of the British MI6, and staged by General Zahedi while the Shah was in exile in Rome.

Mosaddegh was arrested at his home on the night of August 19, 1953. The Shah returned to Iran on August 22.

Mosaddegh was detained and put on trial. He was sent to prison for three years and later put under house arrest until his death, in 1967.

When we made visits to the professor’s house, Mosaddegh was still alive. Grandfather, the professor, and Takhti were appalled by Mosaddegh’s humiliating arrest and his ludicrous trial and were hoping he would return to power even as the oil once again became a shared resource with other countries, including the U.S.A.

FOLLOWING MOSADDEGH’S ARREST,
his supporters were tortured or executed. The minister of foreign affairs—his closest associate—was executed by order of the Shah’s military court. Mosaddegh’s followers had gone underground, and discussing his affairs was not permitted publicly, now that the Shah was back in power.

Grandpa and the professor would first close all the windows and draw the shutters, halfway. Takhti quietly sat on the chair next to the professor’s desk. I sat in a hard-backed library chair against the professor’s bookshelf, facing the window and absorbed by their very private conversations. The reflection of the sun formed horizontal lines of shadows on the professor’s desk.

FOLLOWING AN ASSASSINATION
attempt on the Shah, the main communist party of Iran, the pro-Soviet Tudeh Party, was banned. Up to fifty of its leaders were executed following the coup in 1953, with the help of Iran’s secret police known as SAVAK, trained by the CIA. The fear of communism was a genuine concern of the progressive Iranians, and the Shah, a great ally of the U.S.A. in the region, was determined to keep the peace in the Middle East. Modernizing Iran and joining the Western world were the first two points on his agenda. That was his dream, but fate would intervene.

The Shah had studied in Europe and was influenced by Western culture. He went to school in Switzerland and was raised in a European environment. His first wife, Princess Fowzia Fuad of Egypt, was bright, educated, and charismatic. They married in 1939, and in 1940 she gave birth to a beautiful girl, Princess Shahnaz. Fowzia filed for divorce in 1945, claiming the Persian climate was hazardous to her health, and left Iran for good. It was really a political marriage.

Soraya Esfandiari Bakhtiari, the only daughter of an Iranian ambassador in Germany, was a statuesque beauty and married the Shah in 1951. They were very much in love, but he divorced her in 1958 because she was infertile. The Shah desperately needed a male heir, so he married his third wife, Farah Diba, in 1959. I still remember the day their royal wedding was aired on television. I was seven years old and was captivated by her beauty, her charming shy smile, and her regal wedding gown designed by Yves Saint Laurent at the House of Dior.

Farah was an attractive, tall athlete and an architecture student in Paris when she met the Shah at the Iranian embassy there. She loved Iran and loved to show off Iranian art and antiquities to the world. She was a great supporter of Iranian artists, too. Under her influence, Iran was becoming a hub of international artists, as well as a great cultural passage point between the East and the West. Not long after their marriage, she became pregnant and produced a male heir, Prince Reza.

The Shah was a proud and ambitious man. He spoke passionately of Iran’s heritage and its enormous resources. He was particularly proud of the fact that the first Declaration of Human Rights was written by Cyrus the Great, in ancient Iran, known as Babylon, in 539
B.C.
The Shah also spoke of change, but, as the professor and my grandfather said, he was a delusional man. He refused to see the reality that Iranians were not ready for modernization and were stuck in old religious indoctrinations and ancient traditions.

His so-called White Revolution gave Iranian women the right to vote in 1963 and was one of his series of reforms. He also personally handed out the deeds of land parcels to hundreds of peasants, making them landlords. The White Revolution was his first of many attempts to help the country realize its great potential and to modernize. While my grandfather and the professor thought some of the reforms were good, they still felt strongly that Iran should be an independent country without Western influences.

The Shah promised Iranians that he would take them to “the gates of a great civilization” if they stood by him, but it was a wish that never came true.

Iran had become a police state under the fearsome SAVAK, which reported to the Shah. Despite reforms, the lack of democracy and political freedom had turned Iran into a claustrophobic society. People feared their own shadows, had a hard time trusting one another, and feared torture for saying something that might make SAVAK hunt them down.

SAVAK was merciless and had zero tolerance for any inclination to any political party other than the Shah’s. It was a one-party political system. Scholars, artists, and academics were randomly interrogated for publicly criticizing the Shah’s regime. Student activists were taken to jail, and the number of young, so-called political prisoners was said to have been rising. When the professor and my grandfather spoke of this in low voices, Takhti and I looked at each other. In truth, I was scared.

I REMEMBER WHERE
I was when I learned that U.S. president John F. Kennedy had been shot. I was in the fifth grade at the Fatiah Girls School in Tehran. Around 10:00
A.M.
the faculty called all of the students out to the courtyard. Around two hundred of us assembled and were told the news. We were asked to pray for President Kennedy. To us, he represented a true American: optimistic, determined, and young and handsome.

In fact he seemed too young to be called the father of a nation, but his smile was fatherly and heartwarming. His pictures with his family were all over Iranian magazines. Iranians particularly thought his wife, Jacqueline, was the most beautiful and chic woman in the world. Her haircut was something our mothers copied at their hairdressers.

My grandfather and the professor were worried about what would happen to the United States and the relationship between the two countries, which during the Kennedy years was very good. Kennedy respected Iran as an equal. Now what?

America in my young eyes was a faraway land, a vast country with spectacular scenery, as shown in American films and westerns. Yet despite these dramatic depictions, it seemed like a peaceful place where people’s dreams came true. America was said to have a real democracy. It was a young country, full of endless ambition. The fact that the First Amendment guarantees the freedom of speech stunned my generation, having overheard horrifying stories of people losing their lives over exercising their freedom of speech in Iran.

For as long as I could remember, there were certain subjects we could not speak about publicly. We couldn’t publicly criticize the Shah and his family or discuss communism or certain books, which were banned from our young eyes, including
The Little Red Book
by the leader of the Chinese revolution, Chairman Mao Tse-tung, and Marx’s
The Communist Manifesto.
In general, all books related to communism or socialism were banned. The list was quite long.

Just like my grandfather, my father taught us as much as he could about politics. Father was an avid listener of the BBC, which was broadcast in Iran under the radar. All he wanted was for us to be good people and to educate ourselves. Both of my parents were in agreement with that.

My sessions with the threesome ended when my grandfather died. Then, in 1968, when Takhti was thirty-six, he allegedly committed suicide, but it was rumored that the government killed him for his liberal political beliefs. Even today, I miss all of them dearly and feel that being around them, even if it was just to soak in their knowledge, was where the seeds of my rebellion were sown.

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That Acting Bug

D
espite my fascination with politics, I developed a love for acting, even if it was only to perform in front of my little cousins. I had never thought of acting as a realistic career choice. My parents had always encouraged my siblings and me to attend university, and my father was intent that I should become a doctor. Still, it was fun to pretend.

Staying at Grandma Bahar al-Sadat’s house during the summer had many advantages. One of them was my cousin Nasrin, Uncle Sadr’s daughter, who lived in the adjoining courtyard. She was, and still is, like an older sister to me. She and I would select neighboring kids and demand that they sit in Nasrin’s front yard, where we performed short plays for them during long hot afternoons. We were older, so they knew they could not move from their seats on the stairs without risking our wrath. Nasrin made up the stories, and I took care of the costumes, hair, and makeup.

My beautiful Aunt Afsar—my mom’s sister and a true fan of Jayne Mansfield—was tall and slim with milky white skin and dark blond hair. She visited Grandma regularly and offered us her surplus lipsticks, which we recycled as blush. Grandma used kohl on her inner eyelids:
sormeh
, a powder made of burnt chestnut shells, in a small silver jar. We would also line our eyes with it to look like Elizabeth Taylor in
Cleopatra.

We begged Nasrin’s mother, Aunt Maryam, to lend us some of her clothes. She was fairly tall for an Iranian but thin, perhaps a size two. She was chic, bearing a slight resemblance to Olivia de Havilland. She made her own dresses out of fine imported fabrics and was inspired mostly by Hollywood and movie stars like Joan Crawford and Bette Davis.

Nasrin’s short plays revolved around a mother and daughter quarreling over the girl’s lifestyle. She always played the mother and I portrayed her outspoken, outgoing, and modern-thinking daughter.

I was visiting Nasrin and her family in Canada a few years ago when she asked me, “How come you always got to play the modern daughter and I played the submissive mother?”

I said, “Sweetheart, you were the writer of those shows, remember? You wrote those parts.” We both laughed our hearts out.

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