The Graduate English Journal of Hunter College

            Some distances are such that they can neither be traced on maps nor quantified in vajabs_the length from the tip of the outstretched pinky to the top of the extended thumb_that were my first unit of measurement. My father had traveled a distance greater than the two continents and one ocean, farther than the span of language and culture, to end up at my bedside in our leafy neighborhood in Washington, DC. He had passed the golden, baked adobe structures of remote village dwellings, more than an hour's walk from the nearest town. He had crossed the irrigated pomegranate orchards and fields of sugarcane, overtaken the dry, jagged rocks of poverty and made bumps on the horizon out of the snow-capped desert mountains. He had fled to the capitol, Tehran, and joined the great migration from the peasantry into the urban working class which would only increase in volume and velocity over the next several decades until there would be no way to return to what he had left behind.

            The village water was soon diverted to the mud-brick town. Yazd, with its ancient bazaar and towering cypress trees, sprouted into a city and absorbed all the young able-bodied men and women, many of whom were only just stopping there en route to their final destination, sprawling metropolitan Tehran. The fields dried up along with the old ways of living. From the other side of the world, my father gazes at nothing_for what he sees is behind his eyes_and wonders, when the aging generation that remains in the villages is no more, who will carry the sand away from the sun-caked walls of clay after a storm has turned the sky black in the heart of an afternoon? Will the sand be left to rise in opportunistic piles until the village itself slips underneath? A slow burial for a society that held nature in a mutual embrace, neglected by a jealous modernity, covered over by the same earth from which it was made.

           Until a few weeks before he boarded the plane, he had never had any intention of coming to America. In 1936, my father became the youngest of his young mother's four children. At that time Zoroastrians were not allowed to own businesses in Iran. India was more welcoming, or did not notice, as my grandfather went to work in his brother's little shop in Puna. Britannia they called their store of conveniences. They were a modern day version of their Parsee ancestors who fled east from the great Arab-Muslim invasion of the 7th century that conquered a weakened and war-weary land. Before that, the Persian Empire was Zoroastrian, blessed with the first of the monotheistic religions.

            Faces bathed in the light of the eternal flame, these followers of the prophet Zoroaster have whispered aloud from the holy Avesta and prayed to Ahura Mazda, God Almighty, for thousands of years. Denigrated as fire worshippers, they survive in small numbers and close-knit communities, speaking their own language, marrying each other and passing their traditions on to their children. They are called upon to live according to the divine prescription: good thoughts, good words, good deeds. Though he has long shed his belief in God and thinks only of how to make heaven here on earth, my father has never been able to steal, cheat or tell a lie, even when it would be to the detriment of his sworn enemies. “It has nothing to do with religion,” he says. “It's our tradition. My mother taught me never to take what I didn't earn.”

            His father couldn't have had time to teach him very much. My grandfather worked in the shop in Puna and came home once every two years to his wife and children. In those years the family had goats and chickens. The children played raucous games in the narrow kuch鳠after lunch while the rest of the village was sinking into full-stomached slumber. It was just a matter of time before some grown up appeared from behind a walled-in courtyard to chase them off down the winding alleyways.

            Until one year, when my grandfather came home and he was dying. Too weak to play with his seven-year-old son. Too weak to strike him for disobeying his elders. “That's how I knew he was really sick, poor man,” says the son who has grown decades older than his father ever would. Tuberculosis took my father's father from this earth and delivered the family unto the humiliations of poverty.

            One night they ate only because my father went around to the neighbors asking for scraps to feed the chickens. Pride can nurture the spirit for some time even while the body goes without.

            With my grandfather gone, his young widow, known to me always as Mama Bozorg, took in sewing and knitted sweaters to feed her four children. The two boys cut sugar cane, picked fruit in the landlord's orchards and did odd jobs. My seven-year-old father could make a few pennies for every hundred mud bricks in those days, sculpted with his small hands from special patches of earth. But it wasn't enough. Mama Bozorg began to contemplate saving her children from the unmerciful death of starvation by the swift and desperate act of her own hands. That's when she knew she had to send at least half of them away. My father and his older brother were salvaged at the charitable behest of the Zoroastrian boarding school in the city of Yazd, the historic center of their faith. There they were to thank God they were allowed to live and suffer under the punishing dictatorship of the priests and the stinging taunts of their classmates who knew they were not paying their way. Village donkeys, the city kids called the poor boys from the countryside.

            A single drop of blood squeezed from each nimble finger showed the waiting priest that the fingernail had been trimmed to the school's holy standards. A kneeling body that revolted against the stiffness of the interminable posture, that teetered or, God forbid, lost its balance, was spared neither the rod nor the commandment to start the prayer again from the beginning. Over and over until it was perfect. Up before dawn, and a day spent cleaning, praying, studying and trying to avoid the teacher's wooden stick searing a soft, outstretched palm, or the smart of an ear twisted nearly out of its socket.

            This daily routine was interrupted in 1948 by the arrival of the first refugees from Palestine. “I remember the boy's face like it was yesterday. I can see him coming in through the schoolhouse door. His face was burnt red from the sun. He had walked for days with his family. They had to eat grass. He told us what had happened, why they had to leave. We didn't know where Palestine was. We didn't go looking for these things. They came into our lives.” My father tells me this on the telephone and another point in the constellation of his life reveals itself to me.

            The first time my father ran away from school he was in maybe sixth or seventh grade and he hadn't known where to go. The plan started off well enough thanks to his acrobatic talents (which came so naturally that well into his forties he could still walk on his hands several paces across our living room). Walking on stilts was a popular playground game and he had learned to balance his body and move through the air with ease. Gliding ever closer to the exterior courtyard wall, he waited for the cover of the children's playful distraction and hopped down to the other side, his wooden accomplices knocking back to the ground he could no longer see.

            He ran, fast at first, and then slowed to a walk hoping to dissolve between the crush of bodies in the bazaar. But in a place where most people knew each other, and where adults felt responsible for children in general, it wasn't long before someone took him back.

            Though his guardians tried to beat the lesson of his defeat into him, he only learned to be better prepared the next time. A few years later, when he was maybe in the ninth grade, he escaped along with another boy. That boy got scared, wanted to go back. They said goodbye and went their separate ways. My father reached the bus station and presented his change to the driver. It wasn't enough for a seat. They struck a bargain. He would sit in the aisle on a little stool that would lurch about and send him banging into metal poles for almost 400 miles. “By the time I got to Tehran I was covered in bruises,” he remembers still.

            The Tehran that received this lone refugee from Yazd, was a city bustling towards revolution. In the hot, dusty southwest, at the oil refinery in Abadan, there was the kind of thirst no water could quench. In the desert, they say, a hot cup of tea satiates the body while a cold drink only worsens the ache of parched bones. But it seemed nothing could satisfy England's thirst for oil. Since the day the Anglo oil hunters found the black gold hidden beneath Iran's time swept sands, history's clock had changed its tempo and begun counting towards self-destruction.

            The British Empire licked its lips, sunk its teeth into the flesh and soil of the nation, and drank. Like a persistent parasite, the foreign power bloated up with wealth while the host of ordinary Iranian people became emaciated. The British gave the orders to one complicit Shah after another, and to a growing number of workers, who, despite the extreme squalor and repression their overseers provided, could not be kept from the occasional clock stopping revolt. And so it went for generations, until the oil workers struck at the right moment to break the camel's back.
                        What does it look like, sound like, feel like, when millions of people try to take what they have always deserved? My father knows and will never forget. He was fifteen when the people poured into the streets and he found himself among them. He listened to the speeches and read the flimsy newsprint pages. In their message was the sound of the silent desire he carried with him always. He thought of his mother dragging water from the well, sewing by candle light for a few pennies, going hungry so he could eat. He let himself want it with all the strength of his youth, his silent desire, to be treated with dignity.

            Mossadegh said, “The Iranian himself is the best person to manage his house,” and now this dream too long deferred seemed to be within reach. With the power of the striking oil workers, the displaced peasants, the ambitious students, the chafing professionals, the patriotic shopkeepers and a section of the politically-minded clergy behind him, Mossadegh nullified the British contracts and was elected prime minister in an ecstatic demonstration of popular democracy.

            This was it, al-hamdu-l-illah. Freedom from the despotism of foreign democracies and homegrown monarchs. The new government was going to use what nature had given them, and its extraordinary value on the world market, to lift even the smallest boat on a rising tide of black liquid gold. My father dared to believe in all the possibilities. His good grades and hard work were going to pay off, his family would not have to stay poor, his country would be pillaged no more.

            But it wasn't long before the sounds of the wounded empire-beast, a spiteful laughter made all the more menacing by its undertone of confidence, could be heard from the British war ships that assembled off the Persian Gulf. A rumbling rebuke rolled across the horizon from the port cities to the oil fields to the capitol: Who do you think you are? You think you can get rid of us, run things yourselves? Now you are asking for it. We are going to teach you a lesson you will never forget.

            So accustomed were the Iranians to ill treatment at the hands of what had been the greatest of the great modern powers that no one suspected the threat looming on the other side of the Atlantic. The British Empire was crumbling, making way for a rising star. America, emerging victorious in its atomic splendor, saw no need for arrogant, imperial posturing. This latecomer to the game of world domination organized a coup, had Mossadegh arrested, and put the Shah back on his throne, whereupon His Majesty quivered with gratitude and solemnly swore to do as he was told. To show that they were enlightened masters, and not crude colonizers like the British, the Americans allowed the Shah to keep fifty percent of the profits from Iranian oil, up from the twenty percent figure that had so blighted the previous ungracious terms. But in return, those proceeds had to be exchanged for American-made armaments, consumer products and development projects that left up to 85% of Iranians illiterate, the villages without electricity or running water and the cities blossoming with new shanty towns.

            Though the facts and figures matter, they are not the things that haunt us even as we grow old far away from where the events we call turning points actually took place. The images that mark my father's life experience are his alone. Of the day Mossadegh was arrested, he remembers, “That's the only time I ever saw my mother cry.” And I want to ask him if he has ever let his own tears flow or if they still press against his insides, a dam always on the verge of bursting.

            At the house of his best friend, the son of the Minister of Oil in Mossadegh's cabinet, my father stood as still as if he were praying and kept his eyes down when the Shah's gendarmes burst through the door. A small picture of Mossadegh was burning a hole in his pocket but because he was just a kid nobody thought to search him. The deposed minister was not at home but when they found him everybody knew. All the newspapers carried the story of how they forced him to drink oil until he died.

            Repression and corruption, those old cohorts of reaction, went hand in hand. The democratic spirit was contagious. The Americans had prepared a special secret police squad to destroy every strain of the revolutionary virus. A beloved revolutionary poet, Golesorkhe, red flower, was arrested for something he wrote. His mother went to the Queen herself to beg for her son's life. The Queen, it was reported, held up one royal pinky and with the other hand made as if to chop it off. Her logic was impeccable. You're son is like a cancer and, no matter how small, he must be removed. And he was.

            My father finished high school and entered college in this atmosphere of terror and gloom. What could he look forward to in a country where the Shah's cronies controlled access to every pathway a smart kid like him might wish to walk down? He stood on the edge of the curb and tried to decide which car to jump in front of, the crushing of his physical being certain to be less painful than a flattened life of shattered dreams.

            Somehow something held him back. Not long after that day he met a young communist who brought him to the underground meetings, the places where the dream hobbled forward on broken feet but just enough to leave his suicidal thoughts behind. Because, you see, the struggle continues, always, no matter what, even if only in the hearts and minds of people like him.

            When the son of a wealthy airline executive, whom my father was employed to tutor, made the unexpected offer of a plane ticket to America, there seemed no good reason to refuse. My father made plans to study abroad and left for the cornfields of rural Illinois. Back then Iranians were encouraged to study in America, and vice versa, in recognition of the special relationship between the two countries. And that's how my father ended up in the country that had broken his heart.

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