A Beginner's Guide to Acting English Page 16

  'Be a good girl, help your mother and look after her, won't you?'

  Through my tears I managed to remind Baba to buy me a present when he returned.

  When Baba and Maman kissed, Peyvand covered his eyes. We couldn't go with Baba right up to the plane so we waved to him by the gate as he went through and we couldn't see him any more.

  More Iranian families were moving to London now. 'The country will fall apart without the Shah,' some said.

  'The rich only ever think of themselves,' Maman sniffed. 'If you ever become rich, Shappi Jaan, please remember not to become an idiot too.'

  All the rich people who could, left Iran because they didn't want to live with the new leaders' rules. They weren't very nice to people who had supported the Shah and people were scared of them. The new leaders were very religious. Not normal religious like Madar Jaan who prayed on her little mat towards Mecca. These new people were proper religious, so they didn't even smile or let women talk to them.

  Rebecca's dad kept saying, 'The Shah of Persia has gone!'

  'Why do Englisees call Iran "Persia", Maman?' I asked when we were home after seeing Baba off and he was in a plane flying over our heads. Peyvand said he was not in any of the planes I could see from our balcony so I stopped waving at all of them and went to talk to Maman instead.

  She had gone straight into the kitchen and was chopping a big leg of lamb to cook for dinner. She was making khoresh bademjoon – lamb slow cooked with aubergine and herbs and split yellow peas and tomato. Her aubergines were already fried and stacked on sheets of kitchen paper to soak up the oil. The juices would later moisten Maman's perfectly fluffy saffron rice on my plate. Khoresh bademjoon was one of my very favourite dishes. I ate it until I thought my tummy would burst. I loved to watch Maman cutting up meat. She sat at the little table in the kitchen and, with a big sharp knife that I was never allowed to touch, she sliced it carefully off the bone then cut away every speck of fat she could see. The worst thing you can ever do in Iranian cooking is have meat with fat on it.

  I loved talking to Maman as she made food. She wasn't like Baba, who would talk to us for a while then get bored or had to get on with working and told us to go away. Maman always had time for our questions.

  'Kharejis always called Iran "Persia",' Maman explained. 'It comes from the word "Parsi", which is what just one group of people from Iran is called. We have Parsis, Turks, Kurds, Azarbajanis, there are lots of different people who make up Iran.'

  Then Maman told us about Reza Shah. Reza Shah was the Shah the British eventually got rid of with their coup d'état. He wanted all the other countries in the West to stop calling Iran 'Persia' and call it Iran like Iranians themselves did.

  'Iran comes from the word Aria, kharejis would say Aryan.'

  Maman told us the Aryans were nomads, people who travelled all around the place but when they finally settled in one country and decided to live there all the time, they called the country 'Iran' after themselves.

  'When did the Aryans move there? Before I was born?' I asked.

  Maman laughed. 'A long time before that.'

  'Before you were born?' Maman was born a long time ago.

  'Even before that, a long, long time ago! Before me, before you, before Madar Jaan, before any of us.'

  'Before Jesus?'

  'Yes, a long, long time before Jesus.'

  That really was a long time ago because Jesus was born before the olden days.

  I thought Persian sounded much nicer than Iran. Everyone knew about Persian cats and Persian carpets but no one at school knew about Iran, really, except that there was a lot of trouble there and the Iranian men on TV looked really serious and scary. Rebecca's dad said that the worst thing the Persians did was to kick the British out. 'You had half a hope then, not all this mess.'

  It was hard even for us kids to ignore what was going on in Iran. I heard snippets of conversations from Maman and Mitra and our Iranian friends who came and went from our home. I kept hearing 'they are ten times worse than the Shah!' and the word 'edaam' – execution – and I didn't like to hear the word. I heard Mitra telling Maman that she had heard from her cousin in Iran who was an airhostess with Iran Air that they had flogged a nine-year-old girl for not wearing her hejab. Nine was not all that much older than me. 'Why did they do that, Maman?' I was worried: what if they found us here? What if they came to England and to Montpelier School, found out I was Iranian and flogged me in the playground in front of everyone?

  Maman told me not to worry and that half of the stories we heard were made-up or exaggerated. 'No one is going to come to your school, so don't worry. Go and clean up your room and stop thinking such nonsense.'

  I didn't like to think about all those men in Iran who were on the TV, the ones who dressed all in black and didn't smile.

  Madar Jaan came to stay with us occasionally. She was Muslim, she was a proper Mosalmoon. She didn't eat bacon, even though Peyvand and I kept telling her how delicious it was. Eventually, because she loved eating and the smell of bacon is so delicious, she had bacon once or twice when we made it with eggs and said, 'I don't think it's pig meat at all, you are mistaken, this is lamb. As long as I think it's lamb, it's fine.'

  She did her namaz five times a day and sometimes, when I asked, she would leave a little block of earth for me on a prayer mat too so I could join her. I didn't know the words she said, but I mumbled anyway and waited for her to bend her knees, bow down and touch her forehead on the stone. Sometimes, I took it very seriously and tried to think of God and angels and being good, but other times, I got the giggles really badly so Madar Jaan would glare at me to go away because it broke her concentration and I was being disrespectful.

  Peyvand was much worse than me. Sometimes, he would pretend to join in and bend down with her, but then snatch the stone away just as Madar Jaan lowered her forehead to touch it. Still, Madar Jaan didn't stop praying, she bowed without the stone and afterwards, when she had finished, she quietly packed her prayer things away, without the stone and didn't talk or look at Peyvand until he felt really bad, gave her the stone back and said he was sorry.

  'Why do you namaz, Madar Jaan? Maman Shamsi doesn't do it,' I asked her.

  My grandmother shrugged. 'I am just used to it. It breaks up the day when you are an old lady like me. It relaxes me, too.'

  'Do you talk to God?'

  'Of course, that's what prayer is.'

  'Does he hear you?'

  Madar Jaan shrugged, then sat down in the comfy sofa in front of the television, folded her arms and settled in for an afternoon watching High Chapparal. 'Who knows, my child, who knows. Be a good girl and fetch me some chocolate.'

  Maman Shamsi didn't namaz, even though she was a Muslim. 'My back can't take all the bending, besides, who's got the time? God knows I mean it, even though I don't do it.'

  When we spoke to Iran on the phone now, everyone was very careful what they said.

  'Is everything all right there, Maman?' I'd say.

  And Maman Shamsi would reply, 'What can I say, azizam, it's all in God's hands, we're all praying that we will see you soon.'

  'Have they made you wear a hejab so that men won't look at you, Maman Shamsi?' I didn't quite get how you had to say things more carefully.

  'Yes, azizam,' my grandmother told me, 'and thank goodness for that! I was getting so tired of handsome young men flirting with me all the time.'

  Did the Ayatollah really sit somewhere and listen to everyone's conversations? Maman told me that he probably didn't personally do that but he did have people who did it for him. The moral police were everywhere. Maman worried a lot about the moral police and she didn't even live in Iran. 'The walls have ears,' Maman Shamsi said to Maman on the phone when she asked her a question that wasn't just asking after everyone's health.

  When Baba called to say he had arrived safely in Iran, I heard Maman say to him, 'Come back to England, Hadi! You can't joke with these people!'

  But I knew the mullah
s would find Baba funny. Maman was worrying about nothing.

  Everyone had wanted Khomeini in because he wasn't the Shah and he didn't want Iran to be ruled by Britain and America. But pretty quickly it seemed nobody liked Khomeini any more. Sinister whispers of 'so-and-so' being 'Hezbollah'. 'Hezbollah' were Muslims but much more strict than Muslims like Madar Jaan and Maman Shamsi. My grandmothers were the normal kind of religious, like my teachers at school who sang hymns and went to church but didn't go on and on about it or think that everyone should be like them. My grandmothers never walked in the house with shoes on and they always said Enshallah about everything, but apart from that, they, like most other people in Iran, were quite normal.

  'We plough the fields and scatter, the good seed on the land...'

  In assembly we had to sing a hymn once everyone had sat down. We had hymn practice every Wednesday to make sure we knew the hymns well enough to sing them. One boy, Luke, wasn't allowed in hymn practice because his family were Jehovah's Witnesses and he said that going to assembly was 'against his religion'. I didn't see what harm a few hymns could do. There was a boy in Peyvand's class who had long hair and wore a turban because of his religion but he was allowed in assembly. I wondered if God minded me being in assembly.

  I asked Maman Shamsi if she thought Allah would mind me singing 'We Plough the Fields and Scatter' because it was a song for God. Maman Shamsi explained that God and Allah were the same person; people just used different names for them depending on what country they were from. 'But does he speak Farsi or Englisee?' What if all the time, he only spoke Farsi and looked down on all those people in church wondering what on earth they were saying. What if loads of people in Iran hadn't had their prayers answered because they said them in Farsi and Allah only understood English? And what about French people and Indian people who couldn't speak Farsi or English?

  Maman Shamsi told me not to worry, that God understood all languages and I should give the phone to Peyvand because the call was expensive and she wanted to speak to both of us.

  The Ayatollah began to make woman wear a hejab all the time. Even if they didn't want to. Women were not allowed to show their hair in public. This was because he believed it was wrong for women to let men see their hair. Maman Shamsi and Madar Jaan were really old, so even if men saw their hair, I didn't think it would make them fall madly in love with them. But even they had to cover their hair and so did Nadia and Bafi and all the other cousins even though they were only little girls like me.

  Baba wrote a joke in his Etela'at column. The joke went like this:

  Two men were chatting and one of the men said to the other, 'I had my wife flogged for being haram. She shamed herself by showing her hair to our male dinner guests.'

  His friend said, 'Haram? Your wife? I have seen her many times and she has always been a most virtuous woman, she has always worn her hejab in the correct manner.'

  The man replied, 'I know, but one of her hairs had fallen into the soup she had made, that is how they saw it.'

  Baba was not religious. Baba drank and smoked like all the other Iranians in London. Baba didn't think it was right to make all women cover their hair. The mullahs were so strict that Mr Esfahani had taken Maman aside and told her to try and persuade Baba to not make the jokes he was making. She didn't try to persuade him, but she did tell him what people were saying and Baba laughed. 'Mr Esfahani likes a drama, that's all.'

  At school, Mrs Wybrow asked me how my father was getting on in Iran. 'I don't know,' I told her, 'he hasn't rung for a few days and my mum keeps on crying.'

  Maman told me not to say anything bad about the ayatollahs on the phone to Maman Shamsi. 'The regime has eyes and ears everywhere.'

  I wanted Baba back home with us, not in Iran. I didn't want to hear about Iran, I wanted everyone there to come here and close the door.

  Finally, Baba called. 'I'm at Heathrow. I'm getting a taxi home.'

  Maman kept crying, 'Thank God! Thank God!

  Thank God!' Baba looked very tired when he got home. He hugged Peyvand and I tight and showed us a teddy bear he bought for us at the airport. It was a Panda bear, really. He had brown patches around his eyes (which closed!) and a white tummy with brown arms and legs and a little brown nose. We called him 'Felfelli' – Peppery.

  'I want to talk to them, let me go out there and talk to them.' Hadi was trying to push past Ali Reza Taheri in the lobby of the Etela'at offices. Ali-Reza, one of the newspaper's most senior journalists, managed to keep his cigarette firmly in his fingers while restraining Hadi, pushing him back, away from the door which was locked against the growing crowd outside. 'Are you crazy man? They'll kill you! Listen to them! They want to kill you!'

  The day had started off so well. Hadi, the bright young star of Etela'at, whose column had tripled the paper's circulation, had come home. Hadi was full of joy and expectation. When things settled, he would return to Tehran with his wife and children and resume his glittering career.

  Hadi was met at the airport by at least twenty members of his own and his wife's family. They were all so proud of him. The women covered his face with kisses, the children clung to his arms and legs and the men fought a fierce battle over who should carry his cases. The family were not able to hold on to Hadi for very long. Ali Reza Taheri soon came to pick him up and was the first of his colleagues to welcome Hadi back to Iran.

  'You look well, Hadi! It looks like London is treating you well, how is your English?'

  'My name is Hadi, I am thirty-two years old, I like ice cream.'

  Ali-Reza laughed, slapped him on the back and led him to the waiting cab.

  They had a lot to talk about. Hadi's articles had made him even more popular now they were so heavily politicised. Hadi was excited. He couldn't wait to catch up with his friend then head to the offices of Etela'at where he would surely be met with the warmest welcome. They had got their revolution, now where were they going to go? What were they making of Khomeini? He was old, they had thought he would take a back seat once they had got rid of the Shah. For revolutionaries like Hadi and Ali-Reza, the Ayatollah had been a figurehead to inspire people to see there was an alternative to fight for, but now it looked as if he actually wanted to lead. He showed no sign of stepping aside and making way for a democracy. He was appointing leaders in government without consulting the people. They were creating a revolution within the revolution, pushing Iran towards strict Islamic laws.

  Ali-Reza took Hadi to a swanky restaurant in town for lunch and together they talked it over. They still had great hope for this new era in their country. These were just teething problems. Hadi had, from the very start, embraced the hard-drinking culture that went hand in hand with journalism, but this afternoon, with Ali-Reza, the two of them, in their jubilance, surpassed themselves. After a couple of Turkish coffees, however, they were poised and ready to go hail a cab to the office.

  Skipping up the stairs of the Etela'at offices, Hadi raised an arm in greeting and smiled broadly at a female colleague, Maheen, who had come out to meet him. They embraced warmly, but she was tense. Immediately Hadi knew something was wrong.

  'Chi Shodeh, Maheen?' What has happened?

  'Let's go inside, Hadi,' she said. 'Quickly.'

  Ali-Reza had paid the taxi and was also being urged to go inside. 'What has happened? What's wrong?'

  Inside the building, everyone greeted him with the usual Iranian etiquette, but they were all on edge; this was not the warm homecoming Hadi had been expecting.

  Some senior colleagues arrived quickly. They had great affection for Hadi, he was their paper's golden boy. They were concerned for him as well as for themselves and their newspaper. 'You are in trouble, Hadi, they are out to get you.'

  The alcohol did not exaggerate the bleakness of what he was hearing. It was there, all over his colleagues' faces, full of the concern and panic they were desperately trying to keep at bay.

  'Word has come that a flash mob is gathering and they are on their way here to fin
d you. They are ruthless, Hadi, we have to get you away.'

  Hadi heard these words but was finding it difficult to make sense of them. Why was he in trouble? He had not aligned himself with any of the growing political groups or anti-revolutionary parties. He was pro-revolution but his allegiance lay only with change.

  His bosses made the situation clear to him. He had written an article mocking the mullahs, he had criticised the enforcing of the hejab, he had made it clear he was not a supporter of an Islamic regime. He had been branded by the fervent supporters of the Ayatollah as 'an enemy of the revolution'. Hadi could not believe what he was hearing. No one more than he had wanted this revolution; he only wanted freedom and equality for the ordinary people of Iran, he was one of them. What was happening in his country?

  'There is no joking with these people, Hadi, they are fanatics, they will show you no mercy. People have disappeared or been executed for being half as outspoken as you.'

  They heard shouting outside the offices. 'They are here, it's happening, we have to get you out of here.'

  The outside doors had been locked, as had all the windows. Suddenly there was a panic of shouting and bustling.

  What was going on? Hadi was confused; was there really a crowd outside? Was he really hearing them chanting his name?

  'Marg Bar Khorsandi! Marg Bar Khorsandi' – Death to Khorsandi.

  The chanting was loud and clear.

  Ali-Reza and his colleagues knew that if they did not protect Hadi from the crowd, they would kill him with their bare hands.

  The booze still swirling through his bloodstream, Hadi suddenly made for the doors. 'I will go and talk to them.'

  Ali-Reza stood in his way. He pushed Hadi away from the door. 'Are you crazy, man? Get back, get back, they will kill you!' Other colleagues joined in, restraining Hadi until he had calmed down.