“What is your relationship with her?” he said to Sina harshly, nodding in my direction.
“She is my sister,” Sina replied immediately.
“Show me your ID cards,” the guard said, looking at Sina and then shifting his focus to me.
“Why do you need to see our ID cards?” I replied. “Can’t you see that we look alike?”
All Iranian citizens have to carry ID cards in case they are stopped by Revolutionary Guards, a practice that angered me even as a child. The government should not be controlling people’s lives.
The guard dismissed me by raising his voice and hitting the inside of his hand with his baton. “SHOW ME YOUR ID CARDS AT ONCE!” he barked.
I nervously dug my hands deep into my bag, searching for the ID card. Finding it, I pushed it forcefully into his open palm. As he read the card, I couldn’t help myself—I told him I would ask the next person who walked past if they thought Sina and I looked like we were related and I bet they would say yes.
Handing over his ID card, Sina glared at me. “Quiet, Sami. You can’t argue with them.”
“Don’t tell me what to do, Sina,” I snapped.
We continued to fight in front of the guard, who by now had checked our ID cards and realized we were bickering like brother and sister. He explained that he had to check ID cards because too many people were indulging in “inappropriate” relationships. I was enraged but could not say anything. Whom we chose to spend time with should be our own free choice!
My brother Salar, the most spirited of us siblings, suffered far more from the new regime during those years. Around the age of ten he started borrowing Hollywood movies from his friend for us to watch at home. Hollywood movies were illegal in Iran, but they were smuggled in, and if you knew the right person you could get hold of them relatively easily. My brothers and I loved watching the movies any chance we got. One movie was broadcast on television every Friday, but they were really old black-and-white comedies such as Laurel and Hardy and the Three Stooges, which I never found funny.
Salar, like my oldest brother, Sina, took classes in karate and loved Jackie Chan movies, so these were a prominent feature in our video-cassette player. I also remember watching Die Hard, Rocky, and The Exorcist. None of us could understand the words, because the films were in English and not subtitled, but we loved them regardless. The West was a strange, enticing world to us.
Our family looked forward to seeing which movie Salar would borrow from his friend each week. My mother always said she was too tired to watch the films, but my father would often join us. We would sit huddled around the small TV in our sitting room, stuffing our faces with nuts and sunflower seeds, my brothers carefully watching the karate moves, and me collapsing in hysterics.
Salar’s journey to his friend’s house and back usually only took about ten minutes, but one evening Salar didn’t return. We waited almost an hour until the worry got too much for us and we went out in the streets searching for him.
Eventually a man admitted he had seen Salar being dragged off by Revolutionary Guards. My dad became frightened, frantically contacting his friends and eventually managing to locate Salar. He had been beaten black and blue by the guards for being in possession of non-Islamic material. They had tied his feet together with rope and beat him with sticks. My father brought him home, and upon seeing Salar my mother and I had burst into tears. I was so angry but there was nothing I could do. Salar was in terrible pain and unable to walk for a week.
Now, many years later, on this trip back to a repressive country that was so different from my adopted Ireland, I vowed to show Saba the real, enduring beauty of the country of my birth, taking her to all the places I had loved in the cheerful innocence of childhood. Despite its current government, Iran is a beautiful country and I love every corner of it. I took her to the Lahijan Mountains and introduced her to my favorite restaurants and traditional food, like the delicious chelo kebab—the national dish of Iran—which is made with ground beef, lamb, or other meat infused with aromatic saffron and served on skewers with Persian rice.
I hired a small boat to take us out to the Anzali Swamp, which lies parallel to the Caspian Sea and is covered in water lilies. The water was so clear that we could see the fish swimming below. “Look, Mummy,” Saba squealed, pointing. My eyes followed her outstretched arm to a beautiful silver fish that glided toward us and quickly disappeared under our boat. It was such a beautiful, peaceful place, and in that moment, with my daughter so happy beside me, I was glad to have taken the chance to come back to the hometown I loved.
As I peered over the edge of the boat, I saw my reflection staring back. I almost didn’t recognize the woman who held my gaze and looked so tormented, her self-esteem in tatters. So weak, vulnerable. What had happened to the vibrant, defiant young woman who had left Iran with so many great hopes and dreams?
I dropped my hand into the water, and ripples shattered my reflection. I could not bear to look at that woman any longer.
TWO
Rasht had changed in many ways since I had left in 1995 for a new life in Ireland. Money from oil and agriculture had been pumped into construction, and it now seemed as urban and modern as many European cities. Streets had been widened, and access in and out of the city was now greatly improved with the construction of numerous fly-over bridges. Skyscrapers and multistory office blocks had sprung up amid the traditional buildings, and shops and restaurants lined the streets just as they do in any major city in the West.
Other changes had occurred on a more personal level. It amazed me how Iranian women now wore so much makeup. I recently read that Iran is the seventh largest market for makeup in the world and the second largest in the Middle East. It makes sense that Iranian women want to highlight the one part of their bodies they can freely expose—their face. I had always made an effort to look nice as a teenager and college student when I lived there, but what I saw women wearing now was in a whole different league.
Such a change from my experience. When I was seventeen, I was going to a private tutor in Rasht to help prepare for the college entrance exam. One evening as I was coming home, a white bus pulled up and two middle-age women got out and hurried toward me. Each of them was dressed in a black chador, the traditional large piece of cloth wrapped around the head and the upper body, leaving only the face exposed. Their pointy, angry faces made them look like two crows about to pounce on their prey—and that’s exactly what they did.
Grabbed roughly by each arm and flung toward the bus, all I could manage to stutter was, “What did I do?”
Glaring at me, one of them squawked, “You have not covered your hair properly!”
Terrified, I knew that if my father found out, I would be in big trouble. He was always warning me, “You must be careful. Never do anything to allow those people to harass you.” These women were Revolutionary Guards, their role to arrest women because the male guards were not meant to touch females when arresting them.
Upon being pushed into the bus I found myself surrounded by young girls with eyes as big and scared as mine. We were driven to the nearest police station and taken in.
Fortunately I was not wearing makeup. Brandishing dirty cloths, the women moved from one girl to the next, harshly scrubbing their faces and cursing at them. The young girls cried in pain, but the guards were unmoved. Once the makeup had been removed, leaving the girls’ faces swollen, red, and raw, the guards started hitting them with the back of a heavy gun.
Unbelievable. Angry, I could say nothing.
Given that most young women wore makeup