In the Beginning …

I don’t know which came first: the angels, the earthquakes, the times I used to fly. The times with my grandmother going through family photo albums, where she would make stories of each picture.  Time spent with my head snug on my aunt’s warm chest.  Time spent playing with Ali, my youngest uncle on my father’s side – when he would lift me into the air and throw me over his shoulders.  He always wore these thick black glasses, and had such an innocent and playful way about him.  He was very skinny, tall, and his head was shaved, military style.  All these things attracted me to him as a child and he now is one of the seven or eight uncles on my dad’s side that I still remember.

I remember a good man named Abbas. A man who worked for my dad, and lived with us when I was young.  I remember crying, frightened, as he took me to the beaches of Iran, into the deep ocean water, as I clung onto his body for life.  I loved this great man Abbas and thought of him as another of my uncles or a second dad, taking for granted how often he played with me and took care of me – not knowing that at the age of 5, I would never see him again.

The paper airplanes I would make and hide in a closet – hundreds which I would keep and play with.  The bee that stung me on the butt when I was about 3 and my grandmother who chased me through the house wanting to comfort me as I ran screaming in pain from the bee’s sting.

I remember the black glasses my grandmother wore, the black scarf that she donned on her head, the eggs she cooked me for breakfast and the sweet butter that she used. The beehive that my brother burned from the roof of our house with dozens of bees still alive inside.  Our German Shepherd, Cocoa, that I tried to ride like a horse.  The car window that I fell out of trying to imitate a popular TV show aired even in Iran in those days: Starsky and Hutch, and chipping my front tooth.

These are the impressions, the earliest memories:  a large house that I loved, people that I took for granted, played with, and miss.  The school where I spent only a few months before leaving for America with my mom, dad, and brother – just the four of us that later became my family – rather than the barrage of people, blood related or not, who were my family in Iran.  Even the number 4 representing to me a solid bond of family when I was younger.  I never imagined that a family could be smaller or larger.

Earthquakes seemed to be frequent in Iran, and I remember all of us climbing out of a window of our house which led to the backyard.  It was the fastest way out of the house.  And then playing outside with my uncles as the threat of the earthquake passed—in the tall grass and the trees that seemed so large to me then.  I remember my green army Jeep toy that I loved so much when I was only 1.  And at the same age, when I could not even yet walk, I remember the angels, the beautiful and glorious visitors from God who would come and talk to me twice or thrice.  I remember them telling me that I could fly – and so I would, every once in a while, as I stared off into another world, while my spirit flew around through the air of our house.  I remember the wooden, cream colored banister of our upstairs hallway which I would hold on to, and let my spirit soar – far, up and away, over the family room where we spent so much of our hours, my hands clutched safely to my toy Jeep.

*     *     *

I didn’t return to Iran until the age of 20.  A revolution and a ten year war with Iraq had torn the country apart, made it poor, and many of its people drastically changed.  My grandmother didn’t seem very different though – she was still very loving, and looked surprisingly the same to me.  I remember her spirit so well then – even after 15 years of being away.

Other memories come back to me: the screaming, wailing women clad in black at the large, oily, aromatic mosques.  The mosques always smelled like some kind of anointing oil – not a bad smell, just foreign and sweet: like something that didn’t belong in that country.  Perhaps because the way we lived at home and viewed God was in such stark contrast to the one people practiced in the public mosques and squares.  I remember the crying women, as I thought of them, putting what little money they had into an offering box near the beautiful turquoise and ornate tile walls of the mosque, while they cried hysterically for something I did not understand.

Holding my mother’s hand, I would ask her why they are crying, and she would simply say, “They are crazy. Nothing!”

And the tough looking and sweaty, smelly men who walked the mosques in a separate location, segregated from the women – these I remember less because as a child, I was allowed into the women’s part of the mosque with my mom and was able to catch a glimpse of what seemed like a chaotic and sad hysteria.

My dad never took me to the mosques.  Not really.  I never saw my dad pray or express any belief in Islam.  But he took me to a great spread of land, filled only with dirt, and the beginnings of a Mosque that he was building.  Not because he believed in Islam, but because it would bring him honor and glory.  Only later, in America, my dad would constantly drill into my head to thank God for everything and to ask him to guide and protect me in everything that I did.

But it wasn’t to a Muslim God he wanted me to pray to necessarily, but just to “God” – and that was the extent of it.  Sometimes he would have me start, by praying, Khodayeh Khoob vah Mehraban.  Translated into English as “God who is Good and Kind”.  And then he would have me ask God for something.  For a long time, I thought you couldn’t pray to God unless you started by approaching Him as the “Good and Kind God” in Farsi.  But this wasn’t a bad thing.  It taught me of God’s infinite goodness and benevolence. This fact alone made me trust God completely and it never entered my mind that God could want anything but ultimate good for me.  So as a child, I would always pray to God – even before I came to know Jesus Christ at the age of twenty-one in Sunny California.  And I know God was there all along, hearing me, and answering me in His way.

I remember how on this great stretch of empty land in Iran, my dad and Abbas, my favorite “uncle”, would take me in their Jeep and Abbas would put me on his lap and pretend to let me drive the car through the great stretch of land.

But there was never anything in these massive turquoise colored architectural mosques, which my mother occasionally took me through, or the large Mosque that my dad was about to build, that I associated with God. Not even the beautiful perfume smells that emanated from the people.

I remember, in Iran, the security guard who guarded the large house across the street from us, who I really loved and looked up to.  Because of his uniform, I thought he was a policeman.  He would take me into the small room where he worked and show me a copy of the Koran, with its strange and beautiful Arabic writing, that looked so exotic to me, and its colorful blue and red lettering.  When he told me that the great and massive book he held in his hand was a Magic Book, well, I believed him.  He must have told me that to entertain and awe me.  It worked.  I’d always ask to see the Great Magic Book every time I would see him!  And he always laughed jovially and obliged!

When we left for America, we first stopped for a brief time in New York, before coming permanently to California.  I don’t know if we were in New York for 30 minutes or an hour – or for several days.  All I remember of that time was what my parent’s video camera preserved for me in memory: my brother, Hossain, and I having the largest snow-ball fight of our lives with New York snow.

This “Magic” Book … this same Magic Book would later come to mean for me a religion that oppressed its women and repressed its people.  One that would destroy a nation and defeat freedom.  One that would never allow me, as a Christian, to return to Iran again – no matter how much I would like to once again see my grandmother, or Abbas, or my uncle Ali, who later became extremely religious himself and a supporter of the corrupt mullahs that ruled Iran with a fierce and dark hand.

My Maman Bozorg’s Revolution

As a child of five, my parents migrated our small family of four to America. We settled in a mid-size apartment in Tarzana, California–leaving in the ghost of the static past scores of uncles, aunts, and cousins.

I remember my grandmother in particular–her beaded eyes as black as her heart at our departing–wailing incessantly. It was she who would get cancer soon after and live painfully with it for years before finally dying. She was a strong old, woman who hung on for decades, beating stomach cancer and two strokes, before finally dying of unabated grief.

My grandmother, who I now suspect favored my older brother–her favorite grandson–loved me nevertheless. And I don’t blame her for this choice.

My mother had married at the astonishing age of eleven and had her oldest son, my brother, at fourteen, while continuing her schooling. My grandmother had raised my older brother.

We called our grandmother, Maman, and we called my mother by her first name. By the time my mother had me, six years later, she was old enough to play the role of mother.

In those days, my grandmother would take me to an empty room upstairs filled with dozens of family albums and old Persian faberge cushions. I would sit across from her and she would spend countless hours retelling a story with each photo we passed on each old page. These old Persian cushions hold, to this day, a luxuriously heart-warming, but now somewhat foreign memory for me with their busy geometric patterns and dark reds and blues.

* * *

It must have been exciting. Young revolutionaries and ordinary citizens coming together to oust a powerful king who had alienated his people by forging too fast a union between East and West, bringing Western civilization to a country who did not understand. “A puppet of the West”, they chided. A brutal force who had helped promulgate the vast gulf between the dust-ridden destitute and the uber-rich.

The Shah of Iran was considered brutal and repressive to many–but more than that, he had been downplaying not only the importance of Islam–but the sanctity of tradition–to a people who did not understand the fast and loose culture of the West. Their religion stood  second only to the inherent love and pride of their culture, whose deep-seated roots reached as far back as Cyrus the Great, King Darius, and of course, the Zoroastrian religion which was among the first to preach the monotheistic tradition of the One True God, and with it, secured ancient Persia among the first of nations to usher in the harmonious ideals of human rights on a mass scale. From this ancient religion sprang the Festival of Norooz and all its rich and symbolic rituals (a celebration of the onset of Spring).  And from this old religion also was birthed the inherent Persian disregard for rules–a tenacious sense of rebellion (for love of freedom) that marks–to some extent–every Persian.

It was grossly tragic that the very people who helped birth human rights into neighboring civilizations and clung ambitiously to the tenets of unhindered freedom, found themselves voluntarily–albeit ignorantly–ushering in a morbid course of annihilation that would bind them to this formidable act of rebellion which would affect generations now and into the foreseeable future.

The Shah had concerted his force into fighting the secondary or tertiary threat of communism and underestimated the power of the faux-spiritual men in meek, black robes who quietly and calmly promised freedom from repression, liberation from the West’s vastly invasive culture, and the ideal economic climate of fairness and justice for all of Iran’s inhabitants.

* * *

Marg bar Shah. Marg bar Shah. Marg bar Shah. (Death to the Shah).

I hear this strange chant on our 1978 television set and the long, detached face of a gray man in funereal-black robes who incites both fear and anger in my parents.

I hear my young mom with her short feminist hair-style of the late 1970s,  exclaim with anguish and disgust, as if she were watching a tragic movie, “Stupid, stupid people! What are they doing?” And then with a sadder, frigid voice, “Oh the poor Shah–poor Shah. What a good man he was. He was so good.”

Hopeful, angry, elusive olive-skinned men, some smooth-shaven, some with beards, chant to the gray Ayatollah Khomeini whose white conical beard shrieks in stark contrast to his raven-colored and solitary garments.

They think they are chanting liberation for my grandmother, but she knows better. She, again, sees only death.