Aria Minu-Sepehr’s father was a high-ranking general in the shah’s Imperial Iranian Air Force. Aria grew up in a sheltered and privileged world. But when Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi was overthrown on February 11, 1979, the Ayatollah rose to power, and the world that ten-year-old Aria had known up to that point disappeared. The Ayatollah was more than a political leader—he became Iran’s supreme spiritual leader, turning the country into an Islamic republic. Seemingly overnight, new laws governed the social sphere, including such things as how women could dress and what books could remain in circulation. Many people who opposed the Ayatollah’s imposition of religious and cultural ideals were executed or imprisoned.
Like Qais Akbar Omar’s experience in Afghanistan after the rise of the Taliban, Aria’s life in the new Iran became a waiting game with an outcome he couldn’t predict. Because his father had held a position of power in the old regime, the new world held terrifying dangers for the entire family as they waited to see if the soldiers would come, if family members would be kidnapped, if his father would be publicly executed like the other generals in the shah’s Air Force.
Like many other Iranians who had supported the modernizing, secularizing, sometimes pro-Western culture of the shah’s era, Aria’s family realized exile was the best possible outcome. They moved to the United States in 1979.
ROWS OF SYCAMORES lined the boulevard I took to fifth grade. The tops of the trees met to form an arch over the lanes below. For miles. Boisterous sparrows flitted in and out. Sunlight shot through windows in the canopy; the tail of a blue bus was suddenly aglow. Tangerine taxis came to life in puddles of sun. Chrome bumpers glinted rhythmically. Zany cabbies pulled off the impossible in teeming traffic to squeeze in another passenger going their way. Slats full of tomatoes marked a grocer. Heaps of slender cucumbers. The aroma of fresh-cut herbs drifted down the sidewalk—tarragon, dill, coriander, mint, fenugreek, basil. A file of people waited for sheets of hot bread in front of a bakery. Across the way, a peddler ladled walnuts out of a scuffed glass tank brimming with milky brine. Last bell sent schoolgirls ambling home, looping arms, laughing.
That very same road now soured the mood. Winter gray. Stores chained shut. Women cloaked in black. Seeing them glide across the streets without their legs visible made them wraithlike. Ghostly. Were these the same women as before? One day, after school, I spotted a handful of slim-necked brass shells littering the sidewalk. Sniffing one, I found a singe of fresh gunpowder, memory racing back to the night before, to the echo that had shaken me awake, heart pounding with the gun’s roar in the still air. Was I standing in the footsteps of the executioner? My hair was wafting in a silent breeze; I was imagining the killed. Someone had looked down a gun’s barrel at men I knew. They had peered back. These shells bore witness to my horror. A horn’s blare shook me out of my stupor. I was teetering on the edge of the sidewalk, being pelted by the gust of rushing traffic.
The madness had started when Ayatollah Khomeini appeared in the moon. One night people flocked to their roofs to spot him, to point fingers and praise Allah. Radio interviews the next day corroborated the rumor—truth in numbers. Of course, the media didn’t seek anyone who hadn’t experienced the lunar phenomenon. This was a time of national reflection, of soul searching, and rationality was considered to be limiting. It didn’t help anything that my father deigned it below us to even entertain the idea that the Ayatollah could appear in the moon; we didn’t once look up that night. But from then on a clear line was drawn, a boundary demarcating an us and a them. They could see faces in space. We couldn’t. They yearned for an earlier time, for tradition and for God’s unequivocal directives. We questioned blind faith. They wanted the shah dead. We upheld the law of the land. They set the streets on fire, cars billowing black smoke, storefronts smashed to bits. We watched, dumbfounded. The day the shah flew away, they swarmed the streets, giddy that their revolution had succeeded. Another plane carried the Ayatollah back to Iran. It was then that the killings began.
The first four men who were shot were my baba’s colleagues. They were pictured on the title page of the day’s paper, toppled in pools of black blood. Soon, others followed. In the ensuing weeks, I would find pictures of lifelong family friends lined up on a cement floor, naked, riddled with black, coin-sized holes. Quiet spread through our home; no one had any idea what to say or do, waiting as though miraculously it would all begin to make sense. The day our air force ace, Nader, appeared in the paper, my mother keened. “No! not Nader,” she said and fell onto the couch. Nader and Baba were rivals. They had screeched over Iranian airspace faster than anyone, higher than anyone. Both had led the Golden Crown aerobatic team. Both men were jet pilots first, then air force generals, then husbands and fathers. If one was deemed threatening, the other would also be targeted. I had the unfortunate acumen at ten to realize this logic.
Before Nader, I had tried to convince myself that the dead were culpable. Why else was Baba, a two-star general, still alive when others were being slaughtered? Presumably because he was guiltless. Unlike others we knew, he refused to hide. He went about his day like the revolution was a parliamentary reorganization which would have minor reverberations. His tough, impassive façade let little of his internal turmoil through. We haven’t done anything, it said. We have nothing to worry about. But with Nader, I had to question this resolve. Perhaps we were guilty of the same invisible violations for which others were being killed. I imagined Nader being questioned—and his indignation. Air force men, and particularly fighter jet pilots, walked with an ethereal air, like the troubles on the ground didn’t pertain to them, like their communion with the heavens removed them from politics. When he was reproached in court, Nader had charged the judge, struck him in the mouth.
The TV offered few escapes. My after-school fix of Laurel and Hardy had been replaced by televised court trials and righteous clerics promising Islamic justice for the decadent. Baba frowned on such spectacles, calling them absurd mockeries, but when he was away, my grandmother would turn to me, press an index finger to her nose and tune in the trials. Grandmother sat at the edge of the couch, biting her lower lip, and I sat next to her, matching her intent gaze, not sure what was being said but fully grasping the power shift and what it meant for us. The clergy had coined an unintelligible Arabic label, mofsed fel arz—it was their foregone verdict. I couldn’t believe it described us, this foreign phrase scrawled on rectangles of paper, dangling from the necks of the guilty. Morgue shots of the executed displayed the signs on their bare chests, paper softening on skin, ink running with blood.
The trials weighed on me, made me doubly culpable. Already, my mind was in a steady state of playback, a review of all my childhood trespasses. Now this, going behind my father’s back to watch things he had explicitly reproved. I desperately wished to confront him, to say I knew things I shouldn’t, even if it meant I had to betray Grandmother’s trust.
“What is mofsed fel arz?” I dared to ask Baba one day, hoping he would see the question for what it was, my growing need to confess.
“Arabic gibberish,” he said dispassionately.
“But what does it mean?”
“The ending, fel arz, means ‘of the land.’ Mofsed is a person or thing that furthers fesad.”
“What’s fesad?”
“Mofsed, fesad, fased, fasada.” Often, Baba forgot my generation didn’t study Arabic. Since my birth, the country had tried to expunge the language of the Qur’an from our tongue. Those in power thought that Arabic had corrupted our Farsi.
“I don’t get what it means,” I had to admit.
“Corrupter. It means ‘corrupter of the land.’ Corrupt, like spoiled. Like to spread rot. It’s the bad apple in the bunch that turns all others, the one that attracts flies, encourages stench and decay. If you listen to them, you’ll conclude that anything new is a disease, a corruption of the old. We’re to go back to outhouses and cholera. To dirt roads and wagons and a perpetual cloud of dust.”
Clearly, I’d hit a nerve. My father wasn’t answering me anymore; he was rehearsing a defense.
In fact, in our dichotomous world, it was difficult to parse out the right from the wrong and the pure from the corrupt. We lived in an age of divides, and cultural clash was a mainstay of life. One side had latched onto modernity and made it its guiding light. As a result, we had acquired one of the most sophisticated air forces in the world. Iran’s vast oil reserves meant we were a nation whose economy was poised to rival Japan’s by the year 2000. Oil cash also meant the advent of electricity, sewer systems, paved roads, universities, hospitals—mundane advances to the other camp who focused, instead, on a loss of values. They blamed the twentieth century for the cultural upheavals that had rent us apart, reshaped and transmogrified us. Half of us were grotesquely progressive, half inanely traditional. And yet, as I looked back on it, my childhood seemed like a juggling act, a condition by which two discordant worlds had been held in some constant but tenuous balance.
My father’s delusions of safety, his naiveté when it came to his innocence, mirrored the ruling party’s blind spots. In response to a clerical uprising some years before the revolution, the shah had marched with his troops into Qom—the hotbed of zealotry—and delivered what he thought was a unifying speech. He had chastised the mullahs for wanting to remain in “the age of the donkey” when he was trying to take us into “the jet age.” But just as traditionalists had no solutions for the rapid changes taking shape, the proselytizers of progress never stopped to imagine what a mullah in the jet age would look like. These men still donned their thousand-year-old garb at a time when the miniskirt was fashionable; they clung to their thousand-year-old roles when gay marriages were in vogue; and they continued to prophesize the return of the Hidden Imam.
Far from a parliamentary reorganization, the revolution drew a line through society and set it ablaze: you were either on the right side or you were hoping for repentance. For some it was too late: there was a palpable sense that there was only so much you could take back. My internal dialog put me on the hopeless side one moment, and on the saved-through-clemency at the next. Pastries stolen from the cupboard in which they were saved for guests were possibly forgivable—as was silent flatulence in a movie theater. What posed a genuine concern, what I was sure would cost me my life if discovered, was sneaking into my brother’s bedroom to leaf through his The Joy of Sex. It was one thing to regret my misstep but another to deny that mammary glands had begun to excite me. My father’s own behavior suggested he had unpardonable deeds to worry about.
I was sitting on the edge of my parents’ bed, talking to Baba as he got dressed. He pulled open his chest of drawers, carefully slid an undershirt out from under a revolver, and eased the drawer back in. “What’s that for?” I asked in alarm. I had seen the handgun before, back on the air base. Once, Baba and I had practiced shooting paper targets with it.
“So that a lifetime’s effort doesn’t end up trampled underfoot,” he said.
I didn’t want to know what he meant, but it was clear that the weapon wasn’t loaded for targets anymore.
The gun made real my central fear that people would come for us. The rest was a given; morgue shots of our friends left no doubt. In a recurring dream, I had imagined the knock at the door, but it was my father who had seen the scenario through: the rap comes by night, the adults whisper and gesticulate, someone goes to the door, he takes out the gun, aims to kill, blinding flashes of light back and forth, blood. And what am I expected to do? Cower? Scream? Pick up the gun and fire?
A MONTH AFTER the revolution, Baba petitioned for and was granted early retirement. There was a sense of relief at home. The air force had been the first branch of the armed forces to side with the revolutionaries, opening their armories to the public, and everyone had taken my father’s return to work as a death wish. One by one, the leadership had been taken in for questioning, and they had never come back. Maybe, as my family thought, retirement meant my father would be forgotten. Maybe, they hoped, he would lead a quiet life.
Several months into retirement, having thrown himself into art and guitar lessons and French, Baba was getting antsy. The land he had served—improved, he would say—was quickly devolving into dogma and provinciality. And there was no sign of a government to halt the decline. The emerging winners of the revolution were not the secular nationalists thought most likely to restore order, but rather the politically ambitious mullahs under Ayatollah Khomeini, the self-proclaimed moral voice of the revolution. Having secured the courts, they ruled with impunity. One turbaned judge boasted that he personally administered the death sentences he authored.
“Tomorrow,” said my father one day, “we’ll go water-skiing. How does that sound?”
I was curious to know where, in the middle of the ravaged capital city, one skied.
“The Karaj Dam isn’t far. We have a clubhouse there,” he said.
“The air force. It’s time we find out what about retirement people like so much. And what kind of a retirement would it be without skiing? What do you say?”
“Sure, I guess.”
In addition to daredevil aerobatics, the elite cadre of jet pilots to which my father belonged were athletes. Without exception, all of them water-skied.
The next morning we packed to leave for the clubhouse. Grandmother had gone pale. As we readied ourselves, she approached Baba and said, “Do you think, my dear, this is a good time to ski? It’s so unsafe to be out. And going back to the air force, I mean, what if someone were to recognize you?”
“If we can’t ski, what else is there left to do?” he said.
The twisty, mountainous road we took to the air force clubhouse was the same one my father and I often took to snow ski. But now, without snow, the landscape felt foreign and hostile. It was as though the soothing white veneer had hidden the true craggy nature of things. The slopes, so graceful in winter, were blackened in stark shadows. Jagged rocks. And trees, vicious trees, sent their roots into any crack or fissure, splintered the shale or jutted out of looming escarpments. Rocks the size of houses teetered above us; loosened, they could flatten us. We were following a river to its dammed source. As we pushed further and further upstream, I could tell it was getting angrier—a rolling, frothing fury.
I wished I could have taken back my entire childhood and started fresh, wished I could have been as overjoyed as my father at seeing the concrete wall of the dam and the lake behind it. Instead, I glanced nervously at the ominously still water lined by wall-like mountains. We could have been looking at a vast bed of onyx or at tar or ink or—
“Baba, are there animals in the lake?” I asked.
“Sure. It’s known for its trout.”
“Do trout bite?”
“Nibble, maybe.”
“Baba, I’m serious.”
“If you mean, do they bite humans, then no. But I imagine they use their mouths to masticate.”
“Are there any sharks in there or killer whales or sea lions?”
“You think I don’t know my saltwater animals? Very sneaky, you.”
“How about alligators then?”
“Okay, maybe a couple of lost alligators. But only two.”
“Baba! Are there or are there not any alligators?”
“Alligators principally favor warmer climes, and this water, as you can deduce from all the snow that feeds it, is nippy.”
“How nippy?”
“Close to freezing,” he said. “It’s very exhilarating, actually.”
“Is it true that when hypothermia sets in, you feel warm?”
“Yes.”
“Then how would you know you’re freezing to death?”
“You don’t. But what difference does it make? Real or imagined, if you feel warm, then you should try to enjoy it.”
Pulling onto a discreet driveway brought us to a fenced gate shackled with a heavy chain. A few flat buildings, fifty or so yards down the driveway, stood by the water’s edge. In front of a quiet bank of docks, two maroon ski boats sat tethered. They looked as if they had petrified into the lake’s granite surface. Baba waited quietly, looking over the facility and the glassy water. I knew that look well. It was responsible for public fountains, playgrounds, water towers and efficient traffic flow. When I saw Baba pondering something, I heard wheels in motion. The gaze felt silent now, as though we’d come to see something for the last time.
We approached a guard sitting idly on the other side of the fence. He seemed not to care that someone had arrived. The soldier’s rolled-up sleeves, untucked shirt and fuzzy face would have been criminal half a year ago. Returning to the air force after so many sweat-soaked nightmares made me nervous, and here, confronting a fallen soldier, a revolutionary, made my knees quiver.
“What goes on here, soldier?” said Baba sternly.
“You’re looking at it,” said the man.
No one had ever addressed the general with such cavalier disrespect, and I shuddered to think what might happen next. I half-expected my father to grab the man by the ear and shout a thing or two in his face. But then my eyes fell on the man’s gun. I had memorized its exact shape, its splayed barrel and artless, pressed-steel frame. The gun had become an emblem of the revolution. It was the same type of assault weapon that had produced the shells I had found.
“Is the facility open?” Baba asked calmly.
“Who wants to know?”
“Is Shob here?”
The name seemed to make a difference. The soldier straightened himself as though it were a chore to stand up. He snatched his gun and shuffled away toward one of the buildings without a word.
Baba turned to me with a quick lift of his brows, as if to say, We’ll have to see about that! Stuck behind a fence with the air force on the other side and boats glistening in the sun, we faced the sum and substance of our lives. What to do? Severing some bonds required amnesia or death, and Baba was unwilling to forget.
A few minutes later Shob emerged, moving quickly toward us with the soldier lagging behind him. When he got within hearing distance, he put on a loud show of concern and authority. “General M,” he said glowingly. “Welcome, sir. Hurry up and open the lock, soldier,” he said. Shob, the custodian, was effusively apologetic. As we waited for the soldier to search through his keys, he carried on as in the old days, showing proper deference for Baba’s station. But it did little to calm my nerves. There was a lawless man with a gun standing on the other side of the fence.
“You know how it is, General. It’s an amazing mishmash,” he said. “But what a pleasure it is to see you. How have you been, sir? If I’d known you were coming, I would have prepared the place for you.”
When the soldier finally found the right key and released the big padlock, he parted the fence with no more effort than needed. As we squeezed past him, he sneered. “General, aye? I didn’t think there were any generals left.”
Overnight, we had become relics. But unlike other remnants of times past who, like the mullahs, could maintain their integrity and strive for a return, we had become detestable artifacts. Whether they killed Baba or not didn’t matter anymore. He was already a dead man walking.