The Alley of Love and Yellow Jasmines (26 page)

He also told us that the number of fanatical Iranian Muslims in Canada was growing at an alarming rate. People who held key positions in the Islamic Republic of Iran had chosen Canada as a home away from home, running successful businesses in Iran out of Canada.

A Farsi-speaking weekly show in Canada interviewed us afterward, and I did not shy away from letting its Iranian audience know how disturbing the whole incident was to all of us. I also mentioned that we would be back to perform the play. “I for one am not threatened by some leeches fed by the Fundamentalists!” I said.

Two months later, we were back in Vancouver. This time the theater was ready for any disturbance. The police had installed two metal detectors at the entrance. A dozen policemen and a couple of trained dogs searched the place thoroughly before the audience came in.

All the ticket holders were back, and our sponsor had to turn away newcomers. Six hundred people sat in the theater to watch what they had missed two months before. It was amazing to me that they, too, did not care about the bogus bomb threat, even though the Canadian police had taken it very seriously.

The show started at eight o’clock sharp with a couple of policemen waiting backstage. I was talking with the chief of police when an officer came in and told us they had received another bomb threat. I said, “But your men have searched the room. We know it’s phony.”

I was told that according to the law they had to evacuate the place. I delivered the bad news, and the audience again gathered in the parking lot. We managed to talk to as many people as we could. They were all very supportive of us and, again, said they would hold on to their tickets until they could see the play.

On our third attempt, we managed to stage our play in Vancouver. I was told months later that there were rumors that one of the actors had disabled the main switchboard at the theater before showtime.

HOUSHANG WAS DYING
to write a musical, a modern version of an Iranian fable called
Amir-Arsalan
, the story of a princess imprisoned by a beast. I was not very keen on the idea. I felt that the message and the content of the play were too outdated for our Iranian audience. It was 1998, and most of them had lived outside Iran for nearly twenty years. And there was the fact that Iranians had not shown a lot of interest in musicals before. Houshang could not be swayed.

What followed was two months of rehearsals that included dance and voice training. A sum of $125,000 dollars from our own pockets was invested in creating an original score, sophisticated portable sound system, props and costumes designed by my friend Pari Malek, the designer of my borrowed wedding gown.

Unfortunately I was right. The musical was not as successful as our past plays. To say the least, it created tension in our house. And I realized I needed a vacation.

TARA AND I
took a trip to Yellowstone National Park on a tour with other mostly Iranian mothers and their daughters. I was extremely happy, having Tara next to me at all times, on such a heavenly journey through the grandeur of the Wild West and its spectacular features.

As much as I enjoyed having quality time with Tara, I was sad to learn how little these Iranian daughters knew about their mothers’ pasts. It was during this trip to Yellowstone when I decided to write my own one-woman show, based on the many stories I had either heard or experienced during my life‘s journey. I called it
The Other Half
.

Best described, it was seven episodes in a woman’s life, connected to one another by contemporary popular songs such as “Strangers in the Night,” sung by Frank Sinatra, that played over and over again in the late 1960s at the Palace of Ice on Pahlavi Boulevard.

In the first episode the woman is six years old and listening to her grandmother’s bedtime story. Then she goes through her teens, thriving, growing into a young woman, getting married and having to flee her birth country. Finally she successfully immigrates to England. In the last episode, she is chasing the sun in Hyde Park Corner in London. As she looks back on her life, she keeps talking and moving her chair toward sunspots.

The play was staged at the Comedy Club in Farsi for a couple of weeks for a limited engagement. It was directed by Houshang, who was pretty much the only male in attendance. Hundreds of Iranian mothers brought their daughters to see the play.

I cannot remember how many times I was approached by these daughters, who told me that, after seeing the play, they had a totally new perception of their mothers. One of them actually thanked me for showing her who her mother was. She told me she was born here in the United States and had no idea what sort of life her mother had led in the past.

I performed the play in Stockholm, Sweden, on March 8, 1999, on Woman’s Day, to an audience of hundreds of Iranians. I performed it in Goteborg the following night. Again it was well received. I felt humbled by the audience’s jubilant applause. I marveled that I was able to write a story, or rather convey my
own
story, in a way that allowed daughters to connect with their mothers. Tara came to see it a few times, once bringing me red roses at the end of the performance.

36

Always with My Daughter

T
ara was already seven years old, still studying at LILA in Woodland Hills. It is fascinating how children grow in the blink of an eye. I was anxious for my parents to see Tara. They had to travel to Istanbul to apply for a visa at the American Embassy, since the U.S.A. no longer had one in Iran.

Tara and I took my parents to Disneyland, and they loved it, especially riding in the small teacups as the song “It’s a Small World (After All)” played along and the colorful pastel teacups swirled about. I wish I could have had them longer, not only for my own sake but also for Tara’s. They only stayed for two months and went home so soon that it still seems like it never happened. My father was incredibly polite and said that he did not want to be a burden on us. I tried to tell him that they would never be a burden on us, but he said I was married and had to think of my husband’s privacy, too.

Tara was already a young girl with a lot of ambition. She wanted to become an astrologer, then an archaeologist. The list went on. She had her own close circle of friends, all from school, and they would speak French in her bedroom—I think because they knew I didn’t understand it that well, and they wanted to talk about boys.

Tara also had a particular taste in clothing. She preferred casual clothes and flat shoes. I’ll never forget the day I wanted to get her a designer top and she said she did not understand why she had to wear the designer’s name on her shirt, having already paid for it.

Around this time I asked Tara if she wanted to learn to play an instrument, something my mother had wished for me but had never happened. She accepted the offer of piano lessons only if I stayed in the room while Madam Kazjanian taught her to play. I agreed, as I did years later when she needed extra help with math and algebra. I had sat at the back of the evening class with the permission of the school and her teacher while Tara was studying her math. The school may have thought that I was too protective of her, but this was my way of teaching Tara that I would do anything for her to get a better education, even if I had to sit in the classroom for two hours, realizing that my own math wasn’t that good.

Although things weren’t picture perfect with us, life seemed calm and promising. But far away, another disaster was about to consume my family.

37

Evin

A
s a doctor in Tehran, my middle brother, Shahriar, had gone to a school sponsored by the military. He had risen through the ranks of the military regime to become the head of the Health Department for a division of the air force. As time passed, my brother was being pressured by the military to fulfill its ever increasing requirements, which included daily prayers. He did not approve of what was being imposed upon him and felt like he no longer belonged in Tehran’s medical world. He fled Iran, having told authorities he was going on a short visit to London, though he never planned to return. His wife and children were supposed to join him later. But after about a year away, his wife urged his return to Iran with assurances that he would not face ramifications for fleeing Iran and the army.

His capture in Iran just so happened to be the day after a huge demonstration was held at the Federal Building in L.A., where ten thousand Iranians showed up. CNN had called me in advance and told me that they needed to tie a story to the demonstration. Houshang and I agreed to be interviewed.

I had met an Iranian student who had fled Iran after a year in Evin Prison. He had been beaten and tortured. One of his legs was an inch shorter than the other after being pulled in a torture session. In graphic detail on CNN, I spoke about him and the torture chambers he had been through.

The next day my brother was put in Evin Prison, accused of having passed military information to the British. He was charged with being a spy. He was interrogated and asked if he had anything to do with what I had said on CNN about torture chambers in Iran.

The conditions at Evin are horrid. Shahriar was interrogated and beaten and held for a year. Because of his skills as a doctor, though, the other prisoners and officials sought him out with their medical complaints, and he helped them as best he could. He wasn’t allowed any visitors, which was very hard on my family. My parents were the ones who suffered the most, dreading the possible execution of their son. Upon his release he was officially dismissed from the army and stripped of his medical degree.

When he eventually left Iran again, this time for good, he went to Istanbul. He couldn’t practice medicine since his medical license and degrees had been taken away by the army in Iran, but my parents helped him as he tried to figure out what he was going to do next. Unfortunately he had to leave his family behind, including his three children. He would eventually divorce his wife for her own safety.

38

That Day

H
oushang had finished writing his newest play,
Happiness Plus Tax
, and we were getting ready for rehearsals when Shahla called and told me she was going to leave the States and live in a village in India called Rishe-Kash. She had divorced her husband and visited India with a friend of hers earlier that year. She was taken by the poor children of the village and had decided to sell her properties in Northern California and start a free school for them.

I was so happy for her. Being friends since our youth, I knew this was what she wanted and would make her happy in life. Tara and I traveled to San Francisco to say good-bye to her. We went to bed early that night, since she no longer had a TV or a radio.

It was seven-thirty in the morning when Shahla’s father called us and told us that the Twin Towers had been hit by terrorists. We were stunned. I was horrified at the tragedy and could not believe Shahla did not have a television.