Missing home: Tehran after nine years

By Avesta Afshari-Mehr

A brutal, merciless sun. The sweet smell of saffron and cardamom tea mixed with bitter pollution. The faint sound of a pair of uncles bargaining over carpet prices from the nearby bazaar that is inevitably drowned out by the relentless beeping from the Paykans and Mercedes. These are all wistful reminders from a happier time back in Iran, a time that remains only in my imagination, without any hope for resurrection to reality.

It’s been nearly a decade since my last trip back to Iran. My parents, both Iranian, gave me a heritage I wear with enormous pride: the language, the cuisine, the particular music of family argument and family laughter… yet the country itself has become, for people like me, unreachable. Not just far away – unreachable. The reasons are my own, but I know I am not alone among the Iranian diaspora in understanding that returning is no longer simply a matter of booking a flight.

What I miss most is not a place, precisely, but rather, people. My aunt Maryam, whose laugh, completely involuntary, utterly unstoppable would fill a room and drag everyone in it with her, whether they intended to join or not. My cousins, younger than me, with whom I never particularly got along with, I catch myself dreaming now of travelling across Iran with them. Not just Tehran, but the gardens of Shiraz, the tumult of Isfahan, the green forests rolling down to the Caspian in Mazandaran, and the incredible remnants of Persepolis. A country enormous and varied enough that you could spend a lifetime crossing it and still find something new. That journey exists, for now, only as a dream.

There is a strange consolation in university life. As President of the Iranian Society, I have spent evenings surrounded by Iranians from every corner of the country: fellow students from Tehran, yes, but also from Mashhad, Tabriz, Shiraz, from cities I have only ever heard described through someone else’s nostalgia. For a few hours, something of Iran reassembles itself in a university college bar somewhere in the middle of nowhere in England. The food appears during our socials in Newcastle; the music at our joyous bar crawls. There is a particular warm loudness to Iranians in a room together. It is genuinely joyful, but then it ends, and we all return to our separate flats, and the joy curdles just slightly into something more complicated: because it is not the same, and we all know it. Many of us have not seen our families in years.

There is another loss too, much harder to articulate. Iran is a country whose image reaches us now in unstable, patchy fragments: through VPNs; through messages that arrive slowly and sometimes not at all. The internet blackouts have done something disorienting to distance: the Iran I carry in my memory was last updated nine years ago, and I am increasingly uncertain whether what I am missing still exists in the form I remember it. Streets change, people change, my cousins, those children I bickered with over nothing, are adults now. I would be a stranger to them in certain ways, and they to me.

This is the particular grief of the diaspora: not bereavement, exactly, because the people are still there, still (hopefully) living, still laughing that contagious laugh. But an inability to close the distance. Travel writing usually ends with an invitation: go, see, taste, feel it for yourself. I cannot offer that here – it’s just too dangerous to visit Iran right now, particularly for Britons. What I can offer is a portrait of a place held very carefully in memory, kept alive by community and stubbornness and the persistent, perhaps irrational hope, that one day the flight will be possible again, and my aunt will laugh, and I will be pulled helplessly along with her…

Image: Laurens R. Krol via Wikimedia Commons