Odyssey of High Hopes: A Memoir of Adversity and Triumph

Book I

An Enduring Quest

Life is either a daring adventure, or nothing.

— Helen Keller

Prologue

It was a long, rough morning and a scene worthy of an Alfred Hitchcock spy thriller. Earlier, a cold front had rolled down from the fields of Soviet Central Asia, coating the streets of Tehran with a foot of snow, but this day turned out sunny and beautiful with a mild breeze blowing in from the Alborz Mountains north of the city. The sidewalks were by now almost clear. As I kept skulking about in my neighborhood of small houses and many shops, thoughts uncommon to most teenagers raced through my mind. My preoccupation was with the stranger for whom I was keeping an eye out. He often made his appearance at midday. I had picked him out of the throng of pedestrians near my home in Tehran.

Balding, middle-aged, slightly pudgy, and dressed in a nondescript suit, the man could blend into any crowd. He was, however, not your average everyday mystery man. He walked with a purposeful stride and wore a perpetually preoccupied look. I guessed he was a foreigner. The city was home to many nationalities at the time, so he could be from anywhere, but I fervently hoped he was an American. I had urgent need of a U.S. embassy connection.

The side street on which I lived and where the mysterious stranger walked was a narrow pedestrian lane. Tehran had more than its share of such picturesque and winding streets. This one was bisected by a shallow irrigation ditch into which the city would periodically run water. The adjoining homeowners would then direct the flow to water their gardens or to fill the tiny backyard pools common in that section of town. Too narrow for automobile traffic, the lane was used by pedestrians as a cross street between two broad avenues.

I had no idea where the man was coming from each time I saw him, nor where he was going. I’d have to follow him to find out if he was someone who could help me. I was fourteen, and to be thinking of tailing a stranger, I had to be desperate. And that I was.

Chapter One

Scent of Roses and Poetry Games

There is an old saying, sometimes attributed to Aristotle, that the unexamined life is not worth living. I never believed it. Life comes in endless shades and shapes, each as precious as a soft summer breeze. I was particularly eager to examine my father’s life, but it remained an enigma to me.

Other children I knew showed little interest in their parents’ early history. Some fathers liked to talk about the hardships they endured while growing up, and how fortunate their children were. These—and other stories that always started with when I was your age—bored the kids to no end, but I was not jaded in that way. Intuitively, I felt that my life was defined as much by Father’s experiences as by my own. I wanted to know about his family and friends, the world he had been born into, and the incandescent culture of his day.

Father, however, showed no inclination to lift the veil on his upbringing, smiled cryptically at my questions, and changed the subject. So I turned to Mother for the snippets of his life she knew about. Patiently listening to her stories, I was able in time to pull together a rough sketch of Father’s boyhood. Still, these brush strokes never attained for me the crispness of a Rubens portrait. Rather, they were more like a painting dominated by dark colors and obscuring shadows.

Orphaned at six, Father found his upbringing placed in the hands of an abusive older brother. His new guardian took sadistic pleasure in beating him. He never knew when the next blow would fall. Battered, hopeless, and unwilling to be trapped in this nightmare any longer, he ran away from home at the age of nine.

I wondered how Father survived without family or friends in one of the most inhospitable areas of the world, the Persian Gulf region of Iran in the early twentieth century. During the years when most children’s lives revolved around family, friends, school, and play, he must have been desperately scrounging for food and shelter. Who comforted him when sick or injured? And how did he avoid cruel adults? What was it like to hide under bridges and ducts, always on the run, and never to have a decent set of clothes or shoes? I had loads of questions but few answers. Obviously, the memories were too painful for Father to resurrect. His abhorrence of the turmoil of his early days played out now in a determined search for order and stability even in small things.

Father was slight of build, trim, and wiry. He stood proud and erect and was rarely without a white shirt, suit, and tie. He had a round face, a strong chin, a clear forehead, and thinning hair. In time, he became bald. Unafraid of physical confrontation, he was almost combative. He looked like a man who had been tested by life’s challenges and had emerged unscathed. It probably accounted for his favorite saying, which was something along Nietzsche’s old line that suffering ennobles. Father would know, I always thought.

You’d think his early struggles for survival would have left Father with no chance for intellectual pursuits. And yet he taught himself to read and write Persian, his native tongue. Along the way, he also developed fluency in English, Hindi, Urdu, and Arabic. And enough French and German to order dessert. Amazingly, through the long arc of his life he never lost his sense of humor—undoubtedly what saved his sanity.

Father’s reluctance to reminisce about his childhood did not keep him from waxing eloquent about the cities he had visited. As a child, I loved hearing him talk about the travels of his youth. Being the last-born of four children, I had precious few opportunities for quality time with my parents. How Father had ended up in India I never knew, but he did talk about the country. Calcutta and Bombay, where he had spent parts of his youth, he described as hot and crowded. He must have walked hundreds of miles as a young man visiting several countries.

By 1921 he had worked his way to Basra, a major city in Iraq near its border with Iran. There he found a job as a telegraph operator. He was twenty-one at the time. The only photo of him at that age showed a fresh-faced and skinny young man with a small mustache, wearing a bow tie on a detachable white collar and a funny hat that was the fashion in the country where he worked. Archaic finery, but probably the style in the early 1900s.

Later, Father worked at the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company in Ahvaz, a city on the Iranian side of the border with Iraq. It too was hot and tropical, but he felt lucky to have a job. Once settled there, his thoughts turned to romance, and he began searching for a wife. The city was filled with the families of sunbaked oil workers and peasants, but he had no interest in looking among them for a mate. He asked for a month’s leave and then expanded the radius of his search by about 250 miles.

Eventually, he zeroed in on Shiraz, a medium-sized city in southern Iran. There he heard about the eldest daughter of one of the local grandees. Without ever seeing her or even a photo of her likeness, he mounted a full-fledged campaign to win her father’s consent to marry her—not easy to do for a stranger in Shiraz. Acutely aware of the passage of time before his leave ran out, he importuned several influential people in town to intercede for him.

Improbably, he eventually succeeded in securing my grandfather’s permission to marry my mother. He was twenty-seven, she eighteen. The night of their wedding was the first time my mother and father laid eyes on each other.

By then Father’s leave from his job was over, but when he tried to return with his new bride to Ahvaz, she balked. An early experience had left her fearful of losing her loved ones, so she was resistant to any move away from her family. In 1918, when she was nine, the influenza pandemic infected hundreds of millions worldwide. With no vaccines, an estimated 50-100 million people lost their lives. It was one of the deadliest natural disasters ever to befall the planet. Mother suffered irretrievable losses of her own. In a single two-day period, she bore the indescribable pain of watching her mother, grandmother, and older sister die agonizing deaths from the virus. The overwhelming grief left her with a deep-rooted attachment to the remaining members of her family.

Now she was married to someone who lived in a different city, but she would not give up her beloved Shiraz without a fight. Not exactly the submissive Persian bride Father may have expected, she argued that Shiraz was infinitely more pleasant than the smelly Ahvaz oil fields. Where would he like to rear the family they were planning, she asked? She was persuasive, so he promised to relocate as soon as he could line up a job in Shiraz. It was not a difficult promise to make. The oil company was hardly an ideal place to work, as the British class-and-caste culture treated the local staff no better than servants. A couple of the English overseers, set apart by their square jaws and muttonchop whiskers, were often quick to resort to flogging, even for minor infractions.

Father took Mother to Ahvaz, where their first child was born in 1927. He was named Hushang, but Father affectionately called him Hushy (to rhyme with sushi) when he was small. (Later I’d want to call him Hugh, but he refused to let me shorten his name.) True to his promise, Father gave up his job soon after and moved his family to Shiraz.

The new town may have been only a few hundred miles from Ahvaz, but it might as well have been on a different planet. While Ahvaz was hot, dry, and dusty, Shiraz had a temperate climate and lush gardens. Father found a job at the government-owned Bank Melli (melli being the Persian word for national), the only financial institution in the country. With no formal education, he had to start at the bottom. There he learned about money and interest rates, collaterals and secured loans, and other arcana of finance.

In the ensuing years, Mother bore three more children, another son, Bahram (whom I came to call Barry) born in 1928; Pary, my sister, born in 1931; and me, born in 1933.

Once settled with work and family, Father maintained a rigid schedule at home: Breakfast at 7 a.m., lunch at 1 p.m., lights out at 10 p.m. Amazingly, his turbulent childhood led to an uncanny level of self-control in adulthood. He loved beer, for example, but he rationed himself to a single bottle before dinner on the last Friday of every month. He looked forward to it, counted the days, but then the one beer was it until the next month.

With his children, Father maintained strict discipline, but he was also often thoughtful and tender. His method of rearing us was to ensure that we had an intellectual bent, that debate and dispute were our daily fare, and that we were imbued with deep professional ambition. An orphan, he had learned to operate in a world he’d never dominate, and wanted to pass on to us a few nuggets he had picked up the hard way. But when he tried to impose his own daily regimen on his rowdy and inquisitive children, he totally struck out. We loved him, but we laughed at his quirks, openly made fun of them. It was ironic, but he didn’t seem to mind.

And so we were living in Shiraz, a town of about thirty thousand residents, known for its literature, flowers, and beautiful sunsets. It also had pleasant weather; extremes of temperature were rare. In the spring, its crystal pure air was permeated with the sweet scent of red roses, and at night the sky shimmered with the glint of a million dazzling stars against the dark backdrop of space. Even as a child I was amazed at how brilliant the moon looked. There may be nicer places on the planet, I used to think, but not many.

In the center of town there was a large round pool with a fountain spewing water in the air, the sunlight reflecting off it like diamonds. The people congregated there every evening, with loads of children playing and families socializing.

The population of Shiraz included a tribe of mountain people. They were goat and sheep herders. At the approach of summer, they’d break camp and move their flocks higher in the mountains. Growing up I often saw several groups of tribal men and women walking around in colorful attire when they came to town to buy provisions. They spoke their own dialect of Persian and tried to stick together. I was always curious about them and eager to learn about their lifestyle in the mountains, but they would not mingle with the other Shirazis. There were similar tribes in other parts of the country.

Shiraz was also a city of poets and poetry lovers. The country’s best-known poet, Saadi, who had poured his heart out in rhyme centuries before, was buried there. His works were translated into German by Goethe, and into English by Sir Richard Francis Burton. Another poet, Hafez, was also buried in Shiraz. Both their tombs attracted visitors from near and far. Still another, Ferdowsi, wrote a mythical history of Persia in a mind-numbing 50,000 couplets. It too was translated into English verse.

Another Persian poet was Omar Khayyam whose quatrains were translated into English by Edward FitzGerald. Having studied Persian while at Cambridge, he made Khayyam’s Rubaiyat famous in the English-speaking world, of which the following is a sample:

A Loaf of Bread beneath the Bough,

A Jug of Wine, a Book of Verse—and Thou

Beside me singing in the Wilderness—

And Wilderness is Paradise enow.

Most of the adults in Shiraz were poetry buffs. There was an emotional attachment to verse, and the calling of poets was universally revered. In an era of deprivation, wars, and disease, the language and imagery of poetry were designed to change life’s calculus. There were even games that tested a player’s knowledge of verse. One player would recite a single line of poetry, the next player had to come up with a verse starting with the letter of the alphabet in which the previous line had ended, and so on with each succeeding player. Often ten or more people would participate, and unbelievably these games could last for hours. Poetry up the wazoo. Without radio, television, movies, sporting events, or even political theater, we were making do. As for me, having been consistently excluded from the ball games of the older boys on weekends on account of my age, I began boning up on Persian poetry so I could participate in the adults’ poetry-recital contests. By the time I was ten I knew hundreds of lines of Persian poetry by heart, and soon started winning my share of the games.

Despite their archaic formality, the games were satisfying and fun; they also served as a fulcrum for the development of literary skills among the young, including me. In time, however, I’d learn that the rest of the country did not share the Shirazis’ enthusiasm for poetry games.

Chapter Two

Live the Life You Dream

²

With an area of 636,000 square miles, Iran occupies a territory larger than Britain, France, and Italy combined. Its population of 25 million in the early twentieth century included an ethnic mixture of Turks, Kurds, Arabs, Armenians, Assyrians, Baluchis, and various tribal groups. It was equally diverse in religion. Though a Muslim country, it notably included sizable Christian, Jewish, Baha’i, and Zoroastrian minorities.

Roughly 2,500 years earlier, Persia (as Iran was then called) was a vast and powerful nation. Founded by Cyrus the Great, the First Persian Empire connected almost 40 percent of the global population in 480 B.C. From its seat of power in Persepolis near Shiraz, Persia extended its rule across Asia and Africa: from Egypt to parts of India, and included modern-day Turkey, Iraq, Kuwait, Syria, Jordan, Israel, Lebanon, Afghanistan, and Bahrain.

In the seventh century, a man from the Arabian Peninsula by the name of Mohammad created a religion called Islam and declared himself its prophet. His Arab followers, driven by a messianic zeal to spread the new faith, conquered huge swaths of three continents, a feat even greater than that of Genghis Khan or Alexander of Macedonia. The Arabs then sent their armies to Persia, again and again, until they wiped out all resistance to their new faith. The penalty for refusal to convert was death. The reign of terror thus unleashed led to thousands of beheadings before the desperate local population caved in, gave up their own faith, and accepted the new religion.

Even so, the Iranians still found clever ways to thwart the Arab raiders. They held on to their unique Persian culture and language, and then, in an act of ultimate defiance, created their own version of the religion. Thus was born the Shiite sect of Islam.

Before the Arabs came, the Persians belonged to a gentle and peaceful faith. Named after their spiritual leader Zoroaster, they were called Zoroastrians. Fleeing from the religious persecution emanating from the Arabian Peninsula, large groups of Zoroastrians began abandoning their homes in Iran and migrating to India in the seventh century. There they were welcomed by the Indian government, subject to three conditions: They had to speak Hindi, even at home and among themselves; they had to adopt the Indian form of dress for men, women, and children; and they had to make earnest and immediate efforts to assimilate into the local population. They agreed and soon became known in India as the Parsees (meaning Persians).

In time, the wisdom of the Indian government’s requirements was borne out. Over the generations, the Parsees became fully integrated into the Indian population. When Britain’s East India Company set up trading posts there in the seventeenth century, the enterprising Parsees learned the English business methods and discovered their own flair for commerce. Some of India’s largest modern companies—such as Tata, Godrej, Mistry, Poonawalla, and Wadia—were started in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries by the Parsee families. Today, they are some of the most philanthropic of all Indians. There are also large Parsee communities in England and the U.S.

A few pockets of Zoroastrians, however, remained in Iran and somehow escaped beheading by the Arabs. A small group of them happened to own a magnificent fruit orchard and cattle ranch in Shiraz, and needed a revenue source. My grandfather, a prominent man in his day but reduced by financial misfortune, was a longtime friend to the Zoroastrian community in the city; he persuaded them to carve out a portion of their land and build a house on it for rental income. Father and Grandfather rented it on a shared basis. It was located on Zand Avenue, the broad thoroughfare in the center of the city. There was, of course, no running water, electricity, telephone service, or radio, and the roads were unpaved, but we didn’t miss what we had never known.

The house itself was comfortable. Its central feature was a porch running the entire length of the lot with rooms coming off it. There was also a room with a well in it and a nearby cistern. Periodically, one of the older boys would pull up the pail from the well and pour the water into the cistern. A faucet at the bottom of the cistern provided drinking water for the family.

Grandfather’s quarters were on the other side of the porch. He had been married before, to my maternal grandmother, one of the millions who had died in the influenza epidemic of 1917-18. She left behind three children—my mother and her younger brother and sister, both of whom now lived with us. Grandfather’s second wife produced two children, a girl and a boy, but he divorced that wife before I was born. The boy, Mother’s half-brother, also lived with us, as did my Great-Aunt Baji. And, of course, Grandfather and his current wife and their five children lived in the shared house.

That was still not the whole menagerie. From time to time, Father’s nephews, two nice and polite teenage boys, lived with us. We also had a black and white terrier named Husky and a playful kitten no one had gotten around to naming. Somehow that jumble of people made for a tight-knit family, and I never felt crowded.

We slept in bedrolls on Persian carpets and rolled them up and put them away in the morning. In the summertime, all of us slept on cots on the roof beneath a palette of stars. We took baths at the public bathhouse in separate facilities for men and women.

The house had a large backyard with a most attractive feature, a private portal into the beautiful Zoroastrian garden and fruit orchard. For us children, that small inconspicuous door was our escape into the lush world beyond. The Zoroastrian owners were kind and tolerant and they gave us children the run of their property. We came to know every bush and tree and every rock and pathway in that private oasis. We climbed the ancient oak trees with limbs that reached toward the pristine skies of Shiraz, and reveled in the bronze and gold colors of the leaves in the flashes of sunlight. Flocks of sparrows were visible on the trees, and an occasional rabbit quietly nibbled on grass or peered through the vines. We gorged ourselves on the ripe apples, pears, grapes, walnuts, and goji berries on the fruit trees and bushes. Solid and serene, the house and the adjacent orchard bespoke comfort and contentment. I thought it was a blissful life.

Most food was expensive and sparse, particularly in the early days. So we learned to fill our tummies with bread, which cost little. Mother was always ready to go without, so some of us would have a little more. If there was one thing we learned from her, it was that there was sheer joy in doing for others, never with any expectation of a reward or benefit.

Preparing meals for the family in the basement over a brazier was an all-day affair. Aunt Baji helped Mother with the chores. Baji was really my great-aunt, but we called her Aunt Baji, it was simpler. A small person, she had never married. She was the hardest-working woman I had ever known and was totally dedicated to the family.

The national holiday was called Noruz, Persian for new day. It had no religious significance, so everyone could participate. Noruz was held on the first day of spring, most often on March 21st. It was a celebration of the end of winter and a time for the gathering of family and friends, of festival and laughter.

Mother and Aunt Baji would labor for weeks making sweets for the guests. They would set a Noruz spread with traditional rice dishes. All of us children waited eagerly for Noruz, as there would be no school for a week. We could also have pistachios and other nuts, pomegranates, and homemade treats made with dates. There would also be a goldfish in a bowl of water for good luck, and a mirror as a symbol of light. Father gave each of us money. I got the equivalent of ten cents, while the others, being older, got more.

Mother and Aunt Baji also made new clothes for us at Noruz—the only jacket and trousers we boys got for a year. By the time a few months had passed, our new clothes would be in tatters, but we’d still have to wait for the next Noruz. We would also get a new pair of shoes then, again meant to last a full year. Glue being unavailable, the shoemaker used nails to keep the leather together, which hurt when they stuck out from the soles until we could hammer them down. Of course, as we were growing, with the passage of months the shoes became tight and uncomfortable, even painful. But we’d have to bear it. I looked forward to the day when, with a sigh of relief, I could remove the tight shoes of the year just past.

In those years, I was in the habit of retreating to the Zoroastrian garden and climbing my favorite oak tree, the tallest one around. High above the ground, forty feet or so, two branches created a perfect cradle where I found indescribable joy in spiritual solitude. As a gentle wind stirred the leaves, I basked in the feeling of freedom there; it was my moment of enchantment. Inspired by Father’s stories, I’d dream of traveling to other lands for my education and carving out a fulfilling professional niche there for myself. I had an unquenchable desire to experience life in other cultures, and this became my dominant motivation early on.

Chapter Three

A Question of Seniority

My older brother Hushang was an exceptional boy. Among the Ansary children, he was the one who had won the genetic lottery. A classic overachiever, he had a faultless memory and an IQ that was off the chart. He also had the gift of the gab. Even as a kid, he could outtalk most people. You’d think he had kissed the Blarney Stone! Way back, when he was small, my grandfather predicted that Hushang would lead a life of rip-roaring achievement. As events would prove, Grandfather was prescient.

Mother adored her first-born, put him on a pedestal, and showered him with love and attention. Hushang was her golden boy. She was effusive in her admiration when he showed initiative or learned something new. She made sure he had the right playmates and friends, and her maternal instincts kicked in in full force to protect him from inadvertently getting into trouble.

I was not so fortunate.

Over time, Mother herself told me in bits and pieces the story of my desolate infancy. With a slight flush to her face, she spoke hesitantly and with reluctance, but I needed to hear what I had already suspected about my beginnings from my siblings’ innuendos and taunts. This was not a ghost I could lay to rest.

Mother had had a difficult pregnancy with her first-born, and lingering health issues afterwards, including abdominal separation which failed to improve. When she had her second and third births, she fervently prayed for no more children, but it was not to be, as birth control was unknown in Shiraz. Besides, she was already at her limit running a large household. She cursed her luck when she became pregnant yet again. There was no rejoicing at my arrival, and she was in no mood to love and cuddle her new baby. Unable to airbrush out my existence, Mother turned me over to a succession of maids hoping they’d serve as wet nurses, each lasting for only a short time.

Impatient and exasperated, Mother then hired as my caregiver a stocky male servant named Sadeq who was known to be an angry and violent person. She felt she simply had no choice. Infant formula being unavailable in Shiraz at the time, how this man was supposed to feed the baby entrusted to his care weighed heavily on her mind. When she eventually checked up on me, I was emaciated to the edge of starvation and showed signs of physical abuse. Belatedly, she tried to fire Sadeq but he grabbed me roughly under his arm and refused to leave, threatening you’ll never see your baby again. So, Mother gave in and kept him on.

My emotions swirled as she spoke. She related all this as if her mind could see no connection between me and the nightmare she was describing.

Struggling not to flinch, I was still shocked and depressed by her revelations; they were reminders of the bleak and loveless feelings that had dogged my earliest days and of the terror I still felt at the merest reminder of Sadeq. It was cruel fate that had made me the last-born of Mother’s children. If I could have reverse-engineered my own birth then, I would not have hesitated to trigger it.

Past the infancy stage, my earliest memory was seared on my brain before I was two years old. Father had a midday break and would come home for lunch. Mother was the efficient homemaker all morning, cooking, cleaning, shopping, and sewing, but shortly before his arrival, she became a transformed woman. She would put on a pretty dress, comb her hair, and carefully apply makeup. A small woman with wavy black hair and luminous brown Persian eyes and delicate features, Mother would be standing by the door looking daisy fresh as Father arrived. She’d smile, take his jacket and hat, and sit with him as he ate the meal she had set out. I had no idea what they talked about; I’d assume he told her about his day and she reciprocated in kind.

Being too young for school then, I was the only child at home at these times. With unbridled enthusiasm, I’d do everything I could to get my parents’ attention. I’d run around them, roll on the floor, jump up and down, and keep up a steady stream of one-sided infantile conversation, wishing to be included in their intimate tête-à-tête, but nothing worked. They had eyes only for each other. To my amazement, they didn’t even seem to see or hear me, as if I were Casper the Friendly Ghost.

Later when