Camelia Read Online Free Page A

Mercedes Benz with its royal plates. The Revolutionary Guard would stop expensive cars to check the identities of their owners. Usually, they’d seize the cars and take the drivers away to the Komité. My aunt’s husband, Uncle Musayyeb, who was also my father’s cousin, had been the highest-ranking member of our family under the Shah’s government. He’d worked in the Shah’s personal office as “His Majesty’s Calligrapher.” He would write His Majesty’s letters in elegant script for the Shah to sign. The walls of my aunt’s house on Khiaban-e Fereshteh were covered with her husband’s calligraphic renderings from the Ruba’yat of Omar Khayyám, and with exquisite miniatures of their older daughter, Gita. Their second daughter, Mahta, had a beautiful face and was being groomed to be the wife of a man of distinction. In fact, it was even whispered among our family that perhaps one day she would make a fine wife for the crown prince, Reza. Only a few hours before the Shah fled Iran, the royal car came for Uncle Musayyeb. The Shah summoned him for one last private meeting. The subject of this conversation has always remained a secret.
    My father’s family took great pride in the notion that not only was their family’s honor and history not less than that of the royal family, but was in fact even more distinguished. My paternal grandfather’s cousin was Amujan Timsar, “Dearest Uncle the Major
General.” He had been the security chief of Tehran and would boast that he had had the title “His Majesty’s Private Guard.” We all knew his daughter Mahnavaz, who was the same age as my aunt Turan, had once been approached by Queen Turan, Reza Shah’s third wife, for marriage with the Shah’s half-brother, Shahpur Gholamreza. And we all knew that her family had declined this offer because Shahpur Gholamreza was a playboy and a philanderer and not worthy of their daughter.
    Our proud family didn’t go to the polls during the last two days of March to cast our votes on the new constitution of the Islamic Republic. But we heard on the first of April when the constitution was approved by a majority of the country, 99 percent to be precise, and Khomeini proclaimed it the “first day of God’s government.” Fresh waves of arrests swept the country and the executions continued. Our ever-present television constantly broadcast interrogations of those condemned to execution, exposing the “traitors to the nation.” Then one night, we were shocked to see the image of my grandfather’s cousin Agha-ye Sayf-Allah Shahandeh. He had been the editor in chief of a magazine now linked to the imperial government. He had gone into hiding, and we had heard that he had recently been arrested along with his daughter, Guli. My father, astounded, remarked harshly that he must have been severely beaten since his whole face was swollen. A dazed Agha-ye Shahandeh confessed like a parrot to treason, monarchist sympathies, and spying for foreign powers. They executed him and held his funeral at an undisclosed location.
    My family became closer to his widow, Afsar Khanum. She never lost her sense of humor (and always had Smarties in her purse for me and my younger cousin Bita). And despite our sorrows, afterward I remember I also felt proud. Though many revolutionary families would be ashamed to have a relative executed, I was proud of my family’s history because it showed strength and conviction.
Two decades later, when I was taken to jail, I know my family was waiting anxiously to see if I would suddenly end up on national television. My uncle Bizhan later told me, with tears in his eyes, that he kept remembering the shock of that day and how afraid he’d been that they would lose me, too.

FALL 1979
    Concerned for our safety, my father sent us along with our mother to England for the summer. But we returned home to Iran to join