The Politics of Passions: Growing Up Shia

Extract

And youth is cruel, and has no remorse

And smiles at situations which it cannot see.

I smile, of course,

And go on drinking tea.

T. S. Eliot

My mother's mother Kaukab Khanum (Madam Dahlia) was convinced that our family was accursed. Along with her sister, uncles, and a handful of cousins, she had left her native city of Kirman in southern Iran in the 1890s, plodded through deserts, crossed mountains, and reached the Persian Gulf port of Lengeh, whence an Arab dhow provided a tortuous trip to Bombay, India. They were running away from famine, endemic in southern Iran at the turn of the century.

Kaukab Khanum believed that our family was accursed because in their eagerness to leave and for expediency, they had abandoned a blind cousin barely fifteen years old. Times were bad, the destination vague, the trip arduous and tricky.