A Voyage To Find My Father In Iran

[Rasputin]

Given up for adoption at birth, Katharine Rayner spent two decades tracing her Persian roots before travelling to Teheran on an emotional journey.

[Rasputin]

We ate lunch at a traditional chelo kababi (a kebab house): tender lamb flavoured with saffron and served with buttered rice. We were unmarried and therefore should not have been there unchaperoned, but no one seemed to care.

The ladies who lunched alongside us in their Chanel headscarves were immaculately made up, their peeping hairlines hinting at glossy highlights, their coats - which, by law, should have been loose-fitting and worn to the knee - were sharply tailored, some barely grazing the thigh.

When I expressed my surprise at the relaxed scene, Minovi replied: "We are not all one-eyed women and sweaty men here, you know."

This, he reminded me, was uptown north Teheran, where the parties are legendary and frequent, the black market in alcohol and opium is booming, and where couples can live together if their landlord will turn a blind eye.

The coffee shops are full of handsome young men in leather jackets and jeans, flirting with beautiful women. The malls sell silk lingerie and strapless dresses.

The young, Minovi told me, have their own ways of overcoming restrictions on their freedom, sculpting their hair into artful quiffs in the usual teenage quest for individuality and arranging amorous liaisons on buzzing internet chat rooms.

But this world is in stark contrast to the other Iran - the Iran of bellicose Islamists who deny the Holocaust and defy Western imperialism. This image has more truth in southern, downtown Teheran, where government stooges gather for demonstrations lauding their hardline president.

Women struggle home with the shopping from the bazaar, shrouded in their chadors, which they have to clutch to their faces, leaving just one eye open to the outside world.

The two worlds are often bizarrely juxtaposed. A billboard confiding (in English) that "I am closer to Allah than his jugular vein" sits close to a Benetton concession.

An advertisement exhorting faithful parents to send their children to a madrassa (religious school) is just 50 yards from a full-length poster of David Beckham in a sports shop.

I was keen to explore outside the capital and, later that week, caught the midnight train south to Esfahan, a cornerstone of the ancient Persian empire and one of Iran's largest cities.

I had booked a sleeper compartment to be shared with five other "sisters".

One, a beetle-browed youngster, frowned furiously at me when she discovered I was English. A theology student with impeccable language skills (in her spare time she liked to translate the Koran into Farsi), I think she suspected me of being a spy.

The others were far friendlier. Sahar, a student of English literature, was a Jane Austen enthusiast.

"The relationship between men and women here in Iran now is very similar to Jane Austen's time," she told me. I was intrigued.

"So do you live in modern times?" I asked her. She looked flustered, wary of the others listening in, and suggested we meet up the next day.

I woke in Esfahan, breakfasted on eggs, and refused the offer of a smoke on a qalyan (a hookah pipe) with my glass of tea. I had arranged to meet Sahar and her brother, Karim, who sells air-conditioning. We strolled over Bozormeghr Bridge and I asked her again about Jane Austen.

"Sometimes we live in modern times, but religion divides us," she told me.

"You cannot discuss so many things with the religious."

Her brother, spying a mullah ahead, spoke with a sudden passion.

"She is right. Those people use religion like a needle. And they stab us in the eye with it."

Later we visited the Imam mosque, one of the most beautiful in the Islamic world. Karim told me that once worshippers were so plentiful that they would spill out into the vast square outside.

"Now nobody comes - except the tourists."

I heard this many times; how the intellectuals have turned their back on Islam as a once-proud and ancient Persian culture has become tarnished by Islamic extremism, and by the aggression of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who won a landslide victory two years ago.

The violent demonstration outside the British Embassy during the hostage crisis, when students from the University of Teheran threw petrol bombs, were symbolic of a very different Iran from that which I saw during my visit.

Back in Teheran, Amir showed me Evin Prison, where he spent most of his stay blindfolded and where he was beaten regularly while the guards played Koranic recitations to "re-educate" him.

It is a forbidding, sprawling complex, surrounded by barbed wire and we dared not stop or take photos. Zahra Kazemi, an Iranian Canadian journalist who did so in 2003, was arrested and beaten to death.

On my last day, we ate at Amir's favourite Armenian restaurant. "The next time you come," he said, "you will stay with me. You won't need a hotel."

I was so touched by his words. I do want to return - and not as a tourist. Physically, I fit in. I lost count of the times that I was asked for directions in the street. But, on occasion, I also felt like Mr Bean on holiday, forever fiddling with my coat and headscarf, feeling that, at any moment, I would commit some horrendous gaffe.

All my life I have wondered whether I was lucky or unlucky to have been given away as I was. I will never know. I know I am lucky now, though, to be loved by all my parents, and forced by none to choose between them. England is my home but Iran pulls me to her as well.

The fates of both countries matter to me - those I love live in both, and part of me is always where I am not.

But, most of all, I grieve that the warmth, the kindness and the intelligence of so many of the Iranian people is unknown to most in the West - and will probably remain so for the foreseeable future.

*** Names have been changed and faces disguised to safeguard identities. Katharine Rayner is writing a book about her experience of being adopted from a Middle Eastern background

[okiddi]

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