A Voyage To Find My Father In Iran
Given up for adoption at birth, Katharine Rayner spent two decades tracing her Persian roots before travelling to Teheran on an emotional journey.
I was born in Leeds and grew up in rural Norfolk but have spent almost half my life searching for my Persian father.
Last year, I found him. Amir Parsei, a 22-year-old student in Portsmouth, had held me just once before he reluctantly signed my adoption documents and relinquished his right to be my parent.
My birth mother, who was just 19, did not want to keep me but nor did she want to marry him or let him take me back to Iran as he had offered. My father returned home convinced that he would never see me again.
That was nearly 40 years ago. I was adopted into a loving family with three boisterous older brothers. My dad has Yorkshire farming roots, my mum is of Yugoslav, English and Spanish origins.
I grew up with no knowledge of Iranian culture, aware only that sometimes I felt adrift from my family and peers.
After I graduated, I started a tentative search for Amir, but it wasn't easy. My social worker deemed it "impossible" to track him down, as did the British institution to which he had been seconded for a year.
But an Iranian television director heard of my search and got in touch. With the help of his contacts, we tracked Amir down last March. When he emailed me, my yelp of delight sent my husband and children pelting up the stairs.
We arranged for him to come to London in the autumn and I met him at St Pancras station. The long search was over. Finally, we could get to know each other. That evening, my family and my mum had dinner with him. It was a wonderful but emotionally draining day.
For me, the next step was to visit my father in the country that could have been my homeland. Four months ago, just days before the detention by the Revolutionary Guard of 15 British military personnel, I flew to Iran. It was not an easy journey to make and I was scared as I boarded the plane.
My destination was a city at the heart of the "axis of evil", but my fears were more personal than that.
Following the 1979 revolution my father, like many other Western-leaning Iranians, had been sentenced to death. He served four years in the "Hotel Evin", a notorious Teheran prison.
His younger brother was tortured before being executed. I was an illegitimate child and it was vital that my link with Amir be kept from the authorities. Even now, revealing such family ties could have resulted in another prison term for him.
So I travelled to Iran on a £110 tourist visa and as long as I stipulated the purpose of my journey was to sightsee and visit "friends", I would be safe.
As the plane began its descent into Teheran, the glamorous women around me, clad in tight T-shirts and jeans, began to shroud themselves in black mantoux (obligatory knee-length coats) and headscarves.
But, perhaps in an act of defiance, they also touched up their lipstick and donned designer shades. Nervously, I joined the line for foreigners at passport control and, within minutes, had been pulled aside and taken to a darkened office.
Two officials scrutinised my visa. Looking me up and down, one said: "Tourist, yes?" I nodded. He stamped my visa and let me through. I was free to go, a stranger in my own land.
During the years I had searched for Amir, I had mourned the loss of an idealised Persian childhood - the sight of the mountains that ringed Teheran, the sound of Persian poetry, the taste of apricots on a child's tongue.
But my first impressions were far less romantic. I gaped at the empty vastness of the Ayatollah Khomeini's mosque as my taxi sped past and at the fluttering banners proclaiming the glories of the Islamic revolution.
I listened to a language I could not understand - shamefully, the only phrase of Farsi I managed on that first day was: "Shoma ingilisi baladin?" (Do you speak English?)
Later, I met Amir at my hotel. It was only our second meeting and we were both still too shy to embrace. Besides, kissing or hugging someone of the opposite sex who is not a relative is haram (forbidden) in Iran, so we shook hands instead. My father had instructed me to explain to hotel staff that he was the father of a friend.
We ordered hot chocolate and settled down to talk. Before long, Amir had launched into an attack on Islamic mores.
He railed against girls being married off before puberty and told me how he hated the hypocrisy of middle-class life in Iran, whereby children whose parents openly drink or play cards at home have to pretend that their parents are good Muslims when they go to school.
And when I asked him about the mourning flags that were draped everywhere, he exploded: "We love the dead more than we love the living. We are never out of mourning for some imam or other."
He made me nervous, but it became clear that such feeling against the Islamic state was not unusual.
The next day I met a television director, Arash Minovi, and quizzed him about the kind of life I might have lived as a middle-class woman in Iran.
I was born in Leeds and grew up in rural Norfolk but have spent almost half my life searching for my Persian father.
Last year, I found him. Amir Parsei, a 22-year-old student in Portsmouth, had held me just once before he reluctantly signed my adoption documents and relinquished his right to be my parent.
My birth mother, who was just 19, did not want to keep me but nor did she want to marry him or let him take me back to Iran as he had offered. My father returned home convinced that he would never see me again.
That was nearly 40 years ago. I was adopted into a loving family with three boisterous older brothers. My dad has Yorkshire farming roots, my mum is of Yugoslav, English and Spanish origins.
I grew up with no knowledge of Iranian culture, aware only that sometimes I felt adrift from my family and peers.
After I graduated, I started a tentative search for Amir, but it wasn't easy. My social worker deemed it "impossible" to track him down, as did the British institution to which he had been seconded for a year.
But an Iranian television director heard of my search and got in touch. With the help of his contacts, we tracked Amir down last March. When he emailed me, my yelp of delight sent my husband and children pelting up the stairs.
We arranged for him to come to London in the autumn and I met him at St Pancras station. The long search was over. Finally, we could get to know each other. That evening, my family and my mum had dinner with him. It was a wonderful but emotionally draining day.
For me, the next step was to visit my father in the country that could have been my homeland. Four months ago, just days before the detention by the Revolutionary Guard of 15 British military personnel, I flew to Iran. It was not an easy journey to make and I was scared as I boarded the plane.
My destination was a city at the heart of the "axis of evil", but my fears were more personal than that.
Following the 1979 revolution my father, like many other Western-leaning Iranians, had been sentenced to death. He served four years in the "Hotel Evin", a notorious Teheran prison.
His younger brother was tortured before being executed. I was an illegitimate child and it was vital that my link with Amir be kept from the authorities. Even now, revealing such family ties could have resulted in another prison term for him.
So I travelled to Iran on a £110 tourist visa and as long as I stipulated the purpose of my journey was to sightsee and visit "friends", I would be safe.
As the plane began its descent into Teheran, the glamorous women around me, clad in tight T-shirts and jeans, began to shroud themselves in black mantoux (obligatory knee-length coats) and headscarves.
But, perhaps in an act of defiance, they also touched up their lipstick and donned designer shades. Nervously, I joined the line for foreigners at passport control and, within minutes, had been pulled aside and taken to a darkened office.
Two officials scrutinised my visa. Looking me up and down, one said: "Tourist, yes?" I nodded. He stamped my visa and let me through. I was free to go, a stranger in my own land.
During the years I had searched for Amir, I had mourned the loss of an idealised Persian childhood - the sight of the mountains that ringed Teheran, the sound of Persian poetry, the taste of apricots on a child's tongue.
But my first impressions were far less romantic. I gaped at the empty vastness of the Ayatollah Khomeini's mosque as my taxi sped past and at the fluttering banners proclaiming the glories of the Islamic revolution.
I listened to a language I could not understand - shamefully, the only phrase of Farsi I managed on that first day was: "Shoma ingilisi baladin?" (Do you speak English?)
Later, I met Amir at my hotel. It was only our second meeting and we were both still too shy to embrace. Besides, kissing or hugging someone of the opposite sex who is not a relative is haram (forbidden) in Iran, so we shook hands instead. My father had instructed me to explain to hotel staff that he was the father of a friend.
We ordered hot chocolate and settled down to talk. Before long, Amir had launched into an attack on Islamic mores.
He railed against girls being married off before puberty and told me how he hated the hypocrisy of middle-class life in Iran, whereby children whose parents openly drink or play cards at home have to pretend that their parents are good Muslims when they go to school.
And when I asked him about the mourning flags that were draped everywhere, he exploded: "We love the dead more than we love the living. We are never out of mourning for some imam or other."
He made me nervous, but it became clear that such feeling against the Islamic state was not unusual.
The next day I met a television director, Arash Minovi, and quizzed him about the kind of life I might have lived as a middle-class woman in Iran.
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