Visiting Her Birth Father in Iran

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A voyage to find my father in Iran

Last Updated: 12:01am BST 16/07/2007

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.

Katharine Rayner spent two decades searching for her Persian father
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.

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