Article by Izzi Boustead

Letters from Tehran Izzi Boustead

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ear Mum & Dad, I’ve had a letter and also got the flouride tablets. Thank you. I’m trying to get Don to get around to writing to the Albury accountant and getting some money sent to you to cover these things...Paul is driving me up to the

wall this morning, asking for things all the time and whingeing.” The letters that Elizabeth Boustead wrote home from Iran were written in cramped, loopy, almost decipherable cursive, and they were also somewhat mundane. They outlined what was going on with her husband, three children (one of whom is now my father), and housekeeper named Golpani; what food she was eating; and the dinner parties she was holding for other Australians living in Iran. On January 31, 1976, she wrote about how she organised a “Pie night for over 100 Australians” which involved cooking 300 meat pies, a dozen pavlovas and then some apple pies. (I do not know why everyone needed so much pie.)

I only learned a few years ago that the Bousteads had lived in Iran for four years. But today, my grandma talks about it almost every time I call her. I think maybe it was a way for me to relate to her, since we both had the experience of living in a faraway, unfamiliar place.

My grandma is resilient. She adapts to the global situation with ease, or at least she seems to. She’s an avid Twitter user. She follows the news, critically and consis-

tently. She adapted when moving to Iran, and when

moving home, even though it was very grandfather died, and that had to be The world is changing, quickly climate change and the politmore important than ever.

difficult for her. She adapted when my the hardest thing in the whole world. and scarily, due to pandemic, ical climate, and resilience is We can’t give in. We need

to keep going, just like my

grandma.

This is a story of learning

to adapt to the unknown

with confidence, and stick-

ing together as a family. My

grandmother’s letters and

her verbal accounts differ

quite a lot, it turns out. In

the letters to her parents she

comes across as confident and and mother. In our conversations, what scared, really. “The secret police careful what I wrote about,” she told me. It

capable, a perfect housewife she tells me that she was someopened all of my letters, so I had to be was hard for her. They were on the plane just

four days after it was confirmed that they would be moving. They had a layover in Hong Kong on the way there and she told me that she “had a panic attack there and wrote a letter to [her] mum saying [that she] couldn’t breathe and thought [she] was dying!” (E. Boustead) The letters I can find about Hong Kong still seem, for the most part, calm and collected. When they got to Tehran, though, they had no visas and were taken into custody. Some American got them out, and took them to a fourth floor apartment which was “teeming with hundreds and hundreds of cockroaches of all different sizes,” so they had to wash every piece of crockery before using it. Her husband immediately left for his work project. Her children were two, three, and four, and almost immediately they all got whooping cough, which they had been vaccinated against. It didn’t go away fully for six whole months, during which the house was robbed while everyone was asleep. “It was an inside job,” Grandma wrote in an email to me. “Our driver, we think” (E. Boustead). Later they moved to a house in the middle of nowhere, on a dirt road with no other houses in sight.

She often went to have tea with a woman she calls Mrs. Nafisi, one of the first women to be elected to the Iranian Parliament under the Shah, who she says tried to take all of the expats under her wing to take care of. My grandad, Don Boustead, worked for the Shah’s regime, doing agricultural work, and some years later, they found out that one of his employees, a man who carried a bible around everywhere with him, and who my dad says that Don “did not respect very much” had actually worked for the CIA. 2

“Dear Mum & Dad, I’ve had a letter and also got the flouride tablets. Thank you.

I’m trying to get Don to get around to writing to the Albury accountant and getting some money sent to you to cover these things...Paul is driving me up to the wall this morning, asking for things all the time and whingeing.”

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M

y dad had much fonder memories of Iran than my grandma did, because he was so much younger. He was only two when they moved there, and six when they moved back. His first ever memory is catching the bus to preschool and at naptime sleeping under a blanket that his grandma had knitted him. He and his sisters went to a British school in Iran, and every day at lunch he’d go home and sit on the floor of the

kitchen to eat rice that the housekeeper Golpari had cooked for him. The way my grandma tells it, Golpari adored my dad with all of her heart. If my grandma got mad at him Golpari would try her best to protect him.

“Towards the end it was stressful”, said my dad. “There was violence on the streets. I think I saw a dead person on the streets but I don’t remember if I actually did. We suddenly left and it was pretty stressful… I remember Golpari the most.

She and her kids waved us off at the airport and we were all crying. We never heard from her again, because she didn’t really speak English.” Revolution was imminent in Iran. At that point the leader was US-backed Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, the Shah of Iran. My dad had met him, when he was five, my grandma told me. Dad didn’t remember, though. They left Iran when it was building up to the revolution, which was partially a backlash on the westernization of Iranian society.

A woman participating in the revolution said that American lifestyles had come to be imposed as an ideal, the ultimate goal. Americanism was the model. American popular culture-- books, magazines, film-- had swept over our country like a flood... we found ourselves wondering ‘is there any room for our own culture?’” (M. Axworthy) The Shah was mostly only

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good for the rich, and for America, and so when the Shah was overthrown, I think that most Americans picture the anti-America side of the revolution. The revolution had the potential to be a great thing. Overthrow the American influence on Iran, give more rights and freedom and democracy to the people, but that’s not what happened, and the country slid into the Islamic republic that it is today.

Today, my grandma lives in a small apartment in a tall, triangular prism shaped building across from North Steyne beach. Her husband, Don, had died before I was born, and so now she lives alone. She’s an artist-- her house is filled with canvases and oil paints and Caran D’Ache pastels, and her walls are lined with glass cabinets which hold meticulously placed trinkets of all kinds, sculptures, barbie dolls, flimsy plastic toys and the like. The mirrored wall of her bedroom is obstructed with abstract white organic shapes cut out of paper. When I imagine her at home she’s sitting on her couch, which is green velvet with a pale, leafy pattern, and telling me long, and detailed and intriguing stories which also double as life lessons. She plays bridge often, and talks about the people she plays bridge with, and how much she hates some of them. She posts on Instagram more often than I do. Photos of her artwork, of the view out her window, of the tangled cords behind her television.

My family lived with her for about a month, once. All five of us were shoved into the tiny apartment, my parents on the sofa bed and me and my brother squished into the “guest bedroom” which was triangular and not technically big enough

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“Towards the end it was stressful”, said my dad. “There was violence on the streets. I think I saw a dead person on the streets but I don’t remember if I actually did. We suddenly left and it was pretty stressful…”

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to fit a bed, so we were on tiny air mattresses on the floor. She’s very particular about some specific etiquette rules. She hates it when people stack plates at the table. Once she got mad at me over the fact that I bought the bad quality ice cream instead of the better stuff. My aunt Julieanne used to live above her in the same building, in an apartment with an almost identical layout but a polar opposite aesthetic, with very minimalist, all white furniture, and even all white Lego bricks. Julieanne called my Dad to tell him that I had interviewed my Grandma to write this article, and that’s when I found out that she had in fact been in hospital during our interview, and that’s why she had to type out and email her answers. She’s okay now, she just had to have her medication adjusted.

The letters that I’m reading are all careful photocopies, formatted in such a way that a photocopy of the envelope is also on the back. They’re wrapped in a plastic sleeve, which itself is tied in a stiff black cardboard folder with an inscription from when she gave them to my dad. “Happy Christmas ‘94 love from Mum.” I used to spend a lot of time imagining adults as how they were when they were younger, through glimpses in photos and stories they told, and I don’t really know if these letters are that much more helpful. Young grandma will always be a stranger to me, I think, even after I’ve spent all this time trying to get to know her.

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Works Cited Axworthy, Michael. Revolutionary Iran: a History of the Islamic Republic. Penguin Books, 2019.

Boustead, Elizabeth. Personal interview. April 27 2020.

Boustead, Elizabeth. Letters to Mr. and Mrs. T. Lorenz. 1972-1976.

Boustead, Paul. Personal interview. April 28 2020.

Raifee, Saira, et al. “Iran’s Quiet Counterrevolution.” Jacobin, 9 Oct. 2018, www.jacobinmag.com/2018/09/iran-revolution-counterrevolution-intervention-protest-opposition.

Maloney, Suzanne, and Keian Razipour. “The Iranian Revolution-A Timeline of Events.” Brookings, Brookings, 7 Feb. 2019, www.brookings.edu/blog/order-from-chaos/2019/01/24/the-iranian-revolution-a-timeline-of-events/.

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About the Author Izzi Boustead is an artist/high school student who lives in Los Altos, California, with her lizard, Phoenix. She is described by her best friend as a “local icon�, but no one else thinks that. She cares about her friends, coffee, and art and she dreams of one day living in a tiny apartment in a big city and owning a cat. Currently, she collects vintage clown dolls and does paintings of public transportation, and is trying her best to be a good barista.

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