The Rooftops of Tehran : review

"It was the best of times; it was the worst of times."
Charles Dickens might have penned a few memorable lines and few lines worth memorising, in a career then called meteoric, not just for its pace, but also for the impending doom, but hardly any matches those that commence A Tale of Two Cities. Down to the latest London riots, the sentence is oft quoted even when the best of times has been such a far cry. As for the worst times, as far the adage goes, times can be worse that none can adequately fit the bill. What makes Dickens’s line so quotable is that like Tolstoy’s happy families, revolutions are all alike; but the aftermath of each is distinct in their own way.

As for the Iranian revolution, unlike the French Revolution or the Vietnamese War, accounts have focussed on the aftermath rather than the Revolution itself. Examples abound. Azar Nafisi’s Reading Lolita in Tehran and Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis, for two instances, narrate the sexual discrimination and oppression of desire in post Revolution Iran. The House of Sand and Fog by Andre Dubas III, more from the viewpoint of an exiled Iranian upperclass, speaks more of the privations, emotional and material, of life in a foreign land, and of the impossibility of returning home.

What strikes most about Mehbod Seraji’s The Rooftops of Tehran is its reluctance to flip, so ever easy, to this Iran-after-revolution bashing. The bashing, justified it sure is, tires nevertheless most often by the flippancy. Stark black and white contrasts does not do justice, except as a political rhetoric can make the voice heard. So, while not discounting the power of rhetoric, and equally the power to recognise it when one crosses it, let me excuse myself in favour of a story that has more to it than just political oppression. This is a book that brings back smiles of those days when one fell in love for the first time, the time where daydreams were indeed what days were made of, and those titbits of conversation, those occasional glances, the tree shades (cherry tree in the novel; mango tree in our memory) under which we sat, we read, we discussed, we boasted, lied, blushed and just hid when cascades felt then drowned our dreams in languorous longing. Pasha’s and Zari’s teenage love do not slip into long paragraphs of soliloquising adoration (not that they are boring when in the right hands), but is well balanced in humour and wit by Pasha’s best friend Ahmed. Some of the best moments of the novel, where you slip back into the teenage reading experience, are the conversations between Ahmed and Pasha.



The novel has its own twists and turns, fair share of tragedy and some heartfelt feel good in the initial build up, but a novel on Iran cannot be exempt from politics. Politics forms the backbone of the novel, except that the era depicted is the oppressive rule of Shah, its totalitarian torture, exile, its exuberant displays, its reign of mistrust, and its dirty hate-thickened underbelly.

Published by New American Library, the book also has an interview of the author and a questionnaire at the end!