A new year, a new life

It’s early morning on the first day of the year 1393. Last night, at 20:27:07, the exact time of the spring equinox, those who follow the Solar Hijri calendar celebrated the beginning of a new year. Mr. S. and I are walking through the quiet streets of a private condominium by the Caspian Sea.

Everything here is clean and beautiful. Each house has a small porch and a surrounding garden. The streets are lined with orange trees and tall, bare cypresses. There is even an underground passage connecting the condominium with a private stretch of sand on the Caspian coast. This way, guests can comfortably reach the sea without crossing the terrifying Iranian roads.

Mr. S. is in his early seventies. He has two children: a son who lives in the United States and a daughter who lives in Tehran. It is his son that we have been talking about for the last 20 minutes.

“When the revolution broke out, we feared for our son,” Mr. S. tells me. “He was politically active and against the regime. He wasn’t safe here anymore.”

It was 1979, and the Pahlavi royal family had just fled the country. A few months later, the world’s first Islamic Republic was founded. His son was 18 years old when he left Iran through Pakistan to Europe. “He reached Paris with a false passport, but the French police sent him away on the first plane.” He landed in Lisbon, where the Portuguese authorities failed to notice his forged papers.

“We didn’t know where he was. He had little money, and at that time, there was no possibility of contacting us.” Mr. S. pauses as we pass a family in tracksuits. He greets them warmly in Farsi.

We continue walking, and after a few minutes he resumes: “Somehow, he got in touch with his uncle, who lived in Florence. My brother visited him in Lisbon and helped him as best as he could.” By the time he left Portugal, he had been granted political asylum and was able to travel to Italy, where he applied for a U.S. student visa.

“After finishing his studies in Washington, his student visa expired and he had to leave the USA—or find an American wife...” Mr. S. smiles at me. His son got married and has been living in the United States ever since.

Mr. S.’s story is a very successful one among many others that did not have the same happy ending. It is estimated that after the revolution and the start of the Iran-Iraq War, over 1.2 million Iranians fled the country—some of whom never returned.