My Father, Asghar (August 18, 1923 - June 15, 2019)

By Kamran Nayeri, October 9, 2019

Asghar in his nursing home with a visitor who seemed amazed at him.  Photo: Teymour Kamali

My father, Asghar Nayeri, died in John Muir hospital in Walnut Creek, California, sometimes between the attending nurse’s last visit to his room and 4:35 p.m. on June 15, 2019.  He was in comfort care for a week after a pneumonia infection landed him in the emergency room followed by a series of other life-threatening complications.  He lived a long and healthy life of contentment.  

After a number of  falls, the last one caused by a stroke, Asghar spent the last five years of his life in a skilled nursing facility in Orinda, California, close to her daughter Zhilla, who was his primary caregiver. Nursing homes must be supervised by the residents’ families to ensure they take adequate care of them!

A resilient man who loved long walks each day before his knees no longer cooperated, Asghar had increasingly become incapacitated in the last year of his life losing his ability to enjoy small daily gifts of life we all take for granted. 

He was buried with an immediate-family-only service at Oakmont Memorial Park next to my mother Nezhat Nikrad who died six years earlier.  Zhilla and her husband Touraj (Mansour) hosted a memorial dinner for several dozens of family members and friends.  The ceremony started with the sharing of memories of Asghar who had a love of reciting Iranian poems he had memorized and enjoyed entertaining others with humor and jokes and came to a close with Saeed Shahram, the Iranian film composer, playing some of his compositions on the piano. 

Asghar’s generation came of age in the post-World War II boom when many Iranians experienced upward mobility in the 1960s and the 1970s.  He began his career in the late 1940s as a civil servant in the administrative apparatus of Shahrebani (literary “watching over the city”)—the countrywide police force—with a modest salary of about 150 tomans a month.  He retired in the early 1970s with an “equivalent rank” (hamradeef) of a colonel with a full salary pension and benefits.  A year or two into retirement, he was offered a job in the Royal Investigative Bureau (bazresi-e shahanshahi), part of the Shah’s public image campaign to show he cared about the injustices of his regime by providing a limited venue for appeal.  Impervious to the year-long anti-Shah mobilizations of the millions, Asghar continued working there until the revolutionaries took over the office in February 1979.   

A lifetime of working for the police and identifying with the Shah’s regime turned him into a bitter opponent of the revolution which he believed was a foreign scheme to get rid of the Shah to stop Iranian progress.  The idea that great powers have been responsible for the problems of Iranians is shared both by the monarchists and by many leftists.  During the Shah’s dictatorial rule, the “silent majority” justified their apathy with the nihilist proverb that “politics has no father;” that is, in politics anything goes. 

Earl life 

Asghar was the second child from the second wife of Mohammad Nayeri, a postmaster, in Arak and in Tehran, both part of the Central province at the time, and, later, Kashan, part of the Isfahan province.  Asghar was born in Tehran but spent his adolescent years in Kashan which sits between the Karkas mountain-range to the West and the Central desert to the East. He and his siblings had wonderful memories of Qamsar, a village at the time that is now the seat of the District of Qamsar famous for its rosewater, where the family had an orchard.  It is important to bear in mind that when Ashgar was a child, the largest of these municipalities, Tehran, had fewer than 500,000 inhabitants (now 12 million).  There were many more open spaces and far fewer people.  Asghar told us stories about his time in their orchard in Qamsar. 

Asghar’s siblings

Mohammad’s household must have been a busy place. He had three wives (the last two were concurrent) and nine children. No one I talked to had known the first wife. But she gave birth to a son that was named Mohammad after his father, and a daughter named Annis.  I do not have an image of my aunt Annis although I know I had seen her as a child in the customary Noruz (New Year) greeting visits.  My uncle Mohammad, called by his siblings Agha Dashi, literary meaning “Mr. Brother” because he was so much older than they were, was a tall, large man with a big head and a big mustache that cover the entire area below his nose including his upper lip, and who was the gentlest of all the giants that I have ever met.  He was married to a tall, thin, and pretty woman with an ivory white complexion who always wore a floral chador and was equally as nice as he.  My image of them is how I often saw them together, sitting on the cushions laid out on a rug on the floor next to a samovar with a kettle full of freshly brewed black tea.  They drank a lot of tea and she was a chain smoker, preferring filterless Homa cigarets.  As long as I remember them, Uncle Mohammad, who like his father was a postal employee but of low rank, which meant he had little of life’s possessions, was retired and at home. I saw them a good deal when I returned to Tehran from New York in February 1979 and initially settled in my parents' house in Tehran Pars. They lived in two rooms in the basement of an empty storefront. Whenever, I visited them Uncle Mohammad would kiss me on both cheeks and offer me tea and sweets or if it was close to a mealtime, generously insisting that I should stay and eat with them. Within a few months, uncle Mohammad and his wife moved to Rasht where their son, Khaghan who was just a decade or so younger than Asghar, lived.  About a year later, I heard of his demise. 

The third and last wife of my grandfather Mohammad was Heshmat Khanum (Lady Heshmat) who gave birth to a son and a daughter: Massih (Messiah) and Moneer.  I also have no visual memory of them although as a child I visited their home for Noruz greetings.  Asghar did not socialize with his half-sisters and half brothers.  He spoke highly of Heshmat Khanum, especially of her cooking which he always praised. 

Aside from Uncle Mohammad who I really liked, I also knew Asghar’s immediate brothers, Akbar, the oldest and Hassan, the youngest.  Uncle Hussein, the third son, died in his early 40s of bladder cancer so I have only vague memories of him.  From these memories and from what I heard from others who knew him, he was the most glamorous of the four brothers. He married an educated woman from Qazvin, named Azar, who was a poet and as chain smoker who also drank, and as I learned later, she suffered from episodes of mental illness that put her in hospital from time to time.  After Azar also died early, my cousin, Shahrokh, became the guardian of his two brothers and a sister while he was still finishing high school.

My uncle Hassan, the youngest, was an employee of Bank-e Meli (National Bank) and had an interest in singing. His voice was good enough for him to try his hand professionally. But his first concert tour had to be canceled as he suffered from stage fright.  He and his family now live in Sweden. At 86 years of age, he is the last survivor of the Nayeri brothers. 

Of all my uncles, I knew and interacted most with Akbar, Monavar’s oldest son. Monavar Nouri, Asghar's mother, was Mohammad's second wife. Uncle Akbar was briefly educated in Switzerland and knew a fair amount of English and French, he wrote poetry and painted still life. He was a middle-level manager in the Ministry of Labor.  He, too, had an unconventional wife, Shahzadeh Khanum (literary, Lady Princess), who was much older than he was and had inherited a small fortune from her earlier marriage to an older man, Mr. Kazzeroni.  Shahzadeh Khanum was infertile and uncle Akbar was burning with a desire to his own children.  While there was a lot of malicious gossips around the origin of Shahzadeh Khanum’s wealth and how my uncle had married a much older woman for her money. From all I know, she was a nice woman.  True, Shahzadeh Khanum lived a strange life.  Her wealth had allowed her to employ her younger and chronically ill sister as her caregiver. She spent her days sitting atop of a decorated platform bed leaning against large cushions and being served food and drink and a couple of times a day her opium which was legally sold by prescription in Iran at the time.  Still, she allowed and financially supported uncle Akbar to marry a second wife who already had a child from an earlier marriage.  She gave birth to two daughters.  

Starting a family

I do not know when and why my grandfather moved to the Sarcheshmeh neighborhood of old Tehran, close to Bahrestan Square and Majles (the old Parliament).  But they did settle in a rented house in Koche Bahroolum (The Sea of Knowledge alley).  That is where I was born and my grandfather, Mohammad, promptly named me Kamran.  I have told the story of how my parents met and married elsewhere (see, The Proposing (Khāstgari)).   

Within a year after I was born, Mohammad, my grandfather died, probably of old age and his household disintegrated. My parents rented part of the house of an older woman’s (Khanum-e Motamen) house who according to my mother was scheming to marry off her aging daughter to Asghar.   The young couple, who just had their second child, a daughter named Zhilla, two years younger than me, moved to another rental in a house with a very large yard in the outskirt of eastern Tehran, inspirationally called Tehran No (New Tehran).  There was a large square-shaped cement pond with goldfish close to the house (houses in Iran are walled).  The live-in landlord was Akbar Taghikhani who eventually became a very successful household appliances store owner.  Asghar nearly lost his life one hot summer day when he decided to cool off in the pond without realizing that it sloped deep and the bottom was slippery! As he did not know how to swim he panicked and was taking water into his lungs. Luckily, the little girl Zhilla who was watching him cried for help and adults arrived and saved Asghar!

Asghar and Nezhat, with me, Tehran, 1951.

Narmak

A turning point for my parents was to build their own house on the plot of land that Asghar had purchased as a civil servant. When Mohammad Mossadegh, the nationalist prime minister who helped lead the nationalization of Iranian oil controlled by the British Anglo-Iranian Oil Company, Iranian oil which provided the bulk of government’s revenue was embargoed.  To generate badly needed revenue, Mossadegh sold public land to state employees at very low prices.  Asghar had bought a 600 square meters plot (6,458 square feet) in the middle of nowhere in northeastern Tehran, which the government had named Narmak, after the name of a village on the downslopes of the Alborz mountain range. 

The young couple mortgaged valuables (rugs, wedding dining set, etc.) to raise money to build a wall around the property and build two rooms, a bathroom, and a simple kitchen on the southern side.  Their dream was to build their residence in the northern part of the plot.  

By the time I was five years old, the northern residence was completed and my parents rented a room to a teacher and his wife who was nursing a baby.   I remember having a crush for her. 

Borazjan

I was in the sixth grade that the family moved to Borazjan, a small town of about 5,000, about 60 miles north of the historic Persian Gulf port city of Bushehr.  As part of his job, Asghar was required to serve three years in a remote location or one with a bad climate.  Borazjan was both.  It was hot and humid—its main cash crop was Medjool dates—and was isolated, reachable from Shiraz to the north via an unpaved narrow road that went through Kazerun and then snaked up and down a mountain range.  The wide-open spaces in the region were seasonally inhibited by the Bakhtiari tribe.  Despite the campaign of repression of the tribal communities in Iran by the Pahlavi Shahs, by the 1979 revolution, there were still 2 million tribal people in Iran out of the population of 38 million. 

Each summer, my mother and the children left Borazjan for the relatively cooler Tehran while Asghar stayed behind. But Asghar’s career took off after serving in Borazjan, in part because the entire Iranian economy that was transitioning from being predominantly agrarian to a rapidly urbanized, semi-industrial capitalist society in the 1960s and 1970s.

Back in Narmak

Three years after we returned to our house in Narmak, a certain Mr. Sultanni managed to convince my parents to remodel and rent it as a school to him.  We relocated to a rented top floor apartment in a two-story structure in Kooye-Kalad, the new development in the northernmost corner of Narmak.  I spent my senior year in high school there and left for the United States on January 8, 1969.  Mr. Sultanni lured my parents with financial calculations that proved wrong.  The basic idea was the considerable differential in rent obtained from commercial structures and residential structures. Mr. Sultanni planned to run a private school, a lucrative business at the time, and pay a high rent. But he did not provide my parents with insurance if his planned business failed.  The school never attracted enough students to make a profit and he defaulted on his monthly rent. He eventually claimed bankruptcy and left the house badly disfigured by the remodeling to accommodate a large number of children, such as a row of bathrooms built on the western side of the house!  My parents had to sell the house as it was at a loss.  With whatever was left they bought a house in Tehran Pars, a more recent development to the east of Narmak.

Tehran Par

When I returned to Tehran on February 1, 1979, I settled in my parents' Tehran Pars house in a bedroom upstairs next to the dining room which was rarely used.  They had lived there for less than a decade and they continued to live there for another two or three years after I returned to the U.S. in 1982.  Asghar was now permanently retired as his post-retirement at the Royal Investigation Bureau was taken away from him by the revolution.  The job was more about him being with his office buddies than about making extra income.  Now, Asghar was really confined to the house, something that lasted four decades! So he helped my mother by going shopping and running errands for her. Both of them were very bitter about the fall of the old regime and whenever I was home I could hear them grumble about the new chaotic order and long for the olden days.  In this house too, they had hoped to make a business venture as they bought it in part because it had a storefront on the southern side. The problem was that the house was located in a residential neighborhood away from the nearest businesses.  Who would want to set up shop where there is not customer traffic?  They never found an interested party to rent the storefront!

Asghar and Nezhat with Zhilla (R) and Kamyar (L) standing and Mina.  Tehran early 1970s

Gisha

A couple of years after I and soon after Zhilla and her family moved back to the U. S., my parents sold the Tehran Pars house and bought the top floor apartment in a three-story apartment building in the northwestern neighborhood of Tehran called Gisha.  The couple and my younger brother, Kamyar, who never left home, moved there.  In 1994, Kamyar died of inoperable thyroid cancer. Mina, their youngest child, and her husband had already moved to the U.S. as well.  In 1995, Asghar and Nezhat sold the Gisha apartment and moved to the U.S. for good where their three remaining children lived.  

Minneapolis

My parent initially moved to Moraga, California, where Zhilla and Touraj and their two daughters lived, and where they obtained their permanent residency status.  However, they remained culturally isolated and entirely dependent on Zhilla for their daily lives—they did not drive and did not speak English.  In consultation with Zhilla, they decided to move to Minneapolis where Nezhat’s brother, my uncle, Manouchehr, his extended family, Nezhat’s youngest sister Valentine, her husband and her extended family, and Nezhat’s two other sisters, Zinat and Farah also lived.  The four sisters had apartments in the same senior residential building in Minneapolis.  There, Asghar also became close to Mr. Abbas Azemai, Valentine’s husband.  In Tehran, Asghar and Abbas did not socialize much except in occasional Friday family visits.  Their interests did not coincide. In Minneapolis, they became good friends, at least as far as Asghar was concerned.  He was much impressed by Abbas’s kind heart for other species.  He told me many times how Abbas would not harm even an ant.  

The couple had a rich social life in Minneapolis. The sisters spent a lot of time together and ventured out to garage sales in search of treasures and the nearby casino where they played jackpot.  Asghar and Abbas would go for long walks and talk.  In the early 2000s, Nezhat who was diagnosed with type II diabetes in 1975, had open heart surgery and a day after the surgery suffered a stroke. Her recovery promised to be long and difficult. Zhilla arranged for my parents to relocate to California, and settled them in the Senior Village in Orinda about 10 minutes away from her house. 

Orinda

Nezhat never fully recovered from her open heart surgery as her health continued to decline.  By 2010 she was wheelchair-bound and lived in a nursing home in the nearby town of Moraga.  She died of a massive stroke three years later. 

Although Asghar did now show much emotion about Nezhat’s death he did become lonely.  They spent much of the time together even though not all of it was fun for them.  Asghar began to spend much of his waking hours in the lobby of the Senior Village or if the weather was fair just outside of it just to see people come and go and try to strike a conversation with them.  He had much better luck with the Farsi speaking residents or visitors. But a Russian woman who lived there told me that he talked to her is Farsi and although she did not understand him, she listened.  

Asghar’s health also deteriorated.  He had glaucoma in both eyes and I had to call him twice—in the morning and in the evening—to remind him to use his eye drops.  He did not like those calls and sometimes angrily retorted that he “knows” and has “has” done the drops!  Alas, his stubbornness caused his right eye to go blind. He also had several falls, the last one caused by a stroke. Zhilla who took him to the ER each time and the last time, he was assigned to the nearby nursing home in Orinda.  He maintained his spirits until the last year of his life. He wheeled himself in hallways and still recited poetry for his visitors. 

Asghar that I knew him

In important ways, Asghar was a man like his most of his contemporaries.  His world was limited by his own life experiences and a narrow field of interest.  When I was growing up, there were no books in the house except a copy of the Quran, no newspapers or magazines unless someone left one behind or the grocer or butcher wrapped their products in them. When we had our first television in the 1960s, Asghar showed no interest in it and often wanted us to turn it off. He did like listening to the radio, mostly to listen to the extended news coverage at 2 p.m. and the nightly extended news coverage. He especially liked the Farsi programs of the BBC, Voice of America, and radio Israel. He seemed to feel at home with their slant on what was happening in Iran and around the world. But his interest did not go any further. Like most Iranians in the post-1953 CIA coup era when the Shah dictatorial rule tightened, he avoided political discussion out of the fear of SAVAK, the secret police. 

Asghar took in only a few friends and only for a brief period. That was partly because my mother did not like friends he picked so their socialization was limited and ended soon.  As a child, I too found friends Asghar picked as odd.  One was Mr. Tabatabai, a thin man with eyeglasses and largely bald head who was single and practiced occult. Another was Mr. Frotan who was much older than Asghar. He was already retired and lived with his wife in a house nearby. 

Asghar did not like going with us to the movies and when he went on my mother’s insistence, he quickly fell asleep. He did not like visiting family and socializing. He preferred staying at home with his canaries, a hobby of his for a few years which he gave up. 

Asghar’s idea of fatherhood was also limited. He never played with his first three children. But this changed with the arrival of his last child, Mina, who is 11 years younger than me, the oldest.  He talked to her in baby language.  He played with her by acting like a horse carrying her on his back.  But as Mina grew up Asghar lost interest in her as well.  Like the bulk of the household work, raising the children was my mother’s task.  Asghar never cared about how we did in school.  

At the same time, his hands-off attitude towards parenting was a blessing to us. Some of my friends had overbearing fathers who controlled all aspects of their lives.  In our household, the children, especially me by the virtue of being male and self-assured, chose our own paths more freely.  In comparison to my friends, I charted my own course thanks to my mother who supported my decisions, and thanks to Asghar who faithfully handed over all his salary to my mother each month and agreed to raise money in special cases.  Thus, it was I who decided that I wanted to attend a top-rated private high school, convinced my mother who then paid off 800 tomans year tuition, a hefty sum as the public schools were free.  After I finished high school, I decided that I wanted to go to college in the United States. Asghar was initially dismissive of it; he told my mother that I should get a job as a teacher and not to go to college at all.  I threatened that I would go to the Gulf states to work and raise money to go to the U.S. for my college education.  Asghar decided to consult his colleague, Colonel Dr. Nemati, who was a professor of law in the Police Academy.  One day, he took me with him to work to be interviewed by Colonel Nemati.  After some conversation, he turned to my father and said: “This is a bright young man. Send him to college in the U.S.”  My father relented and sold a piece of land the couple had bought for their retirement to raise enough money to buy my plane fare and give me $900 that paid for tuition, room, and food for a semester of English as the Second Language course at Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge.  

In my Sophomore year, I again needed money because I was unable to find the summer job in Chicago where I had raised enough money the previous year that paid for my freshman year expenses.  Asghar with help from his friends got me a loan from the Pahlavi Foundation that paid for that year’s expenses.  I worked my way through college and life ever since.  After the 1979 revolution, the Pahlavi Foundation was taken over by the Islamic Republic and the foundation was renamed Mostazafin (Poor People’s) Foundation.  I saw no reason to pay back my loan to the Shah and at that time had no resources of my own anyway, but Asghar who opposed the Islamic Republic still paid off the loan on my behalf.  

Ashar’s hand-off fatherhood allowed both my sisters Zhilla and Mina to meet and marry their own husbands.  Only Kamyar suffered because he did need a more assertive father to guide him through life. 

When I left for the U.S. in January 1969, my relationship with my family was limited to written correspondence with Asghar for a decade.  In the 1970s, it was not financially feasible to make international calls and almost every Iranian student in the U.S. had to rely on international mail.  Aerograms, blue in color, was the medium of choice.  I wrote to and received dozens of letters from Asghar who read mine aloud to my mother and promptly wrote back. What was rather strange about his letters was their uniformity of composition. They followed a precise structure as if written by a robot each and every one! Except for response to direct questions, I asked regarding actionable items.  I kept these letters despite their uniformity (one was just like the one before and the one after; each written as a prompt response but included no news and was largely formalities). I know that I have picked up Asghar’s habit of promptness in my social affairs, including responding to mail or phone calls. 

Asghar was also a very contented man. He never asked my mother for a special dish to cook for dinner. He almost never complained about anything.  It was always my mother who insisted that he needed a new pair of shoes or a new outfit.  He was generally healthy. I do not recall him getting seriously sick or visiting the doctor often.  Unlike many others of his generation, he did not drink, smoke, or chase women.  In his old age when his contemporaries started to die off, Asghar used to brag that his good health and longevity was because his “did not drink, smoke, or fool around.” 

My relationship with Asghar was conflicted from a very young age.  I attribute this to the conflict in the relationship between my mother and him. Their marriage was arranged and Asghar never had even a whiff of romantic feelings in his attitude towards my mother. When he desired her he would act clownish making her laugh and make way for a closer encounter. But he never brought her flowers or perfume or even praise her hard work around the house or her cooking.  I know my mother longed for such expressions of love.  When I was born, their first child and a son, my mother gave all her love to me and this persisted throughout her life.  I, in return, bonded with her because Asghar was entirely aloof towards me.   There are family photos of when I was a small child but absent because he and I just had an “argument” and I refused to pose with him in the studio.  Although unlike many of his contemporaries, Asghar really never physically abused his children, I do remember an episode when he tried to beat me with a belt and I had to hide behind my mother to protect myself.  By the time I was in the tenth grade, our relationship had deteriorated so much that I stopped talking to him altogether.  That lasted until I left for the United States.  When I returned in 1979 and stayed with them from time to time in their Tehran Pars house, there was an ongoing conflict between me, the revolutionary, and him, the counter-revolutionary.  Except, now I could ignore him and leave the house to stay with friends. 

By the time Asghar and Nezhat migrated to the U.S. in 1996, Asghar had mellowed out.  Not only our relative power relations had changed, I was now a middle-aged man with my own life and he was a senior who depended on his children for navigating in the new country largely alien to him, and he also had mellowed out. He now liked to watch television, recite poetry for others, and go to restaurants. He even liked to sit with his son-in-law Touraj on their balcony and puff on a cigar and drink a beer! 

But until he became too frail to fight there was an occasional burst of anger in which he would call me the “commie!” as an insult. His worldview never changed. 

Asghar was a showman above all else. This part of his personality dominated in his long retirement.  It started in Tehran when he would stand in line to acquire rationed goods during the Iran-Iraq war. He enjoyed joking with his neighbors and total strangers who stood in line with him.  Later, in the U.S. he began reciting a few dozen poems he knew by heart for anyone who would be within his reach.  I do not know when his interest in poetry started and when he memorized so many poems.  To him, the poetic rhyme and some moral lessons in the poem mattered most.  His close family members, especially my mother, started to complain to him because he recited the same poems to us so many times that it became annoying. But he did not care. 

Asghar was unable to hold an equitable conversation with anyone. He either listened to instructions from superiors, say at work, or liked to engage in monologues, usually in the form of a story or a joke or a poem. 

Above all, Asghar was largely a contended man. He did not have high expectations from life. He never complained about anything, not even pain when he was told he needed knee replacement on both knees! When I took him to his medical appointment, he would leave his walker, lower himself into the passenger seat and then would count “One, Two, Three!” as he pulled one leg and then the other inside the car.  When we returned from medical appointments, to make conversation I would tell him about how his Medicare and Medicaid government insurance would pay for it; he was always grateful not only for such assistance but also to his caregivers. 

His aloofness protected him from tragedy and loss.  So when my brother, who lived with him and my mother, died of thyroid cancer at age 39, he did not betray any sense of loss or being diminished by it. He acted similarly after my mother’s death, except in this case, he did lose a companion and became alone. 

Asghar also had a sense of wonderment about the world around him, except often I had to point the beauty around us to him. 

When I visited him in his nursing home, I usually wheeled him to the Sun Room which had a picturesque view of Orinda hills, lush green in the rainy season and golden brown in the dry season.  I had to draw his attention to the beautiful scenery before us. He would look into the distance and sigh: “Glory to the Creator!”  Asghar was not a religious man nor believed in an afterlife.  He was a simple man with little expectations who happened to be in the right place at the right time.