Opinion Saffron and sorrow: What I learnt about grief in Iran

As were my professors, who wondered why I was not keen to document the rise of the Indian economy or conduct a critical investigation into a company fraud in the United States during the programme.

My answer was always the same: I think I need to report my project on “the winners and the losers” of the US sanctions.

My pitch and dataset were compelling; it was the logistics that caused a great deal of concern. But then, why be a journalist if you can’t pursue the story you believe is worth learning about?

A senior official at the university, while handing me the scholarship amount, wished me luck and said, “Just don’t do anything in life to make a statement. Statements make good plaques. Paragraphs make a better story.”

I agreed, for I have always believed that there is a thin line between being smart and being over‐smart, and a slight shift can lead to unwarranted damage.

Yet, it is also true that I was obsessed with Iran and had almost personified the entire country in my head as a lover. I read about the Persian civilisation, photocopied all the articles published by The New Yorker in the past four decades that focused on Iran, watched all their arthouse cinema, listened to their songs on loop, and read poetry every evening in my shoebox‐sized apartment on the Upper East Side of Manhattan.

The thesis allowed me to live in New York but daydream of Iran. I had chosen to teleport.

I was lucky enough to secure a visa. I also managed to arrange appointments in Iran with professors, activists, artists and, more importantly, with individuals who had reportedly benefited from the sanctions regime by setting up large shell companies across the globe. I wanted to profile them, not judge them. They were defying restrictions imposed by a foreign nation, and I wanted to understand how their defiance was perceived within Iranian society. Were they seen as outliers, or merely tactical operators serving those in power?

The fact that the chauffeur of a top Central Bank official could go on to run a business conglomerate fascinated me. At the same time, meeting innovators whose ideas and ambitions had been crippled by sanctions frustrated me. Mapping the definition of success became my context in Iran.

I made it to Iran via Dubai, wearing a headscarf and a long winter coat. And it was here that I started to realise the difference between the Western narrative and life as it was actually being lived by Iranians. I had wrongly assumed that many people would be fluent in English and that I would be able to navigate through the city without a translator. My only recourse was to head first to the Indian embassy — to register myself, to have some snacks and chai (remember, I was on a student budget), and more importantly, to find a translator.

A senior Indian official introduced me to a driver‐cum‐translator. Once we agreed upon a day rate, my reporting — and more importantly, my ability to feel the rhythm of Tehran — changed. The art, the culture, the conversations felt familiar, as if some residue had been left behind in India. History has Iran and India intertwined. Farsi, or Persian, was an official language in India until the 1840s. Even in some of the poorest quarters of Tehran, generosity and patience thrived, exactly like in India. The fine etiquette offered a sense of refinement.

My research allowed me to be invited into palatial homes where well-groomed women surrounded me and interrogated me about my life, trying to decipher whether I was a spy on a “research” project. Then one of them would suddenly realise how awkward I felt and make hasty attempts to put me at ease.

“You could pass off as a girl from Bandar Abbas,” one woman told me. “Your complexion is very much like the girls from there. The sun has kissed your skin, it’s good to be kissed.”

Iranians know how to make everything lyrical.

And mourning is a way of life, as if a certain degree of melancholy was necessary to cope with the harsh realities of living. Even the most businesslike meetings concluded with a poetic twist, and logic often gave way to destiny — taqdeer.

Everything felt a bit like India, and yet nothing was Indian. I travelled to villages and towns. I met women who hated America more than the hardline regime. I met students desperate to leave for France to embrace a new life. I broke bread with girls who were more interested in getting nose jobs to resemble Europeans.

My presence as an Indian always generated mixed emotions.

Those were the days of Ahmadinejad, and a new set of crippling sanctions was being imposed. In tea rooms, Iranians hated the fact that not a single American leader had even made an effort to pronounce the name of their nation appropriately.

“It’s not I-ran,” one man said. “It’s Iran — just like it’s India.”

“The Americans have chosen to hate Iran,” said an Iranian businessman, who, in recent years, was jailed for large‐scale financial fraud. “A strong hero always needs a robust villain to sustain the narrative. And Iran is the villain. It’s this that the US has proclaimed with its web of propaganda.”

Strategic experts argued that America’s determination to build the Gulf region from scratch depended on degrading Iran in every possible sphere of life. The exodus of its finest minds and the crushing of its ambitious streak through waves of sanctions made me see how Iran had fallen behind despite the enormous natural resources and intellect it commands.

In some ways, I could see how a nation could fall off its growth trajectory when it is ostracised from the global economy — and how fortunes can suddenly change when economic liberalisation opens up world markets, as it did for India.

Yet, Iran’s isolation seemed to have preserved its art, literature, and culture without letting them be muddled by a rapid dose of consumerism.

“When you have no distractions, you focus on what you have,” said a photographer at one of Tehran’s popular art cafés.

As my notebook and recorder filled with names, notes, and voices, I began to feel the urge to understand mourning as a process, in a land where the Shia tradition allows, honours, and integrates grief into the culture.

I started to sense that my obsession with Iran was really my desire to nurture my ability to mourn.

It was in this quest that I travelled to a village called Abyaneh. The women there wore colourful clothes and refrained from the black hijab. Their scarves reminded me of spring — small, bright flowers printed on cotton fabric.

I had gone there to understand how life differs from Tehran, but more importantly, to experience a maatam, a mourning ceremony for a man who had died of cardiac arrest.

Snow covered the mud homes. While men prepared for the final rites, older women wept and wailed, and younger ones cooked for the entire village. Saffron was mixed with minced meat, and I sat there watching everything — an outsider trying to understand Iranian ways of dealing with grief.

It was at that moment that I also realised that Iranians use saffron, the world’s most expensive spice, the same way Indians use turmeric: Generously.

For the first time in my life, I kicked myself for being a vegetarian, as the way in which the meal for the maatam was being prepared made me see the culinary superiority of the Persians.

The snowfall made it gloomy and when the march for the final rites began, I walked almost reluctantly with some young women who began beating their chests and started the process of wailing, completely ignoring every distraction as if crying was the only way to cleanse.

It was in this long and arduous journey that they mourned — to honour and carry the cellular imprint of what was left behind, and even more so for the possibilities that once belonged to them but were snatched away, as if they were destined never to be kissed by the sun.

And yet Iran, in many ways, made me see how ancient civilisations do not die. They crumble and realign.

Rupam Jain has been war correspondent for Reuters in Afghanistan and has worked in South Asia and the Middle East with AFP and the Indian Express. She continues to report on politics and policy for national and international publications