I didn’t play squash, and, as a consequence, perhaps, I fell from grace.

1979

It was happenstance, of course: Lady L and her old adversary Reza Shah falling in the same year, he from his throne, she from her bicycle. (Perhaps I never had lost her favour in the few months – was it even six? – I was under her tutelage. I don’t remember. Life has a way of taking over from memory.) I recall the hours spent over verbs and tenses and subjunctives, and the rise of Khomeini, and the hanging of Bhutto, and the gentle middle-aged Persian native who took me over from Lady L when she went on protracted leave after an accident. (Her broken limb gave rise to a battle of succession, and she never did reclaim her role as High Priestess of Persian in the department.) Marco, who had switched from Persian to Hindi, laughed at me. ‘Trust you to choose to study Persian, Mehran, just as Iran’s star is falling and the stock of Arabic rises.’ And Thatcher won the elections at some point. Pakistan had let me down by letting Bhutto be hanged and ogre-faced Zia take over with his henchmen. Iran, too, which seemed to offer me some sort of alternative, was now becoming a kind of dictatorship; I would not be going there for a long while yet. I drifted away from Tina, who spent more time in Venice and Milan than in London and was too absent a partner for a twenty-four year old; instead I hung around university bars with Marco and others, went to midweek socials in the evenings in the idle hope of meeting someone new; rushed between work and classes when I did more of the former and attended fewer of the latter; and often spent Saturdays alone at the cinema, a concert, or with a pile of records or a book, or writing down my thoughts and reflections for hours in my notebooks between pages of grammar exercises and passages of translation.