Iran

Iran enters the novel chiefly through memories of political upheaval and the experience of exile. Its significance lies in the way one exile’s account links changing governments at home to surveillance and danger that reach Iranian communities in Bombay.

Political Repression and Revolution

Mahmoud describes growing up under the Pahlavi Shah: his parents died in prison after opposing the regime, and he later joined the struggle against it. He says he was jailed twice and subjected to beatings and electric torture. The revolution brought Ayatollah Khomeini to power and the Shah fled to America, but, in Mahmoud’s account, the secret police and the people who ran its prisons remained in place, now serving the new government. Political change therefore altered who held power without ending the machinery of repression.

Mahmoud’s account also reaches beyond the revolution. He says that friends of his died in prison and in the war against Iraq, after which he escaped to Bombay. Iran is thus presented not only as the setting of political conflict, but as the place from which people were driven by successive rounds of imprisonment and war.

Exile and Surveillance in Bombay

The novel connects Iran to Bombay through a large expatriate community that includes people who fled the Iraq war and opposed Khomeini. Some made their living in black-market businesses; others joined criminal organizations or worked for gangs. The account describes Iranian secret-police agents moving among the exiles, collecting information and sometimes taking part in violence themselves. Their presence makes exile an uncertain refuge: people may leave Iran, yet still fear that information sent back can endanger those they left behind.

One exile recounts that reports about him led to the torture of family members in Iran. He says his sister was sexually assaulted and his uncle killed after the family could not pay the secret police promptly. These losses explain why he wanted to leave Abdel Khader Khan’s organization and pursue the agents himself; Khader instead offered to help him find them.

Iran in the Novel’s Wider Conflict

The pursuit begins with nine men identified as Iranian spies. Farid and Khader help locate six, while three remain alive; the survivors know that a spy is close to Khader’s circle. The account then identifies Abdul Ghani as a Pakistani figure with connections to the Inter-Services Intelligence, which is said to cooperate secretly with Iranian agents and foreign intelligence services. Iran’s political conflict consequently becomes entangled with Bombay’s criminal networks and with rival intelligence operations.

The novel gives little physical description of Iran in these passages. Instead, the country is made present through remembered prisons, the revolution’s unfulfilled promise of change, wartime loss, and the continuing reach of secret police. This focus turns Iran into a source of both displacement and unresolved danger for the exiles whose lives continue elsewhere.