The Way Back to Iran

THE NEW YORK TIMES

BY ROGER COHEN

LONDON — Rouzbeh Pirouz can still hear the raised voices, the sobbing. There was a list at Tehran airport. If you were on it you could not leave. Aged 7, he passed through the controls, after his mother. His father, a prominent businessman, did not follow. Agents of the newly birthed Islamic Republic stopped him, demanding that he provide an accounting of his activities under the shah. “Go without me!” he insisted. “Never!” Rouzbeh’s mother screamed. Over the head of the small boy, disabled by a neuro-muscular condition, a parental argument raged. They left in tears, without his father. It was 1980, a year after the Iranian revolution, the turning point in his life, the line of fracture. Everything changed.

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