Growing up in Essex, my summers in Iran felt like magical interludes from reality – but it was a spell that always had to be broken. When I was 12, a friend gave me the first Harry Potter book in 1999. Two days later, my family flew to Iran for our six-week summer holiday. In my grandparents' Tehran apartment, I read the book aloud to my twin sisters while the adults napped. We fell for it instantly, rooting for Harry as he escaped a gloomy suburban cupboard for a world of wizardry, fellowship, and belonging.
Over subsequent years, I read each successive book to my sisters, even though they were too old to be read to. It was more companionable, and we could only get one copy. We lived in Southend-on-Sea, attending a poorly performing comprehensive school in a brutalist building on a council estate. Most pupils were poor, and racism flourished alongside other cruelties. With our packed lunches and summer holidays, we were the lucky ones, but we still hoped the prosaic world around us was merely the opening scene of a story with stronger narrative and clean magic.
Returning from Iran each autumn, we brimmed with secrets, adapting our capers into mundane retellings. The International Statute of Wizarding Secrecy required wizards to behave as Muggles, just as we had to conceal our double lives. As any migrant or mixed person knows, value in one place holds none in another. We kept our lives studiously separate; so much was at stake.
The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps enforced the dress code, but the merciless policing of Essex schoolchildren was far more intimidating. One September, a classmate suggested I was lying about visiting Iran because I never returned with a tan. I was stunned into silence. How could I explain picnicking in the mountains after dark, singing with a pan of dolma? Another girl asked why I holidayed in a war zone. I held my tongue. Our English relatives would reproach my mother for letting us go to a place 'where they chop off people's hands'.
