Persian Nights by Alaka Rajan Skinner is a graphic memoir that weaves the magic of storytelling with the historical and political contexts of a young Indian girl growing up in Tehran in tumultuous times and the geopolitical ramifications. The novel treads difficult political issues through the lens of a child’s wondrous imagination, which can accommodate the seemingly mundane with the serious.

The storyline traces the journey of an Indian family that moves to Tehran in the 1970s, as the father gets a job teaching English at the university there. With two young children, the parents set up a home in an ancient and beautiful city. Here, the children learn to read and write Farsi; they go to school and begin to understand the deep connections the land of Persia has with India. Things changed in no time with the Islamic Revolution, followed by the Iran-Iraq war, and the once-existing ways of life were gone forever.

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The novel begins with a surreal image: a ten-year-old holding a machine gun surrounded by a circular mosaic of geometrically aligned diamond-shaped figures with evenly spaced Molotov cocktails. The graphic squarely places us at the crossroads of innocence and experience, where contradictions coexist in ambivalent interactions. The child’s narrative voice offers unfiltered veracity, poised from a distinctive point of view.

Skinner takes us through her father’s reluctant acceptance of relocation from Hyderabad, where he “was quite content teaching at the Central Institute of English and Foreign Languages” when the “Head of Tehran University Language Centre and her deputy arrived to recruit teachers.” Egged on by her mother, “the more adventurous of the two,” “father left for Tehran”. Navigating her insecurities about her to-be-born sibling and the emotionally troubling absence of her father, the reunion takes place after almost what “seemed like forever”. Housed in a small, cosy apartment in central Tehran, they soon discover the open-mindedness of the Iranians in their “hospitality”, full of warmth and affection. Images of cross-cultural transactions, differences and similarities celebrate transnational solidarity.

The tricky nature of language learning is brought about in a quirky and humorous way when her father asks a student’s businessman relative about the number of children he had. The reply is an unusual 39. It is eventually revealed that the incredible number refers to the children in his wife’s class.

In a brief run of images, the stark reality of the revolution bursts on the pages as anti-America and anti-Shah slogans reverberate through the thickly crowded streets. The school bus windows, the conduits for accessing the outside world, are now shut as the cheerful revelry inside is outvoiced or replaced by aggressive, noisy protests and blockades.

Skinner reconstructs these images through an adult-once-a-child eye. Sensitive to these liminal spaces that can turn problematic, she lends them an inclusive, apolitical aura. The image of the gun-toting “chador-clad female revolutionaries” confronting her father boldly impresses the inescapable presence of women in the revolution. Skinner embalms it with her characteristic, almost nonchalant humour. The seamlessly paced narrative traces the transitions as she “saw that many Iranian women were now wearing chadors”. Her enthusiastic, funny, and incisive recollection of the chador she got as a gift, which she had now outgrown when she first came to Iran, had tiny red flowers on it. This interjection reinforces the child’s worldview, bereft as it is of the insidious political, social and cultural whirlwinds that had swept away the Iran that nostalgically coloured her memory.

The juxtaposition of the Molotov Cocktail (an improvised weapon for combat) with the “sort of fancy drinks” she “had seen at the parties” her parents hosted reminds us of how drastically removed these two worlds are. Their continuing intersections, unsuspectingly unsettling, keep us glued to the narrative.

There are moments when the escalating tension slips into much-needed comic relief. For instance, Skinner’s father is seen nervously enquiring about wall graffiti “at the base of the stairs, scrawled in red paint” since, unlike his daughter, he could not read Farsi. Quite contrary to his apprehensions, it had nothing to do with the demand of foreigners to go home; it merely stated, “Please do not put your trash here”. This brief episode unwraps, however innocuously, the contested notion of home that informs politically fraught discussions on national boundaries as much as the deepening implications of the growing identity crisis.

Years later, Skinner is appreciative of how well her parents “had shielded” them “from the harsh realities of the uprising”. Back then, they only had to deal with sibling and school dynamics. Amid everything, they were happy. When asked to go back to her grandparents, the question that bothers her most is, “How could missing school possibly be more important than missing my family and friends ??”

In a year, it was time to head back to Tehran, “into the warm, welcoming arms of Mother and Father, and Kish…” But she quickly realised that many things had changed. Many of her friends and classmates had already left Iran as an almost empty classroom stared back. And then, not long after, a fiery war broke out between Iran and Iraq. In Tehran, they “now experienced air raids, nightly curfews and blackouts,” so every evening they would huddle in the kitchen and have dinner by the light of a lamp.

Finally, with fond memories of a well-spent childhood and of a nation that was their home, they head back to India. Skinner is particularly wistful about the “beautiful magic carpet” they had to leave behind, besides “the toys” or even her “precious books”.

It is Skinner’s deft storytelling, entwined with the sophisticated immediacy of the visuals by Allam, Jadhav and Aher, that makes Persian Nights an eminently skilled magical sojourn. Although it bears traces of influence from iconic graphic novels like Persepolis, I Remember Beirut, and Sisters, it throbs with a poignant vitality that blurs and even upends the insider/outsider rubric. It remarkably blends memory, desire and the pristine, unadulterated reality so unique to a child.

The reviewer is assistant professor in the department of English, Diamond Harbour Women’s University.