A nine-year-old girl is brutally assaulted by a much older man – her husband, demanding his conjugal rights.
A 13-year-old boy spends three days and nights cuddling his father's stiff corpse, too frightened to tell the neighbours lest they steal his jar of money. A fatherless ten-year-old living with his grandmother is sent to work in a bobbin factory every day before school because "he must earn his keep".
Harrowing and heartbreaking, these are some of the stories Shappi Khorsandi heard about her family's life in Persia while she was growing up, tales she took for granted. When you're young your family just is; you don't question it.
But writing A Beginner's Guide to Acting English, a memoir of moving to Great Britain, subtitled A Family on the Run in a Foreign Country... England, forced Khorsandi, now 36, to examine these familiar tales from an adult's perspective. It proved unsettling.
It's all the more remarkable, then, that her book is filled with laughter, wonder and compassion, and never descends into self-pity. It plunges us into the vibrant heart of a loud, loving Iranian family and vividly recreates the experience of being a child torn between vastly different cultures.
Of course Khorsandi is no stranger to the power of narrative. A successful stand-up, she's a stalwart of the Edinburgh Fringe. Locals might remember 2007, when her advanced pregnancy propelled some into the betting shops – not to take a flutter on how many stars critics might award, but chancing the odds that she'd deliver her baby onstage. (Cassius Charlie Valentine waited until September to make his big entrance.)
Tiny, with big, dark eyes of the button-bright variety, and masses of jet black curls, Khorsandi admits she's nervous about our meeting. "I've been interviewed hundreds of times as a stand-up, but never as an author," she says, turning my proof copy over and over, amazed that she's really, truly, written a book.
She began it a dozen times, narrating in different voices until settling on that of her younger self. "It started in my maternal grandmother's voice. She spent an evening talking to me and my mum and my Auntie Nadia. The conversation devastated me for weeks. It was about being married at such a ridiculous age. My great-grandmother was married when she was nine! It felt like if I didn't write it in a child's voice I couldn't mention those things (and avoid] really going there. It's something I will write about in the future, but for now...
"They were children! But living in a time when people of their class (in Iran] didn't have the luxury of having a childhood – men as well as women. I remembered my great-grandmother Aziz because she had red hair. My mother's family are all very fair. Everyone had deep respect for Aziz and it was just the family story, 'Oh, she got married when she was nine.' You don't actually engage with what that means until you choose to, because you think it's in the past, but it wasn't really that far in the past. Then you're older and thinking, 'What did sex mean?' It was rape: repeated and relentless and systematic rape."
Aziz's own daughter was married off at 13 and within a year had given birth to Shappi's mother, Fatemeh. "What was interesting was that when I suggested to (my grandmother] that there might be something wrong with these men who wanted to sleep with children, she was so defensive. She said it's not the same as a paedophile."
How old was your grandfather when she married him, I ask? Khorsandi winces. "He was in his thirties. He'd been married before to a woman who was much, much older than him. My grandmother said that women were raised differently; you were a woman when you were 12.
"That was difficult to write about because I didn't want to upset any of their children or her. There are emotions that this brought up in me that I don't want..." she hesitates, groping for appropriate words. "You need to deal with certain emotions yourself before you share them. You need that distance."
Her grandparents defied convention and instead, encouraged Fatemeh, the eldest of nine, to attend university and choose her own husband. She was a veritable "old maid" when she married Hadi Khorsandi at 22. "My granddad was a complex character. He was completely different with his own daughters. He said a woman must earn her own money; she must have independence from a man."
Hadi Khorsandi started life as Nasser. An older brother, Hadi, died before he was born. But, writes Khorsandi, his parents never registered the boy's death. "The trip into town was long and expensive and... who would know or care if they did not comply with formalities? Ahmad decided that neither Hadi's death nor Nasser's birth would be registered. Hadi's birth certificate would now be Nasser's."
It was Hadi, then six, who, along with his two younger brothers, went to live with their cold maternal grandmother after his father's unexpected death. The decision was made for the best reasons – to enable the boys to receive a good education in Tehran – but his grandmother disliked children and theirs was a harsh life.
Luckily, he was clever. He began writing television scripts as a teenager and progressed to a newspaper column in Ettela'at that tripled the paper's circulation, transforming him into superstar, popular with both his employers and the Iranian public. To this day he is renowned as one of Iran's greatest satirists, and his stand-up gigs, performed in Farsi in giant auditoriums, regularly sell out.
At the time, Fatemeh's family viewed his suitability as a husband with suspicion, and were even less delighted when his newspaper brokered a deal with the Iranian Tourist Board to send the young Khorsandi family – now including son Peyvand and 16 months' younger Shappi – to London so that Hadi could learn English. They were only meant to be gone a year or two, but the arrival of the Ayatollah changed the course of their lives permanently.
When they first arrived, Shappi was barely four years old, but she quickly learned how to be English at school and Iranian at home. "Because my parents were so absorbed with what was going on in Iran, their priority wasn't to fit in. My dad, especially, was so foreign. I started speaking in this very clipped English accent –" she adopts cut-glass enunciation to demonstrate, "so wherever we went, when my dad didn't do things right, then at least I would be fitting in so they knew that I was normal."
Double identity meant divided loyalties. Like any child, she yearned to blend in, but equally, she enjoyed the limelight surrounding her popular dad. "At home I loved the way he was, but (when we were out] I'd be, 'Dad, shut up! Stop being so loud, stop talking to people!'"
Her parents led a glamorous life in Tehran, and replicated it to a great extent within London's Iranian community. Their flat was endlessly filled with revellers and there seems to have been very little privacy.
With hindsight, Hadi Khorsandi recognises that he wasn't all that engaged in his kids' upbringing. "That wasn't just because of the patriarchal culture," laughs his daughter now. "It's because my dad was out partying. He was out being this fabulous entertainer and the man who sorted out everyone's problems, and a drinker and a party animal. My parents went to lots of parties together, as well, but in Iran there were parties you took your wife to and parties you didn't, frankly! My mum is kind of on her own little planet. Perhaps she felt she had to be. She is a talented singer and is phenomenally glamorous, though not at all vain. She doesn't drink. Conservative with a small c. And she just loves my dad."
Was growing up with a famous father more good than bad? "It's not just that your dad's famous, but that people love him. They think he's really important; they feel that he speaks for them, that he's this incredibly generous, kind person who helps people, and is so funny. He was all those things, but he was also a dad who told you off and sometimes you'd be like, 'Well, he's not always funny, actually. At home he can be a bit cross.' Because he had incredible pressures on him, as well."
While Shappi negotiated the ever-changing allegiances of the playground, her homeland underwent its own dramatic upheavals. Her beloved young uncle was murdered while demonstrating against the Shah. Then, in 1979, when the Shah fled to Saudi Arabia, Hadi Khorsandi returned, alone, to see for himself what he hoped was a brave new Iran where he could resume his glittering career. Instead, he was nearly killed by an angry mob after publishing a joke making fun of wearing the hejab that angered Khomeini's mullahs.
Branded "an enemy of the revolution" by the Ayatollah's supporters, he lost his job and his bank account and had to be spirited out of the newspaper's offices and hidden until he could board a flight back to London. Once he was safely "home" the Khorsandis applied for refugee status.
With the onset of war between Iran and Iraq in 1980, tensions mounted in the Khorsandi household. The television showed rockets raining down on Tehran every night, and telephone lines were frequently down, making it impossible to know if their family was safe. A house on their street was decimated, along with all its residents, and with a sickening fear, Shappi realised that children died in wars, as well as soldiers.
Shappi calls the telephone "the fifth, most demanding member of our family. Its shrill call had no concept of mealtimes or sleeping times and constantly brought messages (to my father] from around the world... Everything stopped for the telephone."
One day she found herself listening to a death threat directed at her father. She told no one. Days later the threat was repeated. And the next day, and the next. The police intervened, bundling the Khorsandis off to a Windsor B&B for their safekeeping.
In hilarious detail she recounts how, one by one, all their Iranian friends assembled to party and picnic, themselves taking rooms in the B&B, to the mystification of its English landlady. The police arrived to explain that the whole idea of hiding meant their whereabouts were meant to be a secret. Luckily they'd also come to tell them it was safe to return to London.
Their flat was unaltered, but not the family. Psychologically they would never be the same. Peyvand and Shappi instinctively understood that they must keep their fears to themselves, though they leapt out of their skin every time a car backfired, and eyed passers-by with suspicion. "All of us lived in terror of losing one another," she writes. "None of us could speak about it... the terrorists had moved into our house with us."
She began bingeing, stealthily repairing to the bathroom or her bedroom, eating in order to distract herself from thinking "about the Ayatollah and bombs under our car". Her dramatic weight gain prompted a wealth of comments – it's not the Iranian way to keep politely shtum.
The memoir stops short of describing her bulimia, but she's joked about it on stage, so I ask why. She looks wistful. "I'll be honest, I had this period where for the first time in my life I got recovery from bulimia and it went on for a year. That's when I did interviews and jokes about it. I thought I was cured. And it just grabbed me from behind when I least expected it and it dragged me right down into a pit – the entire time I was writing the book. It's something I struggle with every day."
She sought help once she'd finished writing and is back on track now, but admits "I'm going to have to be in recovery forever. I would love to carry on writing books and that is an area I definitely want to write about. I think it's a phenomenally common problem, smothering your feelings. My brother and I were so conscious that our parents were trying to make things very normal for us that we didn't want to let them down by being scared. So you pretended everything was normal."
In many other ways everything is wonderfully normal now, and she's appreciative of her good fortune, not least a happy marriage to fellow comic and musician, Christian Reilly, whom she met here in Edinburgh. She was instantly attracted to him the first time they met, but both were otherwise involved. She returned post-festival for a gig at Jongleurs; Reilly walked into the dressing room – and that, as they say, was that.
In a soft, soppy voice she remembers, "The next day we sat in Princes Street Gardens. He was the first person I talked to about the bulimia. We talked and talked and it started raining, of course, and we got soaked, and we didn't move. It was heavenly.
"That was five years ago. I moved in with him a month later and we have been married for two and a half years."
Reilly's work schedule means he can't spend August in Edinburgh when Khorsandi takes up residence at the Pleasance, so her mum's tagging along to help care for Cassius. At the time of our meeting the show, The Distracted Activist, is largely unwritten. "It's about how activism has always played a big part in my life. I've always had causes, beginning with being Anti Fur when I was about 11. I thought I would commit my life to working as a full-time campaigner, but stand -up comedy lured me away. As human beings, the one thing that unites us is that we all want the best for our children. The minute we start to realise that about one another, that's when we'll find unity."
She says this with quiet vehemence and I picture the wee girl she once was crouched by the wheels of the family car alongside her father and brother. They'd been advised to check for bombs before driving anywhere. They crouched and peered. They slithered on to their bellies and looked again.
Not one of them had a clue what a car's undercarriage normally looked like, much less a car bomb, so in the end they simply piled into the Cortina and hoped for the best. sm
n A Beginner's Guide to Acting English is out on 2 July from Ebury, priced £11.99; Shappi Khorsandi will be appearing throughout August at the Pleasance. For more information or tickets, visit
www.edfringe.com