Brian H. Appleton

Last year I was contacted by a young man who had reason to believe that the woman I described in my book as having saved me from my hostage situation during the revolutiuon with the help of two hired guns, Pouran Nafisi, was his mom from whom he had been seperated by a divorce when he was only a few months old.

 He asked me to help him to locate her. I had had no idea that she had other children besides the little girl I knew when she was two years old named Arian. I wanted to be sure that it was his mom as I didn't want him to be disappointed by false hope. I asked him if his grandparents had ever told him anything unique about his mom and he told me that they had mentioned that he had a half sister in Iran who had once gone to Spain for eye surgery. Since I am the one who recommended she take her daughter to see the famous eye surgeon Ramon Castro Viejo in Madrid, I knew it was his mom so I started an intense search because I also wanted to find her. I had never had a chance to thank her properly for potentially risking her life and saving mine because I had lost contact with her in the chaos following the revolution. With the help of friends I tracked her down only to find she had passed away seven years earlier. However I was able to relocate her daugher after 30 years and also discovered she had another older daughter who was a medical doctor also in Tehran whom I had never known about. All three children had different fathers from different marriages and in fact Pouran had Elizabeth Taylor beat as she had been married seven times.

In the summer of 1978, her daughter Arian and her family were the very first people I visited in Tehran after an absence of 30 years. The last time I saw Arian she was 2 years old and now she was 32 with a 2 year old adorable son of her own. It was like finding my own missing relative and it was very heart warming.

This Christmas season I am blessed by a visit from her and her family here in California. Somehow our fates are crossed and our friendship lives on as if her mom has orchestrated this from the beyond...Happy Shab e Yalda and Merry Christmas everyone!!!