Delhi writer Nasera Sharma recalls reporting from Iran

Nasera Sharma says she interviewed Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini in Qom and Ayatollah Ali Khamenei in Tehran while working as a freelance journalist and researcher in Iran in the early 1980s. She was reporting after the 1979 revolution, as the Iran-Iraq war had begun.

Sharma says Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, then chairman of Iran’s parliament, helped arrange her meeting with Khomeini. She says Khomeini asked whether she knew Persian before the interview. Her interview with Khamenei followed a bomb attack that paralysed his right hand and was published in 1982.

A writer shaped at JNU

After three years in Edinburgh with her husband, geographer R C Sharma, Sharma returned to India and enrolled in a five-year postgraduate Persian course at JNU. The couple lived on the campus for more than two decades while he taught at its School of International Studies.

“The JNU I grew up with is no longer the same,” Sharma says, recalling its trees, Aravalli landscape, bougainvillea, amaltas, gulmohar and keekar. Her first story, *Butkhana*, appeared in the literary magazine *Sarika* in 1976 and followed a small-town man in Delhi.

Fiction, reporting and ordinary lives

Her first novel, *Saat Nadiyan Ek Samandar*, set against the Iranian revolution, was published in 1984. Sharma has visited Iran five times, written on Iran, Iraq and Afghanistan, and interviewed Afghan mujahideen leader Gulbuddin Hekmatyar. Her two-volume *Afghanistan: Buzkashi Ka Maidan* drew on research that included about 20 days in Kabul during President Najibullah’s time.

In 2016, Sharma received the Sahitya Akademi Award for *Parijat*, a novel set in Allahabad, now Prayagraj, and Lucknow. She lives with her family and three dogs on the outskirts of south Delhi.