Today is the day of Mina. My Khaleh Mina (Khaleh is the Persian for aunt, specifically, maternal aunt). I woke up this morning, my head filled with thoughts of her, my eyes brimming with pictures of the past. Waiting for a train at a London train station, I look up at the January sky stretched pale blue behind the building. That colour, distinct, watercolour, essentially northern. Here the sun languishes far from the earth, encouraging coolness, calmness, detachment. You never get that blue in countries hovering too close to the sun, countries painted with passion.

The sun beats down in Iran, the sky a brilliant shade of turquoise setting off the minarets and domes of the vibrantly-tiled mosques. Aby – the Farsi for blue – means, literally, watery. The sight of the familiar turquoise dome rising out of the desert, offering shade and shelter in the cruel heat of the day. Aby. In a land of vast deserts, it makes sense.

My Khaleh Mina now lives in Shiraz, a town in central-southern Iran, capital of the province of Fars – the cradle of the Persian race. It was in Fars that the splendid Achaemenian kings erected a palace for the New Year celebrations in the semi-desert. Persepolis was a party pad, where they could receive tributes from the corners of the far-flung Persian empire. Shiraz, where the grape was transmuted into wine, long before being transported to the soils of Australia and California, before Iran stopped carousing and became the Islamic Republic, teetotal and chaste.

But when she was my Khaleh Mina, she lived in Abadan. Hot, humid and almost in Iraq, near the Persian Gulf, Abadan swayed with palm trees and the over-whelming sentimentality of its natives’ souls. Khaleh Mina had a house with a courtyard and a flat roof, where we would sit, my mother, a brace of aunts, my sister and myself, at night, under a sky inlaid with stars. My sister and I would stay up late, refusing to go to bed, drifting into a delicious semi-consciousness while the women chatted and gossiped and laughed and laughed. They would drop their voices a little when talking of sex or marriage or mocking the mullahs, but as the night wore on, they were emboldened and forgot our presence as they slapped their thighs, rocked forward with hilarity and cackled. I had my first drag of the hubbly-bubbly pipe up there on that roof, at the age of five.

I remember sobbing with Khaleh Mina in that house. Arriving there with newly-pierced ears, woozy and sore, not allowing my mother to touch them, the studs encrusted solid with goo. Khaleh Mina took me in her arms and cried with me. Then she sat me in the yard edged with jasmine flowers and, under a yellow moon, with a soothing breeze blowing us their rich scent, she gently massaged my ear lobes with cream and slowly, slowly, eased out the throbbing studs, replacing them with little gold pin-points of her own. I snoozed in her arms, exhausted by the force of tears and the relief from pain.

Khaleh Mina. Born to be an aunt. Forever an aunt. If there is a talent to aunting, as opposed to mothering, then she has it in spades. When I returned to Iran last year, I found her aunting a whole new generation. And when they grow up they too will deliver up their babies and she will be their Khaleh Mina: loving, sharp-tongued, wickedly witty and dynamic as the devil. Even her sisters and brothers, my mother included, call her Khaleh Mina. A pang of envy went through me when I met her new brood; I wanted to be little again. But it soon became clear that my reappearance as a grown woman did not preclude being aunted. She would sit on the floor at my feet, wide-eyed, and ask details of my life in London, as I begged her to rise, mortified by the gesture.

Abadan in the early Sixties was swinging. My mother and her multitudinous siblings were treading an uncharted line between traditional and modern life. Black and white pictures show them stylized, made up and invariably grinning from ear-to-ear. You feel the sun beating down, the money in their pockets, the sense of freedom and endless possibility. The four eldest daughters clicked around town in their stilettoes, their skirts short, their hair backcombed high, their eyeliner black and winged. The eldest two had been married off to my grandfather’s specifications. My grandmother, small and strong, her eyes set wide apart and blazing green, picked a husband for the bee-hived, 18-year-old Mina. One of her own kinsmen, a kindly, scholarly man with brylcreemed hair and a pencil moustache. As short as my grandmother and nearer her age than Mina’s.

Apparently Mina (as she still was then) cried for days. I’ve never found out if she was already in love with a young man, but knowing girls of 18, I expect she was. She couldn’t cross her mother but she was horrified by the thought of marrying a man more than twice her own age, even in a country where this was common. It was her most passionate wish to have her own family; her elder sisters had already started. No reason why not, my grandmother had pointed out, sitting cross-legged on the floor of their central courtyard as she cleaned a bundle of herbs, her black plaits hanging down her shoulders. Just because the man is mature, that’s no obstacle to love, she had said, pulling on her ears, the lobes of which were stretched down by the heavy gold of her elaborate earrings. Mina’s silent tears fell into the basket of parsley in front of her, her deft fingers automatically picking off the leaves of the herb and tossing them into a basket in the centre of the yard. My mother had looked up from the fennel seeds she was grounding and ventured to say that he was rather handsome, like Clark Gable. Mina smiled weakly, but in the years to come, it became one of their favourite jokes.

Khaleh Mina’s Clark Gable is still a kindly and scholarly man. His hair is still brylcreemed and his moustache slim as a pencil, now snow-white rather than jet black. Mina’s excessive tears may have sprung from an instinct she had about him: they never had children. The reasons why are hidden behind the thick veil of family history and gossip, but it was always said that the problem lay with him.

Luckily for Khaleh Mina, by the time her mother’s youngest child was born my grandmother was more than glad of help, little Yasmin being her twelfth child in as many years. Gradually, seamlessly, Yasmin’s visits to Mina became permanence: one day, she simply never left. And Khaleh Mina got to raise her youngest sister as her own and feel the joy of a child running about her house. Despite being sisters, she was called Khaleh by Yasmin: hence the legend was born. Yasmin was married from her house, a day of pride and gut-tearing sadness for Khaleh Mina, though the young couple could hardly afford their own place yet and so were ensconced, giggling, in Khaleh Mina’s spare room.

By then my own family, as many others, had already been wrenched from Iran by the revolution. While travel was still relatively easy, Khaleh Mina came to spend a few months with us, filling my depressed and unmoored mother with her energy, leaving Clark Gable to fend for himself. This was the last time we saw her in many years. The Iran-Iraq war came and, eventually, went, leaving a nation broken-hearted and bereft of its young. The horrors of a medieval war with modern weapons I leave for other pens, but its repercussions in one respect concern me here.

Abadan, my mother’s family home, was one of the towns worst hit by the war. By this time Yasmin had just moved into a flat with her husband and started her own prodigious family. Bombs were falling in rapid succession; my grandmother’s house had a direct hit. The inhabitants of Abadan were leaving in droves, pouring out of the city like a plague of locusts, over-running any species of transport available. Men obliged to stay with their work in the oil company were packing off their families to relations in Tehran, Shiraz, Isfahan, Mashad, anywhere away from the Western border. Both Yasmin and her husband worked for Iran Air, and they could not get their family on the few planes still flying. Within this chaos, Khaleh Mina provided strength and humour whenever anyone’s courage failed. She kept Yasmin’s eldest, Maryam, locked in her arms all night when bombs were falling and the wailing of women filled the night air. She had a strange glow, calmness, a blooming beauty. Everyone noticed, but in the mayhem, few registered and no-one commented.

It was the day the bomb fell on my grandmother’s house that it was revealed. Khaleh Mina had, with the unerring instincts of a seer, dragged my grandmother out, making her agree to stay a few days at Mina’s house. As they were walking away from the house in the early evening, Khaleh Mina dragging my grandmother’s bag and urging her to hurry, the bomb fell. I won’t pretend to know what it was like, but despite being some distance away, the women were knocked over with the shock of the blast. Khaleh Mina picked herself up and rushed to her mother, got her to her feet, dusted her down and made sure she was unhurt before she allowed herself to feel the searing pain in her womb. She collapsed, blood snaking out of her.

In the hospital they announced to her dazed family that she had miscarried. Her one and only pregnancy. Grief piled on grief: this was the first anyone had heard about it. Khaleh Mina, in her late 30s and resigned to a childless marriage, had surprised herself and Clark Gable by getting pregnant some two months before. She had planned to surprise the rest of the family with the news once past the dangerous early stages. Any possibility of off-spring was now sealed with clots of ruby blood.

She eventually went home, where she wandered dazed, uninterested in even getting dressed in the mornings. Her laughter died in her throat, her love was trapped in some remote place, she was a shadow. For two more months she hardly felt a thing, especially not any interest in life. Then one day Yasmin rushed in. “I have found a friend’s truck driving to Shiraz and there is room for us, the babies and our husbands. Get Clark Gable. Get packing. They are picking us up in half an hour. Come on Khaleh Mina, there is no time to lose.” Khaleh Mina couldn’t care, but Clark Gable chucked a few things in a bag (there was not much room for luggage, they all erranously believed they would be able to send for their things). When the truck arrived, Yasmin made Khaleh Mina put a coat over her dressing-gown and she was shuffled into the truck by Yasmin’s husband, still in her slippers.

A few days later they heard that Khaleh Mina’s house had been bombed. Her life had disappeared. In Shiraz, cramped into another sister’s spare room with their brood, Khaleh Mina began, slowly, to return to life. She got dressed. She started to rebuild. She found comfort in the reassuring presence of Clark Gable and joy in the new baby that Yasmin soon delivered.

And there she is now. In a tiny flat in a high-rise in Shiraz, with her new, small life around her, laughing and cleaning and cooking and scolding her husband. There is no jasmine-scented yard, no flat roof from which to go travelling through the galaxy, but Maryam and Ali, the eldest of Yasmin’s six kids who one day simply never left her house, don’t seem to mind. They still find magic in her presence and adventure in the far-away mountains visible from the kitchen window. And Khaleh Mina’s hips grow ever wider as her love transforms lives.