I thought I’d left looting mobs behind in the Middle East

Last week shattered all my sense of stability and permanence in New York, the city I’ve called home since 2012 (though I’ve spent some of those years in London). The looting mobs that rampaged through Gotham’s streets — including my block — put me in mind of my native Middle East; it’s a phenomenon I thought I’d left behind ‘over there’, not to be encountered except on the occasional reporting trip to Iraq or Egypt. But no. An unjust police killing in Minneapolis — combined, no doubt, with the effects of a prolonged lockdown — Arab Spring’d the United States, if you will. Or rather, the riots revealed that America’s advanced liberal society isn’t all that different from the client Arab states Washington likes to lecture. It was all so grim — and terrifying, if you witnessed firsthand the NYPD’s sheer impotence in the face of mass disorder, as I did. On Lexington Avenue, a stone’s throw from my apartment, I watched police officers stand around like schmucks as rioters openly looted. Add the iconoclastic frenzy sweeping America (and Britain), and I wonder if we are witnessing a slow-motion regime-collapse scenario. My wife, who’s Chinese-born, says it reminds her of the Cultural Revolution, which damaged her family grievously.

The joy of being a dad has been my principal escape through the riots and lockdown. Fatherhood and nostalgia are tightly bound up. I see this clearly now, as I rekindle my friendship with Tintin and introduce him to my three-year-old son, Max. My earliest memories of books involve lying in a sun-bathed room somewhere in my childhood home in Tehran, tearing through those crisply illustrated tales of the Belgian boy-reporter, his loyal dog and his sweary, alcoholic sailor friend, Captain Haddock. The Persian editions were tattered hand-me-downs from the Pahlavi era, before the mullahs cancelled Hergé and other icons of western ‘decadence’.