In 1960s Tehran, Mahin, accompanied by her friends Azar and Tahira, visits an Assyrian fortune teller with an established reputation at the royal court. At first the clairvoyant refuses – except in her own case - to reveal the girls’ terrifying fortunes, but when they insist, Azar learns that she will have a terrible accident, Tahira that she will lose someone very close to her and Mahin that something will come into her name, that she will meet a man with blond hair and blue-eyes and travel the world. Not long afterwards, Azar is declared ‘mad’ when, bleeding profusely, she is pulled from the wreck of her car screaming ‘Thank God! Thank God!’

 As a teenager, John goes on exchange to France where he falls in love with his Sophia Loren look-a-like hostess. Unable to forget her, he vows to search for another. On leaving school he studies to become a Chartered Surveyor and, in 1969 takes up his first overseas posting in Zurich. Quite unexpectedly, a few weeks later he is sent on a 7-week assignment to Tehran all expenses paid.

 Some six months earlier, Mahin’s father had quite unexpectedly given her the money to buy a house. Not long afterwards, she goes with her sisters and friends to the horse races, where to their amazement, they catch sight of a young man with blond hair and blue eyes. On just their 3rd date, in a moment of total infatuation with a girl he finds more exotic even than Sophia Loren and whose beauty far exceeds his wildest dreams, John impulsively and unpremeditatedly asks her to marry him. 

 In the remaining weeks of his stay in Iran, Mahin charms her lover with extraordinary and exotic oriental tales of her childhood and her famous 11th century ancestor Hasan-i-Sabah, the leader of the Ismaili Assassins, the world’s first political terrorists. Saying goodbye at the airport, John cannot hold back his tears. His profound reservations notwithstanding, he is so crossed in love with his exotic Sophia Loren look-a-like Persian girlfriend that he accedes to her request to send her a ring from Switzerland and come back and marry her in the autumn.

 Only when returning the following October during his annual 3-week vacation, does Mahin explain that they will need at least 3 months for her, as an Iranian subject, to marry a foreigner. In the circumstances, she has made no preparations whatsoever and her father will never agree to her leaving Iran unless she marries first. Initially, John is crestfallen but to his enduring amazement, his resourceful fiancée takes him on a hair-raising week-long paperchase around Tehran and in just a few days overcomes the many seemingly imponderable administrative obstacles to their impending union that include having her fiancé circumcised.

  As newlyweds, they set up home in Zurich. Shortly afterwards, Mahin receives a letter from her friend Tahira, with the news that her young husband is terminally ill with leukaemia. Horrified, for the first time she reveals to John the story of the fortune teller.

In 1978, at the height of the Iranian Revolution, Mahin takes John to meet one of the Shah’s generals. She places a large brown envelope on his desk and challenges him to open it declaring that it contains the dystopian future of their country. Petrified, he apprehensively tears the package open to reveal a neatly folded black chador. Mahin asks him what he’s going to do about it. On hearing his response, she throws an apoplectic fit and urges John to take her home, pack their bags and fulfil the fortune teller’s final prediction: ‘to travel the world’.

Many years later, while drafting this memoir, John still cannot accept that it was actually he himself that had impulsively and unpremeditatedly - against his own better judgement - asked Mahin to marry him. However unbelievable, he remains convinced that it was someone else that asked on his behalf. He consults a reputable psychic and receives a truly astonishing metaphysical explanation linked back to the time of the Assassins.