Lipstick Jihad (15 page)

So they do understand, I thought to myself. We continued to talk, and he displayed an advanced awareness of gender relations and their intersection with politics in an oppressive system. But as with so many reformists, his were private reflections. I never heard him air them in public and incorporate them into policy strategy.

Many of the reformists came from an ultra-traditional class that held more conservative social values than the majority of Iranians. Because they were enamored with Western philosophy and borrowed all their ideas about freedom and rights from thinkers such as Kant and Habermas, they were starting to see that their vision of an open society was incompatible with individual rights. But they were as yet too narrow to include women in the category of individual.

This was the Achilles heel of their movement, this foolish idea that they could take a Western concept, like democracy, alter it with Islamic attitudes toward women, and expect it to function properly. Siamak described it well one day, in a conversation about his antique, forest-green Mustang convertible. He had purchased it for what he called “Mustang therapy,” which mainly involved gunning it up and down the expressways of Tehran, blaring Led Zeppelin. His mechanic kept installing old Iranian parts into the car, and declared himself shocked each time to find they didn't work. It's the same with our politicians and intellectuals, Siamak complained. They borrow Western concepts like democracy, stick in Iranian parts, and can't figure out why they've lost the juice.

My reformist and I sat smoking in silence, until the light in the office went off, and the streetlights cast shadows over the building. We were both trying to quit, and always fidgeted through the first minutes of every meeting, before sheepishly asking if the other had any cigarettes. In those days, the height of the reform movement's struggles with the establishment, such figures made themselves available to journalists.

Those were the days when we saw each other every other week, when the
reform movement was on everyone's lips, the topic of lively dinner debates in homes across the country. When it had spark and momentum and people actually believed it could change Iran. As I walked home, I wondered how long it would hold together, this delicate alliance between a long-suffering people and a political movement without prospect.

The mysterious woman across the street continued to fascinate me. When I watched her turn that light off, I knew once and for all that skewed sexual relations were not confined to cosmopolitan, Westernized Iranians. They were experienced by two halves of a society, sliced apart by the regime's gender hang-ups, struggling to relate to one another in a toxic atmosphere of moralizing propaganda. I wished I could find her, and tell her story.

I imagined her walking out into the street, getting into a shared taxi to go home. She would be wearing a navy-blue
maghnaeh
(an Islamic bonnet that cloaks the entire head), a faceless public-sector employee, and melt away into the ordinariness of rush-hour Tehran. She probably did not speak English, and her evening would not be colorful or particularly interesting. Her promiscuity did not offer as striking and exotic a contrast to the Islamic face of society as the parties of north Tehran, awash in tequila, drugs, and designer labels. Had I found her, she wouldn't have made coolly detached comments about love and tyranny that would have made sexy quotes for a story. But her alienation was also Iran's reality, in all its drab desperation.

Even teenagers, at the high-pitched outset of adolescence, found themselves relating awkwardly across the gender divide. I spent a lot of time with teenagers, and was becoming somewhat expert in their mores. They were easier on my nerves than Iranian adults, smooth men who flirted in grandiloquent, high Farsi, or catty women whose skillfully masked insults I was unequipped to defend myself against. Instead of being reduced to a tongue-tied teenager, I figured, I might as well just hang out with real teenagers. They made me feel clever and interesting. And their conversations, though no material for literature, were a lot more edifying.

One summery Thursday afternoon (the Friday afternoon of a Thursday-Friday Islamic weekend), as I sat scrawling vocabulary flash cards at the office, my cousin Kimia called my mobile phone. “Pleeeease, pleeeease, Azi,
you
must
come out with us, it's going to be so fun, and Kaveh might even be there, and you can meet my friends, and if Mom knows you're going I can stay out later,” she pleaded in one breathless, run-on sentence. I contemplated my choices for the evening: going out as Kimia's chaperone (again), or yet another night with my faithful companion, the dictionary. For the last two hours I had been too distracted to absorb new words and had taken to comparing the Farsi and English for terms like “lust,” in search of cross-cultural insight. A change of scenery was clearly in order.

Fine, I'll go, but I'm not going to stay out too late, and I'm not going to drive, I said. Driving in Tehran, with its exhausted and edgy taxi drivers and daredevil motorbikes flitting through miles of gnarled traffic, gave me backaches. The veil impaired my sideways vision, and I constantly feared it would slip off while I was driving. What do you do first? Uphold modesty or prevent an accident? I had meant to pose this conundrum to an authoritative ayatollah, after one day, while attempting to do a U-turn across four lanes of oncoming traffic, I found my head scarf down around my shoulders. A man crossing the street in front of my car noticed my confusion, and laughed.
Khanoum
(lady), you've lost your Islam!

Kimia shrieked with joy at my agreement and promised to share her strawberry Pop-Tarts with me and love me forever, in that order. As dusk turned into night, her two friends picked us up in a gray Peugeot. One's face looked like a cadaver, under what must have been a solid centimeter of foundation and powder. The other had glued little rhinestones around her eyes, and wore a smear of fuchsia where her mouth should have been. We piled into the car, and headed toward Shahrak-e Gharb, a suburban neighborhood in west Tehran, which is home to Golestan, a large mall popular with teenagers.

I assumed the mall was our destination, until Kimia informed me she and her friends had been caught at the mall by
komiteh
last week and couldn't risk going back there so soon. As we fermented in the awful traffic, the girls scanned the cars next to them, making eye contact, giggling furiously, and rolling the windows up and down. Who knew so much flirtation could be conducted while cruising? They finally located their crew of male friends, having traded coordinates by mobile phone, and a Jeep full of teenage boys drove perilously close to our sedan, trying to keep pace so the couples facing each other could talk, or rather yell, over the engine noise.

This continued for an hour, and I leaned my head back against the seat, trying to test myself on vocabulary (How did you say
supranational
again?). A
zi,
hissed Kimia, stretching my nickname into two syllables, you're not
talking
to anyone. I'm here to observe, not participate, I said. But she looked so tense that I relented, and stuck my head out the window, to answer one of her friend's questions about UCLA. That one could be Iranian, from California, and
not
from Los Angeles occurred to no one. Suddenly, the exhaust fumes, the crick in my neck, and the sad nuisance of it all got to me, and I caught a cab home, leaving the youngsters to pursue the only public activity they could think of—getting cantaloupe smoothies.

Late that night at home, Kimia padded into my room and asked me what I thought of the evening. It was very . . . I don't know . . . very Islamic Republic, I said. The phrase stuck, and from that day forth we used “very Islamic Republic” to describe any experience that was comically tragic, or tragically comic. Kimia and her friends were still young, in that stage of adolescence when drugs and sex loomed on the not-too-distant horizon. It wasn't long, I knew, before they would tire of cruising the expressways of Tehran, the highlight of their evening a pit-stop at the juice stand. Eventually they would say screw the
pasdar,
and the traffic, let's just stay at home. And teenagers home alone for hours on end do, well, exactly what you imagine.

The next afternoon, Kimia ran into my room, as I was transcribing an interview tape, and flopped down on the couch, tossing her
roopoosh
on the floor. Her green eyes sparkled, and for the first time since we had begun living together, she appeared happy. With the culture shock receding, she was delighting in the rich drama of her new life. Dealing with the
komiteh
was dangerous and frightening, but it made each weekend a unique adventure.

The brushes with the law, the exposure to a mainly authoritarian system, filled her mind with lofty concepts like power and freedom that in Palo Alto—where her friends stole street signs for stimulation—were abstract to the point of meaninglessness. But if she stays here, I thought, there will be bad times, and in those there will be no glory. If she gets stopped on the way home from a party, and gets whipped, or worse, gets her virginity checked, she will come home devastated, and we will not laugh it off as “very Islamic Republic.”

Her mother has agreed to bribe the police at the Caspian this weekend,
so she and her friends can play co-ed basketball at their villa. This is a great social coup, and will make up for the fact that she can't invite her friends over. I could
never
bring them here, she said regularly in mortification. Pedar Joon, our grandfather, filled the pool with cement years ago, and there was no space for her friends to romp around in bikinis, listening to Puff Daddy, sitting on each other's laps, and pretending they are at the MTV summer beach house.

Kimia herself wasn't wedded to this sort of behavior, because she had lived in the West and knew that life did not actually resemble television. Most of her friends hadn't, and worked fiercely to imitate music videos and Hollywood movies to every last detail. They assumed, with a touching naïveté, that all guys should act like Carson Daly, and that girls in the United States wore tight, revealing clothes at
all
times. Thus convinced, they would show up at any social occasion—yearning to feel worldly—in wildly inappropriate clothes, called
lebass-e mahvarayee,
satellite dress, after the inspiring TV medium.

So we sat and discussed what she would wear that night to her friend's birthday party, to show up all her overdressed friends with a relaxed, sexy cool. Skinny, low-slung jeans, a cotton tank top, and sandals. Her light-brown, honey-kissed hair down her back in waves. Only lip gloss and mascara. PJ sniffed morosely around the room as we dressed, lonely now that Kimia had a social life. At nine, we covered everything up, got in the car, and drove north. Other than the steady stream of cars that silently pulled up to the Kermanis' front door, there was no indication of the scene transpiring inside the darkened house. For their daughter Leila's seventeenth birthday, the Kermanis were throwing a “mixed party,” which meant both boys and girls would attend and dance together to Western music, both activities officially banned by the regime.

Inside, the atmosphere was more Japanese hostess bar than a teenager's birthday party: a disco ball flashed against the walls, as erotically dressed girls and bored-looking young men prowled about self-consciously, oppressed by the pressure to have wild, illicit fun. Staging and attending such an event involved such elaborate subterfuge that nothing less would do. Leila worked the room in a white halter top that glowed in the flashing strobe light, trying unsuccessfully to lighten the edgy mood.

Everyone scanned the room furtively, carefully blasé, holding distracted
conversations. The heels were high, the skirts short, and the corners dark. In shadowy corners, shots were taken, hash was smoked. A Toni Braxton song came on, filling the makeshift dance floor with couples swaying in close embrace—an intimacy out of place in an Iranian family home, especially with Mrs. Kermani yards away in the kitchen, clucking orders to the maid preparing birthday cake. Toni Braxton went over well. So well that the song, “Unbreak My Heart,” was played three more times, and each time, the embraces got a little tighter.

I, spinster chaperone, sat in the kitchen with Mrs. Kermani, who cast forlorn, helpless glances at the spectacle in her living room. I don't know what's wrong with these kids, she sighed. Poor Mrs. Kermani. Five years ago, she had fretted over raising a daughter in a grim, socially oppressive society. Now, she seemed aware that social permissiveness carried its own knot of worries—strained sexual relations, drinking and drugs, a new range of emotional pitfalls. When I was a teenager, we would dance all night, she mused, fiddling with the stack of dessert forks. They're dancing, just
slow
dancing, I said. She gave me the Iranian parental your-generation-is-weird look, and I gave her the your-generation-made-the-revolution look.