Lipstick Jihad (16 page)

Around midnight, Mrs. Kermani began finding quiet rooms where worried parents could be pacified on the phone. While she called taxis, the girls scrambled to pull pants under their miniskirts. The cloakroom was strewn with slipdresses, for coming, and veils and
roopoosh,
for going. Leila looked exhausted; she didn't sparkle or preen, as she might have, given that she was beautiful and young, that it was her birthday, and that she had just presided over the most glamorous party of the season. As she shut the door, a girl in five-inch heels traipsing toward a waiting car turned her head back, and cried “Happy
moharram!”
in a tinny voice.

Three years ago, parties such as this were unthinkable. President Khatami's election made them commonplace. Elite Tehranis threw parties where waiters in starched white shirts circulated cocktails in gleaming crystal. Less status-conscious Iranians gathered as frequently, though they drank homemade vodka instead and were comfortable sitting on cushions. Everyone celebrated this newfound freedom in whatever way made sense to their lives. Trendy teenagers hung disco balls over their parties. Shiny, exposed, pedicured toes. Political arguments in the backseats of taxis. Young families picnicking with music in the Alborz foothills. Small freedoms, admittedly, that appeared inconsequential
from the outside, but here they were felt deeply. They were the difference between suffocating, and breathing very, very heavily.

As Kimia and I drove home that night, careening down the wide expressway that connected north Tehran to downtown, I wondered how many more of such parties I could stand. All the laconic airs, the premeditated exposure of so much flesh. It hadn't been a birthday party so much as a pushing and shoving match with the Islamic Republic; a cultural rebellion waged indoors against the regime's rigid codes of behavior. Those codes banned young men and women from interacting casually together, attending soccer matches, studying at the library.

When they were finally permitted a few free hours in each other's company, they scarcely knew what to do, or how to behave. They had never developed a sense of what normal behavior between the sexes looked like; not only were they lacking a template, they found the prospect of normality unsatisfying. Instead, they sought to contrast the oppressive morality outside with amplified decadence behind closed doors, staking out their personal lives as the one realm in which they could define their individuality, and exercise their free will. The realm where the system tried to intrude, but ultimately could not control. The Islamic Republic does not control me; see it in the layers of makeup I apply to my face, the tightness of my jeans, the wantonness of my sex life, the Ecstasy I drop.

One indolent, quiet Friday afternoon, after lunch, my flamboyant Aunt Khaleh Zahra gazed with such hostility at the tea Khadijeh Khanoum was serving us that I suggested we go to a nearby bakery for cappuccino instead. We walked up Villa Street, past the closed government buildings and handicrafts shops, talking about stocks. For all her eccentricity, Khaleh Zahra was a financial wizard who, even when her life was falling apart, stayed up all night trading online with steely alertness. Halfway up the street, her gauzy, sky-blue scarf slid off her head, leaving her hair fully exposed, its wine-colored streaks glinting alarmingly in the sun.

She didn't miss a step, or pause in her meditation, which centered, as usual, on the Islamic Republic's backwardness. Azadeh jan, in the U.S. people are wearing computers the size of a phone on their belts, she said, taking
longer strides. Inches matter in terms of how small you can get a piece of technology—a camera the size of your palm. Here they care how many square inches of your hair peeks out under your veil, how many inches of ankle you expose in sandals. I couldn't concentrate on a word she was saying. Her bare head might as well have been a bare breast. The effect would have been the same.

Khaleh Zahra had taken permissiveness to a new heights, turning her Islamic covering into lingerie. She deliberately chose sheer fabrics edged in lace, and they resembled nothing more than delicate slips. The effect was infinitely more alluring and seductive than a pair of shorts and tight T-shirt could ever have been. And now, now she was going without a head scarf entirely. This was as unthinkable as showing one's face in the Taliban's Afghanistan. One probably wouldn't be stoned to death, but nothing could be more transgressive. I was unnerved but stayed silent. People had different thresholds for the Islamic Republic in general, and the veil in particular. Some people were so distracted by other ideas and thoughts, they stopped noticing. Some felt it like a radioactive hood, all day, every day. Khaleh Zahra fell in the latter camp.

She was clearly trying to say something, either to herself or to Iran, and it wasn't my place to obstruct that message. So I just keep walking, staring ahead as though the gleaming, bare head-breast at my side was the most ordinary thing in the world. As people passed on the sidewalk, they shot
me
disapproving glances, assuming that she didn't notice (knowing and not caring being inconceivable), and that I was the one at fault for not telling her.

This is how the regime eased its burden of repression: by conditioning people to police one another. If you had conducted a national referendum that very day, the vast majority of Iranians—men and women alike—would have voted to abolish the mandatory veil. But accustomed to being watched in public, people internalized the minding gaze of the regime, and turned it back outward. When we arrived at the coffee shop, she mercifully pulled it back, with a quick, disdainful flick of her wrist.

Our household was showing unmistakable signs of strain. Had I been paying attention, I should have noticed earlier, but I had been detached for weeks. The days slipped by more easily when I blurred my vision, obscuring the details. I knew I had grown distant, and assumed that's why Khaleh Zahra exploited my runs for conversation. The groaning whir of the treadmill—not
the world's most advanced machine—was her cue, and she wound her way up the staircase, lay sideways on the sofa by the window, lit a cigarette, and talked and talked.

I think, like me, she yearned to articulate herself in English, to someone besides Kimia, in conversations that went beyond “You're grounded” and “I hate you.” It didn't matter that I was panting, sweaty, and unable to respond, because mostly she needed to inhabit her mind in English, release all that emotional pressure with the outlet of words. Twice, going downstairs for a glass of water in the middle of the night, I had found her reclined on the couch, in her bra and underwear, eating ice cream cake from the box. Want some? Sit down! What's new? she asked me brightly, waving her fork in the air, as I rubbed the sleep from my eyes.

Kimia finally alerted me to the urgency of the situation when she arrived home from school one day in tears.
Everyone
is talking about me, and it's
all
her fault, she hiccupped. She was becoming known around school as the girl with the crazy mother who refuses to wear the veil. Besides being mortifying, she explained, it is dangerous. A few days ago an enraged driver chased them through traffic, and got out of his car at a traffic light, waving his arms menacingly, all because of Khaleh Zahra's uncovered head. Really? I asked curiously. Does she not wear it all, or just way, way back? Around her shoulders, she said. What is
up
with that? Whose mother does that?

A few days later Khaleh Zahra announced they were moving. To Connecticut. Why Connecticut? Because I don't know anyone there, she replied cryptically, flinging cookie cutters and cases of salon shampoo into giant cartons. She never explained what had drawn her back to Iran, but I had watched her struggle, swimming upstream against a current far stronger than her determination.

She was accustomed, after decades in the West, to controlling society's perception of her life. In California, she could transform herself from Cruella de Ville of Tiburon one year to a Palo Alto soccer mom the next. Here, in the lap of a culture liberal with affection but stingy with tolerance, she had had no such freedom. For my part, I had chosen to dwell on their sense of alienation here, rather than my own, and their day of reckoning arrived with implications for all of us. Khaleh Zahra was a fuller synthesis of Iranian and American than I could ever hope to be; the decades of her life had been neatly divided between the two worlds. With her leaving, the
questions hung in the air: Could I last? Was my Iranian side developed enough to sustain the compromises of life here?

But as I sat on the floor cross-legged, watching them pack, I wondered whether I was even posing those questions properly. Now that I had met actually existing Iran, the Iran of the Islamic Republic, the question of Iranian identity had become infinitely more complex. That Khaleh Zahra could not cope with life in the Islamic Republic did not mean she could not have coped with a different Iran, a place more tolerant of privacy, and private life. Amidst all this haze, one thing was apparent.

All of us, Khaleh Zahra, Kimia, and I, had arrived in Tehran as Iranians of the imagination. We had Iranian identities, but they were formed by our memories and the Farsi-speaking parts of our soul—the part that responded, with years of accumulated references, when someone said “love” to us in Farsi, our first language of affection. But we could not navigate the Tehran of today, or share in the collective consciousness of the Iranians who never left.

Khaleh Zahra and Kimia's departure reopened a wound in Pedar Joon. Before their return, he had spent twenty years reconciling himself to a life away from four of his five children. In his old age, he had grown dependent on their presence quickly, and felt more acutely the pain of its being wrenched away. Empty of half its inhabitants, certainly the louder half, the house took on the feel of an abandoned fort. Khadijeh Khanoum was liberated from cooking for PJ, but her relief was short-lived, as Pedar Joon became more crotchety and demanding, buzzing her quarters at all hours with the little electronic button near his bed. Eventually, he moved his quarters downstairs, to avoid the daily ascents and descents that grew more labored.

For a man well into his nineties, his mind was impressively alert. He needed less and less sleep at night and assumed only sloth kept the rest of us in bed past five A.M. A few nights after Zahra and Kimia left, he floated into my room at four A.M., wearing blue striped pajamas and an angelic smile, and put a plate of Danish pastry on my desk. He took a rusted Swiss army knife out of his pocket, and put that next to the pastry for
yadegari,
keepsake, and floated back out. After he left I couldn't fall asleep again, and padded downstairs in my slippers to look through the stack of discarded old photos and papers in the living room.

I spread the faded images into a fan, and through the dim moonlight that peeked through the window, pulled out my favorite photo. It was of
me and four of my cousins, sitting on the steps of this house, the summer I visited Iran as child. I wondered what my personality would have been like if the small girl staring back at me from the picture had never left. I tried to imagine her as a twenty-four-year-old woman, her worries and dreams and sensibilities. As I sketched her in my mind, filling in her thoughts, I saw so clearly that she was not me. Her challenges would have been different than mine; other strings would pull at her heart. She was the woman I came here thinking I was, and at that moment, sitting crosslegged on the floor of the dusty, dark living room, I knew better at last.

I practiced one main ritual of normalcy in Iran. Ally McBeal night. Every Wednesday, my Australian friends, diplomats from the embassy, gathered a group over to have drinks, chatter about everything and nothing, and watch the show, taped off of satellite cable. In truth, I disliked the banal adventures of this neurotic, frail heroine, but watching the show lightened my mood. Like a sedative, it dulled my sensitivity to the ugliness of the world outside—the show trials and arrests—and lifted me to a plane of yuppie American preoccupations: promotions and dating.