Lipstick Jihad (36 page)

That winter morning, I could muster no response to a plea that came wrapped in insult. Instead, I leaned over her shoulder as she prepared lunch, rice with lentils and raisins. She poured, I could have sworn, a full cup of oil onto the soaking rice. She hated me. She knew I wouldn't eat it that way, and she did it anyway, because she knew then I would tell her to take it home. “Remember how we compared our definition of a
drop
of oil?” She smiled sweetly, and said it would burn otherwise, as I would know, if I knew how to cook. It was unfortunate we have no word for passive-aggressive in Farsi, since it is half our culture.

I kept flipping absent-mindedly through the inky pages of newsprint. But wait! Buried on the back page, there was a headline that read “
Ghalyoon
Smoking Now Illegal for Women.” Oh God. My one, favorite publicly acceptable pastime, unceremoniously banned. I dialed Siamak's mobile phone.

“Hi. It's me. Do you find it arousing, watching women smoke
ghalyoon?”

“Not particularly. Especially knowing that a thousand ugly men have smoked from the same pipe before them.”

“Well, I have news. One half of the population can no longer smoke
ghalyoon
in public, on the off chance that a pious passer-by notices, and becomes titillated.”

That night Siamak invited me over for a homemade
ghalyoon,
in consolation. I sat cross-legged on a chair in the kitchen, as he heated the coals on the oven, and contemplated his back. As we relaxed on his balcony, high above the western suburb of Tehran, passing the pipe between us and inhaling
its humid, fruity smoke, I thought about how perfect we were for each other. Well, maybe we weren't perfect. We couldn't even agree on vacations, as friends. He always wanted to four-wheel-drive through the desert, and camp under the stars, and I wanted to lie on a beach, preferably attached to a plush resort, where a waiter would bring me fresh juice and we would sleep on fresh linens at night. Deep down, I thought he was an unrepentant sexist; deep down he thought I was radioactively high-maintenance.

But in Tehran, Siamak was the one I wanted to be with. His manner of speaking and thinking were so familiar to me, as evocative of home as the tart sweetness of sour cherry jam, and the smokiness of
esfand,
the pungent herb we ritually burned to ward off the evil eye. I clung to the belief that in time we could develop feelings for one another. The thought was vaguely gross to both of us, but all those happy, old couples whose marriages had been arranged probably felt that way at the beginning.

I leaned across his boat-like sofa, poked him with a toe and demanded to know why he had never asked me out on a proper date.

“We know all the same people. We would throw the best dinner parties. Can you imagine?”

“Babe, I know you too well now,” he replied. “You have no idea what you want. You don't want a relationship. You want a story to tell over cocktails.”

“That's so unfair. You don't want a person either. You want an ornament /chef who happens to have a brilliant intellect. Who happens to want to live in Tehran. That doesn't exist.”

“I know I'll have to compromise. Eventually. And I know it'll be a big-deal compromise. I'm just not there yet.”

I understood precisely what Siamak meant. He didn't need to say anything more, but he did.

“You're not really into
me
in that way. And I'm not really into
you
in that way. And we both know it. If you don't want to hear that reason, I can come up with different ones. But that's really it.”

He was right. The whole point of us being romantically involved was flawed, because I had conceived the idea not out of attraction or spark, but out of a frustration with the confusion in my own life. Rather than admit that Iran was disappointing me and wearing me down, it was easier to concentrate on Siamak, a reassuring dinghy in the chaos. Rather than work through my lingering uncertainties about the place of Iran and America inside
me, it was easier to pretend assurance by affixing myself to someone who already had it figured out. In the same way Fatimeh sought the company of Davar, instead of challenging the constricting tradition of her parents. As Mira confused dating a consummate jerk with exploring her sexuality. It would take me a bit longer to see it, but I used Siamak as a refuge from realities I could still not bear to admit: that I would probably feel out of place everywhere, always; that my family would be divided forever, between America and Iran; that I would always feel alone.

—MAHMOUD DARWISH

My face pressed into the plastic strips of the beach lounger, and I wiggled my nose into a crack, so I could breathe and maintain this position of optimal sun exposure. My friend Kim unlaced the strings of my bikini top, so my back would tan evenly. No, we were not in Iran. That would have involved what political scientists like to call step-change, a major and significant transformation in a country's development. I had come to Lebanon to do a story on Hezbollah and had extended my stay for a few weeks, so I could go to the beach with Kim, a journalist friend. We lounged by the freshwater pool, discussing whether she should buy an apartment in Beirut and whether I should buy one in Tehran. She reminded me the Iranian regime was unstable, and I reminded her Israel could reoccupy southern Lebanon.

Real estate did not appear the safest investment for either of us. Our lives, in this region, of this region, always returned to this question: how to put down roots in ground that was so unstable, in ground that was either meant to be temporary, or susceptible to shifts, in response to decisions made by politicians or generals or clerics. Ground that was either being occupied, invaded, liberated, or beginning to tremor, under regimes that seemed destined to collapse.

At the Caspian Sea, where I had chosen not to spend any time that summer, my uncle and his partners had built a gated compound of villas on the waterfront. In our little patch of beach there, I could even swim in a bikini, as long as I waited till I was fully submerged before taking my tee-shirt off. When I told my family I was going to spend the summer in Beirut, they urged me to stay. I thought about all the blissful weekends we'd spent there. We would splash around in the pool, then dry off to play basketball, and grill fresh sturgeon for lunch. When the sun set, we walked laps around the compound and dropped into everyone's open living rooms for tea, and then played games of pool before gathering for heaps of fresh caviar and ice-cold vodka.

It was idyllic, really, if you could get yourself to stop thinking about what was going on outside, or back in Tehran. That summer in Iran, there was
yet another anti-immodesty drive underway. The system issued hysterical public warnings against “decadent Western behavior” and sent police to raid the café scene. For Elvis's café, that singular place where Celine and I and countless others took special delight in drinking coffee, it was the beginning of the end. Elvis became tense and moody, reluctant to police the behavior of customers who had become friends. Only twice did he ever tell me to fix my veil, each time with his eyes, his whole posture, radiating apology. He hated having to say such things. Yet if he refused, he could be fined if police showed up and found us as we were, too busy talking to notice our head scarves had slipped back a few inches. He began closing earlier and earlier, and eventually shut down.

Rumors raged that bands of
Basiji
were roving the streets, in search of women wearing sandals and Capri pants. As punishment, they forced them to dip their bare legs in a bucket of cockroaches. Either that, or they sprayed their feet with a paint that took weeks to wear off, so the ankle-flaunting harlots would be forced to wear shoes and socks all summer. When Khaleh Farzi recounted this to me in warning, I laughed it off. Come on, that's urban legend, I said. For one,
Basijis
are too lazy to go around collecting buckets full of cockroaches. But the bucket became fixed in my mind. I've been petrified of cockroaches since that childhood summer in Iran, when they would come hurtling through the air, miniature avian-reptiles, and corner me in a bathroom leagues away from adult rescue. No, I decided, I would not do a cockroach summer. So I went to Beirut.

Splat. A wet volleyball soared out of the pool and hit Kim in the knee. A little boy in orange swimtrunks trotted over to collect it. I
got
it, he screeched, in perfect American English. I pressed my eyes into the softness of the towel, and tried to isolate voices in the conversations around me. A pack of young girls walked by, chattering about the boys around them, and where they should go clubbing in Beirut that night. A serious young voice from inside the pool complained about a detested biology teacher. Further back, from the shady grove of trees, middle-aged Lebanese women deliberated whether an absent friend should have her drooping butt surgically lifted.

Their conversations swung between Arabic, French, and English, but it was the variety of English that intrigued me. I heard British accents, and American ones, and among the American accents, I detected distinct strains—native, ten years post immigration, California, New Jersey.
Lebanese expatriates rivaled the Iranian diaspora in size, but unlike Iranians, many visited their home country en masse every summer. They returned with their children in tow, and all those Lebanese kids growing up in France and Africa, Canada and America, ended up with a tangible sense of origin. They wouldn't have to subsist abroad on stale memories and myths. Memories carried you only so far. They faded steadily over time, and were overlaid by fresh recollections and new longings, until one's consciousness eventually recomposed itself without them. The accents mingled together. Cousins from far away splashed about with relatives who had never left. Their merriment was spontaneous. Young and easy. Borderless.

I wondered, for the thousandth futile time, what would have happened if we had spent every summer in Iran, what would have happened if there had been no revolution. Would my laughter have been this easy, at a crowded pool where my cousins, both the boys and the girls, would have swum together? Would we have felt Iran was ours, felt ties pulling us back, rather than dark fears pushing us away? I thought about my cousins in the U.S. How many of them would bring their no-Farsi-speaking, half-third-generation children to Iran?

That week in Beirut, an editor I knew asked me why Iranians, unlike Lebanese, deserted their country when the going got tough. “We had a war too,” he said, puffing self-importantly on a cigar, “but we didn't pick up and leave. Why did you?” Intellectually, I could argue with him. You had a war, but no one ever stole your personal freedom. Your city became a war zone, but you still lived your lives. No one crept into your bedroom, into your mind, and tried to insert their hateful morality into every crevice of your existence. These were rational arguments, but they did not wash away the guilt. Of leaving Iran to
them,
throwing up our hands and collectively moving on. Go ahead, ruin the country. We'll be in exile, if you need us.

I turned over, and studied the sky. My mobile phone rang, and Kim and I exchanged glances. It was Friday, the day Hezbollah usually staged attacks along the southern border. Hopefully it would not be an editor, watching the wires in London, sending us off to work.

“Khosh migzareh, Khanoum?”
drawled a haughty voice. It was Dariush, asking me if I was having fun. I shook my head to Kim. He and I were just friends now, but helped each other out when we could, out of an only-child-with-distracted-parents solidarity.

“Listen, something happened a couple of nights ago. I don't want you to get worked up over it. But I think you should know.” His voice was calm. “Last night my friend Amin and I were taking a box of stuff you'd left in my garage to your apartment, and we got stopped at a checkpoint on the way. They searched the car, and found a bottle of wine in one of the boxes.” He paused.