Lipstick Jihad (37 page)

“Go on.”

“He had dropped me off to get cantaloupe juice, and was making a U-turn, so he was alone in the car. Amin told them it was his. I caught up to the car, and told him to keep quiet, that I'd say it was mine. But he said it would be less trouble for him than me. The next day he went to the court, on Vozara Street. They fined him thirty lashes. But he was lucky, they let him keep his T-shirt on, and it was thick. He's fine. We went to a party straight from there.”

My lips parted, but no sound came out, as though I had swallowed a shard of glass. What could I possibly say? Tell your friend I owe him dinner, when I get back to Tehran?

“Azadeh? Are you there? Listen, we're used to this kind of thing. As a teenager, I don't think I made it home a single night without getting stopped and smacked upside the head on the way. Stop being so squeamish and American about it.” His voice was even, but tinged with impatience.

“Please tell him, from me, that I'm really, really sorry,” I said hoarsely.

I hung up the phone, pressed my face back into the beach towel, and wept
.
Someone had been whipped, like a dog, because of my carelessness. For a stupid bottle of wine that I should have remembered to throw away. I lay there for half an hour immobile. Then I uncurled myself, put on sunglasses, and wound my way through the laughing throng to the rocks along the beach. My little fantasy, of one day being in Iran surrounded by this sort of crowd—Iranians from the West, summering at the Caspian with their children—was shattered. It finally hit me: It would never come to pass. There was no sequel to IRANIANS FLEE TEHRAN ON EVE OF REVOLUTION, and I would never write my dream headline (VILE CLERICAL REGIME FALLS, MULLAHS CHARTER FLIGHT TO NAJAF AS EXILES RUSH BACK). Not even if Iran changed tomorrow. Not even if Siamak and I became the most international, perfect Iranian-American couple ever.

Kim and I drove back to Beirut that night to meet friends for drinks.
From the second floor of the bar, the breeze floated in from the Mediterranean, the lights of the corniche twinkled, and I gazed down into my Bellini feeling utterly alone. I couldn't concentrate on a word being said around me, so I left early to walk my regret home.

Along the way, on a decaying building still riddled with bullet holes from the war, I noticed a giant portrait of Ayatollah Khomeini. I stood beneath it, and matched his glare with my own. A group of men at a nearby ATM glanced over at me, curious. I shrugged my shoulders, basking in their bareness before the ayatollah's sullen grimace. Why are you frowning? I asked him in my head. Everything went your way. You got the country. People saw your face in the moon. I considered sitting down on the pavement to smoke a cigarette in defiance, an anti-pilgrimage. But that was taking things too far. One did not sit on dark street corners, arguing inside one's head with a dead ayatollah.

I returned to a Tehran that was still under cockroach alert. My mother was in town, having come for a month of summer vacation, and during this time she sniffed around suspiciously, detecting a pro-American tilt to my work. She concluded I was “a tool in the pro-Israel, anti-Middle East mainstream media machine,” and had taken, in between cooing reunions with relatives, to being cool and dismissive of my ideas, my stories, and ultimately, me. Although she had not visited Iran in a decade, she already knew the country she wanted to find—materially deprived by the revolution, but blissfully unsoiled by the West—and she edited reality to fit this conception.

As luck would have it, the month my loudly anti-American mother came to Tehran, I was doing a string of stories on the popularity of American culture. She refused to believe that young people were transfixed with the United States, that American products were growing more popular each day, that young people, tired of the constrained social life prescribed by the regime, associated brand-name icons of American culture, Coke and Barbie, with the freedoms they were denied. When I told her that young people from all walks of life loved American-style burger outlets, and would choose a Coke over an Iranian cola any day, she chose not to believe me.

I tried to persuade her with fact. I explained that fake American fast food was taking over Tehran. That fake Hardees, KFCs, and McDonaldses were swarming with teenagers thrilled to be tasting and participating in a ritual they associated with openness—eating a burger and fries. Burger places exploited this impulse, I told her, modeling themselves, down to the last detail, after American franchises.

At Tehran's Super Star, which imitated Carl's Jr., smiling employees wore polo shirts monogrammed with the Carl's Jr. star, THANK YOU was printed on the swinging door of the trash can, and a comments box solicited complaints. The only design element that would have been out of place in an authentic branch was the discreet plaque reminding customers to PLEASE RESPECT ISLAMIC MORALS. When rumor spread that Super Star procured its buns from an American burger franchise in the Persian Gulf, the crowds only grew.

Just last week, I said, I stood in an hour-long
line
outside the newest burger place, Apache, while a
bouncer
regulated the flow of traffic in and out. If you don't believe me, come next Friday and see for yourself. She snorted.

One of the hottest new shops in Tehran those days was near Khaleh Farzi's house, in Elahieh. My mother and Khaleh Farzi had not been on speaking terms since 1997, so she had not seen this neighborhood marvel. The store's name was too risqué, by local standards, to be displayed out front, and was painted instead, in gilt letters, on a dusky rose wall inside: Victoria's Secret. It wasn't a real part of the chain, of course (U.S. sanctions forbade American companies from doing business in Iran). Some savvy merchant in West L.A. probably bought out his local VS, threw copyright to the winds, and set up shop in Tehran. Iranian women flocked there to rapturously fawn over delicate silk negligees, lace underwear, and other fripperies. All over the capital, it seemed Iranians were craving consumer symbols of American culture. The scarcity of supply only drove more demand, even for faux versions of everything you could imagine.

I tried to refine the point. Perhaps Maman might understand that young people embraced the “Great Satan's” products not out approval for U.S. foreign policy in the region but as a way to register their discontent with the religious conservatives who controlled their country. But none of this heartfelt explaining did any good at all, and she just gave me that narrowed,
skeptical look that said I feel that you are lying, but because you are my daughter, and we are polite people, I will not point this out to you. “I understand that you and your five yuppie friends feel that way,” she said.

The stories about pro-U.S. sentiment in Iran, she insisted, were concocted by the American media (and its journalist-propagandists, like me) to pave the way for American cultural/political/military/culinary domination of the region. The U.S. wanted to keep Iran either weak and isolated, or weak and dependent. That's why the CIA overthrew the country's democratically elected government in 1953. The United States cared only about securing its own interests, along with Israel's, in the region. Given this, Iranians had a duty to be anti-American. I had a duty to be quiet, and not criticize the Islamic Republic, because in the short term I would be making things easier for a neo-imperial America bent on undermining the country.

If I have to function that way, I told her, I'd rather not be a journalist. The whole reason I do this is to document reality, not cover it up. Besides, why isn't it possible to criticize both? Do America's abhorrent Middle East policies somehow oblige us to defend the Islamic Republic?

Our arguments were never-ending. Frequently, they sank to absurd depths. One afternoon, irritated that my work had me undermining Islamic solidarity, she made a theological critique of my outfit as I prepared to leave the house.

“You're not going out in those sandals, are you?”

“Yes, I am. Is that a problem?”

“You're disrespecting Imam Hossein.”

“Mom,” I said, “Imam Hossein has been dead for a thousand years. Surely he doesn't care about my footwear.”

“Fine. Disrespect your culture. People won't say it to your face, but
know,
Azadeh,
know,
that in their hearts, they are insulted.”

I tried to take her censure about my clothes, my understanding of Iran, my work, lightly. Rationally, I knew I was in charge of my reactions. In the split second after a standard maternal provocation (“I regret how bourgeois you have become”), I could choose patience over fury. But most of the time, I regressed in nanoseconds to my disconsolate fifteen-year-old self, mute and wounded at being told she had betrayed her real culture.

The only difference was that now, I was armed with my own arsenal of
Iran savvy. This insane traffic that made her shudder? I could navigate it from the top of Tehran to the bottom. With short cuts. The politics she made pronouncements about? I actually understood the fine points and could recite the history of its evolution by rote. When our arguments in Farsi became heated, I no longer had to switch to English, in liquid wrath, to make a point. After months of dislocation, my mother's arrival demystified what I had been seeking all along—a shared history with Iranians living inside, a history in modern Iran. And now, finally, I was more at home than she was in Tehran, street-smart in the city where she grew up and that she now no longer recognized.

Now I could see how much of my journey back had been directed to this very point—the point where my relationship to Iran was bilateral, not negotiated through a third party (my mother) and at the mercy of our turbulent relationship. Before I came to Iran, my mother essentially
was
Iran to me. During her long stretches of estrangement, I felt exiled from Iran as well. No matter how many Iranian restaurants I dragged my friends to or Iranian films I sat through at art-house cinemas, I hadn't been able to fill the cat-shaped hole in my life.

Looking back, I saw that my return to Iran was partly to preempt my fear of a loss I knew was inevitable. One day my mother would die, and with her my Iran would disappear. Once, when we were driving together from Carmel to San Jose, I shuffled through the tapes in the car, and slipped a tape of classical Iranian music into the stereo. The drawn-out twang of the sitar filled the car. She smiled softly. “Do you remember,” she asked, “when you were little, and told me, ‘Mom, it'll be sad when you die, because no one will listen to this music anymore'? I think
you
will.”

That summer of 2001, the summer of the cockroach, was a time-marker for both my life and Iran. It was the last summer Iran would be boring old Iran, and not a member of the “Axis of Evil,” the Bush administration's rogue-state triptych. It was the last summer the country would have relative calm on its borders, instead of the wars that were to come, in Afghanistan and Iraq. It was the summer I stopped tormenting myself with such enthusiasm, and began to admit that Iran was disappointing me horribly.

As the mullahs waged a multi-front war on fun, stirring rumors of a cockroach menace and siccing the morality police on cafés, young people's hunt for entertainment found a new outlet: post-soccer match celebrations. The regime considered exercise healthy and virile, and the national soccer team represented Iran in a sport associated with populism, all worthy in the regime's calculations. So celebrating the team's victories became a pretext for kids to pour into the streets, make noise, and be young. Eventually, people even began “celebrating” the team's losses and dismal wins over inferior teams.

It became such a phenomenon that the media started covering soccer nights as news stories. The evening Iran played the United Arab Emirates, I packed a reporting satchel and got ready to go out. The Iranian team performed badly and failed to secure a spot in the playoffs. But teenagers poured out onto the streets as though we had won the World Cup. Hundreds of thousands of people descended into the Tehran night, under a velvety sky occasionally lit up by lightning. Najmeh, my anti-smoking journalist friend, and I drove over to Shahrak-e Gharb to check out the celebrations. The square was thick with teenagers and families, waving Iranian flags, honking their horns, setting off firecrackers, and chanting “Iran!”