Lipstick Jihad (4 page)

Those were the first years after the revolution, when it wasn't clear whether Iran would mutate once again, consolidate, or collapse under the weight of a war with Iraq. How do you make decisions, when your fate hangs in the balance of a country in chaos? How do you force yourself to build a new life, when deep in your heart you hold out hope that the nightmare will end, and your country will be returned to you? My youngest aunt, Farzaneh, who I called Khaleh Farzi, held out hope until doing so became foolish. During my childhood in California, she was one of the most important women in my life, and she became central again in 2000, when I moved to Iran. Just like so many thousands Khaleh Farzi had been drawn to the revolutionary street protests in Tehran without a clear sense of their destination, without any inkling that they would explode the world of which she was so fond. Tehran under the Shah, with a nightlife so dazzling she abandoned her studies in England to come home to party—weekends at the Caspian, smoking grass on the beach in bikinis; weeknights in Tehran, making the rounds of private clubs, drinking champagne in dresses from Paris.

The move from her pre-revolution party life in Tehran to the bedroom she shared with her husband in my grandmother's rented apartment in San Jose, was a shattering, incomprehensible blow. She couldn't drive, there had never been a need; that's what drivers had been for. She never thought she'd
need to work, and like so many Iranian girls educated abroad for the principles of being modern and well-bred, she had a useless degree—in her case, in sociology. Soon it became clear that if her husband, Hamid, were to transfer his medical license to the U.S., he would need to pass a bevy of tests in English. That meant many expensive classes. So Khaleh Farzi stopped spending her days wistfully floating through the department stores she could no longer afford to shop at, and donned the scratchy, dull blue uniform of a Woolworth's waitress. I wonder what people thought of her, this shy young Iranian woman with her bobbed hair, delicate gamine features, and sad eyes. I wonder what she minded most: that an Iranian she knew might walk in; that she had a college degree and was serving milk shakes; that this might be reality, and not a bad dream—not a cruel interlude intended to make her value the life she gambled away with what she later came to consider reckless idealism.

As though this all wasn't enough to bear, her own sister, Maman, had the nerve to proclaim the revolution a good thing. Maman had left Iran a few years back, and had more memories of the Shah's oppressive politics; in 1979 she was a single mother of a three-year-old, untroubled by the loss of a glittering social life. And it was still early then. No one knew whether to believe the reports of the countless executions; the full truth of the bloodbath would only emerge later. Full of fire and exultation that the U.S.-puppet Shah had fallen, my mother coaxed my aging grandmother into the car and drove to San Francisco to vote at the Iranian consulate in a referendum to support the newly formed revolutionary government. Khaleh Farzi looked on bitterly.

The trauma of dislocation varied, of course, by generation and gender. Young husbands felt the pain of not being able to provide, with great wounds to their male dignity and self-respect. Older people like my grandparents missed the comforts of retirement in a familiar milieu, with old friends and trusted servants; they felt vulnerable in a strange country, with a language they couldn't speak. But the loss everyone felt together, among the most acute, was the loss of gardens. Trees, flowers, the garden courtyard occupy a hallowed space in Iranian culture. Just look through the photo albums of an old Iranian family. You'll find faded images of parents seated outside on a raised divan covered with Persian rugs, with children playing by a fountain, or amidst a grove of trees, in the background. In one of my favorite stories that Maman would tell me as a child, my great-grandmother,
in a fit of wounded rage at my great-grandfather, taking a second wife, ordered the leveling of one of the oldest mulberry orchards—tall, proud trees that had grown for decades, destroyed in revenge for his betrayal. She had found no better metaphor for the death of her love than the destruction of trees. In California, the absence of gardens seemed the bitterest part of our reconstructed lives.

They tried to make do, my grandparents. Their apartment in San Jose, which faced the garbage dumpster, had a small, squalid patch of green out front, covered in coarse, dusty ivy. My grandfather, whom we called Agha Joon, patiently cleared it away, and tried to grow
gol-e shamdooni
(geraniums). Each day he would water them, determined to make something bloom, to resist letting himself go. My grandmother, fiercely proud, had from the beginning decided on a strategy of not caring; if she could not have her orchards at Farahzad, she didn't want gardens at all. When the time came to minister to the flowers, she would roll her eyes, “It's Katouzi, what can I say?” as though my grandfather—whom she called by his last name, in that stately, old way—were watering a desert. Their apartment complex was built around a large pond, with grassy patches on its banks, and on summer evenings we would lay out a rug and loll under the suburban sky with thermoses of tea. My grandmother would cook a huge, steaming pot of fava beans, which we'd unpeel, dipping the hot beans in a vinegary sauce, after popping them out of their long, velvety pods. I wondered whether anyone I knew from school might see us—so absurd, we must seem, all sprawled out on a rug by the pond, eating beans from the pod.

My father, too, was obsessed with the re-creation of a garden. He rented a plot of land in a lot in Saratoga, and each weekend after he picked me up from Maman's, we would drive there to water his patch. He transported me to and from the patch in a white Volvo, the first of many white Volvos to come, with the license plate RAKSH, after the name of the hero Rostam's wondrous white steed, in the
Shahnameh,
the Book of Kings, the ancient Persian epic poem. What's your dad's license plate mean? my friends sometimes asked. Oh, it's just this horse in this one story, I said quickly. Eventually the Volvos graduated to SUVs, still white of course, and RAKSH became RAKSH Jr., bearing us round the wide streets of San Jose, as though the suburbs were a battle.

With seeds he had relatives bring from Iran, Daddy planted rows of eggplant, narrow cucumber, mint, basil, and all the herbs necessary for Persian cooking that at the time didn't exist—at least in their proper variety—at the immense supermarket that everyone else's parents seemed to find sufficient for their produce needs. The only aspect of Iranian culture he cherished, and wanted to pass on to me, was this reverence for nature, which he worried he might not be able to instill amidst the cement and strip malls of San Jose. And so, after monitoring the progress of the Persian herbs, we would take long walks through the hills of Los Altos, stopping at each new tree to note the quality of the bark, the shape of the leaves. Eventually I could distinguish a mulberry tree from a walnut, walnut from almond, and both from the tree that would grow pomegranates. At nights, Daddy would take sheets of white paper and trace the outline of what looked like a bloated cat. He then built me an architect's table, on which I too could learn to draw the proper dimensions of the cat, which he informed me was the accurate geographic contour of Iran. Until I became an adolescent, and insisted on living at the mall, this was all my father and I did together: cultivate herbs, draw the cat-Iran to scale, pass leafy examinations.

Agha Joon, my grandfather, was a gentle, lyrical man, who spent his days in America—almost three decades of them—reading Persian poetry, going for walks, and not learning English. He never complained about the hardship or the crudeness of his transplanted life, and somehow managed to keep that same remote, blissful look in his eyes until the very end. His great joy was also his patch, which he eventually did transform into a wild garden. When I would run back to the apartment after swimming, waiting for my bathing suit to dry, he would point proudly to the blooming flowers, his voice lilting softly with a Turkish accent, from his childhood in the ethnically Turkish region of Iran: Look, daughter, look at what God has created. As a first-grader, it puzzled me that he considered this an offering from God. Besides the fact that everyone knew he shunned religion, the sad, valiant garden seemed more a cause for sorrow than thanks. But seeing the world gently was how Agha Joon coped, and what protected his spirit from a change that had crushed stronger men. This is how he kept the shame of these new circumstances from eating away at him, as it did my grandmother. He ambled around the neighborhood, praised America for its vast malls, the quality of its television channels, the orderliness of its traffic.
Eventually he abandoned prose altogether, and began communicating exclusively in verse, remaining connected to us only by the vast stores of poetry in his memory. In each conversation he would dip into his reserves, and find a suitable line or couplet to voice his thoughts. When Maman and I bitterly fought over some new restriction, he refused to take sides. With eyes twinkling through his thick glasses, he would elusively repeat the verse reserved for our arguments—“with the way illuminated, why do you take the darker path? Go then, for you deserve the consequences!”—leaving it intentionally unclear to which of us it was directed.

Only at rare moments did I suspect that Agha Joon was not entirely preoccupied with his flowers, but felt the sting of loss—on those days he would ask Maman to play Banaan, the classical Persian singer whose voice ached with melancholy. He would sit on the couch, pouring his tea into a saucer so it would cool more quickly, sipping it through the sugar cubes held between his teeth. He would sit like that for hours, as the tape played over and over. I would try to turn it down—my friends from school were calling to discuss field hockey, and lip gloss, and I didn't want them to hear foreign wailing in the background. But Agha Joon's hearing was starting to go, and he would look up with such desolate surprise that I quickly turned the volume back up.

As detached as my grandfather was—
dar alam-e khodesh,
in his own world—or had managed to make himself, my grandmother was alert. My cousins and I stopped watching television in her presence, frustrated by her constant demand for translation. What are they
saying,
she would ask, even if she was in the kitchen, her hands stained with green juice, wrist-deep in colanders of minced herbs. To her mild irritation, Agha Joon was content to watch only animal world programs, whose stalking lions and hatching eggs rendered words irrelevant.

Mornings, in the sunlight by the window, my grandmother sat me down to teach me a set of unfamiliar sounds—
al-fatiha,
the opening sura of the Koran. But how can God be good, if he invented Khomeini? I asked, trying to evade the lesson. I didn't want to learn these unintelligible words; I already had my tap-dancing routine and piano scales to memorize. Khomeini has never done anything bad to me
personally,
she said. Well, duh, that's because he didn't know you, I replied, rolling my eyes.

She always had a tin of French raspberry pastilles in her bag, and had
named all her children with names beginning with F. Like all Iranian grandmothers, she never called out the name of one per se, but a staccato string of all their names (Fariba, Ferial, Farzi, Fariborz) one of which would inevitably be correct. When we would set out together from the apartment, for the short walk to the grocery store, she slipped her hand into mine, and said,
Asay-e dast-e mani,
you are my hand's cane. I felt this as both a privilege and a burden, knowing that I, barely in second grade, would have to defend her honor at the checkout line. Her acuity was a hundred times more painful for me, because I knew with dread that she felt every backward glance, was stung by every rude word from a pimply, ignorant teenager who only saw a strange old woman in a veil in the line at the grocery store, taking too long to fumble the bills out of her clasp purse, counting them out slowly.

My grandmother cooked often, exclusively Persian food, and in that manner typical to immigrants, exerted some control over her transplanted life through purity of the palate. Since she refused to eat in restaurants, the kitchen became her domain, from whence she spun fantastically delicate custards and fluffy cakes.
Katouzi,
she would call out to my grandfather, come eat. And he would assume his usual place at the table, making his way through a heaping pile of my favorite dish,
adas polo,
fluffy rice with cinnamon, lentils, and raisins drizzled with saffron. Then he would remind us—as usual, in verse, with a couplet that says when the appetite dwindles, the end approaches—that at his prime, he could eat four times the amount of whatever he had just consumed, and drift into his bedroom for a nap.

My mother modeled herself after Agha Joon, seeing only what she wanted to see, impervious to everything else. I was like my grandmother, proud, thin-skinned, sensitive to every backward glance. And so it was with us, as it was with them—a constant friction, a dismay with the other's approach to the world. As Agha Joon planted his garden, enraptured by the petals and leaves, my grandmother ignored it icily, disdainful of its modest size, preferring not to have one at all. As my mother dragged me to operas, where we had to stand because seated tickets were too expensive, I fidgeted sullenly, mortified at being relegated to the serf quarters in the feudal system that was opera house seating. I'd rather stay home and rent a movie, I insisted, than endure that sort of humiliation. But she wouldn't hear of it, and so we went, planted on our feet for hours on end, weekends in a row.

The apartment complex was overrun with other Iranian exiles, and the shoved-up-against-each-other intimacy of condo life—to the chagrin of Khaleh Farzi, who lived with them—erased the social distinctions imposed in Tehran by neighborhood and district. There were Iranians we could associate with,
adam hesabi
(good families), and a slew of undesirables who I wasn't sure whether I should say
Salaam
to. The bogey man of the émigrés was a man who I remember as Mr. Savaki. He had been an official in the SAVAK, the Shah's brutal secret service, and he now spent endless hours by the pool, turning his body on the beach chair as though he was on a rotisserie. I didn't know what
savaki
meant at the time—didn't know it was a byword for torture—except that every grown-up's face drew tight and grave when the word was uttered. When my cousins and I spotted his leathery, wrinkled body stretched out on a pool chair, we would stare briefly at the tattoo of the Shah's face on his bicep, and then flee. On the days he would come by for tea, sitting with Agha Joon to enumerate the flaws of Ayatollah Khomeini, Khaleh Farzi would fume. Maman, I don't understand why you let that man into our house, she complained to my grandmother.