Lipstick Jihad (9 page)

During my first weeks back in Iran, in the spring of 2000, the family devoted much time and energy to ensuring I dressed properly. Among the most concerned was my Khaleh Farzi, who was in her mid-forties, petite, and marooned in Iran from her two favorite pastimes, jogging and drinking coffee at Starbucks. She and her husband had moved back to Iran in 1998, after long years in New Jersey. During the first year that my uncle had floated the idea of relocating, she would only say—in a nod to my grandfather's refuge in poetry—“I will only move to places that rhyme with Tehran, such as Milan.” This awkward relationship with reality also characterized her life in Iran, where she spent most of her time reminding us all that “this is not a country, it is hell.”

She thought if left to my own devices, I might forget we lived under an Islamic regime and stride outside in a tube top.
Are your ankles covered? Elbows?
Khaleh Farzi would call out a checklist of body parts from wherever she was in the house, as I headed for the door.

Mercifully, by the time I began living in Iran, the Khatami spring had
made it possible to wear
roopoosh
(a long, loose coat also called by the French term
manteau
) that did not make one look like a great-aunt. Just one year before, going outside had meant draping oneself in banal and anonymous folds of cloth. Every morning, getting dressed had involved a
me
vs.
the regime
calculus. Shall I look remotely like myself, or shall I pass through all this unpleasantness as a ghost, invisible in a wash of grey or black? One's relationship to the veil had been a truly existential question: How important is it to be myself, to have my outside reflect my identity? When faced with this choice, only the true radicals and street warriors chose to flout the dress code. Because it was a fight, they applied war-paint—coats and coats of makeup—and aggressively risqué clothes. But ordinary women who just wanted to go to work, rather than be Rosa Parks through their choice of dress, simply accepted the erasure of their personality through the
roopoosh
uniform.

But by 2000, a
roopoosh
as concealing as the
chador,
the billowing, all-encompassing black tent that only very traditional women and government employees wore, was no longer required apparel. The middle part of the spectrum—between washed-out ghosts and angrily painted peacocks—had grown. The stark contrast between how one looked in public and private faded. Isn't it lovely, I said to Khaleh Farzi happily, we don't look like crows anymore. Come on, she replied, running her fingers over the rainbow of colors in her drawer, it's just a prettier cage. Like so many small freedoms that Iranians began experiencing that year, it registered as miraculous progress for about ten minutes, and then was deemed no progress at all.

Still, once the costs of disobeying the regime were reduced, people began steadily pushing the limits. My great-aunt, who had no patience in her dotage for purchasing something that would be confiscated the next day, went out and bought a banned satellite dish. We stopped carrying socks in our purse, reasonably sure we could bare our toes in sandals without hassle. My uncle stopped watching basketball on satellite television each and every night, and began reading the newspapers instead, stopping every ten minutes to read aloud a particularly amusing criticism of the ruling clergy. The changes were modest, and no one pretended they were nearly enough or nearly secure; but they made life, compared to the gloomy years of pre-Khatami privation, infinitely more livable.

My family in Iran still amuse themselves telling stories about the first
weeks I moved to Tehran, in the early months of 2000. My patience for this humor is limited, because in the end, no one who feels imbued with serious purpose enjoys being mocked for verbal slips, such as confusing the Farsi words for “speech” and “cabbage,” which were unhelpfully distinguished only by a twist of a vowel. But there was such an entertainment deficit in Iran that the bumbling first steps of a newly returned relative offered a welcome distraction from the dulling routine of daily life. I was like a running sitcom played for their amusement,
Azadeh in Ayatollahland:
Watch her accidentally insult powerful clerics! See her try to wear a beret instead of a veil!

My Iranian version of the exotic ethnic novels I read in college—my Persian
Like Water for Chocolate,
where I was supposed to discover the ancient myths of human civilization in a kitchen, in the ancient ritual of sauces or puddings three days in the making—was nowhere to be found. Where were the orchards, the old houses filled with evocative scents and closely knit clans who spent their days cooking together and puzzling the meaning of life over tea? Not only did this world not exist anymore, it had been replaced by something cynical and alien, familiar only through course of habit to those who had known nothing else. Iran, fountain of my memories, the leisurely black and white world of old films like
My Uncle Napoleon,
had been wiped away, replaced by the Islamic Republic.

Of course until that moment, had someone asked me, I would not have admitted to living most of my life under the spell of nostalgia, an emotion that disguises itself as healthy patriotism or a fondness for Iranian classical music or a hundred other feelings that are sincerely experienced as something else. The first, jarring chip at my romanticized view of Iran was inflicted by Siamak Namazi, a cocktail party acquaintance who quickly became one of my closest friends. Many of the U.S.-educated Iranians who had returned to Tehran were there because they had been mediocre in the West, and preferred to be big fish in a small swamp. “All the exceptional people have left,” said a young Tehrani to me one night at a party. “They're the ones who'll never come back.”

Siamak was one of the few exceptions. He helped start a business consulting firm in Tehran because he actually wanted to be there and build something that could make a lasting contribution. He was twenty-eight, a Tufts graduate, and the son of a U.N. diplomat, with wide brown eyes and
the sort of endearing, chauvinist-tinged gallantry common to frat boys from the American South. Socially, he affected an image of rebel playboy, but he could strategize better than most Iranian ministers and was vulnerable to his mother's dictums.

He warned me, in the early weeks of our acquaintance, of the difference between nostalgic and realistic love. If you are a nostalgic lover of Iran, he said, you love your own remembrance of the past, the passions in your own life that are intertwined with Iran. If you love Iran realistically, you do so
despite
its flaws, because an affection that can't look its object in the face is a selfish one. I observed Siamak's life, its constant negotiations and self-interrogations, and took note, tried to set things in perspective. I had to reconcile with
actually existing
Iran; fate had determined that in the course of 2,500 years of Iranian history, I would live during this blip, this post-revolutionary second.

Most of my relatives lived uptown, in northern Tehran, in quiet back streets of leafy suburbs, behind tall gates that separated them from the loud, polluted, congested downtown that was home to the rest of the city's inhabitants. As a rule, I am not the sort of person who sees valor in discomfort. The
Vogue
down the pants was pretty much my threshold. But from the moment I arrived, I saw very clearly that I would not see much of Iran from my family's privileged perch.

Much of my extended family had left Iran on the eve of the revolution. One of my uncles, an industrialist with close business ties to many of the Shah's associates, saw his assets confiscated, while another uncle, who supported the revolution, saw his appropriated as well. The latter uncle was one of the few to stay in Iran and, with a great degree of effort and caution, managed to rebuild his petrochemical company in the course of the next two decades. I spent a great deal of time with him and his wife, but among all the relatives who had remained, including a few of my parents' cousins and the odd great-aunt, I was closest to Khaleh Farzi, my mother's sister who had returned a few years before me. This smattering of family lived in various corners of the city, and I shuttled between their houses for teas and lunches, but when it came to choosing a residence, I decided to move in with my grandfather.

My father's father, whom we called Pedar Joon, lived in central Tehran. Still the family patriarch in his nineties, his house sat off of Villa Street, in
a middle-class neighborhood that forty years ago, when he moved there, had been a desirable location. It was near one of the few institutions the Islamic Republic did not rename after the revolution, the Danish Pastry Shop. Living downtown meant inhaling air thick with pollution, hotter during the summer than north Tehran and sludgy with dirty, melted snow in the winter, but it was worth it to be closer to the heart of the city, to Tehran University, to the cafés where Iranian intellectuals had sipped Turkish coffee and brewed politics over the years.

Though I hated parting with my long-cultivated fantasies, I began to accept that life in Iran was more a firsthand lesson in the evolution of a tyrannical regime than an ephemeral homecoming to a poetic world of nightingales. But there were enough moments of delicious poignancy that I could, for a time, postpone facing this reality. The first round of teas and lunches with relatives around the city were so atmospheric and idyllic, so overflowing was everyone's graciousness, that I felt like a character in a period drama.

An elderly relative cooked my favorite saffron rice pudding,
sholeh-zard,
and sent it over with my name written across the surface in cinnamon and slivered almonds. Another aunt mapped out the city for me, with the determination of Martha Stewart on a desert island, and introduced me to the family fruit vendor, tailor, candlestick maker. When I phoned up the fruit vendor for the first time, he greeted me like long-lost kin, trilling with courtly salutations for minutes. We're so
pleased
to hear you've come back. An hour later, the delivery arrived, and covered every surface of the kitchen with tiny mountains of my favorite fruits—bright green, sour plums; miniature, blush apples that taste like roses; fresh almonds in their furry green skins. The kitchen smelled like summer, and I sat on a barstool at the island in the center, enchanted with the abundance and the knowledge that generations of my ancestors had eaten this precise sort of apple, exactly these peaches.

My grandfather's house occupied the width of a short block, tucked inside high walls that separated it from the street. The airy rooms were a delicate, pale blue that softened the navy tones in the Persian rugs covering the floor, and were situated around a central dining room with a vaulted ceiling that reached the second story. A curved staircase, the sort designed for young boys to careen down, led to the upstairs bedrooms. Attached to the
front house was a separate quarter, where the maid, Khadijeh Khanoum, lived with her husband and daughter.

Khaleh Zahra, my aunt, and her fifteen-year-old daughter Kimia (like me, born and raised in California) had moved back to Iran a year before me, and were also living with Pedar Joon. We formed a motley, impromptu family that became the nucleus of my first few months in Iran. We spent most of our time in the atrium that looked out onto the garden, and the small sitting room downstairs, because Pedar Joon, a widower in his nineties, did not interrupt his tight schedule of naps and herbal tonics to entertain.

Small elements in the house were familiar to me from my childhood summer. I remembered hiding shyly behind the dining room chairs, during the commotion of a family lunch, and perching on the cool stone steps leading to the garden outside. But beyond the walls of the house, lay miles of alien, traffic-clogged Tehran sprawl. I rose each day to a lingering fuzz of disorientation, and the unshakable sense that I was a stranger to my surroundings. Having no real desire to admit this to myself—the agonizing possibility that I would feel transplanted everywhere, just in varying degrees—I focused instead on the steady supply of comedy our household offered.

Of all my aunts, Khaleh Zahra was the most unlikely to have returned home. In her years abroad, from Swiss boarding school to Los Angeles, she had converted to Christianity, officially taken Clarissa as her middle name, and married more than one non-Iranian in poofy church weddings. My defining memories of her date to childhood visits to her house in Tiburon, where she would paint my nails crimson, and let me play in her fur closet with the lights turned off. She was fond of sensational effects, and had decorated the house in all-white, retired all the fur coats save the white ones (which she wore even during the summer), and acquired a mysterious Eastern European husband with a regal air and romantic accent.

Into this world, she brought a string of miniature Doberman pinschers named Badoum (almond), all destined to die when they raced into the blind curve behind the house. After each dog's death, she bought an identical one, and without bothering to dignify it with a new name, simply called the replacement Badoum II, Badoum III, etc. All these years later, she was still slinky slim, still leaned back with the same posture, legs crossed with a cigarette dangling languidly between her fingers.

When she moved to Tehran, Khaleh Zahra shipped the entire contents of her California house, bedroom furniture, washer and dryer, so convinced was she that she would love Iran, and that Iran would love her back. The move tore Kimia from all she knew and loved, namely the mall and Britney Spears, and she was wretched with homesickness, with a nervous, prancing Pinscher named PJ as her only consolation. They walked down Villa Street together each afternoon, she with a foot of light brown hair hanging out beneath her veil, he with his tiny legs working furiously to keep up, enhancing each other's oddity.

Pedar Joon was a devout secularist who mocked religion with an enthusiasm most old people reserved for complaining about arthritis. But dogs he considered filthy, in the ritual sense; a ghost of religious sensibility in an otherwise profane person and household. PJ disrupted his peace, trotting into his room at all hours, soiling the august atmosphere of herbal medicine and law books with paws still greasy from his meal of choice, French fries.