Together Tea (17 page)
P
eople crept and muttered quietly as they inched their way through the passport check line. Small women swathed in chadors appeared out of nowhere. Bearded men in army fatigues stood in doorways. Darya and Mina had exited the plane, going down the metal stairs that had arrived on wheels, and they smelled the dusty night of Tehran once again. They hit the ground, and fifteen years evaporated. People spoke Farsi, the night air caressed their faces, the hustle and bustle and busy sounds seemed the same. Darya smiled her high school smile, the broad, chubby-cheeked version Mina had only seen in black-and-white photos from long ago. In those initial moments, it felt like coming back to something they knew.
Maybe you could go home again
.
It was the posters that jolted them out of their giddy feeling. Immense pieces of fabric and huge rugs draped over the airport walls, cascading from staircase rails. Faces of the regime leaders, larger than life, looked down at everyone. Everywhere she looked, Mina saw them. The deep lines on their foreheads, the painted eyes and scowling expressions were far more jarring than the sight of real young men who peppered the airport in army fatigues, holding rifles. Mina didn't dare look directly at the faces of the guards, but it was clear from a stolen glance that these guards whom she'd dreaded years ago and who had featured in her nightmares for so long, were now younger than she. A few looked like teenagers. Mina recognized the uncomfortable stance of adolescence. She noticed acne sprinkled across one of the guard's faces, peach fuzz above his lips. The guard looked back at her, then looked quickly away, as if embarrassed. Mina almost felt sorry for him. But then she remembered that with a simple nudge of his rifle and a word to one of the airport bureaucrats, he could prevent her from entering Iran or keep her stuck there indefinitely. And then her pity returned to fear.
“Don't be afraid,” Darya whispered as a few women shoved them and cut ahead in line. “Just stay calm. They can't do anything to us. All of our papers are in order.”
How fearfully they'd left Iran, inching their way toward the passport officials, praying that nothing would go wrong. Now, here they were again, trying to reenter the country with that same sense of powerlessness and the knowledge that their fate depended on the whim of a bureaucrat. Mina prayed for the passport check man to be in a good mood. The barrage of horrifying images from the news had prepared her for half-beasts behind the airport counters, waiting with handcuffs and ropes to shackle returning exiles so they could transfer them to isolated torture cells simply for having the wrong stamp in their passport or for having a strand of hair sliding down their forehead. Mina tied her headscarf as tightly as possible for the umpteenth time. She knew it looked awkward, but she was unschooled now in the fine nuances that those who never left had surely mastered. She no longer knew how to walk with the correct mixture of modesty and confidence to show a Revolutionary Guard that she was not in the wrong.
She cleared her throat and rehearsed in her mind the short answers Darya had told her to give the bearded bureaucrat. Mina shook off the image of torture photos passed around by Amnesty International on the Columbia campus last month.
Darya nudged Mina. It was her turn at the window.
Behind the counter sat a girl, young and petite. Mina searched behind the girl for the airport bureaucrat. The girl tapped the counter and slid her skinny hand across. In her nervousness, Mina placed her own hand against the girl's, giving it, in effect, a mini high five. Realizing what she'd just done, Mina withdrew her hand, melting in embarrassment.
“Passport, please.” The girl's voice was matter-of-fact, louder and more confident than Mina would've expected. Her whole demeanor was calm and composed, as though she were accustomed to dazed former exiles behaving strangely in front of her window.
Mina slid her passport across the counter. Darya had renewed Mina's Iranian passport especially for this trip; her exit permit was clearly printed. Mina knew because she'd checked it five dozen times.
You are not going back there until you are sure you can leave. Curiosity has its limits
, Baba had said as he nursed his biggest migraine yet since her decision to make this trip.
The girl flipped through Mina's passport. “When did you leave?”
“Fifteen years ago. With my parents and two brothers, we went to America, to New York. It was winter actually . . .” Darya had told her to keep her answers brief and to the point. But she couldn't stop rambling.
“Do you also have an American passport?” The girl interrupted Mina's monologue.
Mina stopped in midsentence. “
Baleh.
Yes.” As soon as she said this, Mina felt she shouldn't have. Dual citizenship was not recognized by Iran.
“Can I see it?”
With shaking hands, Mina fumbled through her handbag and plopped the telltale navy blue American passport on the counter. What had she done? Would she get into trouble now? Her university's chapter of Amnesty International wouldn't even know to post her photo during their next campus demonstration for political prisoners. Did the girl have any idea that this passport was the result of years of hard work, endless visits to the Immigration and Naturalization Service office, loops of forms filled out at her parents' dining room table, and years of waiting? It was only with this passport that they weren't harassed at airports and no longer needed special visas to visit other countries. Did the girl know what she cupped in her hands?
Mina sweated under her headscarf. Her poor mother. From her peripheral vision, Mina saw Darya rock back and forth impatiently on her heels as she waited behind the yellow line a few feet away. Was she imagining it, or was Darya's forehead vein throbbing at diesel speed? Of course it would be.
The girl stroked the passport cover with her tiny thumb. Then she slid it back across the counter to Mina.
“Thank you,” she said.
Mina stood across from the girl, dizzy.
“Go on. Next!” the girl called out to the queue.
Quickly, Mina shoved both passports back into her handbag and almost tripped as she stumbled away from the airport counter. She power walked toward a staircase a few feet over and leaned against the rail to catch her breath. The bottom of a heavy fabric poster depicting a scowling leader caught on her headscarf and almost yanked it off. Mina tried to remain nonchalant under the watchful eyes of the guards.
She looked in the direction of the girl's counter and saw that it was now Darya's turn. Mina's heart pounded as she absorbed the reality of how much power that girl had over them. Darya said something, laughed, then made a face as if imitating a crazy person. Mina couldn't see the girl's face from where she stood, but she guessed that Darya had expertly switched into that quick intimate manner she had with other Iranians, joking and acting as if she and the girl were the best of friends.
WHEN DARYA WAS CLEARED, THEY
went to the baggage claim and then to the arrival gate. There Mina saw a group of people holding yellow and white flowers, some red carnations, a bouquet of pink roses. They drank from Styrofoam cups. A stainless steel thermos was being passed around. It was four in the morning and there they were, craning their heads, searching the faces of the arriving passengers. Then a few of their hands rose up in the air, waving.
“Darya Joon!”
“Mina?”
“
Een Mina-e?
Is this Mina?”
When Darya and Mina approached the group, they were engulfed in hugs. Mina was kissed, her cheeks pinched, her body squeezed in excited delight.
“
Mashallah! Mashallah!
”
“Would you look at her? That's our little Mina!
“Darya Joon! Mina Joon! May I die for you!” In her jet-lagged daze, Mina recognized Aunt Nikki's voice. It came out of the mouth of a woman whose headscarf was slipping, showing gray hair beneath. A woman whose face was lined, whose slender figure was now round and wide. Darya squeezed her sister tight.
A team of small children tumbled around exuberantly. Darya held her hand to her heart and exclaimed. “And you must be Arianna!” she said. “And you are Mehdi, right? Look at your cousins, Mina! Look at them!”
Mina looked at the row of small round faces, some of them missing teeth, a few of them shy, all of them strangers. These were the cousins she'd never seen. “How big you've gotten!” Darya said as she hugged each of them. And Mina thought,
But we never saw them when they were smaller
.
Fingers touched Mina's face, she was embraced by Uncle Jafar. Small black dots danced in front of her eyes. Maybe it had to do with the plane ride, the exhaustion, but her vision was blurred. Aunt Firoozeh was near her, her hair clearly dyed light brown, her gray roots showing from the front of the headscarf, her cheeks sagging below her chin now. She wept into a handkerchief.
A tall woman wearing a white headscarf smiled at Mina.
“Leila Joon! Leila-ye Aziz!” Darya hugged Leila.
Mina suddenly remembered Mr. Johnson standing across from Leila at her tenth birthday party, nibbling the tips of his glasses, his arm pushing against the wall near her shoulder. Mamani's wish to get Leila out of Iran.
Leila pushed forward two fair-skinned, hazel-eyed children, a boy and a girl around eight and five. “See?” she said as she bent near them. “It's Mina Joon. Here all the way from America!” Mina hadn't heard Leila's voice in fifteen years. Where was Mr. Johnson?
Then she saw her grandfather. He stood at the front of the crowd. How had she missed him? He wore his khaki suit, his pants were crisply ironed, his white shirt starched. He held a pink rose. He held Darya for a very long time, then turned to Mina.
“You've come home.
Omadi peesheh ma.
You've come to us.”
It was the same voice that used to tease Mamani as they bantered in the kitchen, the one that called out Mamani's name in the middle of the night, in his sleep, unabashedly romantic, on the nights Mina had slept over at their place. He looked at her now with rheumy eyes. She walked over and kissed both his cheeks. Agha Jan took Mina's face in both his hands. She could see the hazel eyes so much like her own mother's.
“We have missed you,” her grandfather's voice from long ago said. Only she heard it now, in the present. He was in front of her. “We have missed you so very much. Did you know that?” A few of the adults in the group stayed silent as they watched Agha Jan put one arm around Darya and one around Mina. Aunt Firoozeh started it. With the wet hanky in one hand, she started to clap, and the rest of the groupâLeila and her two children, Aunt Nikki and Uncle Jafar, the small collection of young cousins, and all the rest who had come there to greet themâbroke out into applause even if a few of them had to clap against their thigh, due to their other hand being occupied, resolutely and expertly, with that perfect cup of tea.
