The Ministry of Guidance Invites You to Not Stay: An American Family in Iran (6 page)

A short while before embarking on our trip, we had attended a friend’s birthday party at a New York restaurant. As soon as everyone was seated, he had announced, only half-jokingly, that the party was in fact not in celebration of his advancing age but an intervention designed to persuade us to refrain from moving to Tehran for a year. He had insisted that it was too dangerous an endeavor for me, let alone with an American wife and child in tow. I had laughed it off, but now I wondered if his words had had any effect on Karri. To be fair, she mostly kept her apprehension hidden from me and anyone else who wondered about her wisdom in acquiescing to my crazy plans. Her family was certainly nervous and had made their concerns known, but they hadn’t told her to refuse to go to Iran under the threat of divorce. My own father, better equipped to understand Iran, implored me to reconsider. I hadn’t even told Karri or my father about being stopped at Tehran’s airport the last time I flew there, for I was almost certain that if I had, Karri would have refused to go and would insist that I never set foot there again, and my father would have threatened to disown me. So here we were, six or so hours away from Tehran, and Karri and I were equally nervous, for different reasons. I was uncertain whether going through passport control would be the promised breeze: perhaps the Intelligence Ministry officers had been lying, or perhaps someone higher up would decide to detain me anyway. Although I was not particularly frightened of another round of questioning, Karri would in all probability—how to put it—
freak out
if her first experience of the Islamic Republic was her husband being carted off for questioning while she tried to soothe a
crying baby in a country where she didn’t speak the language, didn’t have a phone, and hardly knew a soul to call anyway.

A typical flight to Iran is loaded with expats going home for vacations or to visit family, along with a smattering of actual residents of Iran returning from trips abroad and perhaps two or three non-Iranian businessmen, always in business class. Once on board, Karri checked to see who was drinking alcohol and who was looking at her, an obvious Westerner sitting in coach with an obviously Western baby, occasionally breast-feeding him. She, along with quite a few of our traveling companions, had wine with dinner.

When we landed, she adjusted the scarf she had worn around her neck to cover her head, just as most of the other women did. We followed the other passengers into the arrivals hall without speaking to each other, preoccupied with our thoughts and with keeping our son, who had been awakened at an ungodly hour for him, as quiet as possible. At passport control, when it was our turn, I handed over our Iranian passports—mine a few years old, and Karri’s and our baby’s brand-new.

The officer, to my relief, seemed as bored as they usually are and smiled when he looked first at the baby’s picture and then at him, in my arms, with a just-woken-up sulking expression on his face.

“His name is Khashayar?” he said, mildly surprised. “And he’s
American
?”

“Yes,” I replied. “We call him Khash, too.” (
Khash
, at least in the Yazdi idiom, means “happy” or “pleasant.”)

“What a fantastic name! It’s a real man’s name, not like what they name their kids these days,” the immigration officer said disapprovingly, referring to a recent trend among middle-and upper-class Iranians—ones he encounters at the international airport—to pick made-up or non-Iranian words as names for their children. “Can’t even tell from the name if it’s a boy or a girl!” He stamped our passports without another word, and we were officially in Iran.

My heart had raced when he had scanned my passport, but now I felt relief—
no instructions to report to a ministry, no questioning, and no worries
, I thought,
at least probably not, until we’re ready to leave Iran
. As we got on the escalator to descend to baggage claim, I could see my friend Khosro and my cousin’s husband Ali Khatami through the glass partition, and as soon as Khash’s stroller came through on the conveyor belt, I told Karri to take him outside, past customs, to wait with our welcoming party while I collected the rest of our luggage. I watched them greet one another through the soundproof and presumably bulletproof glass, a little horrified as Karri not only shook hands with them but also kissed both men, and Ali’s daughter, on both cheeks. Head scarf: check. Modest clothing and the obligatory manteau (a coat, of any fabric, that covers a woman’s behind and extends to the knees): check. Not shaking hands with and not embracing men (one of them a former president’s brother and someone who is carefully watched and monitored) in public: definitely
no
check. It would take time, I knew, for Karri to remember all the rules, and I suspected that she would never quite adjust.

As I slowly put each heavy bag on a cart, two extra-large carts actually, and made my way to customs, I started to worry anew. Each bag had to be unloaded and pass through an X-ray machine—the equivalent of a lie detector for one’s luggage—and as I received the assistance of a young man whose sole job is to help with the oversize and overweight bags Iranians always seem to travel with, I watched my wife and son with my friends and family and wondered if this had been a big mistake. Was I incredibly irresponsible, as my friend Glenn had suggested, or was I just selfish? I was a new father at an advanced age; had I given enough thought to the well-being of my child? What if his mother got herself arrested by the morality squad tomorrow for some unintended infraction? What if I got myself arrested for saying
something not to the liking of one of the many authorities in charge of the national security of the Islamic Republic? Looking at Khash through the glass made me panic for a moment. Had my years of being childless made me completely ill suited to fatherhood?

I had spent the first half century of my life—I’m not suggesting there will be a second half century—childless. It’s not that I was against having a child or children, although I did spend part of my youth clinging to the tired cliché that bringing yet another life into this shameful and overcrowded world was an act of supreme vanity at best and completely irresponsible at worst; it’s just that I never gave it too much thought. My friends had kids, some while in their thirties, others later; my siblings and cousins had children of their own, and I loved them all. I always enjoyed seeing them—really I did—and I could recognize the joy they brought to their parents’ lives. But somehow I didn’t see myself as someone who needed to experience that particular kind of joy. Having a baby is an act of selfishness, I thought when I wanted to rationalize my hesitancy, but of course it is simultaneously an act of supreme selflessness. I recognized that, too, but the idea of selflessness wasn’t enough to make me want to be a father. You can be selfless in other ways, perhaps even by contributing in some way to the part of mankind that’s already been born. Plus, as a perpetual worrier, I knew that worrying about mankind in general was probably a little easier on the nerves, having practiced it from an early age, than worrying about my very own little mankind.

Once we had our son, all those ideas went out the window, and worrying about my child didn’t seem a big deal anymore; it was simply no longer something to actively contemplate. The worry is just there, accepted, a new constant, like breathing, involuntary and not worthy of thought, for the rest of one’s life. But here I was consciously worrying about my son, Khashayar, the guy with the cool name, according to one government official, who like all infants was just happy he had woken up to his parents still being around, and who seemed to also be happy with the attention my friend and family
were paying him, but who had no inkling of what his father might be subjecting him to. The idea of selfishness and selflessness crisscrossed my mind, and I was suddenly sure I’d be condemning myself later for depositing my family in a strange country where the rules of the West did not all apply.

The water filters in our luggage, along with the baby food, the diapers, the medicines, and all the other personal belongings, passed the X-ray test with flying colors. The machine operator looked bored as he glanced at the see-through bags on his screen, and I wondered what he was looking for, if not strange-shaped charcoal filters and plastic packages filled with gooey substances. Alcohol? Subversive literature? I had magazines, as I always do, in my carry-on, along with my laptop, and Karri’s Kindle had books loaded on it, so that couldn’t be it. Alcohol, although banned in Iran, is readily available everywhere, so I couldn’t imagine anyone bothering to smuggle in a few bottles of booze. It remained a mystery to me what exactly would trigger suspicion at customs—except for weapons, of course—if not a solo man with six heavy suitcases and three carry-ons.

It was fortunate, in the end, that both Khosro and Ali Khatami had come to the airport. I had known Khosro was coming (we were going to be staying with him at his house until we found our own apartment), since he had insisted that with all our luggage we’d need the use of his truck. But not even his vintage Nissan Patrol could accommodate everything, so we split our belongings between his truck and Ali’s SUV and headed to town. I sat in the passenger seat of Ali’s car, with Khash, Karri, and Ali’s daughter Nasseem in the back, while Khosro and his sometime employee Ali
Amreekayee
(Ali the American, known for his love of all things United States) rode in Khosro’s truck with most of our luggage.

We approached the city on a clear moonlit spring night, speeding through empty streets, passing through tunnels, on and off overpasses and the highways that ringed and bisected Tehran. Garish neon lights everywhere illuminated fluttering flags on every bridge.
With twinkling lights extending as far as the eye could see, I turned to ask Karri how she felt, now that she was finally in the country she had heard and read so much about. “I feel like I’m in a cartoon,” she said. A cartoon? It was alien, yes, with the fancifully colored lights, the flags, the strange writing everywhere, and that’s what Karri, ever the visually oriented person, meant. But Iran, the country I was born in, a country I always thought of as sophisticated, cultured, and my home, reduced to a cartoon on first impression?
Yes
, I thought,
but that won’t last very long
.

International flights from Europe arrive in Iran in the early hours of the morning, usually between midnight and six, ostensibly for security reasons, but I’ve always thought it was to spare poor travelers from having to spend as long in Tehran daytime traffic as they did on the flight over. We breezed into town in the middle of the night, and perhaps what made the place seem cartoonish, beyond the goofy and garish neon colors or the alien alphabet on the billboards, was the speed with which we made turns, crossing one highway after the next and ending up on a narrow street in the middle of the city.

We were at Khosro’s house a good fifteen minutes before he made it back, his vintage Nissan no match for Ali’s late-model Toyota SUV. I had a key, and we went into the house, slowly carrying each overweight suitcase up a flight of stairs to the private apartment Khosro had set aside for us. Karri seemed relieved that we were in a comfortable home, but at the same time she was looking around for every possible danger to Khash—first the stairs, then the wall sockets, and finally every piece of furniture, especially the glass-topped tables. But it was time to put Khash, whose sleep had been interrupted by our arrival at the airport, to bed, so I left Karri to that thankless task and went downstairs to chat with Ali and Khosro, who had just arrived.

“So,” both of them said, almost simultaneously, “you’re here!”

Yes, we were in Iran, and while they expressed it in a happy, pleasant, and welcoming way, I panicked for a moment. Now what? I wondered. How would I even begin to organize our life in Tehran? On
my previous trips, sitting with Khosro in his living room after I had arrived from the airport had been an exciting moment—I would enjoy myself, knowing that I’d have no responsibility for others’ well-being and happiness, and that I’d probably be leaving just as I was getting homesick. But this time, and for the first time for me in Iran, I had no idea what to expect, and no idea how my wife and child would cope.

The panic subsided quickly, though, and all I could think, as I went upstairs to get ready to go to bed, was that we had done it. We were here, safe, and it would all be okay. It was Iran, after all, my country and my people. I was going to let nothing faze me.

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WE LOVE YOU (US EITHER)