The Ministry of Guidance Invites You to Not Stay: An American Family in Iran (8 page)

But of course she was right. Here it was, the unique beauty of contradictory
Iranian behavior: simultaneous extreme concern and complete disregard. My friend Khosro, cynic that he is, recognizes the contradictions inherent in Iranian culture and in societal norms, but he was convinced that the only reason that woman chased us down was to practice, or to show off, her English, as loudly as she could. And that, sadly, was probably partially true, because for an Iranian there is almost no greater contribution to a sense of self-importance and vanity than to be seen in public comfortably conversing with a foreigner in his or her language, English ranking highest. Oddly for an Islamic country, it’s usually women who insist on striking up a conversation with
farangis
(foreigners, from the root word
farang
, which once meant “France” but now denotes “anywhere not Iran”), even when it’s just to berate them.

The combination of traffic and children is a whole other story, perhaps the single most disturbing aspect of Tehran, to any foreign mother and probably to some Iranian ones, too. I had experienced, naturally, the city’s horrific traffic and, more important, the aggressive driving that makes it a requirement for any pedestrian to undergo a course on how to cross a street, but I hadn’t imagined that Tehran’s drivers—men, women, and in some cases children, yes, children sitting in their fathers’ laps and actually driving; one time we saw one as young as Khash doing so, with a wide grin matching his father’s—would not only be discourteous to someone crossing the street with a baby stroller but would actually in some cases accelerate, as if the child were an obstacle to be avoided at top speed or run down if collision was unavoidable. By the end of our stay, after almost a year of crossing streets at clearly marked crosswalks, often while a traffic policeman viewed the parade of cars refusing to slow down for anyone unless they flung themselves into traffic (as I had been taught
to do by Khosro years earlier), it was still unclear to me whether the drivers thought more points were to be gained in that unique Tehran derby by avoiding a baby or by slamming into him.

Karri, needless to say, was purely horrified. How, she wondered, could a people so polite, so gracious, and so orderly in normal life turn into Nightriders of
Mad Max
fame and transform Tehran, with its utter ordinariness and occasional beauty, into a dystopian nightmare of homicidal drivers and impotent cops? After a while, she developed her own method of crossing the street with Khash, a peculiarly New York method that involved raising her hand palm outward, as if she had the full authority to halt traffic, and yelling at the top of her voice, in English, as she made her way across. Always her screams would involve profanities, of the “What the fuck!!” and “Shit!!” and just plain “Fuck!” type, reminding me of Ratso Rizzo in
Midnight Cowboy
and his contretemps with a Manhattan cabbie: “Hey, I’m walking here! I’m walking here!” If only Tehran could be as civilized as New York—in the driving habits of its citizens, I mean.

It soon became routine: me trying to use my “pedestrian ed”—far more important in Iran, it seems, than “drivers’ ed”—and gingerly cross, holding my hands down low and waving to indicate to the drivers aiming for me what my next move would be; Karri insisting, with raised arms, on her right to cross; and Khash, after numerous experiences, thinking that yelling at the top of one’s voice was just something one did when one crossed the street, a habit he kept up long after we returned to New York. Fortunately he was too young to understand his mother’s cursing, but on the occasion now when he says something that sounds terribly like “fuck,” and we wonder where he could have possibly heard such an utterance, I can’t help but think he’s retrieved a distant memory of crossing the streets of Tehran in his stroller—and not from the drivers. In Iran, as in New York,
I occasionally would get into a screaming match with a driver if he or she actually slowed down enough to hear me. Sometimes my pushing Khash along forced a car to come to a complete stop, and I was often taken aback by women drivers’ vehement insistence that it was me and my baby who were the inconvenience, and not them and their cars accelerating through the crosswalk—they would even curse me as they drove by. Karri came to believe that women drivers, socially oppressed in many ways, act out their frustrations when they are behind the wheel, exercising one of the few powers they have in Iran. I tend to think of the behavior less in feminist terms; loving children and running them down in the street is just one of those Persian contradictions that is probably impossible to understand or explain.

One time, near our own apartment when we first moved there, a taxi with four women passengers was moving slowly, very slowly, out of a parking spot. Karri held up her hand as usual and continued to walk in front of it. The taxi didn’t stop. “Hey, hey, hey!” she shouted, as it almost hit her and Khash’s stroller.

“ ‘Hey, hey’?” the driver mocked at my wife through his open window. “What do you mean ‘hey, hey’?” he sneered.

“She means ‘stop,’ you
ablah
,” I said, using a word that emphatically denotes an idiot. “It’s people like you who make foreigners think we’re a bunch of savages.”

That set the man off. He stopped the car and got out, ready to fight, an occurrence unfortunately far too common on the streets of Tehran, where tempers flare at the slightest perceived insult. “Come back here if you’re a man!” he shouted, as the women in the car remained silent. “They
think
we’re savages?” he cried. “We
are
savages! Don’t you know that?”

I kept walking, now pushing the stroller, as he continued his rant, insisting that yes, we Iranians are savages, and how could I think otherwise? “Yes, we
are
savages!” he yelled, again and again, his voice fading as I climbed the hill to our apartment, wondering when he’d give up or when the women in his car would finally insist he drive
them to their destination rather than engage in verbal battle with someone who had married a
farangi
and had been foolish enough to bring her to Iran.

“Savages” is exactly how Khosro often describes his fellow residents of the city of his birth. He bemoans the loss of Persian
farhang
, the culture he claims we once had, lost forever in this impossibly overcrowded and chaotic, haphazardly expanding capital of a rapidly developing country. He still loves his hometown, more as a concept—the romanticized quiet and beautiful place he grew up in—than as a functioning, modern city whose more than twelve million residents all fight for a small piece of whatever it can offer. But unlike Khosro, I have little nostalgia for the city of my birth, and once established there, I began to feel that his sense of the place and the culture was not unlike my own (and other New Yorkers’) sense of New York, a sense that the changes we witness over the years are not happy ones, that a once-livable city is no longer so, and that new generations of residents have little in common with us, the long-term and older citizens. Tehran has changed dramatically in a short period of time, and the sense of loss for people like Khosro, and even the taxi driver who wouldn’t stop yelling at me, is palpable. Traffic, or dodging it and its attendant clamor, is only one element of Tehran that is disturbing to its residents and visitors alike; the city is also an architectural disaster: a hodgepodge of the monstrously ugly new and the gracious but deteriorating old—like Khosro’s house—lends the city an unfinished quality, mirroring the revolution itself.

The newly constructed high-rise apartments and office buildings—none designed to reflect anything other than the enormous sums of money spent—add to the feeling that the city makes no sense. It doesn’t, but nonetheless it functions. From the millions of automobiles that pour into the ill-suited streets and alleys and somehow
make it to their destinations, to the lush parks that the city has built and maintained and that my family and I took full advantage of every day, to the oddly clean streets and pristine water supply, it all does work. And the culture—a mash-up of self-deprecation, prescribed and proscribed behavior, a superiority-inferiority complex, and a Shia sense of martyrdom, prompting Tehranis to proclaim their fellow citizens, and even themselves, savages—endures just fine. It’s a culture not particular to Iran’s biggest, most chaotic city but applies to all Persians. Still, the paradoxes of Iranian life are on extreme display in Tehran, visible to everyone—especially to a couple with an infant in tow.

For instance, the cultural penchants for exaggeration and exaggerated behavior, the inappropriate-to-Western-ears expressions of love and devotion for a complete stranger, and the obsequiousness toward foreigners were quickly evident. We experienced them all from the doormen in our apartment building, who couldn’t let Khash walk by without picking him up for a hug. (One said, when he first met him, “
Ghorbooneh esmesh beram, khoda hefzesh koneh
,” which means literally “May I be sacrificed for his name, god protect him.”) The doorman of the
next
building down the block would run out of the building and grab him, lift him in the air, and give him a hug every time he spied us walking by. So did the shopkeepers whose stores we’d frequent daily, the people in the parks we’d take him to play with, and the patrons, waiters, and waitresses in our favorite restaurants and cafés.

At one of the very few vegetarian cafés in downtown Tehran, which had a hip, artsy clientele—women in tight manteaus and haphazardly worn scarves, men and women almost all in jeans and printed T-shirts—an older man seated at the next table with two young girls couldn’t stop talking to Khash, telling him how much he loved him and also how he wanted to hold him. “Can I borrow your
jeegar
?” he asked.
Jeegar
means “liver” in Farsi and for some unfathomable reason also means “beloved.” It was hard to translate for Karri, but she understood. I told her I know Persians like their barbecued chicken livers, a favorite street food, but no one has ever been able to tell me why or how
liver
and
love
became linguistically intertwined, foie gras notwithstanding.

Another time, outside the same café, near Khosro’s house and a regular stop for us, a young woman dropped to her knees, made a ring out of paper, and proposed to a curious Khash. He happily accepted the ring, but marriage was out of his league, I explained to her, and would be out of hers when it was in his. Another woman, no older than twenty, made us promise we’d bring him back in twenty years so she could date him, while a young man in a different park, who sat watching him with a notebook in hand, occasionally writing, finally mustered the courage to approach me and ask if it was okay for him to give me a poem he’d just written about my son. “I was depressed,” he said, “until I saw your son. What’s his name?” I told him; he scribbled a few more words on the paper, then tore some pages from the notebook.

I took the pages and tried to make out what he had written, slowly, since my Farsi reading skills still left much to be desired. “Thanks very much.”

“No, no, really,” he replied. “I’ve been depressed for a long time, really depressed. It’s hard, this life in Iran. But your son awakened something in me. I must thank you.” He left me to decipher his poem, waving farewell to Khash, who was busy stuffing grass into his mouth and was by now hardly surprised by all the attention he received the moment he left the house.

“Hands and knees on the ground,” it read,

Curious of everything, Smiling lips,

Golden hair and hanging cheeks,

Without a care for the miseries of life,

What a pure, delicate creature is a child!

Full of movement, full of happiness,

A child of humankind, I know

Maybe you’ll be the start of a new world …

Okay, it’s not Milton, at least not in my translation, but his gesture was sweet and, more important, genuine. I felt bad for him, a young man, like many Iranian youth, sitting on a park bench on a weekday afternoon contemplating life. Unemployment is staggeringly high here—government figures in the low double digits are widely believed to be supremely optimistic—especially for the millions of university graduates, and with all the social restrictions in place under the Islamic system, such as the prohibition on the mingling of unmarried men and women and the absence of any bars, there’s very little hope for them to have any real pleasure in life. Other than sitting on a park bench, of course, occasionally inspired by a young child, or by the couples who do manage to find love and sit together, furtively holding hands and stealing a kiss now and then, away from the morality police, who patrol everywhere except, it seemed, this one park that we frequented almost every day.

I struggled to read the rest of the poem. At the end the man had penned a little note, and signed his name. “I was sad,” it read, “so I came to the park. The smiling Khashayar’s playing around and his happiness brought a smile to my lips. Wishing everyone happiness, freedom, and love.” Indeed. Love to all. That was my Iran, and my Tehran—its warts receded just a little in the shadow of humanity.

Much later in our stay, the overly fulsome greetings Khash received led to a more ominous encounter at a rest stop on the highway connecting Tehran with Qom, the religious center of power in Iran, a
couple of hours south. (The road is well traveled by devout Tehranis who escape the havoc of the city more often for pilgrimage reasons than for any other.) As we were walking from the parking lot to the building, Khash and Karri hand in hand, a large, rotund, bearded man in his forties with his black chador–clad wife—signaling a religious family—a few paces behind, suddenly rushed over to Khash, bent down, and said a few words in Farsi. Karri shook her head, but he tried to force a kiss on Khash’s cheek, managing to get a peck in.

From a few yards away, I yelled at him, “Stop! No, you cannot kiss my son! Go away!”