The Ministry of Guidance Invites You to Not Stay: An American Family in Iran (9 page)

He gave me a dirty look. “I was doing it out of kindness,” he snarled, “and I asked permission.”

“You can see that my wife is foreign, that she’s not Iranian and doesn’t understand Farsi. Can’t you see that a stranger rushing up to her child will freak her out?” I said angrily, then grabbed Khash and walked away.

I was furious, but also a little concerned. Getting into a fight with a religious man just outside Qom was not a good idea, not while our taxi driver was busy praying inside the building. As we approached the doors to the building, a family that had been watching glared at me. “It’s disconcerting to have strangers grab and kiss your child,” I said to the husband, a man in his thirties with jet-black hair, a finely trimmed thick beard, and a windbreaker, who looked very much like the Revolutionary Guards and the Basij—the volunteer ultrareligious militia, originally formed during the Iran-Iraq War, who in recent years have been employed by the Guards to crack down on protesters—who all seem to trim their hair and beards in the exact same style. His wife, under a black chador, pulled their two children close to her, as if it might be me who was the menace, and not the middle-aged man who grabbed my son and kissed him.

“He was just doing it out of
kindness
,” he admonished, emphasizing the word as he put his hands in his pockets and paced slowly. He shook his head as I walked away, but I wondered if he, and perhaps
his zealot buddies, would be waiting for us when we came back out of the coffee shop, to teach me and my wife a lesson in
mohabat
, or kindness, that he thought I didn’t comprehend.

The fact that everybody—even strangers on the street—would give advice on what our son should and shouldn’t be doing initially annoyed Karri, but ultimately it proved a comfort. It reinforced the idea that Iranians are obsessive about health and well-being. I’ve always maintained that Iranians are the world’s biggest hypochondriacs—after the French, perhaps, and Karri—and that they take not just love, but self-love and vanity, to extremes. Yes, life may be shameful; yes, we may not be able to do anything about the environment and the noxious fumes from our cars, bikes, and furnaces; those are realities that we refuse to take responsibility for, but why not be healthy, and look good, in one’s shame? There is almost nothing an Iranian won’t go to the doctor for, no fever that isn’t debilitating and in need of antibiotics, no pain that doesn’t require an X-ray, if not an MRI, and no pill that they won’t take if told it is good, and it doesn’t matter what
for
.

Pharmacies, all spotless and modern, stand on every corner in Tehran exactly as in France, and twenty-four-hour drugstores dot the city, for that emergency dose of whatever medicine one might need, plus every imaginable cosmetic ointment, cream, or makeup item, domestic and imported, required for primping and youth maintenance. Viagra and Cialis may be two of the most popular drugs in the wee hours of the morning, for they are sold without prescription and advertised prominently in every pharmacy, usually next to the huge display of condoms near the front door. Their presence came as a shock to Karri, who had not imagined open condom sales in a country that essentially forbids sensuality and in a culture that frowns on explicit mentions of sex. (Self-diagnosis is another common trait of Iranians, and perhaps of other hypochondriacs, and few would
think that they needed a doctor to write a prescription for erectile dysfunction.) The sheer number of pharmacies, and the astounding number of doctors, as evidenced by the numerous medical buildings in every neighborhood, sometimes whole blocks of them, advertising their practitioners’ specialties on signs outside, gave peace of mind to Karri early on, as did the fact that in my family we have doctors and pharmacists who obtained their advanced degrees in Europe.

That said, Karri also took to carrying an amulet to ward off the evil eye, as instructed by countless strangers every day—who would exclaim upon sight of Khash, “
Khoda hefzesh koneh!
” (“May god protect him!,” among the first words in Farsi that Karri learned and understood). Merchants gave them to her to pin on Khash, even as they implored us also to burn
espand
, a wild rue, to protect him (presumably in case god forgot, or was too busy that day). Later on, when we were well established as residents of Tehran, my optician, an Esfahani, actually bought some
espand
for us, perhaps not believing we ever would, and gave us precise instructions for its use, which I tried to follow at Karri’s insistence. Pre-Islamic Iranian superstition, as well as Islam’s acceptance of the notion of the evil eye, makes every Iranian bazaar or trinket shop into talisman and
espand
central, and they, along with the thousands of pharmacies, clinics, doctors’ offices, and medicinal herb stores, make Tehran a hypochondriac’s delight.

Our first days passed in a tumult of errands and outings and welcome parties, but most afternoons found me standing peacefully in the gated courtyard of Khosro’s house, sometimes holding Khash in my arms while watching the school across the road as classes let out. The racket of the morning was repeated then, and traffic would come to a grinding halt as taxis, buses, and private cars arrived on the narrow street to retrieve the boys, all seemingly desperate to exercise their lungs with the most polluted air of one of the most polluted cities
on earth, exactly at the moment when the idling vehicles pumped even more toxins into their little bodies. But in a remarkable display of street theater, the traffic jam is sorted out every afternoon by a man whose only job seemingly is to ensure that every boy is united with his proper car, and that the various vehicles then extricate themselves from the bottleneck at the school gates and go on their way.

A big, burly man in his late thirties, always dressed in a pair of gray slacks and a white or blue dress shirt with the sleeves tightly buttoned at the wrist, no matter the weather, also usually clad in plastic slippers or occasionally a pair of sneakers, he resembles an orchestra conductor waving and pointing an imaginary baton, then a baritone opera singer as he bellows instructions to the drivers and the boys. They mock but don’t taunt him and curiously seem to need no help in finding the right taxi to get into. Curious because the taxis are almost all the same, pale orange or green domestic models, such as the Saipa Saba (based on the Kia Pride, a car outdated even before its introduction in Iran), the IK Peugeot 405 in various guises (a 1980s-era vehicle still inexplicably produced in Iran), the Paykan (Iran’s original domestically produced car, a deathtrap that was finally mercifully killed off in the twenty-first century), and the IK Samand, a newer Iranian car that is often equipped to run on natural gas, alleviating only slightly the pollution crisis in the city.

Despite the similarities of the vehicles and their random placement in the queue, which could not possibly be the same as it was when they dropped off the boys in the morning, the children fly out of the yard and rush to their cars blindly, the conductor only making sure that motorcycles snaking their way through the traffic don’t run them over, and pile into the taxis that are often shared by three or four families—without a glance at the drivers, who all look the same anyway in their short Ahmadinejad haircuts, three-day-old beard growth, and short-sleeved dress shirts. Within fifteen minutes the school is quiet; the conductor, his surprisingly gentle manner with the unruly boys no longer on display, is on his own motorbike,
looking like a giant on a toy tricycle, and is heading home; and the street is back to its normal, relatively calm state of a constant stream of cars and motorbikes zooming by the house.

The noise from the school, early in the morning and louder in midafternoon, didn’t particularly bother me or Karri, perhaps because our own son now provides plenty of immature vocal accompaniment to our daily auditory experience. But the charm of the scene, which so vividly illustrates the ability of Tehranis to make order out of chaos, has eluded childless Khosro, whose life is still centered on the street of his childhood, and who forever has to put up with the din of traffic that barely existed even in his recent memory. He complained about it all the time, and even more about those infernal two-wheeled machines called
motor
in Iran, and still more about what the country, and his city, had come to. It was an early taste for Karri of the ever-griping Iranian, who incongruously laments change while rejecting traditions he or she views as backward (sheep’s milk yogurt, just for one example) and while deploring the persistence of the class structure that was the norm in Khosro’s childhood. “No one would ride a
motor
when I was young,” Khosro told Karri haughtily, “for doing so was awfully lower class.” Savagery and charm are in the eye of the beholder on this once-elegant street of mansions and homes and once-peaceful gardens, behind now mostly crumbling walls.

4
THE BIG SULK

Ghahr. Ghahr, ghahr, ta roozeh ghiamat, ghahr
. “Sulk, sulk, until the day of reckoning, sulk.” And boy, do Iranians know how to sulk. Sulking is a high art among them, and they do not limit it to personal relationships or dysfunctional families, as much of the world came to understand in the spring of 2011, when the president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the bête noir of Western leaders, went on a public sulk for eleven days. He did so soon after we arrived for our stay in Iran, and naturally it was the only talk of the town, in a society as obsessed with the dynamics of its internal politics as it is with enforcing social behavior. Ahmadinejad, like virtually every Iranian politician before him, had indulged in minor sulks before, but this time he went all out, in a power play that he must have known he was destined to lose. But then, Iranian sulking isn’t always about seeking immediate rewards, as we Iranians knew. And Ahmadinejad, the loser in this very Persian game of sulking, may have ultimately gotten what he really wanted out of his little episode.

What transpired to bring about the sulk was this: sometime in early 2011 (at the start of the Persian year), Ahmadinejad’s chief of staff, Esfandiar Rahim Mashaie—the bête noir (everybody in Iran seems to be a bête noir of sorts, whether to a domestic audience or an
international one) of other conservatives for his unorthodox views on Islam, social attitudes, and Iran-centric nationalistic sentiments—discovered that the Intelligence Ministry had been bugging his office. (Why was that a big surprise to him? many Iranians wondered. What did he think had been going on in the last thirty years of the paranoid, sometimes schizophrenic, Islamic Republic?) The deputy minister who informed him of this was an Ahmadinejad loyalist, while the intelligence minister, Heydar Moslehi, was a cleric, in effect appointed by the Supreme Leader and therefore loyal to no one but him. As the
vali-e-faqih
, or supreme jurisprudent, the Supreme Leader’s title leaves no room for interpretation, even by a rascally president. So when Moslehi discovered that a deputy had been giving information to the Ahmadinejad camp, he fired him. Mashaie, incensed, called Moslehi and told him that he could not fire the deputy and in fact should himself resign immediately, per the president’s order.

Here is where it got complicated. Under the Iranian constitution, the president is in charge of the cabinet, which includes the intelligence minister. But this is the Islamic Republic and not Switzerland, as I have been reminded, and when it comes to the Intelligence, Interior, and Foreign Ministries, he is only nominally in charge. Ahmadinejad had already infuriated the Supreme Leader, Ali Khamenei, by firing the foreign minister without permission a few months prior—presenting it as a fait accompli that the Supreme Leader had no choice but to go along with, given that he had so forcefully backed Ahmadinejad in the disputed 2009 elections and couldn’t really be seen to publicly disagree with the man whose election he had deemed a “divine” decision. This time, however—perhaps because enough time had passed since the elections and the wave of protests that followed, or perhaps because Khamenei felt he had to put the president in his place, if only to avoid setting a dangerous precedent where a president might presume he really is in charge—the Supreme Leader reinstated Moslehi as intelligence minister, telling him to continue to work as if nothing had transpired.