Another voice interjected; this one had the distinct and musical accent typical of people from the city of Esfahan. “Dear Jason, the Great Judge is making you an offer and he never breaks his promises. Just tell us what you know,” he said.
“I have nothing to tell you,” I said.
“He’s afraid,” the first voice, the one that belonged to the Great Judge, said to the others in the room. “He’s afraid. Change his clothes and take him to the cell. He’ll start talking within a month.”
I’ll start talking in a month? That’s pretty over-the-top, I thought. There’s no way I’m going to be here more than tonight, and maybe tomorrow. Their job is to scare me.
I had too much working in my favor. The press ministry would be on my side. The foreign ministry would be on my side. President Rouhani was in the middle of negotiations on the nuclear talks that he needed to work. The Washington Post would be on my side.
But it was the first real moment where I thought, This might be worse than I think.
They led me out of the room where I’d spent the last half an hour being interrogated and down an outdoor corridor into another room, where they took off the blindfold and the handcuffs. It was even more confusing without my glasses.
We were in a small infirmary. There was a patient’s bed built into the wall. I saw cotton swabs and tongue depressors, a blood pressure cuff, and the thing with the little bulb a doctor uses to look into ears. There was someone there in a white coat—they called him “Doctor,” but who knows what he was.
They told me to take off all my clothes except my underwear.
They weighed me. They took my blood pressure. I was shaking.
They handed me a set of their version of prison blues. Light blue pajamas, basically. Pants with an elastic waist without a clear front or back, and a shirt with four big plastic buttons. They gave me a pair of flip-flops and a pair of prison underwear—darker blue.
Then they led me through a hallway and stopped at a door. They pointed in, and that was that. By the time I actually got into the cell on the night I was arrested, it was past midnight.
The cell was small, about eight and a half feet by four and a half feet; I could lie down completely in one direction but not the other. The ceilings were ten feet high. There were two windows above, with bars on them that let in light but no view. Those windows let me know approximately what time of day it was.
An aluminum door led to a toilet—a hole in the ground, as they are in that part of the world—and a tiny sink. The door had many things crudely engraved in it. None of it was in English. There were many rows of four lines with one line cutting through. Exactly like you imagine from the prison movies you’ve seen. Some of those sets of lines added up to more than a hundred.
There were two blankets and a dirty, crudely cut fragment of a machine-made Persian rug, in a Kashan pattern, with an elaborate floral design, on the concrete floor. That’s what I would sleep on, or try to.
There were two fluorescent bulbs on the ceiling that I quickly learned would stay on twenty-four hours a day. There was a fan in the room that made a crazy amount of noise. They obviously didn’t want me to actually sleep. It was extremely warm.
The door had two holes: one at eye level that they could open and talk to me through, and one down below, which, I figured out, was for food.
There was a copy of the Koran in Farsi and Arabic.
I don’t think that first night I slept at all. I was just waiting for somebody to come whom I could talk some sense into.
I sat, but pretty soon I started to pace. I ended up spending a lot of time in that cell walking back and forth. I was so confused, and so unprepared, but still optimistic that this thing, whatever it was, was going to go away. I would be out in a couple of days. I have things working in my favor. But I was very afraid for Yegi—where she was, what they might be doing to her, what she was going through.
I thought, I can handle this. I have to handle this. But I had a real feeling of responsibility for my dear young wife who had never been put in any sort of perilous situation before. Neither had I, actually.
The call to prayer always starts whenever the first sliver of sun comes up. Around four A.M., I heard it. During Ramadan, that’s when people eat, before they begin their fasting for the day.
A guard I couldn’t see brought me water and some food: herbs, a piece of cheese, a couple of walnut halves, and a single sheet of bread called lavash.
IN THOSE LONELY HOURS I THOUGHT ABOUT MY DAD, AND OUR MIGRATIONS IN REVERSE: HIS TO America as a young man, and mine back to his homeland.
We grew up on opposite sides of the world. Dad was born in Iran’s holiest city, Mashhad—or the “place of martyrdom”—home to the shrine of Shia Islam’s eighth saint, Reza, the only one of Prophet Mohammad’s descendants at the heart of Islam’s early split who’s buried in Iran.
Mashhad was then and is now an important city. An epicenter of Islam and a crossroads of people and cultures.
My grandfather Hajj Kazem Rezaian was an influential person in Mashhad. He was a stakeholder in a range of local businesses including a nearby turquoise mine. He also, as his forefathers had before him, held a key role overseeing the Imam Reza shrine complex, which today is one of the world’s largest charitable organizations. He and my grandmother married young and wasted no time in having a family. They had nine children who survived infancy and lived to adulthood.
My dad, Taghi, was the third of those. As fate would have it he was the second son. That, in Iranian cultural terms, meant a life destined to be lived in the shadows. But my dad wasn’t really a shadow sort of guy.
He had a car by the time he was seventeen, unheard of in Iran at that time. Although Tehran was filled with bars and nightclubs, catering to thousands of foreign workers and a growing westernized middle class, Mashhad still had a ban on what the Shia seminary still deems excessive: dancing, most live music, drinking, and commingling of nonmarried members of the opposite sex.
My dad was not a drinker, but I just can’t imagine him in a place where he wasn’t encouraged to show his feathers.
In 1959 Dad decided he wanted to leave Mashhad and continue his studies in America. This was an idea that had no precedent in the Rezaian family, but my grandfather was a forward-thinking man of significant means.
He supported his son’s dreams and tapped his connections at the U.S. consulate, who helped my dad, a strong math student, get admitted to Georgetown.
There was one last obstacle: my paternal grandmother, who didn’t want to let young Taghi go. Of her nine kids, my dad was one of her favorites.
“It will break my heart if he leaves, because he will never return,” she cried.
“But if we don’t let him go do you think he will ever forgive us for standing in the way of his dream?” Kazem asked rhetorically. “He is going. Let him go.”
With that Dad took off. First a train to Tehran, and then one to Baghdad. A bus to Beirut. Then a flight to Rome. Another one to London. And a final leg to Washington, DC.
Years later he would laugh about how far away he was in the beginning, only accessible by mail that took weeks to arrive. And then how easy it became to fly Iran Air direct from JFK to Tehran, only to have that route disrupted, along with so much else, in 1979.
He was miserable in DC from the outset. It wasn’t the America he knew from the movies. His roommate, the only other Iranian at Georgetown, was fanatical in his adherence to Islamic rules, chastising my dad for not fasting during Ramadan. Dad was indignant. He knew the rules; he lived in a place steeped completely in the Koran, which clearly states that when traveling or far from home fasting isn’t required. He was living in DC, yes, but it was not home.
Who the hell was this guy to tell him how to practice his faith?
Well, he was Sadegh Ghotbzadeh, a young radical who, two decades later, would become a top aide to Ayatollah Khomeini and the Islamic Republic’s first foreign minister. He would become involved in secret negotia
tions over American hostages taken at the U.S. embassy in Tehran.
He would also go on to be executed in front of a firing squad for supposedly plotting to assassinate Khomeini.
But this was before all that. My dad knew he couldn’t live with the guy any longer and he decided he was going home to Mashhad even if it meant he had to fast during Ramadan again. He was willing to admit that he had made a mistake. America wasn’t for him. He put it all in a letter to my grandfather, expecting Hajj Kazem to tell him to come home.
The reply took several weeks, and it wasn’t at all what Dad expected.
“You will not be coming home. I have sacrificed a great deal to send you to America and you will get your education. If you decide that you want to return after you are finished, Mashhad will be here. Wait for instructions in my next letter.”
Weeks passed before the next letter came. In it my grandfather described another “university” where several other Mashhadis were studying. He suggested that my dad go there, where he would be welcomed by a budding community of fellow Iranian students.
He packed his belongings, took the letter to the bus terminal, and showed it to the ticket seller.
“Send me there.” He got on the bus. He was twenty years old.
I can’t know for certain, but it’s a safe bet that my dad is the only person in history to leave Georgetown, knowingly and willingly, for Napa Junior College.
In Northern California he and his new band of Iranian transplants felt comfortable. It was a small manageable town with ample work. They were learning English and the community accepted the newcomers. Why wouldn’t it? They were all young men from well-to-do families from a country that was not only one of Washington’s closest allies but was also considered exotic and mysterious. There was no Islamophobia yet. No one in America had ever heard of an ayatollah.
Dad excelled there because he hustled.
On the weekends and over the summer, he and a friend would go to Lake Tahoe, where they found work as busboys. Two of them did the job of four in exchange for the pay of three. It was a good life, and slowly his urge to return to Mashhad began to diminish.
It was 1963 and he had completed Napa’s associate’s degree program. He and his crew moved to the Bay Area, some of them opting for Berkeley and the rest, including him, headed for San Francisco State.
He couldn’t have imagined then all that was to come for the Rezaians in the next half century.
3
A New Way to Look at Iran
During the months that followed Rouhani’s unexpected June 2013 election there was a semisoftening around the edges. A steadily increasing number of foreign journalists and their camera crews began coming back to Iran. University tour groups, the kind that charge exorbitant rates for alumni to travel with supposed experts, started showing up again after a long absence.
And so, too, did the outliers. Backpackers, hippies, and what I think of as specialized tourists, those people in search of unique experiences. Out-of-bounds snowboarders, ravers tapping the underground electronic music scene, fine-art speculators, and people trying to cozy up to Tehran’s LGBTQ communities.
Some of these quests are more obnoxious than others, but the common thread was that they were all part of a process of discovery. The unmistakable reality that Iran was “hot.” The latest it destination, which made every travel magazine’s “must visit” list in 2014.
Everything I had been saying for years about Iran’s being a traveler’s paradise was being recognized. Two years earlier I’d written articles in the Washington Post about tourism in Iran—its potential and the challenges it faced—and I was laughed at. Now, seemingly, the whole world was lining up to come to Iran.
I’ll be honest, I felt some satisfaction. Of all the story lines that didn’t fit within the old Iran narrative, I’d helped take one of the hardest-to-sell ideas and turned it into a trending story.
Zarif and Rouhani believed they’d made it happen. In fact there were so many other factors, and one of them was me.
In the early months of Rouhani’s presidency it became clear that the image of Iran was evolving. After the Ahmadinejad years foreigners, including journalists, not only felt safe again but were being wooed.
By the spring of 2014 I started to alter course, in my mind at least.
For anyone who wanted to accept things as they were, it was becoming obvious that Rouhani and the U.S., under Barack Obama, were trying to find points of understanding. Besides the nuclear negotiations there was the emergence of the Islamic State and the reality that Washington and Tehran’s interests coalesced in a way that wasn’t completely comfortable for either.
What I saw in front of me was a changing story, one that I could tell. At that moment, in the spring and early summer of 2014, I had the best of all worlds: permission to cover Iran from the ground and people in Washington willing to talk with me about it.
But I was also getting bored.
“I have to see what happens next,” is what had sustained me through the dark times between late 2009 and Rouhani’s election four years later. I was a newlywed and we were a couple with ambitions. It’s a natural progression for anyone, I suppose, although our variables may have been unusual.
We were angling for a life on two shores. Others were doing it, and it seemed to us that we were in as good a position as anyone to make it work.
Change, as always, was slow, but we knew it was coming.
One of the side activities that kept me engaged was introducing actual people, not just through my reporting, to Iran. Whether I helped plan a visit or just dropped in for a meal or a museum tour, it was part of my joy. Meeting Americans in Tehran was particularly fulfilling. So I started collecting those experiences.
At first it was a trickle. In the years since the revolution an average of fewer than five hundred non-Iranian Americans had visited Iran annually. And that included journalists and aid workers. But the numbers started to rise and in 2013, following Rouhani’s election, the floodgates opened in a way they never had before and admitted a wave of American visitors.
As the lone American citizen reporting on a permanent basis from Iran I was a natural person to seek out. It didn’t hurt that anyone who read one of my articles could easily contact me through the link at the bottom to my email address.
In 2014 there was a new group every week.
I met with several senior citizens who had been Peace Corps volunteers in Iran in the 1960s. I attended a lecture about organics by a blueberry farmer from Minnesota at Tehran’s chamber of commerce, and interviewed him afterward. I gave talks to tour groups comprised of World Affairs Council members. And I dined with a group of American and Iranian business leaders who could sense the impending opportunities.
Some of these encounters I wrote about and others just sat in my mind, confirming what I already knew to be the case: like it or not, an opening was taking place, and as is often the case, it was normal people—intrepid ones to be sure—leading the way.
But I wasn’t overly optimistic. Doors open and sometimes they close again. I had heard of too many Americans who were denied entry into Iran—like my friends who wanted to come to our wedding—and many more Iranians who, for no good reason, were unable to visit the U.S.
For me there were two things that became clear, though: Iran was not at all ready for the coming influx of tourists, and it was time for me to come up with a new and incongruous subject to write about.
I started thinking about food.
Whenever I visit a new place my research is never about the main sites or the climate I’m about to step into, but about what I’m going to eat when I’m there. I have chosen not to go to countries because I was convinced their food would suck.
With Iranian food there was so much to ponder. It was the ultimate expression of the country’s identity: varied, resource rich, uniquely accented, sometimes pungent, hard to translate, and often unsightly.
Persian food can be gorgeous and fragrant.
<
br /> But it simply doesn’t show well the way Thai, Japanese, or Italian food does. One couldn’t make “Visit Iran” posters featuring our most popular dishes and expect to entice people to come halfway around the world to try them.
Furthermore, Iran doesn’t have the rich restaurant culture that other countries do. Most eateries lacked imagination. None of the love and hospitality that goes into preparing a meal for guests to Iranian homes existed in Iran’s restaurants.
But suddenly there were people even coming for the food. I helped tailor two trips for food writers, one a half-Iranian American, like me, who had recently published a cookbook on Iranian cuisine, and the other a Dubai food blogger who led specialized eating tours of the Emirates’ many ethnic enclaves. We discussed the idea of doing the same in Iran. And as I’ve been doing all my life, I connected the two of them based on their common interests, knowing that there is strength in numbers.
Within days of those two visits something remarkable happened: I was contacted by a producer from Anthony Bourdain’s show No Reservations. They would be coming to do an episode in Iran soon and wanted to talk to Yegi and me.
At some moment, or maybe it was just how I was wired, I recognized that food was one of the best ways into knowing a place and its people.
In the case of Iran, as with every other matter, it was complicated. Iranians love to eat; perhaps the only two things they love more are shopping and feeding others.
The ancient tradition of stuffing guests became increasingly difficult for most Iranians during the extreme sanctions of the early Obama years, because people were busy figuring out how to keep up feeding themselves.
Iran wasn’t near a famine or shortages, but stomachs weren’t as full as they had been and that’s usually a bad sign for a country’s leadership. I used to joke that for many Iranians going to bed hungry meant they were only able to afford one skewer of minced lamb kebab in place of the ubiquitous two served in Iranian restaurants the world over.
No matter what the occasion, as is the case almost anywhere, food and the rituals around it are an essential component. Unlocking that knowledge can lead to deeper understanding.
Prisoner Page 3
