The Ministry of Guidance Invites You to Not Stay: An American Family in Iran

by Majd, Hooman

  There was no question of my staying an extra day now, nor even of spending much time with NBC, so I had the afternoon and early evening to visit a friend or two and then head to the airport for the long trip back to New York. If I couldn’t trust the intelligence officers on the subject of the reactor visit, I wondered, could I trust that I’d be allowed to board my flight in the wee hours of the morning? But they had admonished me to not miss my flight, so after saying my goodbyes at the hotel later that day, I went to visit a friend before heading to the airport.

  Snow began falling as dusk arrived, and by the time I was driven to the airport, it had turned into a veritable blizzard. Cars and buses made no allowance for slippery surfaces or poor visibility and sped along, defying traffic regulations and on occasion ending up in a ditch by the side of the unforgiving road or stranded after a pile-up. Just my luck, I thought—the Intelligence Ministry will blame me, and not the storm, if my flight is canceled and I have to return to the hotel. Almost all the international flights that night were indeed canceled, except for two: mine to Frankfurt and one to Amsterdam. When the plane took off, two hours late and after a thorough de-icing of the wings, I felt genuine relief: not only had I made it through passport control, but during the three hours that I had waited in the airport before boarding, no one had changed his mind about letting me out of the country. Furthermore, once I was seated, no one had come to drag me off the flight, as had happened to other Iranians on hit lists maintained by the competing security services. As soon as the plane leveled off, still in Iranian airspace, I ordered a scotch. A double.

  What is it about Iran and authoritarianism? Why, after so many attempts in the last hundred years or so to advance democratic rule, has Iran always reneged on the promises of people’s revolutions and reverted to dictatorship? Perhaps my optimism about the future, my belief that the country is on a circuitous path to an inevitable true democracy, was unfounded after all; perhaps we Iranians will forever simply replace one dictatorship with another; perhaps our very DNA condemns us to living in a society in which the absolute power of the state is accepted as a fact. I thought about it on the long flight from Tehran to New York via Frankfurt. Maybe I was more concerned now because I was about to subject my wife and child to living in an authoritarian state. Given my profession, it would be impossible for me not to be subjected to government scrutiny and perhaps constant observation.

  How utterly selfish of me! I had been privileged to live in liberal democracies all my life, first far away from the shah’s secret police, who had interrogated some of my student friends, and then far from the Islamic Revolution’s “guidance”—which was much more about dictate than about suggestion. In my reporting and research trips to Iran prior to the elections of 2009, I had been aware that since I didn’t have to live there, whatever discomfort I might feel would always be temporary. I had my escape, my foreign passport and my foreign home, and my stays in Iran were excursions, not a way of life. Although my family and I would still have that escape hatch after moving to Tehran, we would also be living as Iranians in a country whose appeal was, admittedly, more romantic than anything else. I knew people who had been caught up in the security apparatus of the state; I had friends and family members who had been arrested and had even endured long stretches of solitary confinement at Evin prison. Iran, I knew, was not quite the dystopia that Westerners sometimes imagine it to be—it could never be compared to Saddam Hussein’s Iraq or the Kims’ North Korea—but it was also unpredictable in terms of its politics and civil rights. My interrogators in Tehran, Mr. Bad and Mr. Worse, merely represented the long Persian tradition of absolute monarchy, of state or aristocratic control over its citizens; if the shah were still in power, they would have been SAVAK, or his secret policemen. And despite the mildness, the near placidity, of my experience compared to the horrors others had gone through, I again wondered if there was something innate in our culture that consistently produced men and women who happily worked to subdue free thought and opposition to their sociopolitical system, or in feudal times, opposition to what was essentially serfdom.

  During those hundred years of the nation trying to free itself from despots and despotism, each time, from 1906 onward, Iran’s citizens’ efforts were foiled by the machinations of either foreign powers or native despots, often disguised as liberators of the Persian people. Ingeniously, the Islamic Republic’s peculiar form of democracy has not only subverted traditional notions of dictatorship (there are still, even after the 2009 elections, few absolutes in Iran, as my own experience showed), it has also endowed its supporters with a sort of moral righteousness that makes them truly believe they are not just doing God’s work but serving the cause of justice and doing right, much as other ideologues, such as communists, have believed elsewhere. Perhaps that is the reason for the republic’s longevity, despite its vulnerability to an educated and intellectual class’s demands for change. That same class, arguably smaller then than it is today, supported the revolution against the shah, and while it is generally not looking to overthrow the current Iranian system by force, at least not yet, it continues to struggle against the authoritarian state it helped to usher in. (The irony of the Persian Islamic system—rule by clerics with unquestioned authority—is that Shia Islam, the sect to which 90 percent of Iranians adhere but a minority sect worldwide, was founded in response to the tyranny of Sunni caliphs.) I wondered as I left Tehran—my mind swimming, trying to reconcile my run-in with the Intelligence Ministry with my decision to move to Tehran—whether, given my fear of a flaw in our national character, if today’s Iranians ever succeed in bringing true change to their country and making Iran a democracy with freedoms unheard of, Mr. Bad and Mr. Worse will simply find themselves with a new master to serve.

  2

  TOUCHDOWN

  Flying from the United States to Iran is taxing under the best of circumstances, but when flying with an eight-month-old baby, it is an altogether different experience. Especially if one is traveling with enough suitcases for an extended stay, a Cadillac-size stroller, and a Barcalounger-size baby car seat; and especially if that baby is accustomed to organic and natural foods that must be transported in bulk to one’s destination, for god forbid that he consume what other babies do; and especially if his mother insists on bringing the water filter, weighing some pounds, along with its multiple cartridges, from our home in New York, where the quality of the tap water, just like Tehran’s, is boasted about by its residents (but not this mother, who believes that fluoride is a poison, even if only applied to the skin). I was, in the past, accustomed to the mild culture shock of boarding a KLM or Lufthansa flight to Tehran in Amsterdam or Frankfurt—it’s as if one were already in Tehran, okay, a nice part of Tehran—but my wife, Karri, wasn’t. She was nervous as we waited in line at Schiphol airport to board our flight to my hometown, surrounded by Iranians, the Farsi language, and women in various states of Islamic-friendly dress, from head scarves already firmly in place to shawls draped over the shoulder, ready to be summoned for duty sometime before landing. Besides the suitcases we’d checked, we had the stroller, a baby in arms, and as much hand luggage as would ordinarily serve my baggage purposes for a four-week solo trip. Karri asked me if breast-feeding in public was taboo in Iran or among Iranians abroad, for she would be feeding our son on the flight, and I had to confess that I didn’t know.

  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 wa
s 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), sinc
e 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.