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

by Majd, Hooman

  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.

  3

  WE LOVE YOU (US EITHER)

  Waking up the first day in Tehran has always been for me an extraordinary feeling. I don’t feel the pollution in the air, and I don’t really hear the incessant traffic noise; I only feel a comfortable sense of home. Waking up with my wife and son the first day of our stay in Iran was different. Apart from the fact that Khash wanted to explore the house where we were staying by crawling everywhere on the hard, slippery marble floors, floors that led to hard marble stairs, and apart from the fact that I had yet to persuade Karri that the water from the tap was quite drinkable, I had a to-do list that I had no idea how to fulfill. Sheep’s milk yogurt? American-style diapers? Nontoxic baby wipes? Organic nuts and raisins? I had to quickly figure out how to replenish our stock, and I wanted to get an early start, before Karri sank into depression about leaving behind a perfectly good life to live in an alien country, all for her husband’s vanity and his incomprehensible yearning for a motherland.

  Khosro lives in the house where he was born, an early-twentieth-century traditional Persian house, surrounded by high mud walls that hide it from Safi Alishah, a street in downtown Tehran, just south of the former U.S. embassy, in a neighborhood that was once upper class but is now middle to lower and very religious. Motorcycles zoom up the one-way street and occasionally down, identical cheap 1960s-era Chinese 125cc bikes assembled in Iran and sold under so many different brand names—Tondar, Rayka, Behrun, Shayda, Parvaz, Pishro, Tondro, and many, many others—that I lost track ages ago. They sound like 1960s-era bikes, too, and belch fumes like vintage vehicles begging for service or an engine overhaul. Bought new, these bikes cost less than a thousand dollars, with drum brakes, kick starter, and all; used, they can be had for the price of dinner for two at one of the fancier Tehran restaurants; and very used, for the price of a couple of kebabs. As such, they are ubiquitous, but nowhere does one feel their presence more than downtown Tehran, in the business districts, where they are used in lieu of trucks. They carry impossible loads through impossibly narrow streets and alleys that were never designed for anything but the horses and donkeys that were present even in my young days and omnipresent when my mother grew up not too far from where we were staying. In the poorer residential parts of town, a motorbike might be a family’s sole mode of transportation, and sometimes entire families ride on one, making for a visual spectacle as women balance their children and clutch their chadors simultaneously, and a horrifying sight on the highways.

  One can understand why the government makes available a vehicle that almost everyone can afford, yet it’s incomprehensible that a government so proud of its technological abilities and accomplishments persists in allowing vehicles on the road that don’t meet the very safety and pollution standards that officials themselves insist are important in tackling Tehran’s air quality issues and reducing its unenviable accident rate. Anyone wondering whether Iran’s trumpeted scientific progress is bluster or fact has to think the former, as I do, based solely on the motorbikes it manufactures. How hard can it be, I wondered, more annoyed this time than on previous trips, to build a cheap but modern scooter?

  Karri remarked on the cacophony the moment we woke up. “What’s with all the motorbikes? It’s worse than in India.” She had spent months at a time in Mysore studying Ashtanga yoga, which she teaches in New York while also designing and manufacturing her own active-wear clothing line. In fact, she always rented a scooter herself in India as her sole means of transportation. “It’s only like this in this neighborhood,” I assured her, “and we’ll find an apartment where you won’t hear a single bike.” But it was the pollution that seemed to affect her most. Her throat was already itchy, she complained, and it was only her first day. Khash, in his new pajamas, was black from the soot that settles on the floors within minutes of mopping them. And Khosro obsessively mops every day, sometimes twice. I hadn’t noticed that in my previous trips, having not ever gotten down on all fours, and it suddenly gave me a new appreciation for the plastic slippers that Iranians wear indoors. Karri was terrified by the amount of dust and soot Khash was collecting—just as much was entering his lungs, she said—and by his cheerful attempts to pull at every electrical cord and glass object on any table within his tiny grasp.

  “My throat is swelled up,” Karri announced for the second time, as we drank Nescafé, the coffee of choice in Iranian households, where tea is taken far more seriously. Even top hotels in Iran proudly serve Nescafé, I had warned Karri—almost certainly a remnant of the days when instant coffee was viewed as a miracle of modern science—but we’d be able to get good coffee at the numerous coffee shops that have sprung up around the capital in recent years, like the Starbucks knockoff Raees Coffee, which has a litigation-worthy logo and actually serves Starbucks coffee beans imported by individuals in suitcases (as do other coffee shops).

  “Your throat?” I asked. “Do you think you caught a bug on the plane?”

  “No!” she cried. “It’s all the pollution.”

  “And this is the good time of year,” I said. “Just wait until winter. But we’ll be in a part of the city that’s less polluted, I promise.”

  The noise from the traffic outside was now compounded by the screams and cries of hundreds of little boys playing in the courtyard of the kindergarten and elementary school, Payam Ghadir, across the street, waiting for class to begin. Payam Ghadir is a highly regarded and expensive institution, academically rigorous, but because of its religious leanings and its location, it mostly serves the sons of the wealthy religious classes, including a good number of mullahs, some of whom drop their kids off and collect them personally, highly conspicuous in their priestly garb to any Westerner and an exotic first sight for Karri. Incessant traffic noise, screaming schoolchildren, pollution, and dust, dust everywhere: this is the bristling metropolis on any given day, and it’s a less-than-pleasant welcome for visitors from afar.

  On that very first morning in Tehran, and well before we had become accustomed to the vagaries of Iranian traffic, Karri decided we needed to get a car to take us to a market she had found on the Web, a market that supposedly carried organic products, which she was desperate to prove existed in Iran. “Organic?” Khosro had said questioningly. “Everything is organic here. Nobody wants to spend the money on pesticides or stuff like that! It’s cheaper to let half the crop go bad than to spray it with chemicals.” He was
half right—some produce, particularly from smaller farms, is indeed “organic,” or close enough. But Iranian farmers do also use pesticides, probably some that are banned in the West.

  The efficient local car service, Safi Cars, sent a car around right away, a small Iranian-made Kia Pride, and I noticed the dismay on the driver’s face when I walked out of the house carrying a car seat, an object I now despised even more than I had in New York for having lugged it across continents. He opened the back door, and I set it down on the seat, realizing then that there were no seat belts in the back to secure it.

  “Passengers don’t like the seat belts,” he explained, as Karri looked on with a horrified expression to which I was soon to be accustomed. “The clips dig into their backsides, so we stuff them under the seats.”

  I looked at Karri imploringly, but her expression was firm. It’s our first day, I thought, and I’m not going to disappoint her. “Yeah,” I said, “but we need them for the child seat.”

  He shrugged and opened the trunk, dug around for a few minutes under the backseat for the belts, and finally pulled them through the seat from inside the passenger compartment, sweating profusely and looking a bit unhappy. Seat belts are mandatory for front seat passengers in Iran, and most people wear them (I even got ticketed once for not wearing one), but the idea that one would fasten a seat belt in the back is completely alien, even if a baby is involved. In fact, although car seats are readily available in the shops—at twice the price of the same ones in Europe or America, too expensive for most Iranian families—I realized that I had never actually seen one in a car, and I also soon realized that Iranians carry their babies in their laps. The way everybody in the world did when I was growing up.

  “That’s not going to happen,” said Karri firmly, when I opined that car seats were impractical in Iran, unless we owned our own car, and that we might want to leave ours at home. I knew better than to argue, but I was also confident that after this first experience, Khash would be riding in our laps. And I was right. Iran is like that. It makes you adjust, quickly, no matter your life philosophy.

  The organic market turned out to be a complete bust, a small store that carried very little of anything, let alone anything genuinely organic, but after some prodding from Karri, I asked the driver if he knew where we could get sheep’s milk yogurt. I had promised her that all Iranians ate sheep’s milk cheese and yogurt, which by definition would be less hormone- and antibiotic-laden than cow’s milk equivalents, but having never before shopped for groceries in Iran, I had been wrong. Iranians used to eat sheep’s milk dairy products, but times had changed, and the bovine dairy industry had effectively promoted its products as safer, more sanitary, and “better” than the traditional ones. Even the famous Iranian feta cheese, a staple for many families, was now mostly hermetically packaged in plastic tubs and made from pasteurized cow’s milk rather than raw sheep’s milk.

  The driver, though, knew of a labaneeyat, a dairy shop, nearby, where sheep’s milk products might be available in season (which we discovered later is rather short and depends on the sheep’s natural cycles rather than on the demand of the market). Iran, despite its modern supermarkets and grocery stores, still has traditional shops such as butchers, dairy markets, and bakeries in every neighborhood, although they are rapidly decreasing in number. But the idea that we could get fresh yogurt from a specialty store appealed to Karri. Early spring is when the sheep-milking season begins (another fact I was previously ignorant of), so I was ecstatic to discover that indeed, large buckets of locally made sheep’s yogurt were available at the shop, and at a decent price, too.

  The yellow-tinged rim of fat on the lip made me hesitate for a moment, and I asked the shopkeeper if the yogurt was pasteurized. Laughing, he replied, “Yogurt is by definition pasteurized, or at least free of harmful bacteria. That’s the whole point of yogurt, isn’t it? It’s safe.” Of course, I thought, somewhat embarrassed. When we arrived home from our last trip in a taxi with a car seat, we all ate the yogurt except for Khosro, who refused to have anything to do with something as backward and potentially dangerous as yogurt made locally by who knows whom.

  We hadn’t been in Tehran long before I was reminded that children in Iran, boys and girls equally, are considered precious, conspicuously so. Too precious at times, it seems to me: mothers refer to their sons as doodool talah—golden penis—which has only resulted in millions of Iranian men the world over truly believing that their manhood is gold, to be treasured by every woman they meet and even those they don’t. My own rather Westernized parents never took expressions of filial affection to that extreme, so I never imagined quite how Iranian society treats children until I had one of my own and walked the streets of Tehran with him.

  In our first few days on Safi Alishah, we had ruled out using our stroller in the neighborhood: not only was it rather cumbersome and heavy to maneuver on the tapering or nonexistent sidewalks of downtown Tehran—never mind getting across the joobs, the narrow canals that line Tehran streets and that once used to channel water from the mountains north of the city to residents in the flats and beyond—but it would be impossible to go into even a deli with the damn thing, given that entrances to stores were barely negotiable by single adults. No, children too small to walk are carried by Iranians, and strollers are an extremely expensive proposition in Iran anyway, purchased and used only by upscale Persians farther north in the city. Although we were proud, like all new parents, of our son’s percentile ranking in weight and height, it ruled out actually carrying him even a few blocks, so the BabyBjörn sling became Khash’s mode of transport for a short while. We didn’t know, of course, that baby slings don’t exist in Iran, or that even if they did, no self-respecting man would strap his son to his chest rather than just carry him, like a real man.

  The looks I received from women, but mostly men, were disapproving to say the least. Unlike Westerners, Iranians are entirely comfortable expressing their thoughts on children and child care to complete strangers. I caught on fast that walking down the street with a baby against my chest seemed unmanly to passersby, but there was apparently another concern on the minds of some. “Don’t carry your son like that!” one elderly man admonished me. “He’ll get a hernia.” Huh? My quizzical look encouraged him to explain. “His legs are spread too far apart, and you’re bouncing him up and down.”

  “Thanks,” I replied, walking away. “He’ll be all right.” Like staring, which is also perfectly normal and acceptable among Iranians, nosiness, or foozooli, is a Persian trait one simply has to adjust to if one lives in Iran. And other complete strangers, if not worried about our son’s well-being, felt free to marvel, quite sincerely, at his beauty, or to comment on how fortunate we were to have been bestowed this gift from god, some expressing their undying love for him and even begging for a kiss or a hug.

  Iranians’ solicitude toward children and their well-being is annoying and touching at the same time, but it doesn’t extend to two particular circumstances: while driving in traffic and in crowded situations, such as in the bazaar, where people jostle one another trying to move forward, backward, and into the merchants’ stalls. Karri refused to return to the Tehran Grand Bazaar after our visit the first week to buy some washcloths and to look for manteaus for her: she walked with both hands protecting Khash from the elbows and shoves of shoppers, and in the Friday Bazaar, Tehran’s main flea and antique market, which I ordinarily like but which Karri also refused to ever set foot in again, she faced not only rude and aggressive behavior, despite the baby strapped to her, but the admonitions of a young woman who chased us down an aisle in the searing heat and repeatedly told us, in English, that the bazaar was no place to bring a child. “Mind your own business!” I finally yelled, not for the last time on our visit.

  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 inhere
nt 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.