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

by Majd, Hooman

  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!”

  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.