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

by Majd, Hooman

  Life in a city like Tehran, with a population that has grown from less than three million before the revolution to over twelve million today, has certainly become more difficult than in the time of genteel manners, although Persian politesse, including the often infuriating ta’arouf—the back-and-forth niceties, self-deprecation, and faux-embarrassed apologies in transactions that involve money—is in abundant supply. It’s in the cabbies’ psyche—I have yet to have one accept payment without protesting that his service was “unworthy,” even if he had been complaining of hardship on the whole ride.

  Karri was aware of it too and always snickered when I’d get into an argument with a driver about paying him. But when she was riding in a cab alone, the ta’arouf was still there but far weaker and, she could tell, less sincere. Iranians aren’t stupid, I told her. They understand that you, the blond, blue-eyed foreigner with a bad Farsi accent, might actually accept the free ride, and although they instinctively pretend they’d like to refuse payment, they’ll make sure you understand that you have to pay. She actually received fairer treatment from cabbies than I did—they always seemed to quote her the correct fare, whereas I, after insisting on paying, would be quoted wildly differing rates for the same ride. If I demurred, the driver would shrug and say I could pay whatever I wanted to, always making me feel just a little guilty about paying him less than what he expected, especially if he was from a local car service and I might have to climb in behind him again the next time I called for a car.

  Is it the population and education explosion, unmatched by opportunity, that makes Iranians, particularly big-city Iranians, bemoan the dog-eat-dog culture that they insist has replaced their true one? Or is it the semi-isolation from the world economy due to an anti-Western phobia on the part of the regime and an anti-Iran phobia on the part of the West? Increasingly harsh sanctions on Iran by the West, ostensibly to force the regime to give up any nuclear ambitions, have not achieved that goal but have affected ordinary Iranians in ways that the architects of the sanctions may not have intended. Small businesses that in the past relied on imports or exports have found it increasingly difficult to stay afloat, resulting in layoffs, in everything from managerial positions to janitorial staff, and complete shutdowns. Fewer and fewer international or multinational companies are willing to invest in Iran or even maintain a modest presence there, again resulting in less opportunity for ordinary workers. Most Western consumer goods are still available, smuggled in, albeit with increasing difficulty and therefore beyond the reach of many Iranians.

  Inflation has always unenviably been in the double digits, but in the last two years—because of the far more restrictive sanctions that President Obama has been able to impose on Iran with the help of key allies—it has climbed to stratospheric heights, cutting the earning power of almost every Iranian, especially people on fixed incomes. (The creeping devaluation of the rial, the Iranian currency, meant that the dollars Karri and I brought were worth more almost weekly, but inflation, which could be measured just as regularly, meant that our buying power barely improved.) Beyond their economic effects on industry, sanctions have also resulted in shortages of imported medicines; even when medications are available, their prices are unaffordable, causing concern for any Iranian who does not have the ability to travel abroad for treatment, particularly for all forms of cancer. So to make ends meet—and certainly some of the difficulties have been a result of domestic economic mismanagement rather than international sanctions—Iranians at every rung of the socioeconomic ladder have resorted to practices that once would have been considered so dishonorable as to render one an outcast from society. Once a single hair of his mustache, painfully plucked by a lower-class dealmaker in the presence of a partner, would seal any agreement with far more force than the proverbial Western handshake, but today nothing so quaint suffices, and agreements are broken as often as they are signed, sealed, and delivered. Promissory notes are generally considered not worth the paper they are written on. Literally.

  In earlier times, dishonor befell a debtor; today in the Islamic Republic, writing a bad check can still land you in a not-so-nice prison, lending the society an oddly Dickensian flavor. Iranians nonetheless seem to be world champions in signing worthless chits and running up debts. But while some victims of bounced checks have given up all hope of collecting their due and seek vengeance instead, others wait for the possibility that one day the debtor might make good on his promises; for if he goes to prison (and it always seems to be a “he”), the debt is wiped away. Especially among close-knit families, where the very concept of a fraud perpetrated by one against another would once have been viewed with horror, waiting seems to be the only option. My own family was no exception, in 2011.

  My immediate family, meaning my parents and siblings, all live in the West, but on my paternal side I have a large extended family of first and second cousins, uncles, aunts, and their children and grandchildren. Almost all are from Ardakan, a town in the desert, but they have lived in Tehran either their entire lives or most of them. Even before she met them, Karri was aware of the fact that, their being Iranian and, worse yet, provincial in character, they would smother us with their love and attention. But I don’t think she was prepared for what family means to Ardakanis or Yazdis—from the city of Yazd, the big city to the village of Ardakan—let alone Persians. On our second night in Tehran, we were invited to one cousin’s house, and upon arriving with little Khash in tow, some thirty or so family members greeted us, all desperate to play with the newest Majd and curious about the foreign woman who was his mother. “That’s a big family,” Karri remarked to me, a little dazed from jet lag, from being in Tehran, and from the Farsi constantly spoken around her. Yes, I told her, and this is only half of them.

  My family members in Iran are engaged in different professions, from insurance and banking to politics, construction, and import-export, and there are even a couple of highly regarded doctors and surgeons. But one son-in-law of one cousin my age, who had been a teacher but had some time ago decided to become a real estate developer, perhaps to compete with other upwardly mobile Ardakanis, had been offering the family 30 percent interest on their money over the past few years, while banks in Iran were offering between 15 and 20 percent. Iran’s high inflation rate is the reason rial accounts in Iran can offer such rates—those rates don’t apply to the dollar- or euro-deposit accounts that have been legal for some years now. Whether out of greed or the desire to help a family member or both, many in the family handed over their savings to him, which he said was to be used for an apartment block construction project at a popular Iranian beach on the Caspian coast.

  Most of them, rather than taking the monthly interest on their money, elected to leave it to compound, raising their exposure should something bad happen, say, a crash in the real estate market. The crash happened, of course, a couple of years after the U.S. crash, and although it was not as severe as in some American states, selling condos by the sea was no longer the financial slam dunk it had been when the hapless son-in-law changed professions. He never let on that trouble was brewing, naturally, perhaps because of pride and because of that “keeping up with the Majds” concern of his—until two of my cousins needed some of their cash back and asked him for it.

  Wait, he told them, and you’ll have it. How long? A little while.

  He had also gone outside the family for money, and we discovered that he owed some five million dollars to various people, most of whom were not willing to wait very long to get it back. Between ourselves, Karri and I started referring to him as our very own Bernie Madoff, whom, to our surprise, everyone in Tehran seemed to know about. It seemed rather preposterous that someone with hardly any experience in either finance (unlike Madoff) or construction could amass that kind of debt; my cousin’s son-in-law couldn’t have paid what he owed even if every condo he and his partners were building sold right away, and at full price. Madoff may have figured that his scheme could last forever, barring a financial
crisis, and this fellow probably thought the same, although it may have been less a scheme to embezzle than the pure folly of thinking nothing can ever go wrong when everything does, all the time.

  As time went on and farda turned into pass-farda, the day after tomorrow, into next week, then the week after, I think it finally dawned on my cousins that their relative simply would not ever have the money to pay them back. Even if he did manage to come up with some cash, perhaps by selling his house or some land, he’d undoubtedly first pay outside investors, who would have no qualms about taking him to court and sending him to debtors’ prison. The family would wait.

  As they waited, however, relations between cousins frayed, and within a month or two some were no longer on speaking terms. The cousin whose son-in-law was the debtor was shunned by her sisters, even though she had nothing to do with the case and in fact had lost money herself, but of course she didn’t want her daughter’s husband, the father of her grandchildren, to go to jail. She anguished, and our visits to her house for lunch, which she insisted on when we first arrived, going so far as to cook separate vegetarian dishes for Karri, discontinued as she retreated from the family. By the end of the year, her son-in-law was in prison, courtesy of investors who were not willing to wait, were unforgiving of his bounced checks, and knew better than did his family that he would never make good on his promises.

  The despair of my extended family over their own little Madoff scandal was undoubtedly shared by the many other Iranians who are caught up in scams, bad investment deals, and the struggle to get ahead in an economy that doesn’t allow much room for mistakes. A big financial scandal, a $2.6 billion embezzlement case involving numerous private and state-owned banks, made news in the West while we were in Tehran—it was, not surprisingly, headline news in Iran for weeks—yet the lesser scams and financial malfeasances that are daily occurrences are not big news to anyone but those affected. The $2.6 billion case soon overshadowed everything else, even the political infighting going on at the highest levels of the Islamic Republic, to the point that it became the topic of conversation at every turn, an Islamic parable of sorts for everything wrong with Persian society.

  It even seeped into ordinary day-to-day interactions, like shopping. At one’s local fruit and vegetable stand, prices were rising—in the Tajrish bazaar, avocados ran to as much as fifteen dollars apiece, apiece, in the off season. But when customers complained, as they commonly did, the fruit seller—rather than apologize and blame everyone but himself for the sad state of inflation in the country, as he normally would—might retort that one shouldn’t complain about a few pennies when people are walking off with billions. “You’re from America,” one of my local fruit sellers, a man I liked very much, said to me after an agonizingly long bargaining and caviling session with a woman in an elegant manteau and Hermès head scarf, a regular customer who he said lives in California half of the year. “Do they haggle as much over there?” When I responded in the negative, he merely said, “I didn’t think so! And here they steal billions!”

  Two point six billion dollars, I heard again and again. If a taxi ride cost more than one expected, the driver might tell you to not begrudge him a toman or two when others were making billions. It was a staggering sum, those billions of dollars, to ordinary and wealthy Iranians alike. Even the young owner of the sole Bugatti Veyron in Iran, the most expensive passenger car in the world, with a list price of over one million dollars in the United States (and quadruple that in Iran, if he is ever allowed to title and register it rather than garage it in the tony neighborhood of Velenjak, taking it out for a spin once in a while), must’ve been taken aback at the sum of money extracted from Iranian banks with such apparent ease by Amir Khosravi, not much older than himself, and his associates. “A.Kh.,” as he was first referred to in the press, in keeping with the tradition of referring to suspected criminals only by their initials, had somehow, along with Amir Mansour Aria and, apparently, thirty other confederates, forged letters of credit that were accepted first by the nation’s biggest banks (the president of Bank Melli fled to Canada before he could be arrested) and then by other smaller private banks (including the one where Karri and I had set up an account), to buy companies, including state-owned ones.

  They accumulated cash on a level unimaginable to any Iranian, even to the Supreme Leader, whose own wealth probably compares favorably to the queen of England’s. (Being the ultimate authority in the republic for over twenty years has meant that even without dipping into public funds, he and his family have been able to benefit from investments in any business, state-organized and private, that they have chosen to involve themselves with, and they have had access to billions of dollars in unaudited Islamic charity accounts.) The ultimate authority ultimately decided that enough was enough and that Islamic punishment was due the criminals who had made off with such a sum. Except it was unclear who in the government—and the criminals must have had government connections—was also involved, and unclear to ordinary Iranians that a scapegoat wouldn’t be found to deflect attention away from the rampant corruption. Despite Ahmadinejad’s campaign promises to root it out, corruption had actually increased in the years of his presidency: not only among the Revolutionary Guards, whose tentacles reached into even more of the economy than before and without whose partnership virtually no large business could exist, but in Ahmadinejad’s own ministries, documented often enough but punished infrequently.

  The main perpetrators of the fraud, at least those not in government, were certain to be caught and prosecuted; perhaps some would even eventually be executed by an unforgiving and highly embarrassed nezam whose very legitimacy rests not just on Islam but also—in keeping with the notion of justice that it promotes nationally and even internationally—on its constant and consistent defense of the mostazafin, the downtrodden urban poor of society, people for whom numbers in the billions are unfathomable.

  In the last few years, an explosion of luxury cars on the streets of Tehran, cars that often cost far more than the homes the mostazafin live in, along with superluxury apartment buildings with prices matching Manhattan’s or London’s, has given the lie to that peculiar notion of justice; for it is impossible to accumulate that kind of wealth without strong regime connections or a strong proclivity to corruption. If a multibillion-dollar fraud was exposed in 2011, many reasoned, then what about all the frauds that hadn’t been exposed in the past or wouldn’t ever be in the future? They will remain a legacy of the Islamic Revolution, to be brought to light in the future either by a reformed regime or by one that replaces the current one.

  The issue of akhlagh, the Persian character, weighed on me during our stay in Iran. If it was true, as so many people now said, that we had lost our essence—as a people who valued poetry and beauty, family and pride, charity toward the poor, and honor in business, in politics, and in social intercourse—then what emotional connection could I have any longer to the land of my birth? And why would I want my son exposed to that akhlagh, if it bore no relation to the akhlagh, perhaps one I romanticized, of his forebears?

  Iranians opposed to the Islamic regime would often tell me that they were so pessimistic about the future that even if there were a revolution tomorrow to replace the system they hated, it would be of no use, since the Persian-ness that had once defined them was now lost, if not forever, then for generations. “How do you change these monsters?” a friend said to me, after a minor shouting match on the street over a perceived discourtesy, and by monsters he didn’t just mean the stranger who was the target of his ire. “They’ve lived for over thirty years in a system that rewards boorishness and disciplines graciousness; there’s just no hope.” Those once-upper-middle-class Iranians, many of them cash-poor and possessing far less wealth than the monsters—or “savages,” as Khosro described them—whom they deride, should be in the vanguard of a movement to instigate change, but they have seemingly given up on their country, even as they seem reluctant to leave it for good, as many of their c
ontemporaries have done, often with only the clothes on their backs. The Iranian penchant for hyperbole was alive and well, I understood, and although some Iranians, older ones usually, may not be active in any meaningful way to better their country, they will still be there and will contribute to changing society—a society that has little use for them now—when and if they are asked.

  My khaleh-Poori, for example, or Aunt Poori, as my brother and I have called her since childhood even though she is not a blood relation, has lived in Iran her entire life. She baby-sat me, even on her trips abroad, and she and her politically active husband were my parents’ closest friends until, after the shah’s return to power during the 1953 coup, the regime executed her husband. I try to see her every time I’m in Tehran. I was particularly eager for her to see my son during this prolonged stay—she was surprised I had one, assuming that at my advanced age I would remain childless—and to see how she would react to the child of a child she had once taken care of and loved. I’ve always been a little perplexed as to why she persists, a single woman living alone in Iran when she could easily emigrate, for her politics do not jibe with that of the clerics or their lay supporters, and her fluency in English and her education could long ago have provided her with opportunities and a comfortable life abroad in Europe, which she knew well and where she spent much time. I asked her, when she finally was able to come to our apartment after numerous canceled appointments and after I showed her what Skype-ing with my parents in London was like—Khash sitting on her lap and as well behaved as he could be, given that he’d starting walking recently and tore around the small apartment as if in a perpetual race—if she had ever thought of leaving Iran.