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

by Majd, Hooman

  “No,” she said, almost indignantly. “Why would I ever do that?”

  I suggested that perhaps now, after waiting all these years for some change and after the disappointment of the post-Khatami years—particularly the failure of the Green Movement—she might want to retire somewhere she could enjoy more social freedom and escape the difficulties of living in Tehran. Poori had in fact long ago escaped the city for a village in the mountains, but she commuted to downtown Tehran every day and continued to be gainfully employed at the National Library.

  She seemed genuinely taken aback by the question. “There’s nothing like living in your own country,” she said firmly. “This is my country—nothing else matters, does it?” She didn’t say it out of some misguided nationalism, I realized, but simply out of love for what she knew, even if what she once knew, perhaps even some of that Persian akhlagh, had changed. Perhaps her escape from actually living in the heart of the city was a way to close her eyes to the changes, behavioral and otherwise, taking place in her country, I thought. But she didn’t talk about it further, and we didn’t have a political conversation, other than her asking me about former president Khatami, who had once been her boss at the library. She wanted to catch up on family news and spend time with Khash and Karri. It delighted me that she had met Khash, even if for the one and only time, and it saddened me that he wouldn’t remember his father’s onetime baby-sitter. But her visit confirmed to me that whatever was happening to Iran and whatever the perceived changes in the Persian akhlagh in Tehran, Iran was always going to be the Iran I wanted Khash to know—frustrating, yes, but its real character wouldn’t, no, couldn’t, change. All is not well in Iran, not by a long shot, and few people I know would insist that it is, but provided the Pooris and other Iranians don’t abandon her, and persist in living through these troubled times, there is hope for the Iran we love. As long as they remain in their country, Iran and the Iranian essence cannot change irrevocably.

  Bringing Khash to Iran was a way to show him the sights, sounds, and smells of my country but also its character. I knew he would remember none of it, but he might not have another opportunity to visit Iran as he grew up, or as he entered adulthood, and perhaps when I was no longer around, he would at least know he had smelled Iran, figuratively and literally, just once. To add to my happiness in seeing Poori and to my sense of country being affirmed in some way, now that I knew Khash was in the right place, Poori, to my vainglorious delight, said she thought Khash was exactly like me, both in looks and behavior, when I was his age. But we’ll see what he remembers and who he becomes, farda.

  6

  BEATING THE SYSTEM

  Renting an apartment in Tehran is no more or less difficult than renting one anywhere else. If we were to arrive in London or Paris with the intention of living there for a year, without connections, we would scan the classifieds, check Internet listings, and visit a couple of real estate agents. The same is true in Tehran; the English-language papers are filled with ads for apartments, and real estate offices dot the landscape as they do in any Western capital. Real estate offerings are less present on the Internet, where a few searches brought up sites that were inexplicably censored. Perhaps the word bathroom is a red flag for the filtering software Iran employs, or six rooms might be too close to sex rooms, but not many Iranians seek out rentals on the Web anyway, preferring as they do with almost everything a more personal touch.

  Renting an apartment in Tehran for only a year, and a furnished one at that, leaves one to choose between living in what Iranians call “apartment hotels”—overpriced and not particularly appealing—and finding, through pure luck or an acquaintance, a decent apartment that doesn’t require a huge security deposit or a longer-term commitment. One way apartments come on the market in Tehran is for the owner, who often owns the apartment purely as an investment vehicle, to demand a large sum of money, usually more than two or three years’ worth of what would be the rent, up front. With that cash the owner can either take advantage of high interest rates at banks, or make other relatively safe investments, during the lease. At the end, when the tenant vacates the apartment, the owner is obliged to return the entire deposit, which sounds like a good deal except that in Iran just depositing your money in a bank can get you 20 percent interest or more, and if you are cash rich, other investments can bring returns of more than 100 percent.

  Much as the idea of living essentially rent-free appealed to us, coming up with that kind of cash was out of the question, considering that we didn’t have it on hand and, with international banking sanctions on Iran, it would not have been a simple matter to move funds from the United States. So we did what any sane person would do if he or she had connections in Tehran: we asked friends and family if they knew of any vacant apartments or had any friends who had apartments they might be willing to rent to us for a short period, without us digging too deep into our available funds.

  We had opened a bank account within a few days of arriving in Iran, at Saman Bank, a private institution not yet subject to U.S. or international sanctions, and one that shared a name with my brother—reason enough, I thought, to choose it over all the other private banks that seem to dot the retail landscape in Iran with the same prevalence as the banks you find on virtually every corner of Manhattan. Opening an account in Iran is not unlike opening one in the United States—you have to submit every identifying document you have, and you have to be an Iranian citizen or have a residency permit. Credit cards are not accepted in Iran because of sanctions and the impossibility of paying Messrs. Visa, MasterCard, Discover, or Amex through the Iranian Central Bank, or, if there was an alternative payment channel, of them even accepting payment from, god forbid, Iranians. So the bank debit card is an invaluable financial tool that allows one not only to withdraw cash from ATMs everywhere but to pay for goods and services and avoid having to carry wads, and I mean literally wads, of rapidly inflating cash at all times.

  The other factor making the debit card indispensable is that electrical bills, gas bills, and phone bills, and in fact almost any bill in Iran, can be paid at a bank’s ATM machine: every invoice has a bar code and every ATM has a scanner that will identify it and transfer money from your account to the payee’s instantly. Despite the ease with which one can pay bills, when we first arrived in the city in early 2011, Tehranis were tossing away many of them, particularly gas bills, at Ayatollah Khomeini’s mausoleum on the edge of town; they were protesting the sudden massive increase in utility bills since the Ahmadinejad administration did away with (as economists had advised for years) heavy subsidies for fuel and certain food items that had been a fact of life ever since the Islamic Revolution. Tehranis realized, as their bills came in, that direct cash subsidies, provided by the government to ease the pain of moving from government-controlled prices to a free market, did not offset the rise in prices, at least not in their city.

  Bills and invoices in Iran can be confusing to a non-native, and even I am at times discombobulated when dealing with the Iranian financial system, which I believe is intentionally obfuscating. It insists on having both an official currency, the rial, in which everything is priced, and an unofficial currency, the toman, which is ten times the value of a rial. When you are shopping for everything from a loaf of bread to the monthly rent for an apartment, the toman is the one you will be quoted, while price tags, if they exist, will be in rials. Karri simply never got used to it and would tell me that she paid an exorbitant price for something or another; I would assume she had been ripped off, as an obvious and clueless foreigner, until I looked at the receipt or the remaining cash in her wallet and realized she had been thinking rials instead of tomans. Or was it the other way around? Her full-mouth X-rays at a dental office, she happily announced later in our stay, had only cost $150, which Khosro quickly pronounced a blatant rip-off, but when I checked the debit card receipt, I saw they had only cost $15.

  One reason so many diaspora Iranians have traveled back and forth to Iran over th
e years, and that flights to Tehran used to be fully booked, is medical tourism, or medical go-home-ism: not only can medical treatment be much cheaper than in the United States, but it is generally considered to be at a level comparable to First World countries, for many Iranian medical practitioners received their training in the United States or Europe. Western drugs were also affordable and plentiful, but more recently Western sanctions have increasingly made those drugs difficult or prohibitively expensive to obtain, resulting in a slowdown of medical tourism where treatment is reliant upon them.

  While we were in Iran, the government actually proposed to reconfigure the currency, to lop off three zeros from the rial (not the toman, in case you were wondering) and call it something else altogether. The new official denomination would be broken down into ten units of a smaller currency, not hundredths like in Europe or the United States. Already—and to add to the confusion of foreigners—when Iranians talked about money, no one referred to the thousands unit of tomans, let alone rials: 5,000 tomans, for example, was 5 tomans. And if they were talking millions, such as the price of a car or a house, no one referred to the millions unit: a 120-million-toman Lexus cost 120 tomans. It was expected that you knew that a Lexus couldn’t cost 10 cents, or that a bag of apples couldn’t cost 4 cents, and that you knew the difference between a car and a bag of fruit, but it confused the hell out of Karri.

  I wasn’t sure that the government scheme would ever come about, or that it wouldn’t somehow turn out to be equally confusing once Iranians created their own lingo for it. In Iran, after all, many people still use terms like shahi, gheran (written “kran” in English), and hezar (abbreviated to zar), currencies of the Qajar era, pre-1930s, in everyday speech. Such as “It’s not worth do-zar,” meaning it’s not worth two hezars, a denomination no one actually knows the worth of anymore. Or, when haggling, “I won’t pay a shahi more,” meaning the same thing, but without either party knowing what a shahi would actually buy, although presumably it was pretty close to what a penny buys in the West today.

  I didn’t bother to explain this aspect of our currency dilemma to Karri, for she would not only be more confused but would certainly think we Iranians were completely mad or at least xenophobic to the extreme. Although the system is no sillier or more confusing than the old British system of pounds, shillings, and pence, and sovereigns and guineas, too, I’m convinced that the Iranian system, or systems, of currency are in keeping with the Persian character of presenting ourselves as a mystery to outsiders, particularly foreigners. It’s part of our allure, you see, like the veil that hides the stunning beauty of a Persian woman, the envy of the outside world. Right.

  Happy as Karri and I were to be armed with our very own Iranian debit cards, we never carried a tremendously large balance in our account. And anyone checking would have seen that our assets in Iran were extremely limited, given that we owned absolutely nothing and our credit was limited to whatever dollars we had converted to rials and deposited in Saman. My computer checking account app, though, unable to recognize rials, simply put a dollar sign in front of our available balance, making us millionaires several times over, a sure-fire way to get us investigated by the U.S. Treasury Department if the laptop ever fell into the hands of customs officials at an American airport. It looked good to me, but the rial amount wouldn’t have impressed an Iranian landlord seeking some cash to do business with.

  And we needed an apartment fast. Naturally, with an extended family as big as mine, two of my cousins knew someone who had apartments for rent: the owner of a chain of boutique hotels (the best hotels in Tehran, actually, a city not known for its Michelin-starred accommodations) as well as a number of apartment hotels. Mr. Bakhtiari also conveniently owned apartments in a number of buildings (if not the entire buildings themselves) in some of the chicest neighborhoods. Soon after opening a bank account and only a short time after our arrival in Tehran, we arranged to see some of his apartments.

  The third one he showed us, a stone’s throw from the shah’s former Saadabad Palace in Tajrish, was perfect: a small—okay, really small—one-bedroom in a brand-new building that he had built as an assisted living facility for seniors. But the facility had flopped: assisted living is a concept yet to take off in Iran, since the culture still demands that seniors live with their children, who should be perfectly capable of and indeed happy to assist them. So the building was now simply rental apartments. Each unit was more the size of a small hotel suite, plus a small kitchen, than that of a regular Iranian apartment, and they were probably hard to sell to Iranians who value space, but this one was okay for us. It had never been lived in, and the only drawback was that it was unfurnished.

  “Not a problem,” Mr. Bakhtiari said to us when we approved of the idea of living there, “I’ll furnish it for you.” Since he owned hotels, we didn’t think that would put him, a friend of the family, out too much.

  I inquired about the rent, a little afraid that it would be out of my league but that Persian manners—and the fact that he and I had been introduced by my cousin—would dictate that I take it anyway, and I was unsurprised by the response, but nervous nonetheless.

  “Nothing, zero. The rent is zero,” he declared, with a finality that seemed genuine.

  I protested, as any Iranian would, hoping to tease out at least a range, to no avail.

  “Move in first,” he insisted, trying to end the conversation about something as petty as money, “and see if you like it before you worry about that.”

  We agreed, but I was still afraid that, weeks after we had settled into the apartment, we’d be presented with a bill, or my cousin would, that we could not afford to pay. I explained this to my cousin, and he said he’d sort it out.

  We moved in and had been living in the apartment for a short while before we knew what we were paying, as my cousin had to finally threaten to personally move us out if Mr. Bakhtiari didn’t accept rent. How much?

  Well, he was willing to collect rent, but not to set a price. “Whatever you want to pay,” he said to my cousin, “although it’s absolutely not necessary.” That typically Persian ta’arouf meant that, in our own ta’arouf back, so as not to appear to be taking advantage of his largesse, we should probably overpay. Based on what a nicely furnished apartment in a doorman building in the northern stretches of North Tehran would normally command for rent, my cousin decided that we should pay approximately two thousand dollars a month. I hoped his information was not wildly optimistic, but regardless, Mr. Bakhtiari finally accepted after much protestation—without ever acknowledging whether the amount was satisfactory or unfair—and said that my cousin could deposit the rent into his bank account directly on our behalf. That was easy enough to do, since the Iranian banking system is fully Internet-capable, and wire transfers from one account to another across the system are a mere click of the mouse away.

  I’m still not absolutely sure if what we paid Mr. Bakhtari—through my cousin, whom I reimbursed later—was fair or if we took advantage of him, but we were probably close enough for it not to matter much. At the end of our stay, when we vacated the apartment, we said pleasant goodbyes to him on the phone, and he didn’t offer us a rebate. At least he had never asked for a security deposit: such payments were an absolute given in the Tehran rental market, as they are almost everywhere, but it would have been rude for him to demand or accept one and therefore terribly gauche for us to offer one.

  Once we decided on the apartment, Karri was eager to move in, not because she was particularly uncomfortable at Khosro’s house, but because she wanted to leave downtown Tehran, where the persistent smog, lack of trees, and dearth of sidewalks made it difficult for her to enjoy our time in Iran. And Khash, whose commando-style crawling—using his elbows and twisting his body along—elicited laughs and shrieks of delight from my cousins and the curiosity of strangers in the park, was getting rather more aggressive, but it was inconvenient for Karri to take him out much on the busy motorcycle-clogged streets around Safi Alis
hah. Still, I explained to her, I couldn’t very well call Mr. Bakhtiari and pester him about a move-in date when he had suggested we’d be his guests for a year, so we waited until we heard from him as to when we might be able to take possession of the apartment.

  Finally, after a week or so, Mr. Bakhtiari’s sister called me and said she’d be happy to show us the apartment again, fully furnished, so we could see if it was satisfactory and so he could know if we needed anything else. We were indeed satisfied and would have been no matter what the furniture—bright yellow leather as it happened, which, combined with the compact fluorescent lightbulbs that are mandated in Iran, did no wonders for our complexions but was relatively childproof—and arranged to move in the next day.

  Now we had to obtain three things that every nonpious Iranian, and even some of pious ones, have to have on the home front: a good Internet connection, a steady liquor supply, and a satellite television connection. But first, even more important and on Karri’s to-do list from the moment we landed in Tehran, we needed to find a pediatrician for Khash. A cousin of mine who is a well-known radiologist has a son only a few months older than ours, and Karri agreed that his pediatrician would undoubtedly be good enough for us.

  We had decided to wait until we moved into our apartment—Khash had just had a check-up before we left New York—but I made an appointment to see the pediatrician as soon as soon as we had settled in, taking a taxi the following day to the midtown clinic where he kept his office. The receptionist gave us paperwork to fill out, just as we would have done back home as new patients, and I had to beg her indulgence, and her assistance, in filling it out, as my reading and writing skills in Farsi were at grade-school level at best. The other patients in the waiting room, a few cute boys and girls, and their parents stared at this obviously foreign boy among them, perhaps wondering what on earth he was doing in a doctor’s office in central Tehran.