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

by Majd, Hooman

  While setting up an Internet connection that allows free access to information is easier than one might suspect, and easier than the U.S. administration seems to believe given that President Obama and Secretary Clinton often mentioned the “cyber curtain” that exists in Iran, obtaining a good source of liquor is easy, too. A visitor may be forgiven for thinking that everyone drinks in the Islamic Republic, since there seems to be no shortage of alcohol or of entrepreneurial suppliers, but of course it is only in the big cities, and among the more secular classes, that drinking is a regular pastime. Liquor comes into Iran via a number of sources: across the borders from Turkey, Iraqi Kurdistan, Azerbaijan, Armenia, or in small boats from the Persian Gulf countries. Iran’s Christian (mostly Armenian), Zoroastrian, and Jewish minorities can legally manufacture liquor for their own use, but they are technically prohibited from selling it to their Muslim compatriots or even serving it to them. Naturally, that doesn’t stop some in the community, mostly Armenians, from entering the rather lucrative and easy business of selling aragh, the traditional Persian vodka distilled from raisins and affectionately known as “dog sweat,” and occasionally homemade red wine to customers they know, either through a personal recommendation or a genuine friendship. I needed a good supply of both foreign spirits and the Iranian one, which is far cheaper than imported bootleg whiskey or vodka and which I rather like. A year or so in Tehran, a city with no bars, meant evenings at home mostly, drink in hand.

  As with almost everything illegal anywhere, one has to ask friends and acquaintances for a connection to a supplier. One friend had told me to stay away from foreign liquor—even though it looked, smelled, and sometimes tasted like the real thing, it was inevitably fake, produced in the mountains of Iraqi Kurdistan or in Turkey using “essences” of the spirit mixed with alcohol and water. “How can there be more Dewar’s here than in Scotland?” he asked. “Or more Johnnie Walker? You’ll get a bad hangover if you drink that shit.” He himself stuck to good old Iranian dog sweat, which he happily decanted out of five-gallon drums into plastic one-liter Sprite bottles for me, and which I transported home, a little uncomfortably, in the front seat of a taxi, sweating as much as the dog in the bottle whenever we drove past leering Basij patrols under the overpasses.

  But I wanted some whiskey, too, and I thought Karri would like the occasional vodka, seeing as she was unlikely to get much drinkable wine. (Beer, although available almost as widely as spirits, is not as popular in Iran, for it doesn’t offer the same bang for the buck, or thwack for the toman, as spirits do, even though it is just as difficult to transport across borders. And since nonalcoholic beer is sold in every deli and supermarket in Iran, adding an ounce or two of aragh to the brew makes for an easy, cheap, and passable beer.)

  So another friend introduced me to his dealer, a youngish man who drove up to an apartment building where we were having lunch one day and called us. We went into the busy street, where he double-parked his old Peugeot and opened the trunk. A few cases of whiskey and vodka, some open, were in view, and I asked for a couple of bottles, Dewar’s and Absolut, handing over the equivalent of about fifty dollars. He removed them from the cases and put them in a black plastic bag.

  That was his only nod to discretion in an otherwise blatantly illegal act that could get him years in prison and me a good lashing with a whip if a policeman, or worse, the Gasht-e Ershad, the infamous morality patrol, drove by at that moment. I had always had a drink or two, or more, when visiting Tehran over the years, courtesy of friends whose home bars seemed much better stocked than mine in New York, but the act of buying liquor myself, and the thought of making it a regular habit, was a little disconcerting. A bit thrilling, too, I’ll admit—not unlike how I felt buying pot in my college days.

  Karri, perhaps influenced by our friend who insisted all bootleg liquor in Iran is fake, declared my bottles to also be so after taking her first sips. And she’s not even a whiskey or vodka drinker. (To be fair, however, she was, during her acting and modeling days, a bartender at a couple of New York bars, one of which is where we actually met, and she is more familiar with spirits and cocktails than I’ll ever be.) Fake or not, the Scotch tasted fine to me, and the vodka no different from what I’ve had before, but I decided that Karri and my friend were probably right, and that drinking something that could be even more poisonous than the real stuff was probably unwise. We determined that I would only buy the real deal, if I could find it, or else we’d stick to Iranian martinis—dog sweat and whatever fresh juice was available in season. Vermouth, absent in Iran and probably considered pointless anyway, was out of the question.

  A friend of mine who drinks, chain-smokes cigarettes, and uses opium with abandon told me he had a contact who could deliver genuine spirits, specializing in high-end European vodkas. (Oddly, it’s almost impossible to get Russian vodka in Iran, even fake, when Iran shares a border with a number of former Soviet republics and is on friendly terms with Russia.) “They’re expensive,” he said, “but I promise it’s the real stuff. It’s the only thing I drink.” I asked if I could share his contact, and he said, matter-of-factly, no. “He doesn’t trust anyone and prefers to deal with as few people as possible.” To me, that meant the customer had to be connected to government, but my friend said he’d be happy to order whatever I wanted. I said I’d buy whatever was genuine.

  The next time I saw him, he took me into his den, opened a closet and then a huge safe inside, and said I should take whatever I wanted. He had a price list in his hand. From among the thirty or so different bottles, I chose a Scandinavian vodka—not the unexceptional Absolut that is readily available from any dealer—and paid double what it would cost outside Iran, also double what I could have paid if I had been less concerned about its provenance. Back home, Karri declared it genuine the minute she observed me unscrew the cap. “It doesn’t have the shot measure pourer built in, like all the other liquor in Iran,” she said. “It must be real.”

  As easy as buying liquor is in any big Iranian city, it’s even easier to buy bootleg movies on DVD. Along with watching satellite television, watching DVDs is a favorite (illegal) pastime for many Iranians. What is legal and sold at every newsstand tends to be Iranian films that have satisfied the censors or popular television series, so for foreign films one is obliged to turn to the black market. Small shops in almost every mall carry foreign films, below or above the counter, and every day street vendors lay out their wares—the latest Hollywood hits—openly on pavements to entice passersby; if one lingers for longer than a few seconds, they’ll produce stacks of DVDs from a bag or backpack.

  In our neighborhood, one young man could be found outside a shoe store and near a famous ice-cream parlor and an ash joint (a soup restaurant not unlike the Seinfeld Soup Nazi’s in both look and the attitudes of the servers) on the northern end of Vali Asr every day at around six in the evening. At that moment strollers out for air on the tree-lined boulevard, evening shoppers, and ice-cream or soup aficionados, depending on the season, would be out in force. Conveniently, this young man was also across the street from a small park where we would take Khash for his afternoon constitutional, and on our return home we would stop to check if he had any new films we hadn’t yet seen.

  The DVDs were not, naturally, originals—they were always copies made from one original smuggled into Iran, or sometimes they were downloaded from the Internet. I didn’t want to buy pardeh-ee films, literally “curtain-like,” which were films shot in a theater with a video camera; so the dealer, who like all Iranians was fascinated by and taken with Khash and my American wife, would warn me off certain titles. “These are nines,” he’d say, taking out a stack from his backpack, meaning they were direct digital copies of originals and therefore watchable. I wondered why he didn’t say they were tens, but I suppose he was trying for honesty with a customer he hoped to keep—I’d told him we’d be living in Iran for a while. He wouldn’t claim his products to be quite perfect copies, even though technically they
were.

  But our man often seemed to go AWOL, not answering his cell phone for a few days, leading us to wonder if he’d been busted. Then I would venture farther south on Vali Asr to Vanak Square, where another DVD seller would assure me that although his prices were higher than others, a little over a dollar rather than a little less, he could guarantee that all his films were nines. Not tens? No: nines.

  I would buy as many films as possible at one time, never quite sure if our dealers would disappear or be arrested, but they remained a relatively regular presence—we’d usually see them on the late afternoon walk from the park to our apartment. We’d also stop for fresh hot bread at the bakery, which Khash would get a start on nibbling, and whatever groceries we’d missed buying earlier in the day. We returned to the United States having seen every single film of interest that was released in 2010 and even 2011, even a few pardeh-ee ones, new releases that we just couldn’t resist.

  Films were an accompaniment to our satellite viewing, limited as that was to the BBC for news, or the Fashion Channel for amusement, since our satellite guy, who expertly connected the receiver and set up the channels, didn’t have the codes for the pay movie stations, or so he said, and we’d have to get someone else in to unlock them. For another hefty fee, presumably. Satellite installers are very much like the cable guy in the United States, if not the actual character played by Jim Carrey in The Cable Guy. Highly professional and technical wizards, they can install a dish, set up a box, and show you how it all works in minutes, but of course they prefer to take hours, both to validate the amount they charge (for no Iranian would pay their rates if the job seemed a simple matter) and to pontificate on and carp about everything from the government to the state of the world.

  Our cable, excuse me, satellite guy took an immediate liking to Khash, who played with him on the little terrace outside our living room in his brand-new ro-ro-ak, a child’s rolling walker, while the technician smoked and tut-tutted to me about the miserable state of the economy. He’d disappear onto the roof from time to time, claiming he had to adjust the satellite dish, but I suspect he was just taking the opportunity to waste time and perhaps make a few phone calls on one of the two cell phones he carried. He was curious, though, about this family from New York who had decided to live in Iran, and his friendliness and familiarity almost made me think he’d ask to stay for dinner, although I knew an Iranian could never be so bold.

  Our building, like many others in Tehran, actually already had a couple of satellite dishes on the roof, and all he had to do was connect one to our TV. But in the hours that seemed to take, he told me everything about his family, asked everything about mine, and complained about his life—the life of a tradesman whose trade is illegal. “Just on the drive here,” he said, “I was stuck on Modaress [highway], and a motorcycle drove up, and the driver peered at my electronic equipment in the backseat. So he was a Basij, I figured, but what the hell is their problem? I mean, he wants to harass me? What, am I not supposed to work? Why, is it my problem that everyone wants foreign TV? Go fix Iranian TV, and then I won’t be necessary!”

  He went on and on about the government, about the media, and about the Gasht-e Ershad patrols, which were much more widespread in 2011 than ever before. “And they harass women for bad hijab?” he said. “Bad TV and bad hijab. Like our country doesn’t have other problems. What is this place coming to? You’re lucky you’re only here for a while, but god knows why you’re here at all, when you could be in New York of all places. New York!” He left a cell phone number when he finished, and I suspected he wanted me to call, but our satellite always seem to work, and I never did.

  The Gasht-e Ershad he complained about, as so many other Iranians did, even very religious ones, had always been somewhat invisible to me in my previous, much shorter visits to Iran. Recognizing them by the minivans they drive and their patrol car escorts, I had seen them only occasionally, and no one I knew thought of them as much more than a minor annoyance. Their job, of course, is to stop women who are mal-veiled (a wonderful and purely Iranian term). They also stop men who are inappropriately dressed and groomed, but their primary targets are women. Often they will only issue a warning, but they can also haul their victims away to a police station, where the offending woman must pay a fine and promise to never dress that way ever again. Like all Iranians, I’ve had friends and family picked up in the past and family members stopped while driving, but the frequency of the morality squad patrols decreased significantly during President Khatami’s terms in office, picked up under Ahmadinejad’s first term, and then significantly increased in the past two years. While the squads—overseen by the national police—are most visible at the start of spring, when the weather turns warmer and heavier coats and scarves are shed, in 2011 the seventy thousand men and women assigned to the gasht were a ubiquitous presence on Tehran streets, especially in North Tehran, no matter the weather. (While we were staying downtown, we didn’t see any patrols, and given that we were in a religious and conservative neighborhood, south of Vanak Square—the unofficial line dividing North Tehran from downtown and points south—the cops would have had little to do there.)

  It probably didn’t help that Ahmadinejad had come out publicly against the morality patrols, for it seemed that in his later years as president and because of his tiff with the clerical leadership—and his big sulk of 2011—everything he was against, at least from a social and religious aspect, the authorities were for. While we were in Tehran, he complained that the morality squads harassed the youth unnecessarily and argued that, aside from the issue of hijab, the state shouldn’t care if boys and girls hung out together, something the patrols were also on the lookout for. Music to the ears of the very people who voted against him in 2009, but no one was under any illusion that he could change things. In fact, I suggested to friends, if Ahmadinejad really wanted to stop the harassment of women and the youth, he’d come out and say there wasn’t enough of it, for if he did, the authorities would doubtless relax their efforts just to spite him. He undeniably knew that his proclamations on what is or isn’t acceptable in Islam would be ignored—as they were when, after he was first elected, he pronounced female spectators at soccer stadiums to be halal (kosher, in Islam)—and might even promote a backlash by the clerics and a redoubled effort to remind him of his lay status.

  His opinions on the morality police and the strict separation of the sexes were perhaps a cynical attempt to ingratiate himself with the more secular-minded segment of the public and future young voters who might give him, along with his base of poorer rural voters, a platform to be relevant in politics once his second and final term ended in 2013. Few were buying it. Even his publicly stated opinion that Messrs. Mousavi and Karroubi—his two challengers in the 2009 presidential poll, who were now under house arrest in Tehran—should be freed barely registered among those who despised him, perhaps because they knew that if he meant it, he could at least engage in another big sulk to try to force the issue, and maybe he’d even get away with it this time.

  So the Gasht-e Ershad continued their rounds, and remarkably, Iranians continued to defy them, as they always have. They refused to adjust their attire to the preference of the state, and, as I witnessed, heatedly argued with the chador-clad policewomen who stopped them, unwilling to be intimidated. Some women even put up a fight—literally, as evidenced in the many videos posted to YouTube, which, as expected, is filtered by the Iranian ISPs. Not that that would ever stop Iranians from using it. For Iranians, after all, the autocratic system—extant from the time of shahs and viziers—is plainly there simply to be defeated.

  7

  A FUNNY THING HAPPENED ON THE WAY TO THE REVOLUTION

  During my prior visits to the Islamic Republic, Tehran’s zealous morality squad had never directly affected me, and I hadn’t thought that the men in green berets and fatigues and the women in full black chadors, only their disapproving and scolding eyes visible, would be relevant even if I traveled to Iran with my w
ife. Despite their presence, the revolution had surely matured, and the wearing of the hijab couldn’t possibly be taken quite as seriously, or literally, as it once was, could it? Karri had always said that if she ever went to Iran, she would be happy to abide by the Shia Iranian concept of sartorial decorum, but she had seen films and photographs of scantily hijab-ed women, and her idea, and mine, of what was fully acceptable was actually a little too optimistic, especially in 2011.

  A few days after we moved into our apartment off Saadabad Street (renamed Ayatollah Maleki Street after the revolution but still referred to as Saadabad), we were walking on Vali Asr near Tajrish Square when we came upon the Gasht-e Ershad, their van and patrol car parked in front of Ladan, a famous patisserie. The women officers were busy pulling young women aside for questioning, but as we walked by, one of the men, a dour-looking fellow who seemed to be doing his best to appear menacing, gestured to me as he caught my eye.

  I stopped and tried to act surprised, asking if it was me he wanted to talk to. I was pushing a baby stroller, after all, and Karri, Khash, and I were the most unlikely of candidates to be targeted by the morality police.

  “Yes,” he said firmly. “Is that your wife?”

  I replied in the affirmative, adding that the baby was my son.

  “Her manteau is too short,” he said.

  It was close to 100 degrees, and Karri, like many Iranian women, was not wearing a manteau at all, but rather a loose-fitting cotton shirt over a tank top, one that covered her posterior but not most of her thighs. Those were, however, covered by her jeans, for skirts are a big no-no in Iran unless they’re long enough to cover the ankles, in which case one might as well go for the chador.