Honeymoon in Tehran: Two Years of Love and Danger in Iran

by Azadeh Moaveni

  The next day my cousin called and asked whether I had admired the pastry and the floral arrangements at the reception. If so, she could find out who had been responsible. In Tehran, once word gets out that you are planning a wedding, the females on both sides of the couple’s extended family make it their business to help. They draw on the collected knowledge of all their own female friends and acquaintances, so that they can offer you a definitive roster of the wedding coordinator, caterer, and photographer of the moment.

  For a full week our phone rang each day with relatives calling to say, “Shahrooz. Shahrooz and no one else.” Shahrooz was the most coveted, most talked about wedding planner of the year, or at least of that spring. He offered a full range of services, including the unpleasant one of security. Anyone wishing to hold a mixed wedding at a private locale requires some form of security, for without it the reception stands to be raided by police. In the rare worst cases, the guests are carted off to the police station, either lashed or charged à la carte for their transgressions (nail polish, ten thousand toman; makeup, twenty thousand; being in the company of the opposite sex, fifty thousand); more fortunate consequences would include the opportunity to pay a sizable bribe, either to be left alone altogether, or for the party to end but without harassment of the guests.

  A thriving clandestine industry had emerged in recent years to protect private weddings from such invasions. Like every other trade in Iran designed to supply what the state forbids, it grew ever more sophisticated and expensive. The first wedding I attended in Iran, back in 2000, was held at a rented garden in Karaj, on the outskirts of Tehran. Men and unveiled women mingled freely late into the night, periodically slipping flasks out of their purses and jackets, and the police never showed up. No one knew exactly who owned and operated the rental gardens of Karaj, but it was clear they worked with the authorities’ tacit permission. The rental fee—around $6,000 per eve ning, exorbitant by local standards—guaranteed that the party would be safe from the local police. The Karaj gardens peaked in popularity in the early Khatami era, when security forces generally limited their incursions into people’s private lives. This loosening slowly led to the emergence of wedding planners offering security packages, so that Iranians could hold mixed weddings in private homes with similar assurance. The popularity of this option had grown in recent months, as young couples, nervous that the Ahmadinejad government would not tolerate the Karaj gardens, were choosing to hold receptions at home.

  We had already picked the location for our wedding. The ceremony would be held at my uncle’s house in Shahabad, what had once been a village at the footsteps of the Alborz Mountains, but was now entirely within the sprawling city’s limits. The house had been the family seat for decades, and it was important to me that Arash and I exchange our vows in a place where I had roots. Soaring sycamore trees surrounded the old house, reflected in the shimmering surface of the pool, and trellises of pink bougainvillea leaned against the brick walls. I loved the sycamores’ broad leaves, their mottled, flaky bark, and their quintessential Iranianness. Iran is dense with sycamores, and the ancient Persian king Xerxes found the tree so beautiful that he showered it with gifts and wore an amulet engraved with its image.

  My aunt had known most of the neighbors for decades and was certain they would not call the police. But recently, a new glass apartment tower had gone up across the street, home to a number of religious families whose willingness to accommodate the older residents’ style had not yet been tested. After some discreet inquiries, it was concluded they would not pose any problems.

  We would hold the reception at the home of Arash’s parents in Lavasan. The expansive garden there would accommodate all our guests, and because Arash’s father was one of the oldest landowners in the district, we did not anticipate trouble from the local police.

  Arash and I arrived at Shahrooz’s office on a warm weekday morning, passing through two photography studios—one in Grecian style, including urns and a terra-cotta background, and another resembling a Versailles drawing room—on the way to the reception area, which was crowded by two oversize gilt thrones covered in red velvet. A plate of almond cookies sat on the upholstered coffee table, and we sipped tea quietly until the perfectly coiffed receptionist duo (everything at Shahrooz seemed double or triple what was required) with their identical upturned noses, granted us their attention. From there we were escorted to the photographer’s office, where a middle-aged man in a silk shirt opened a leather-bound album featuring portraits of brides and grooms in various unlikely poses: prostrate on a field of autumn leaves, perched in a tree, on the verge of rolling into a pool. This was the “conventional portrait” album, which we viewed before one that appeared to comprise stills from some eighties heavy-metal video in which the bride dies during the guitar solo. In this album, there were grooms saving brides from falling off bridges, drowning in murky pools, being lost in wooded grottoes. The last few photos were atmospheric shots of brides in what looked like boudoir settings, and my personal favorite, a bride in the garb and pose of a flamenco dancer.

  Since most brides want to appear unveiled in their wedding photos, nearly every Iranian wedding photographer has a private garden at his disposal, the public parks of Tehran being off limits for such purposes. The impulse to appear unveiled (or at least only with a bridal veil) in photos seemed natural enough to me, but I didn’t quite grasp the point of the dramatized portraits until we were shown the optional “couple’s video,” a separate production from the standard wedding video that records moments like the cutting of the cake. The “couple’s video” was a fifteen-minute clip set to pounding club music that followed the given couple as they coyly searched for each other amid sandy ruins, galloped into the desert side by side on horses, rolled around on a sandy beach, and encountered each other on the candelit terrace of a palatial estate. Such heady romance being unavailable to the average Iranian couple, the video and the portraits seemed to re-create in images the carefree adventures and wealth that young people yearned for.

  “Fortunately, both our family homes have gardens, so perhaps we could just take care of the pictures there,” I ventured.

  “The price of the garden is included in the fees,” the photographer said condescendingly. He apparently thought we were being cheap.

  Special effects, or the sorts of touches meant to provide the unsurpassed “Wow” moment when your jaded guests are finally impressed, occupied their own stop in the world of Shahrooz. You could be transported to the reception in an antique Mercedes-Benz; you could have plasma television screens mounted around the property, playing videos of the couple, or even a fireworks display.

  By the time we finally reached the private sanctum of Shahrooz himself, we both wanted to bolt. But I had promised my uncle I would at least check out the security package, just in case. The planner of all planners sat behind a large oak desk, wearing a stylish suit with a striped orange tie; he had the attractive but vacant expression of a cologne model. He snapped open a latest-model laptop and began clicking through photos of other people’s weddings, pointing out the chair backs and flowers we could select. In the waiting room, I had scanned their set dinner menus, the most basic of which included twelve choices of entrée, and asked whether we could have just five or six.

  Shahrooz looked affronted.

  “Don’t worry,” I said hastily, “we’re happy to pay for twelve entrées, but because we think that’s a trifle overblown, we would want you to serve just five.”

  “I am not willing to sacrifice the reputation of my institution,” he said. “People expect a certain degree of quality from a Shahrooz wedding, and I must match that on every occasion.”

  “But this has nothing to do with quality. We just want less.”

  Shahrooz was nonplussed. If he had had a button underneath his desk that whisked away undesirable clients, he would surely have pressed it now. I could not imagine him walking into a local police station in his western banker’s suit, but his operati
on necessitated some form of cooperation with the authorities. He, or someone less conspicuous in his employ, either bribed them directly or somehow made it worth their while to refrain from raiding his receptions. When families coordinated their own weddings, it usually fell to the bride’s father or brother to deal with police who inevitably came knocking. I could see the appeal in delegating this repulsive task, but—even though he promised to bring ten security guards camouflaged as guests in suit and tie and equipped with earpiece walkie-talkies, and to set up a roadblock at the head of my uncle’s street—Arash and I agreed that Shahrooz was not for us. We walked out of his office.

  Next, we went to see the city’s top wedding photographer. Photographs occupy an inconceivable degree of importance in the average couple’s wedding. Between the studio portraits, the outdoor photography, and the time allotted to the videographer, most couples spend several hours of the day amassing an elaborate visual record of their union. It was not considered nearly enough to have focused and well-composed shots of one’s guests and the key moments of the ceremony and party. Rather, the wedding day offered an opportunity for couples to create a glamour portfolio that reflected, in its lavish excess, the financial portfolio of their families.

  This impulse seemed peculiar to me, as most people had an approximate sense of the financial position of their extended acquaintances and could guess that a middle-class family had gone into debt or burned through savings to pay for an extravagant wedding. Arash said I was being overliteral and underestimating the extent to which Iranian culture was preoccupied with family dignity. Iranians are notorious, at least among themselves, for their tendency to savage weddings the day after. By noon the next day, the women in attendance will have taken to the phones, excoriating the inadequacy of the dinner, the modesty of the fruit display, the way you needed a magnifying glass to see the gems in the bride’s jewelry. A family would spend well above its means just to preclude this sort of gossip, especially from the bride’s family. The groom’s parents were aware that an event that did not meet the bride’s family’s expectations would entail a lifetime of in-law sniping and patronizing for their son. A wedding that did suffice could be viewed, in the context of such relations, as an investment in a son’s future peace of mind.

  Arash and I had no intention of devoting long hours of our wedding day to photography. Besides the fact that the idea was traumatic, it would take all my energy to make it through an afternoon ceremony and an evening reception. Regardless of what appears on the invitation, Iranians refuse to arrive at a private wedding party before nine or ten P.M., and inevitably our reception would last well past the middle of the night. We hoped the photographer we were on our way to see would understand our more circumscribed needs.

  His name was Babak, and he came recommended by at least five friends, including one photojournalist who should have known better. In his mid-thirties, with thinning hair tied back in a ponytail, Babak greeted us, or I should say he greeted me, with a leering warmth. “Don’t worry, I’ll make sure you look divine,” he assured, inspecting me with an overlong glance.

  Though I was nearly four months pregnant, thankfully this was not at all apparent. I had agonized over setting the date for the reception, anxious not to show in my wedding dress. Nearly everyone knew we were already officially married, and it was common for couples to hold their reception sometimes months or a year later. But I hadn’t heard of any cases where the wife-bride was pregnant. Tehran was not ready for that kind of reception, and I did not want my wedding pictures to record a stomach bump for posterity. Some who knew me well noticed I looked slightly fuller than usual, but my weight often fluctuated according to how much time I spent at the gym, and my extra four or five pounds went mostly unremarked. I planned to wear four-inch heels to offset this thickening, and Arash’s mother, who knew I was pregnant, had introduced me to her discreet seamstress, who monitored my dress’s fit.

  Babak’s cell phone rang; he twisted his chair slightly away from us to hold a loud, five-minute conversation with a woman he kept referring to as “baby.” Once finished with his phone call, he ordered his staff to serve us watermelon, while he sipped a Diet Coke and recounted a recent weekend spent at the Burj al-Arab in Dubai with Kamran and Houman, the Tehrangeles pop duo. I explained to him that we wanted very natural photography, nothing posed or stagey, just black-and-white shots of the ceremony and our guests at the reception. “That’s me, that’s exactly my kind of work!” he insisted, though the albums on the table before us contained photos entirely in the manner of Shahrooz’s in-house photographer. He began pointing to certain photographs. “Do you see this smile? I want this smile. Do you see this shadow? I want this shadow.”

  At this point Arash interrupted him to ask about prices, and whether he took the photographs himself or sent assistants. “It all depends on whether you can afford me,” he said. His assistant flipped through a calendar marked up with bookings, and informed us that he had no weekends free for the next six months. Competition was fierce, it seemed, to have Babak capture one’s perfect day. Once the assistant handed us his price list, I whispered to Arash that we should leave. Babak charged the equivalent of several thousand dollars, which seemed excessive in a country where a loaf of bread cost ten cents.

  That evening, I poured myself a glass of sour cherry soda and settled in to read the newspaper, eager to reconnect with a world that was not preoccupied with weddings. But the front page offered no respite. The government, it seemed, was equally concerned with matrimony. Troubled by the rise in large mehriyehs and the growing demand for elaborate weddings that most young people could not afford but sought to hold anyway, it had thrown a major party to promote moderation, advertising the event in newspapers and on state media. A cartoon ran alongside the article I was reading, showing a bride and groom besieged by chattering flies that criticized everything from the groom’s shoes to the bride’s jewelry. Only young couples recently wed with mehriyehs valued at less than fourteen gold coins (around $2,400) had been admitted to the government party. Once inside, guests were automatically enrolled in a lottery to win gold coins.

  I laughed aloud and began reading the piece to Arash. It captured precisely why Shahrooz, and the entire Iranian wedding industry for that matter, was ascendant, despite the financial strain faced by most of the nation. The regime had chosen as the venue for the party an auditorium adorned with posters of Ali Akbar, the son of Imam Hossein, martyred in the seventh century alongside his father. A mullah had presided over this festive atmosphere, reading for ten minutes from the Koran. He had then introduced a special “celebrity” guest, an actor famous for his appearances in films about the Iran-Iraq War, who quipped, “I’ve been martyred twenty-three times … on film!” A smoke-and-light show followed, which, what with all the posters of Ali Akbar, must have lent the auditorium the strange feeling of an Islamic disco. The party favors included Ti-Top, a sponge cake popular as a snack for schoolchildren, and a book of advice for married couples penned by the Ayatollah Khamenei. In this teeming metropolis of at least six million young people of marriageable age, only three hundred had attended. The rest were, presumably, sitting at home with calculators trying to figure out how they could afford Shahrooz.

  CHAPTER 11

  Even the Therapist Wants Out

  I suggested we start seeing a couples therapist over dinner one eve ning. We were at a restaurant Arash disliked, Bix, one of several new Tehran restaurants that sought, through the generous use of white pillows and curtains, dim lighting, and lounge music, to create the ambience of a French Caribbean nightclub. Arash was irritated by the pretentiousness of such places, filled with affected Iranians and arrogant waiters who preferred to speake English even when discussing an order of tea. But Bix was the only restaurant in the city that served salmon, and I was determined to eat a fish high in omega-3 at least once a month (the pregnancy books warned that otherwise one’s baby would end up a dunce). Suddenly all the lights flooded on, the music went silent
, and the waiters bustled nervously. The manager came over to apologize, in English: “The police are here, so we’ll need to keep the music off for a while. Can I get you guys starters?”

  The idea of seeing a therapist occurred to me when I found myself, for the third night in a row, eating ice cream out of the tub at three A.M. In retrospect, the issues we faced seem manageable, but at the time they were beginning to oppress me. The chief source of much of this stress was my mother. She was now insisting that I invite all of her extended family and friends in Tehran to the reception. She herself would not be able to attend, since she had just spent a month in the country and could not ask for more vacation time so soon. Such wedding stress had begun to affect how Arash and I were communicating.

  My mother aside, even small reception details were proving tricky to resolve. For example, we could not decide whether to serve alcohol, and if so, in what manner. Most Iranians don’t openly serve cocktails, or indeed alcohol in any form, at weddings, both because it makes the party more vulnerable to a police raid, and because it increases the likelihood of drunken brawling. At a friend’s wedding recently, the bride’s brothers had pummeled the tipsy groom for calling another sister nan-e ztreb kabob, “the bread under the kabob,” a playful but lubricious Persian term for sister-in-law (the bread under a plate of kabob is juicy and especially delicious). Often guests bring their own alcohol in flasks, or they disappear in groups to visit the trunk of a nearby car. While I understood why this happened, it seemed like the behavior of high school delinquents, which I suppose was how the mullahs viewed their citizens. I had chosen alcohol as my battle, and was prepared to sacrifice almost anything else—a butter-cream cake over marzipan; a procession of flower girls—for the sake of a real bar with the best bartenders in Tehran, two Afghan brothers who were in high demand.