He tilted his head back toward her boyfriend. So if he’s not your boyfriend, if you’ve never seen him before, you won’t care if I hit him, right? And he punched Nikki’s boyfriend in the cheek. I felt her body tense next to me, but her eyes didn’t flicker. The komiteh watched her reaction closely. From behind him, one hand pressed against his face, her boyfriend shot her a look of warning: Don’t give us away. The komiteh turned back again, and this time he punched him on the other side, on the ear. Nikki exhaled slowly. You can beat him till he’s bloody, she said coldly, but I’ve already told you, and now I’m telling you again, I have no idea who he is. Her voice didn’t even quiver.
She turned her back on them both, and dialed a number on her cell phone. Hey maman, yeah, we’re still waiting for the cab. Do you need anything from outside? See you in a bit. By this time, the komiteh was livid. Okay, so maybe he’s not your boyfriend. Was he bothering you? Because if he was, just tell me, and I’ll make him pay for it. He stepped closer again, so close he was breathing on her, and she moved back. He wasn’t. And I don’t need anyone, especially you, to hit someone for me. Deflated by his failure to provoke an admission from either of them, the komiteh got back in the Land Rover and shot up Vali Asr Street.
It was, to me, an encounter of shockingly casual violence. I thought Nikki would need months of therapy to recover, and that her boyfriend would insist on meeting indoors forever after. Not at all, it turned out. To them, it was just another Friday night in the Islamic Republic. Young people anticipated these sorts of incidents, and had confronted them so many times that they were almost taken for granted. They considered the morality police part of the geography of the city, like the Alborz Mountains and the long boulevards. They had perfected the art of inventing and synchronizing stories on the spot, how to predict what sort of policeman would take a bribe, and what sort would respond to a convincing argument.
As I recounted the story for Daria, he seemed genuinely puzzled. He made little rows of fork holes all over the slice of melon in front of him, morosely refusing to look up. That’s fucked up, he said, a minute later. We had not been prepared to find the cosmologies of our universe so skewed. In California, where I was obsessed with Middle East politics and he was obsessed with the Iranian national soccer team, we had assumed here, in this country where people could pronounce our names, our world would expand. Instead, we felt constricted. Everywhere, it seemed, there were barriers. Of thought and behavior, of places and time. And most dizzying of all, a culture of transgression that could only be learned through firsthand experience. For women, there were eternal limits on dress and comportment, but they could be flouted easily—in the right neighborhood, at the right time of the day or month, in the right way. Young couples also faced endless prohibitions, but these too could be circumvented, with the right verbal pretexts, at the right times, in the right places.
Ignorance of this culture made you a victim, marooned at home with bad Islamic television. Knowing how to navigate its rules gave you freedom, to choose a lifestyle as sedentary or riotous as you pleased. As newcomers, Daria and I were only familiar with a simple, American sort of freedom. Confronted with an oppressive system, we instinctively viewed the Iranians around us as victims, because armed with only our knowledge of California highways and the mall, we had not the slightest idea how to exercise freedom, Tehran-style. We couldn’t conceive of a life where you forcibly took your rights, through adept arguments and heaps of attitude. Where you lived “as if” the rules didn’t exist, and took the skirmishes for granted. And so it felt that in Tehran, even the sky shrank, the streets twined in mazes, and the whole of existence retreated under imposing barriers.
Life in America came with its own set of frontiers, but they were familiar, and from the vantage point of Tehran, seemed more subtle, more bearable. As for a Middle Eastern person, they were symbolic barriers placed between you and your culture, in the Islam-bashing and prejudice that seeped into everyday life, ephemeral barriers between you and your peace of mind, as you had to work to disregard the slights and political slander and ignorance that presented themselves so routinely, in so many guises.
The barriers here were overwhelming, in your face, physical and visual. There were walls and partitions, dour billboards and angry-looking pasdars, around at all times to enforce them. I wasn’t sure which ones I preferred, or perhaps better, which ones I despised least. In America, I hadn’t learned, really, how to scale the barriers. They were political and amorphous, and often I felt they existed only in my head, that I created and carted them about myself. For now, these Iranian barriers frightened me. They produced incessant confrontations between people itching to scream at one another, escalate, and let loose the brew of anger and resentment inside.
To conduct successful and active social lives in Tehran, young people devoted much energy to avoiding the police. These efforts created a sort of predictive science, similar to how people who live in traffic-congested cities try to plan their schedules around rush hour and congested neighborhoods. It was a complicated task. There were several different brands of police and militia, with distinct vehicles, dress, beat, and mandate. They sometimes behaved erratically, and made unexpected appearances at places like pizza parlors, with the obvious aim of keeping everyone in a permanent state of low-level anxiety.
One day, some enterprising Iranian-American from Los Angeles would move to Tehran and set up a radio with ten-minute updates on police flow around the city (“There’s a heavy komiteh presence northbound on Modaress expressway, and a Basiji checkpoint on Aghdasieh Boulevard, but Mohseni Square is flowing”). Keeping this sort of thing in the back of your mind at all times was unpleasant.
It was the kind of emotional strain that I stopped thinking about consciously. Iranians didn’t make a big deal out of it, and I didn’t want to be like one of the strident European expatriates who perpetually complained about the harsh backwardness of life in Iran, as though they hadn’t made the same comments ten times the previous day. Realistically, I should have admitted to myself that adjusting to Iran was tough. I had family around and spoke the language, but that didn’t make life in Tehran easy. In retrospect, I’d have been better off talking about how nervous everything made me. That way, I might have defused the pressure as it built up, rather than waking up one day and finding myself unable to get out of bed. But I was too busy pretending to be cool and brave, like the urban Tehrani girls who sailed through the tensions with poise, managing to look fantastic the whole time.
More often that not, though, the police behaved predictably. This bestowed a small sense of control upon the young and social. It helped, for one, to stay vigilant about the dates of the Islamic calendar. If the regime was liberal with one thing, it was the official celebration of Shiite holidays. The births, deaths, and key events in the lives of various imams and members of the Prophet Mohammad’s family were occasions for public commemoration. Public displays of piety involved leaving the house, and provided handy excuses to proffer at checkpoints (“Really officer, I was just out celebrating/mourning the birthday/death of Imam _____!”) It also resulted in strange calculations, such as waiting for the birthday of a holy man born in the seventh century so you could throw a party.
A vivid illustration of how young people exploited the regime’s Islam preoccupation for their social purposes fell each year during the month of Moharram. In this month in the seventh century, the prophet’s grandson Hossein was martyred in the holy city of Karbala, a significant date in the early schism between Sunni and Shiite Islam. The Islamic regime took this holiday, called Ashoura, very seriously, and draped the whole of Tehran in black. Ubiquitous mosques blared sorrowful chants, and many other devices were used to produce a somber atmosphere that was roundly ignored.
Before the Islamic Revolution, people commemorated Ashoura tamely in their neighborhoods and went home by around nine P.M. But in recent years it had taken on grand, carnival-like proportions, with young people out in the traffic-jammed s
treets until two or three in the morning. Like everything else, it had been transformed into a battleground of wills between Iranians and the Islamic system.
I was still new to Tehran, dim to the social significance of Ashoura to hormonally fizzy teenagers, until one of my cousins informed me that the candlelight vigil marking its final night (called sham-e ghariban) was by far the most excellent night of the year to pick up guys. Young people from across the city congregated for what they called a “Hossein Party” in Mohseni Square, in a busy neighborhood of northern Tehran.
The traffic en route inched along, as though the whole city of ten million was attempting to converge on this snug square. Initially, the scene seemed decorous and tame. Teenagers and families peered at the displays of gold in jewelry shop windows, and milled about the sidewalks, which were lined with police.
As I inspected the young women more closely—they were touching and ethereal, floating through the night in their gauzy veils, with perfect, glossy locks poking out—I realized the conceit of “Hossein Party.” Each one held a flickering candle in her palm, and had tucked underneath scraps of paper bearing her phone number; a great deal of preening went on, and lucky fellow “mourners” were slipped numbers as they passed.
The Basij stood aside and observed this decidedly unsorrowful behavior with surly faces. They are officially considered “volunteers,” but they enjoy the regime’s tacit approval for enforcing Islamic morals, usually with a great degree of violence. Many are impossibly young, no older than fifteen, but their eyes shone with the eager rage of unrestrained bullies. Some, with their untucked shirts and trademark beards, strode around aggressively, eyeing the crowd and deciding what totally harmless transgression would finally provoke their attack.
I walked up to one of them, astride an idling motorbike, and asked him who had sent him here. He didn’t answer. What, then, was his purpose? “They sit around with their candles pretending to mourn Hossein, when all they really want is to let out their sexual desires. It’s our Islamic duty to control this,” he said, revving his engine and peeling off into the street.
I hid behind a tall, potted plant on the front stoop of an apartment building, from where I could safely watch the brewing confrontation. The Basij circled a street corner where a crowd of teenagers stood talking, bathed in the light of candles, and ordered them to leave. The crowd moved apart slowly, but some stood their ground. One, a young girl wearing clown-like make-up and a scant slip of veil over masses of long auburn hair, stuck a hand on her hip, and continued chatting into her cell phone.
A Basij raced up to her from behind, and cracked a baton over the back of her head. She doubled over, and hung like that for a full minute. Then she drew herself up, and charged headfirst into a line of approaching policemen. Her parted arms forced them to break rank. Behind her a chaotic crowd of several hundred watched her, stunned. Some of them started to run into side streets, to escape the Basij, who by that point were swinging their batons around at will and gunning their bikes up and down the street. Others lingered to see whether the vigil would go on. Twenty minutes later, the corner was deserted, and I crawled out from my stoop, tiptoeing around the cooling wax puddles left behind by the teenagers’ candles.
I found a taxi to take me home, and as we inched through the clogged streets toward the expressway, the driver talked morosely about Ashoura past, and Ashoura present. No one has their heart in it anymore, he said, recalling the cathartic, sincere emotionalism of Ashoura during his youth. His sons had also been at the vigil. I told them to stay home, but they said they had to go, he said. Last year they called it a “Hossein Party,” but this year they’re saying “techno-Ashoura.” What’s techno? he asked shyly. He was worried about his sons, so I lent him my cell phone to call home and check on them. Clashes between socially deprived teenagers and vigilante thugs were always volatile, and black eyes and broken arms were not uncommon.
Often their worried parents accompanied their teenagers out on such evenings, and when a riot threatened to erupt, matronly moms with gray hairs peeking out from under flowered headscarves beseeched the vigilantes—with the cultural authority an Iranian woman of fifty-five should have over a boy of fifteen—to put their clubs and chains (their weapons of choice) away. Their efforts met little success. The Basij were carefully selected in the poorest of neighborhoods and were cultivated to violence with a skillful balance of brainwashing and small incentives. I hated watching these scenes. I hated how I could scarcely recognize the traditions I grew up with in the Iran around me. I hated how the Islamic Republic not only dissolved the ties between exiles and Iran, but those between Iranians and their own culture.
A few days before the start of Norouz, Persian New Year, an old friend of Khaleh Farzi—my aunt from California who had moved back to Tehran a few years earlier—called to invite me over for chaharshambeh-soori, the night that opens the cycle of Persian New Year festivities. Come over, Azi jan, we’ll talk a little politics, have a few drinks, jump over a couple fires. Bring whoever you want, he said. Of course I’ll stop by, I said. I have to cruise around the city first, but I’ll definitely come.
Unconsciously, I had internalized the nightlife-as-obstacle-course mentality of young Iranians, and I knew it could be an evening rife with both parties and raids. Once the sun set, I set out with two reporter friends in search of celebrations. Rumors had been circulating that the celebration would be banned this year, since it fell too close to Moharram, and we were curious to see whether the regime would dare sacrifice Norouz to Ashoura.
Norouz originates from ancient Zoroastrian rites, and falls each year on the vernal equinox, celebrating the arrival of spring. Persians practiced Zoroastrianism before Islam’s conquest in the seventh century, and it irked the ayatollahs that people held Persian festivities, with their pagan origins, closer to their hearts than Islamic holidays. In origin and ritual, the holiday is delightful. Ancient Zoroastrians worshipped fire, for its purifying properties. To symbolize the regeneration of new life after a long winter, they lit a row of small bonfires, and skipped over them, singing a poem about fire. Traditionally, they also set out special ajeel, a colorful mixture of pistachios, dried mulberries, walnuts, and green raisins, in large bowls with delicately painted wooden scoopers.
As colorful and lively as it is all meant to be, as a child it filled me with dread. My father, ever keen to embrace anything the mullahs opposed, loved chaharshambeh-soori, and insisted we celebrate it in San Jose. He spent the week beforehand collecting tumbleweed from the deserted railroad tracks behind his house, arranging them in huge piles in the backyard. Without fail, the plumes of smoke from the fire would curl up high into the air, and some well-intentioned neighbor would call the fire department on us.
As we drove around the city, the neighborhoods looked like battlefields. Immense bonfires lit up the night sky, and young men ran about exploding fireworks that were more like Molotov cocktails. The streets were filled with smoke, and the women who were out cowered near buildings for shelter, afraid one of the firework-bombs would blow off a limb. Holidays like this gave young men, seething at the double humiliation of economic and social privation, an outlet to release some of their anger with satisfying loud noises and bangs. For one night, they would be the ones making things go pop and terrifying passers-by, not the militia.
We drove away from the wide Tehran boulevard, with snaps and pops and explosions going off on all sides, toward the family party, where only the embers of the fires remained. Inside, my aunt and uncle were standing with their friends at the bar near the kitchen, sipping pink drinks and smoking miniature Bahman cigarettes. Everyone held out their face for double kisses, and then offered me what happened to be in front of them: ajeel? Tea? Vodka? Potato salad? A joint? I want the pink stuff, I said, sniffing my aunt’s glass. It was aragh-saghi, homemade vodka mixed with sour-cherry juice. Apart from a handful of ajeel, I hadn’t eaten all day, and the drink quickly softened my jagged nerves.
Someone trie
d to engage me in a discussion about the speaker of parliament, and the cleric’s name suddenly escaped me. Please, please don’t make me think about clerics, I said, savoring the cool, sweet juice trickling down my throat. People still didn’t know what to think about the reformists, and in all honesty, neither did I. At parties such as this, people lingered in each others’ living rooms late into the night debating politics. The reform movement had awakened in Iranians two sentiments rare in the Middle East: hope and high expectations. That combination meant everyone—from grocery store clerks to snobby intellectuals—discussed the future constantly. The conversations, though peppered with the political squabble of that particular day, always ended with the same wistful conclusion about the reformists: They’re not great, but we must back them, since they’re our only hope.
What confused people, kept them up holding the same conversation night after night, month after month, was the knotty question of how much credit the reformists deserved for the tangible changes coinciding with Khatami’s presidency. Whether or not to vote in elections (for city councils, for parliament, again for the presidency in 2001) hinged on this answer. At the top, within the strata of officialdom, the degree of change was slight—the mullahs had reshuffled their positions, improved their marketing by rebranding themselves as progressive or pragmatic, but the rotten structures and attitudes were firmly in place.
When Iranians stopped to scrutinize exactly how and where these transformations had taken place, they concluded it was from below—in people’s behavior and dress, their ideas, spirits, and conversations, attitudes and activities. At some historic moment impossible to pinpoint, around the turn of the millennium, Iranians’ threshold for dissimulation and constriction sank, and people simply began acting differently. Women started wearing lipstick, exposing their toes and curves, wearing their veils halfway back, “as if” they had a right to be uncovered. Writers and intellectuals wrote vicious satire and stinging commentary, “as if” it was permitted to criticize the regime. People of all ages turned up music in their cars, caroused with the opposite sex, “as if” people could listen to whatever they wanted, “as if” young men and women had the right to go out for coffee. All of these “as if” acts became facts on the ground, and the authorities knew it would be foolish and impossible to stand in the way. While they were still happy to appear comical, hysterically condemning “decadent, immoral, Westernized ______ [fill trivial noun in the blank, e.g.: poodles, CDs, ties],” over time they recognized cultural rebellion as a force beyond their control.
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