They began disfiguring the graceful old neighborhoods of northern Tehran with gaudy, white-columned mansions. Suddenly, a little swankiness was okay. A revolutionary cleric could buy an estate in rural England and outfit his daughter in Armani without an overtly guilty conscience. Though it was politically prudent to be discreet about such “decadent” habits, preening was half the goal. And so the Farmanieh, Tehran’s first post-revolutionary, posh health club, was born and kept exclusive enough that the masses could not see how the clerics were living it up with their money.
Many of the women there were obviously the mistresses of these rich men because they were too young, breathtakingly beautiful, and middle class to afford the place otherwise. They carried themselves with a defensive, haughty brazenness that only kept women would think to affect. Others were simply high-end call girls, a trainer eventually explained to me, when I asked why they were taking photos of each other doing erotic leg lifts on the machines. They exercised with small movements—crossing and uncrossing legs, retouching their makeup, and sipping tea. If they broke a sweat, it was because they had gone up to the roof to tan, or sat in the sauna after a massage, their activity of choice. On those rare occasions they moved quickly enough to actually raise their heart rate, they rushed immediately afterwards to the club café for a reviving, dainty three-course meal.
For some reason, they hated me. Maybe it was because I spurned the cloying ladies’ maid/valet, or dashed in and out without the requisite fifteen minutes of languorous small talk. Maybe because I was young, like them, but a non-mistress, unlike them. Perhaps if they knew that I worked, that my life included more pressure than leisure—deadlines and allnighters, indecent clerics, and a perpetual fearfulness of Mr. X—they would be less resentful. But they clearly believed I rushed home every day to be fed sugar-dusted grapes and fanned with a palm frond, and they tortured me with incessant, niggling assertions of their authority over the world of the gym. It seemed the less power women had in the world outside, the more they sought to flex their influence in the small universe inside. In the non-mistress-run gyms, as I would discover, people pretty much left you alone. But here, each day it was something new: “Ms. Moaveni, can you please put your flip-flops inside the cubby holes, and not next to them? Can you please change in the dressing room [there was no one around, ever, and I used a towel]? Can you place your mobile on the left of the treadmill rather than to the right?”
Two impulses drove my obsession with finding the just right gym. One, which I tried to ignore, was that I had been raised in California, and therefore had an incessant tape playing in my head about the religious importance of exercise. I could sit there pretending to be as Iranian as the heavily madeup girl next to me, but the tapes would whir on, urging me to keep running, keep eating tofu, keep washing my fruit sixteen times to rinse off the pesticide. The second was the need to calm the chaos inside me with a steadying routine and the sedative effects of exercise. At the time, I couldn’t, or wouldn’t allow myself to, see that life in Iran strained everyone. I felt only that there must be something wrong with me, to be experiencing Iran so painfully, with a constant sense of suffocation and gloomy dread. Clearly, I must be a spoiled, self-absorbed, consumerist foreigner, to be suffering so much. Every day, I put myself on trial, and ruled myself guilty as an American, instead of a resilient, roll-with-the-punches Iranian. Restless within myself, I worked longer hours, and those longer hours—spent over somber, distressing stories—made me even more prone to melancholy.
And so I kept searching for less aggravating ways to work out, and dedicated a whole week to the task. Tehran, a city more palpably tense than any other I had ever known, a city that generously gave all of its ten million residents so many causes for distress, must surely contain places where people could cope with the physical manifestations of the strain.
The first afternoon, I resorted to an aerobics class, despite the off-putting Richard Simmons/Jane Fonda associations. The instructor had built a private studio, complete with wall-to-wall mirrors, in the back room of her house, and cavorted about in sparkly leg warmers, blaring Madonna. Aerobics appealed to Iranian women—it was indoors, so it solved the problem of sweating under a head scarf—and offered plenty of opportunity to talk while exercising. Had I been into coordinated group exercise, Tehran, with its abundance of aerobics classes, would have been a fitness paradise. But all that energetic shouting and synchronized stomping was not for me. I was a runner at heart, and decided to try jogging in the park.
The next morning, I drove through the whitish haze of city smog to Qeytariyeh Park. Scores of exercising women filled the park, power-walking laps around the perimeters, their arms pumping vigorously, or splayed out on the lawn, stretching. Though I had put on the lightest cotton veil I owned, I began to swelter, once my body warmed up. There must be something wrong with me, I thought, all these women are doing just fine, what’s my problem? Running, I concluded, must raise your body temperature higher than walking, and the head scarf prevents your neck and ears from cooling you down. I tried to stick it out, tried to get to that point where I forgot I was running, absorbed in the smell of the grass, the rhythm of my strides. But the whole time I imagined portly ministers treading water in the Farmanieh pool (the latest thing for the aghayoon, the gentlemen, was swimming lessons), and I overheated as much with irritation and resentment.
With outdoor exercise out of the question, I went back in search of non-mistress gyms, where one could work out unmolested, and discovered they were everywhere. They were more modest and worn than the cavernous, well-equipped mistress gym, but functional, and more importantly, filled with women lifting weights and sweating, rather than reclining supine, popping dates—the gym as harem. The one I ended up joining opened at seven A.M., and minutes after that, women overran the locker room, undressing quickly, talking about their jobs, their families. They were young women and older ones, new mothers and college students, housewives and university professors; some had stunning figures, others were almost spherical, but they all showed up regularly, before work, class, or after dropping their children off at school.
I relied on that non-mistress gym, that glorious, precious realm of normalcy, as an escape from not only Tehran but my personal Tehran. No one talked politics. No one knew I was a reporter for an American publication and asked me if the country would be saved, as though I was a magic eight ball. No one took me aside and recounted in wrenching detail the tale of a student relative who had been beaten/arrested/disappeared, because I was an outside witness, and a repository for such testimony. No one knew I had an American passport and asked if I could get her daughter/cousin/cat a visa to a freer life. My mobile phone didn’t get reception (the gym was in a basement), so no editor called to send me off on impossible, terrifying tasks (“Can you drive by the alleged nuclear weapons factory this afternoon, please?”). It was a sweaty paradise.
Since for so many women the sisterly atmosphere of the gym centered on stress reduction, the place was a live bulletin board for other ways to make one’s life feel less constricted. One day I overheard a group of young mothers discussing a yoga class, and one of them pulled a Farsi-language yoga magazine out of her bag to show the others. She let me peek at the table of contents, which listed articles about ayurvedic medicine and vegetarianism, and, best of all, a long index of the various yoga centers and classes around Tehran.
At dinner that night, I raved about my discovery to my aunt. “Why didn’t you say before you were interested?” asked Khaleh Farzi in exasperation, spooning sour cherry rice on my plate, poking through the fluffy, saffron-specked mounds for extra cherries. “Everyone we know does yoga. But I thought you didn’t like it.”
As it turned out, not only did everyone do yoga, but Lily, a distant relative, even held classes at her home in Aghdasieh, a neighborhood near the tip of Tehran. We called her after dinner, and she invited me to attend the next day.
Sandalwood. The plumes of the sweet-smelling incense overpowered
the snug apartment, lined with tatami mats and decorated with portraits of multi-limbed Hindu gods and goddesses. I walked in to find the class, composed of a cult of women dressed identically in snowy-white tunics and pants, drinking tea in the kitchen. They looked like martial arts practitioners or a Mormon sect of housewives, until Lily dimmed the lights, clucked them into silence, and took her place at the front of the room.
At the end of class, we lay on our backs, hands and feet spread apart, as though poised to make angel imprints on a field of snow. Lily instructed us to curl our toes and then tighten our calves, and we tightened and released each muscle working our way up the body. I ran my hands back and forth over my stomach, willing my internal organs to cooperate, to produce an egg and be done with it. I hadn’t menstruated regularly since leaving Cairo, and four months had passed since my last cycle. Unless I had immaculate conception to add to my worries, something was definitely wrong with my ovaries. The worry turned to alarm one night, when a tingly heat welled up from within my body, and I woke up to find dusky-red hives growing all over me. The doctor detected nothing perceptibly wrong with me, and suggested I eat less sushi. But I knew what was wrong. Iran was slowly making me sick.
The women in the room rested peacefully, with blissful smiles on their faces. I could not recall ever seeing such a relaxed crowd of Iranian women, who typically began to provoke one another in groups larger than five. The general stressors of Tehran life—toxic smog, traffic jams, fundamentalist theocracy, inflation, unemployment—together with the special burden of the veil made Iranian life particularly wearisome for women, who were depressed in large numbers. The depression had a major, physical component, in that it was compounded by the clothing regulations of the regime.
Ayatollah Khomeini probably did not consider the damage the veil would inflict on women’s hair, when he mandated Islamic modesty. Besides split ends and a perpetual lack of volume, the veil intensified the general sadness many women were prone to feeling over all the things that were wrong in their personal lives, and in the country at large.
Why do your hair if it’s going to be covered all day? Why watch your figure if it gets lost in the folds of a cloak? And in fact, it really didn’t make sense to spend half an hour blow-drying your hair only to cover it up. And in the heat, as well as in the cold, it was exponentially more comfortable to wear sweats or leggings or nothing at all underneath the roopoosh. As a result, women often found the fine line between a practical approach to Islamic Republic grooming and slovenliness blurred. Before you knew it, you had devolved into a sloppy version of yourself, with unkempt hair (oh, skip a washing day, no one’ll see it anyway), alternately clad in mumu-like roopoosh outside, and messy house clothes inside. On the occasions when Khaleh Farzi and I tended to our appearances for dinner parties, we would check each other out and exclaim, ahhh! I forgot what you looked like!
This phenomenon afflicted younger women much less dramatically. They were more inclined to exploit the fresh permissiveness in the dress code and quickly adapted to the new reality of being able to wear whatever they wanted, as long as it skimmed their upper thighs. Since they were coming of age in a roopoosh that revealed, instead of cloaked, they had the dubious privilege of becoming preoccupied with body image. The fret of their mother’s generation (“Am I letting myself go under this tent?”) was replaced with a more universal, modern concern (“Is my butt too big?”). Perhaps in its own strange way, this counted as progress.
I sat in Khaleh Farzi’s living room, munching on roasted chickpeas and dried mulberries, pondering the nature of change. It was all a matter of perspective, I decided. To me, Iran’s future looked bleak. Bad economy, spineless president, pissed-off populace, entrenched hard-liners, spiraling heroin addiction. It was fashionable at the time, in the West, for analyst types to say Iran’s demographic time bomb made change inevitable. I had trouble buying that. As far as I could tell, the Islamic Republic could experience a succession of baby booms and stay exactly the way it was. Obviously not for fifty years, but easily for ten or fifteen. The only way in which a huge and young population could directly destabilize the system would be for everyone to go stand outside on the street at exactly the same time, and that wasn’t about to happen.
Looking at the big picture—the laws and policies and grand structures of state—the political situation had not altered in a truly meaningful way over the past five years. But from the vantage point of the living room and the park, life was different in the ways that mattered most. My friends now had the freedom to sit around watching American television, give each other rides home at night, sneak pecks on the cheek in public, and dress as fabulously or dowdily as they wanted. No longer forced to fret about things that should have been irrelevant (to wear or not to wear lipstick), there was now mental space for more interesting matters, such as choosing one’s weblog pseudonym.
As this kind of change became ordinary, the gulf between Iranians of my generation and those of Khaleh Farzi’s widened. She belonged to a type of older Iranians I came to think of as purists, because they applied the Purity Test to every facet of life in the Islamic Republic. Every time a lifestyle choice presented itself—Should I have lunch at the new Italian restaurant? See the new comedy everyone is raving about? Buy a new linen button-down shirt to wear as manteau? Try the homemade wine made by the local Armenian vintner?—they asked themselves how it compared to its equivalent before the revolution.
The answer usually failed the Purity Test, because of course the restaurants were now mediocre, the comedy banal, the wine sour . . . and the manteau question was not applicable. Picky and scarred, the purists estranged themselves from the rhythm of the younger generation’s life. It was as though the intolerable years had left a mark on them, and now they resided permanently in that old state of mind—a powerful assurance in the bottomless awfulness of being in Iran.
The purity business always led to arguments between Khaleh Farzi and me. Often, the disagreement centered on lunch, and whether we should go out or not. “I don’t have the patience to eat wearing a veil; you know I don’t enjoy it,” she would say. I hated eating in a veil too, worried the ends would fall in the soup, unable to get past the odd sensation of chewing with my ears covered in cloth. As annoying as it was, I still occasionally wanted to go to lunch. Unlike Khaleh Farzi, recollections of vintage, veil-less Tehran lunches did not color the decision for me.
Khaleh Farzi settled in next to me on the couch, and dialed the rotary phone with a pencil. Ever since she had moved to Tehran, she had developed a habit of directing her contempt for the Islamic Republic at inanimate objects, as though they were contaminated by the regime. She opened car doors with a handkerchief, poked squash at the vegetable stand with a gloved finger.
That afternoon, we were planning to address a major crisis: my wardrobe. One of Khaleh Farzi’s chi-chi friends, a woman who spent her summers in the south of France and the rest of the year in a Frenchified bubble in Tehran, knew a designer who made swishy, smart roopooshes inspired by that season’s couture collections. Khaleh Farzi was calling to get his address and held the receiver away from her ear as soon as it was answered.
“No, I said, pluck in the direction of the feather . . . with the feather! . . . imbecile!” Her friend was screaming at her cook for improperly cleaning the bird that would become that evening’s duck à l’orange. She gave Farzi directions to the designer’s atelier, a second-floor apartment on a back alley in Elahieh.
I owned exactly three roopooshes, and I had worn them so frequently they had become uniforms. The standard, black roopoosh Khaleh Farzi handed down to me the day I arrived in Tehran was spectacularly frumpy. It reached my ankles, and when I wore it I hallucinated that my thighs were expanding and that my hair smelled of fried onions. If I were unfortunate enough to catch a reflection of myself in a window in that roopoosh, I had to go immediately to bed and stay there for the rest of the day. The indignity of this roopoosh was even worse for being unnecessary. It made m
e look like one of those poor, shrouded tourists, who had clearly packed according to the dated advice in a Lonely Planet guide, and gazed in amazement at Tehrani women scampering around in stiletto sandals and short tunics that cinched at the waist.
The designer’s atelier was nearby, so we walked over through the sycamore-shaded back alleys and rang the bell. An assistant opened the door and led us down a tangerine hallway into a bright studio space with custard-colored walls and a vaulted ceiling. A broad antique oak table stood in the center, strewn with fabrics and European fashion magazines, and there was a sitting area to the side with plush sofas and a glass table set with yellow roses floating in a bowl. Arash fluttered in, wearing a lavender linen shirt and khakis, apologizing for keeping us waiting. He turned down Ella Fitzgerald, and immediately began fussing over my aunt.
“I’ve heard soooo much about you,” he said to Khaleh Farzi. “I hear you love to hike . . . just like me. . . . I adore nature. . . . People who like nature are usually very sensitive, don’t you think? . . . You’re so adorable!”
An assistant tottered over with a tray of tea, served in slim, gold-rimmed cups, and Marie biscuits. Arash talked for a good half hour about how much he missed Paris (he had moved back to Tehran two years before), the Louvre, and how much he adored the new “know thyself” classes he had just started.
Lipstick Jihad Page 19
