Lipstick Jihad (30 page)

In the end, I wimped out on Botox, too, but Mitra finally settled on liposuction, aiming to lose an inch off the circumference of her hips and thighs. I argued this was unnecessary. She was already beautiful, and I didn't see why she should put herself through general anesthesia to go down a dress size. She shook her head dejectedly. At the end of the day,
khanoum,
there isn't much else you can do about this flesh, she said, patting her Iranian saddlebags, our genetic predestiny.

After the surgery Mitra went to her mother's apartment in Niyavaran to convalesce, and that is where I went to visit her, with my twin offerings of tuberoses and
Vogue
. She lay in the day bed of the sunny guest room, propped up against pillows. Outside, the birds chirped at unnaturally loud volume. There were pills and tea on the table. Here, pick out all the skinny pants you can wear now, I said, carefully placing the magazine on her lap. I lay down next to her, and turned the glossy pages, trying not to think about the seeping gauze bandages under the covers.

I reached for the bowl of apricots on the table, picked out a plump one, and passed it to Mitra. She took a nibble with a sip of tea. Our time together was usually spent with her two daughters, dancing in the living room or eating pizza on the balcony. This was our first private conversation.

I had always wanted to ask her about why she had decided to leave Iran, even after Khatami. Was it hard deciding to go, I asked. You stuck it out for so many years, what made it finally unbearable? She thought about it for several seconds, passing her finger back and forth over the apricot. When she finally did speak, it was not about the veil, or the violations of private life, or any of the daily degradations I had lived and expected to hear about. I couldn't stand arguing with them anymore, she said, the Sister Fatimehs and Sister Zeinabs at the girls' schools.

Mitra had two daughters, both teenagers. They would come home from school, having learned nothing useful, but with an earful of reprimands. “I would go down there every day, and ask them why my daughters were being treated like this. And
they,
these uneducated, unforgiving women, would stare down their noses at me, like, who was I to be asking questions about my daughters' education.”

Every life in Iran came with its unique set of battles, most of which, like Mitra's, were unknown to me. I had never tried to raise children under the Islamic Republic, so that particular challenge did not even occur to me. I
couldn't imagine what it would be like sending my daughters off to school each day, to be indoctrinated against me, their heads filled with an ideology that I would then need to unteach them at home. To be told that I, their mother, was anti-revolutionary, Westernized, immoral. Had I a choice, I realized, I might not have stayed to fight. Not if it meant sacrificing my daughters. The way I had learned to conceive of the Iranian nation, of devotion to homeland, was, after many months, still abstract. If I had children here, being pried from me and claimed for the revolution, if I had to go through a divorce under a system that stripped me of all my rights, then perhaps these notions of patriotism and loyalty would sound hollow.

Mitra's cheek gently fell against a cushion, and her exhalations became regular. In the quietness of the moment, as twilight settled on the willow trees outside the window, I felt some of the guilt of belonging to the diaspora, to the tribe who left, recede. Through living here, through seeing all the complexity that went into people's decisions to stay or leave, I was learning not to judge so harshly myself or others over such an intensely personal choice.

I respected Mitra for boxing up a privileged life, saying goodbye to all of her extended family, and starting from scratch in another hemisphere. Leaving was not an act of treason or disloyalty but of self-preservation. I had always believed that we outside were compromised for leaving Iran behind. That belief had colored my life, filled it with remorse for a decision that had not been mine. But for Mitra, and thousands of mothers like her, it would have been more compromising
not
to leave. Sacrificing a middle-aged life was one thing. Sacrificing two fresh daughters entirely another.

On the plane, a British businessman sat down next to me, and began chatting as the other passengers found their seats. We both watched women sit down, and, with the exception of pulling their head scarves off, looking pretty much as they had when they got on board. This was wholly unlike the boarding of outbound planes in years past, when women did an elaborate changing routine out of their black
roopooshes,
emerging in full makeup and Western clothes, as though the airplane bathroom was a backstage dressing room. Well, it's much better now, isn't it? he asked, trying to engage me in
conversation. Yes, of course, I said quietly. And I didn't elaborate because I didn't have it in me at that moment to extol all the ways Iranians now had it better. I wanted to say: Yes, it's better, but not for me, because I'm a female journalist, and life is still really crap. But of course I didn't say that, because it was so easy to make Westerners think the worst things about Iran, and my private misery was highly specialized and therefore irrelevant.

At that moment, I remember thinking really how stupid the mullahs were. If they didn't intimidate us with their goony Mr. Xs, people like me could be really useful. I'd have sat here chirping away about how much relative freedom women had, and blah blah. I would have been a perfect little commercial for the democratizing Islamic Republic. But instead, they played stupid games and harassed you and pretended to threaten your family and tried to make you rat on your friends and made your friends rat on you. And then they acted incredibly affronted when you wrote that not everything was sublime in the Islamic Republic.

I was on my way to New York. As assignments went, it was relatively painless. It was not a squalid refugee camp, full of ragged children whose torn overalls and forlorn eyes made your heart splinter, or a trip to a desolate border region where you ate nothing but canned tuna for a week. But for me, following President Khatami to New York, for the United Nations General Assembly, held all the appeal of a winter jaunt to Taliban-controlled Kabul.

Under the Clinton administration, the possibility of a stealthy Iran-U.S. détente always lurked around the corner. It seems quaint from the vantage point of today, with the region on the verge of falling apart and Iran branded as one-third of the “axis of evil,” to consider such micro-diplomacy a big news story. But at the time, every journalist who covered Iran scrutinized Tehran's relationship with Washington for signs of thaw. Since ties were formally severed, the two countries communicated through what was called “track two diplomacy,” where former officials and diplomats acted as intermediaries through private relationships and quiet international conferences that pretended to be about other subjects. The U.N. General Assembly was one of the few occasions when the president of Iran and the president of the United States would be in the same room, so journalists showed up in case the backroom diplomacy went public through some last-minute haggling.

When asked to go, I said yes. Then I went to pack a suitcase and immediately regretted it. I was getting better at existing between Iran and America. Most days one helped me understand the other better, rather than the two squishing me like elephants. But geographically at least, I still preferred them apart. The certainty of vast ocean and great land mass as separator was reassuring. There was always some European airport duty free to loiter through in between, where you could try on ten different perfumes and buy chocolate and prepare yourself for the transition. I did not want the mullahs to come to Manhattan. New York was my American stomping ground. I went there to lounge half-naked in dimly lit bars, sip cocktails with friends, and forget about those same mullahs. Their arrival in New York would taint my sanctuary. Turbans and the Manhattan skyline would mingle in my mind. And the question of “What do I wear?” would take on whole new dimensions.

The morning of President Khatami's press conference, I walked east down 42nd Street toward the U.N., wearing a gray, Donna Karan pantsuit, gripping a soy-milk cappuccino, invisible in the crowded commuter lane of the sidewalk. I was very pleased with this suit because it was my first adult woman suit that actually looked natural on me, instead of boxy and self-consciously suit-like. But inside my bag, glowing like pink kryptonite, was the accessory that would damn it to hell. A carefully folded, rose-colored head scarf.

For months, I had worked around the president and his entourage in Iran, veiled properly, like a professional Iranian woman. Technically, since I carried an Iranian passport and had Iranian nationality, I was legally required to wear the veil everywhere, at all times.

Even secular women activists wore the veil when outside the country, so the system's eyes abroad did not document their violation and use it as pretext to harass them upon return. This probably wouldn't happen to me, but at the same time, I knew the president and his aides were more comfortable dealing with Iranian women who were veiled. Something about speaking Farsi in public with a bare-headed woman distracted them, even though they pretended everything was perfectly normal.

If I appeared before them with my hair exposed, the image would be etched onto their minds forever. Every time thereafter, they would recall me as Ms. Moaveni-whom-I-once-saw-without-
hijab
, rather than simply
Ms. Moaveni. I had gone unveiled before at regional conferences, and half the Iranian delegation ignored me, looking away when we passed in the hallways as though passing a strip club.

The president's men were not so lumpen, and would of course still speak to me. But they would feel mortally disrespected. My youth would render it a precocious offense, rather than a political statement. Who does this girl think she is, they would say to themselves, to be asserting herself so impertinently before her elders? If there was one over-arching value to Iranian culture (at least until the revolution created its own culture of anarchy), it was respect for one's elders. That's why it actually mattered, when you were passing out tea in a crowded room, which elderly woman with purple hair you served first.

Maybe it seems excessive, elevating the question of putting on that scarf to high drama, a Hamletesque teetering back and forth over a square of cloth. But every now and then, I would find myself in these situations, which demanded an understanding of who I was and what mattered to me, and truly felt paralyzed. Putting on that dumb scrap of pink meant betraying my personal beliefs.

First there was my opposition to the veil, inherited from both sides of my family, an heirloom value that every single one of us—monarchists, secularists, socialists, capitalists, dilettantes—held dear. We did not negotiate with the veil. It was the symbol of how everything had gone horribly wrong. How in the early days of the revolution, secular women wore the veil as a protest symbol against the West and its client state policies, and then had it imposed on them by the fundamentalist mullahs who hijacked the revolution and instituted religious law. My generation, Iranians who learned about 1979 at kitchen tables in the United States, absorbed this version of history as truth. Though most women in modern-day Iran might not consider the veil their highest grievance, they knew it symbolized the system's disregard for women's legal status in general. Mandatory veiling crushed women's ability to express themselves, therefore denying them a basic human right.

As a child of this diaspora, how could I wear the mullahs' veil on the streets of New York? As a student of a liberal American education, taught to apply my political beliefs to my everyday life—to recycle and vote, to respect picket lines and observe boycotts—how could I not take a personal stand against the repressive veil? Did I not owe it to the thousands of
Afghani women, veiled by force under the Taliban, the millions of Iranian women who had no choice, to take a stand, when I did?

Of course, even if I'd had days to come up with a position, I wouldn't have known what to do. American individualism and Iranian deference to tradition were irreconcilable. That was the catch that no one ever told you about—that traveling down one of those paths meant turning your back on the other. No commuting back and forth, no shared custody. End of story.

As the flags of the U.N. appeared in the distance, I realized there was no graceful way out. My feet sailed over the pavement, closer and closer to the unmakeable decision. Suddenly, Siamak's voice entered the din in my head. I had spent a lot of time calling him up and presenting him with impossible situations, and by now I could pretty much play his role in my head and talk myself down from the ledge. Okay, Azi jan, stop for a second, he would say. Stop, and imagine the two possible outcomes. Once you can imagine both, decide which one is worse. Decide which one you can live with. If you can figure that out, you know what you need to do.