The Ministry of Guidance Invites You to Not Stay: An American Family in Iran (12 page)

During the time we were at Khosro’s house, and in the months that followed in our own apartment and even to this day, Reza continues to visit Khosro and collect fifty here, a hundred there, and consume a delicious lunch courtesy of Khosro’s mother. She lives in the house behind Khosro’s, separated by a small garden that was once lush but has since been taken over by families of stray cats that she can’t help but feed. And Khosro still waits. Reza Farda’s obligation to him was informal, in that any agreement had been made verbally, and there were no documents to prove bad faith on Reza’s part if Khosro one day decided to give up on the game and try to recover some of his cash outlay, if not the lunches he’s served.

This type of arrangement is more common in close relationships, when family members or very close friends are involved in a business transaction, than in the kind of relationship that Khosro and Reza had. But I suppose eight years of breaking bread together had created a relationship beyond business, as reluctant as Khosro might have been about it, and at any rate if Reza is unable to deliver for him, it isn’t clear at all that he never intended to in the first place. In fact, Khosro is confident that Reza would love to deliver, for that way he will actually make far more money than the fifties and hundreds he pockets from time to time. His capacity for lying through his teeth about when he might deliver, a running daily joke, is mostly indicative of a comfort in Iranian society and particularly among Tehranis with lying and exaggerating, rather than any real confidence game, Khosro believes. Comfortable with lying? My people? Really?

“We’ve become a nation of liars,” the cabbie said after he felt a little more at ease with me. He had picked me up downtown, near the Foreign Ministry, and my destination was way uptown, a good forty-five-minute or hour drive away, even on the highways that bisected Tehran’s clogged surface streets. “Have I met you before?” he had asked when I got in the front seat. “You look familiar. Do you live in Pasdaran?”

I was wearing a gray suit with an open-collared shirt and carrying a briefcase, and with the close-cropped graying beard, I suppose I could pass for a former Revolutionary Guard, many of whom live in that neighborhood of Tehran, named for the Guards themselves. No, I had replied, but I also hadn’t offered any clues to my profession, former or current. Did he think I was lying? Perhaps.

But he had started the conversation by stating that he was a retired army officer, one who had joined the army in the shah’s time, and he was in the mood, as almost every cab driver in Tehran always is, for complaining. Particularly if he thinks his passenger might be someone who will sympathize with him or, better yet, can do something about the jeremiad he is about to unleash. “The Islamic Revolution,” he said, “has brought about many advances, in industry and technology and the like. But in terms of
akhlagh
, manners or character, we’ve regressed.”

I merely nodded.

“Let me tell you a story,” he continued. “A man goes to confess his sins to the prophet. He tells him he’s a thief and a womanizer, constantly cheating on his wife. The prophet tells him there’s only one thing he must not do anymore, and that is to lie. The man, quite pleased, goes away, but within hours he realizes that he is incapable of sinning anymore if he can’t lie about it. He can’t go out that night either to steal or to womanize or both, because he can’t lie to his
wife. You see? That’s why lying is the worst sin, and why our society is crumbling.”

A good story, I commented, but I was not entirely sure why he told it to me. And while I could understand that perhaps lying had become more prevalent—at least in the overcrowded and highly competitive capital, where getting ahead by any means seemed to have become accepted behavior in recent years—I still wasn’t convinced that it had become a part of the Persian persona, despite the fact that time and again during our stay in Iran I heard people say that it had, and that in general the wonderful Persian manners of two millennia, which admittedly included a more refined form of not telling the absolute truth, had given way to the modern Iranian lying boor.

Life in a city like Tehran, with a population that has grown from less than three million before the revolution to over twelve million today, has certainly become more difficult than in the time of genteel manners, although Persian politesse, including the often infuriating
ta’arouf
—the back-and-forth niceties, self-deprecation, and faux-embarrassed apologies in transactions that involve money—is in abundant supply. It’s in the cabbies’ psyche—I have yet to have one accept payment without protesting that his service was “unworthy,” even if he had been complaining of hardship on the whole ride.

Karri was aware of it too and always snickered when I’d get into an argument with a driver about paying him. But when she was riding in a cab alone, the
ta’arouf
was still there but far weaker and, she could tell, less sincere. Iranians aren’t stupid, I told her. They understand that you, the blond, blue-eyed foreigner with a bad Farsi accent, might actually accept the free ride, and although they instinctively pretend they’d like to refuse payment, they’ll make sure you understand that you have to pay. She actually received fairer treatment from cabbies than I did—they always seemed to quote her the correct fare, whereas I, after insisting on paying, would be quoted wildly differing rates for the same ride. If I demurred, the driver would shrug and say I could pay whatever I wanted to, always making me feel just a little
guilty about paying him less than what he expected, especially if he was from a local car service and I might have to climb in behind him again the next time I called for a car.

Is it the population and education explosion, unmatched by opportunity, that makes Iranians, particularly big-city Iranians, bemoan the dog-eat-dog culture that they insist has replaced their true one? Or is it the semi-isolation from the world economy due to an anti-Western phobia on the part of the regime and an anti-Iran phobia on the part of the West? Increasingly harsh sanctions on Iran by the West, ostensibly to force the regime to give up any nuclear ambitions, have not achieved that goal but have affected ordinary Iranians in ways that the architects of the sanctions may not have intended. Small businesses that in the past relied on imports or exports have found it increasingly difficult to stay afloat, resulting in layoffs, in everything from managerial positions to janitorial staff, and complete shutdowns. Fewer and fewer international or multinational companies are willing to invest in Iran or even maintain a modest presence there, again resulting in less opportunity for ordinary workers. Most Western consumer goods are still available, smuggled in, albeit with increasing difficulty and therefore beyond the reach of many Iranians.

Inflation has always unenviably been in the double digits, but in the last two years—because of the far more restrictive sanctions that President Obama has been able to impose on Iran with the help of key allies—it has climbed to stratospheric heights, cutting the earning power of almost every Iranian, especially people on fixed incomes. (The creeping devaluation of the rial, the Iranian currency, meant that the dollars Karri and I brought were worth more almost weekly, but inflation, which could be measured just as regularly, meant that our buying power barely improved.) Beyond their economic effects on industry, sanctions have also resulted in shortages of imported medicines; even when medications are available, their prices are unaffordable, causing concern for any Iranian who does not have the ability
to travel abroad for treatment, particularly for all forms of cancer. So to make ends meet—and certainly some of the difficulties have been a result of domestic economic mismanagement rather than international sanctions—Iranians at every rung of the socioeconomic ladder have resorted to practices that once would have been considered so dishonorable as to render one an outcast from society. Once a single hair of his mustache, painfully plucked by a lower-class dealmaker in the presence of a partner, would seal any agreement with far more force than the proverbial Western handshake, but today nothing so quaint suffices, and agreements are broken as often as they are signed, sealed, and delivered. Promissory notes are generally considered not worth the paper they are written on. Literally.

In earlier times, dishonor befell a debtor; today in the Islamic Republic, writing a bad check can still land you in a not-so-nice prison, lending the society an oddly Dickensian flavor. Iranians nonetheless seem to be world champions in signing worthless chits and running up debts. But while some victims of bounced checks have given up all hope of collecting their due and seek vengeance instead, others wait for the possibility that one day the debtor might make good on his promises; for if he goes to prison (and it always seems to be a “he”), the debt is wiped away. Especially among close-knit families, where the very concept of a fraud perpetrated by one against another would once have been viewed with horror, waiting seems to be the only option. My own family was no exception, in 2011.

My immediate family, meaning my parents and siblings, all live in the West, but on my paternal side I have a large extended family of first and second cousins, uncles, aunts, and their children and grandchildren. Almost all are from Ardakan, a town in the desert, but they have lived in Tehran either their entire lives or most of them. Even before she met them, Karri was aware of the fact that, their being Iranian and, worse yet, provincial in character, they would smother us with their love and attention. But I don’t think she was prepared for what family means to Ardakanis or Yazdis—from the city of
Yazd, the big city to the village of Ardakan—let alone Persians. On our second night in Tehran, we were invited to one cousin’s house, and upon arriving with little Khash in tow, some thirty or so family members greeted us, all desperate to play with the newest Majd and curious about the foreign woman who was his mother. “That’s a big family,” Karri remarked to me, a little dazed from jet lag, from being in Tehran, and from the Farsi constantly spoken around her. Yes, I told her, and this is only half of them.

My family members in Iran are engaged in different professions, from insurance and banking to politics, construction, and import-export, and there are even a couple of highly regarded doctors and surgeons. But one son-in-law of one cousin my age, who had been a teacher but had some time ago decided to become a real estate developer, perhaps to compete with other upwardly mobile Ardakanis, had been offering the family 30 percent interest on their money over the past few years, while banks in Iran were offering between 15 and 20 percent. Iran’s high inflation rate is the reason rial accounts in Iran can offer such rates—those rates don’t apply to the dollar-or euro-deposit accounts that have been legal for some years now. Whether out of greed or the desire to help a family member or both, many in the family handed over their savings to him, which he said was to be used for an apartment block construction project at a popular Iranian beach on the Caspian coast.

Most of them, rather than taking the monthly interest on their money, elected to leave it to compound, raising their exposure should something bad happen, say, a crash in the real estate market. The crash happened, of course, a couple of years after the U.S. crash, and although it was not as severe as in some American states, selling condos by the sea was no longer the financial slam dunk it had been when the hapless son-in-law changed professions. He never let on that trouble was brewing, naturally, perhaps because of pride and because of that “keeping up with the Majds” concern of his—until two of my cousins needed some of their cash back and asked him for it.

Wait, he told them, and you’ll have it. How long? A little while.

He had also gone outside the family for money, and we discovered that he owed some five million dollars to various people, most of whom were not willing to wait very long to get it back. Between ourselves, Karri and I started referring to him as our very own Bernie Madoff, whom, to our surprise, everyone in Tehran seemed to know about. It seemed rather preposterous that someone with hardly any experience in either finance (unlike Madoff) or construction could amass that kind of debt; my cousin’s son-in-law couldn’t have paid what he owed even if every condo he and his partners were building sold right away, and at full price. Madoff may have figured that his scheme could last forever, barring a financial crisis, and this fellow probably thought the same, although it may have been less a scheme to embezzle than the pure folly of thinking nothing can ever go wrong when everything does, all the time.

As time went on and
farda
turned into
pass-farda
, the day after tomorrow, into next week, then the week after, I think it finally dawned on my cousins that their relative simply would not ever have the money to pay them back. Even if he did manage to come up with some cash, perhaps by selling his house or some land, he’d undoubtedly first pay outside investors, who would have no qualms about taking him to court and sending him to debtors’ prison. The family would wait.

As they waited, however, relations between cousins frayed, and within a month or two some were no longer on speaking terms. The cousin whose son-in-law was the debtor was shunned by her sisters, even though she had nothing to do with the case and in fact had lost money herself, but of course she didn’t want her daughter’s husband, the father of her grandchildren, to go to jail. She anguished, and our visits to her house for lunch, which she insisted on when we first arrived, going so far as to cook separate vegetarian dishes for Karri, discontinued as she retreated from the family. By the end of the year, her son-in-law was in prison, courtesy of investors who were not willing
to wait, were unforgiving of his bounced checks, and knew better than did his family that he would never make good on his promises.

The despair of my extended family over their own little Madoff scandal was undoubtedly shared by the many other Iranians who are caught up in scams, bad investment deals, and the struggle to get ahead in an economy that doesn’t allow much room for mistakes. A big financial scandal, a $2.6 billion embezzlement case involving numerous private and state-owned banks, made news in the West while we were in Tehran—it was, not surprisingly, headline news in Iran for weeks—yet the lesser scams and financial malfeasances that are daily occurrences are not big news to anyone but those affected. The $2.6 billion case soon overshadowed everything else, even the political infighting going on at the highest levels of the Islamic Republic, to the point that it became the topic of conversation at every turn, an Islamic parable of sorts for everything wrong with Persian society.