The Ministry of Guidance Invites You to Not Stay: An American Family in Iran (28 page)

The malls did provide a snapshot of Emirati life, perhaps not entirely accurate but one of the only glimpses most foreigners will get: expats prancing about in shorts and revealing T-shirts; Emirati and other Arab women in full black abayas, the Arab equivalent of a chador; and Arab men, mostly in traditional garb and headdresses, usually walking a few paces ahead of their wives if not alone. No one carried a drink in his or her hand, no one had so much as a piece of candy or a stick of gum to chew on.

Outside in the parking lot, I stepped out for a cigarette in the designated smoking area of the Dubai Mall. Suddenly two employees ran toward me at full speed. “Sir,” one of them, a South Asian, said breathlessly, “no smoking allowed!”

I pointed to the cigarette sign and the big ashtray in front of me.

“No, no,” he said, “it’s
Ramadan
!”

I protested that I was an American, seeing no point in confusing him with the Iranian thing.

The security guards didn’t care. It was Ramadan, and one didn’t smoke, eat, or drink during daylight hours, no matter who one was or what one’s faith was.

It was quite a contrast to Iranian Ramadan, where smoking on the street was more common than I had expected, especially in the northern parts of the city, even among pious Iranians. And certainly no one, unless they were from the government security forces, would object there if someone visibly smoked or ate or drank. In Tehran, Karri had often witnessed men and women surreptitiously sneaking a pastry or a sandwich in a doorway, slyly smoking a cigarette, or taking a swig from a bottle of water in the park—and to her surprise, no one seemed to care.

One day when I went to pay my fruit seller, who comes from a
religious family, I caught him hiding a burning cigarette. “I’m not religious,” I said, gesturing at the curling wisp of smoke rising from under the counter. “Go ahead and smoke openly.”

“It’s the one thing that I can’t give up,” he replied, bending down behind the counter to take a drag.

Surely he realized his shop smelled of smoke, despite the open doors? It didn’t matter, I guessed. I asked why he didn’t just go whole hog and eat and drink, too, since he was breaking the fast anyway.

He just smiled, as if I were too ignorant to understand.

Taxi drivers, with pictures of Shia saints hanging from their rear-view mirrors no less, had bottles of water hidden not so well under their seats, I noticed. And as soon as I sat down for a trim before our trip to Dubai, my barber asked me if I was fasting. Actually, he asked it rhetorically, offering me the customary glass of tea, for me to sip in front of a large glass window facing Vali Asr as he cut my hair. I declined.

Iran was fasting, yes, but as with everything else in Iran, rules are viewed as guides and are meant to be broken. The Emirates was different: it had one set of rules for foreigners, whom it is desperate to attract (as long as they don’t flout Islamic mores
too
openly outside their hotels and clubs), and another set for Arabs (and actually for all Muslims, although it’s rarely enforced on non-Arab Muslims). But in a land where Karri could dress as she pleased, the rules of public behavior—or the Islamic nature of the country, as she pointed out to me—seemed more strict, certainly for the natives, than in Iran, which she felt was far more European in its feel and in the outlook of its citizens, even the outwardly pious Muslims.

Despite the restrictions in Dubai, which were easy to bypass while staying in one of the well-stocked, self-contained, and self-sufficient hotels, we enjoyed the brief break from Tehran. It was nice to be able to go to a bar, albeit only after seven-thirty p.m., and who knew that going to Starbucks—which had an outlet in the small shopping mall connected to our hotel—could become a drug that one might have
withdrawal from? Spending time in the Kinokuniya bookstore in the Dubai Mall—where interested Iranians pick up books unavailable in Tehran—was itself worth the trip.

But we were going to spend the rest of Ramadan back at our apartment in Tehran, despite the scarcity of public activities that are permissible in Iran until Eid-e-Fetr, the holiday marking the end of the fast. When we got back, Khash was particularly annoyed by the closed coffee shop at the bottom of the hill from our street, missing his daily dose of love from the girls working there, and he would point to it emphatically as we went on our walks, pleading in his babbling way for me to somehow open it up and take him inside. He was otherwise oblivious to Ramadan, since Karri or I would buy him a drink, coconut water in a Tetrapak usually (which has enthusiastic advocates in Tehran, too). He’d sometimes pour it on his pants, depending on how thirsty or mischievous he felt. And the fruit seller would always give him a banana, which he slowly devoured as we made our rounds of the shops in our neighborhood. The park he liked, which was too hot to visit much before five o’clock, and the nearby House of Cinema (a former Qajar mini-palace) had two rather nice cafés in beautiful grounds—we’d normally go there after Khash was finished playing, sometimes meeting friends; but that was also not an option during Ramadan.

So our life, like the lives of many Iranians, became even more monotonous than it ordinarily was, but we consoled ourselves that it was only two more weeks, not a lifetime. We were invited to a couple of
iftars
, the nightly ritualistic breaking of the fast, but not every other night, as some Iranians are. It’s somewhat bad form to go to an
iftar
if one has not actually fasted, and few religious families will invite friends or family who are nonpracticing or won’t throw reciprocal
iftar
parties themselves.
Iftar
, falling well after Khash’s dinnertime and around the time he would want to go to sleep, was also an inconvenient moment to take him anywhere, although we did manage once or twice. We even had an
iftar
at a cousin’s lodge in Darbandsar, in
the mountains, where Khash ate before everyone else and missed the mountains of food, beginning with dates, cheese, bread, and tea, that appeared on the dining table just as dusk arrived.

After Ramadan, we finally accepted an invitation to spend a weekend at a friend’s house at the Caspian, which Karri had wanted to see and which we thought would be fun for Khash. We left by car, driven by my friend, in the early afternoon on a Wednesday to avoid the traffic jams that would occur later that evening and all day on Thursday. Khash complained most of the way for, unaccustomed to car seats, he couldn’t abide being strapped into one. When we arrived, it was too dark to see or do anything, so we bought takeout from one of the numerous restaurants in the area catering to weekenders, which was rather delicious Caspian cuisine—different vegetable stews and kebabs than in Tehran, but with the customary fluffy rice. Only in the morning, with perfect weather, did we realize that we were surrounded by hilly forests, lush greenery, and smog-free air such as we hadn’t witnessed since our arrival in the dust bowl that is Tehran. Even the mountains outside Tehran are desertlike until one crosses them completely and descends into the Caspian region—which after Tehran and after the torrid Persian Gulf was, to say the least, a delight. A hike in the hills, where my friend owned some property—formerly a tea plantation—was just as delightful, and the view of the sea, placid and inviting, was not something Karri had imagined she’d experience while in Iran. Stranger still, to foreign eyes at least, was what we saw one day at a seaside restaurant. The beach was packed with customers, and while the men with rolled-up pants dipped their feet into the water, the women sat on the sand in their manteaus and scarves, not daring to splash in the surf. Not even the many children went near the water, choosing to play well away from the tide level and seemingly not feeling an urge to jump in. It was probably good training for the girls, who would not, if the Islamic regime survived that long, be able to swim at ease in their adulthood.

A group of women, young and old, sat on some rocks while staring
at the sea and chatting to one another. The young ones’ faces were heavily and inappropriately slathered with makeup, as usual, rather than sunscreen, and one with bleached-blond hair sticking out from under her scarf, bright orange lipstick, and fluorescent orange nails appeared a little forlorn and removed from the conversation. As ridiculous as she looked, still at that moment what came to mind was what a friend had long ago told me: the Islamic Republic has forbidden
fun
. Khash, of course, was oblivious to this fact, playing as he did with pebbles and sand and enjoying the attention he received from camera-wielding tourists, men and women, who kept asking if it was okay to photograph him. I can’t be sure, but I do think that numerous family picture albums and hard drives in Iran include a picture of Khash as a baby, in a Tehran park, on a busy sidewalk, or at the beach.

On the way back to the villa, we drove through a beautiful and heavily forested park—what looked like a nature preserve—with gazebos for picnickers and barbecue pits for kebab grilling. Iranians love nature, and the number of parks and green spaces in Tehran created by successive mayors, and their popularity with the citizens, is a testament to that. But they may love their cars just as much. On the wide sidewalks, right by their cars, families had set out carpets and cushions to sit on and were picnicking within plain sight of gazebos surrounded by ancient trees. A short,
very
short walk would have placed these families right in the middle of nature, away from the fumes of cars and motorcycles and the ugly asphalt, but being next to their cars and still in view of nature probably appealed to them more. On the drive back to Tehran (and I reluctantly drove, since my friend had to leave early, in a different car, to make an appointment in the city), all along the way on the Chalus road, which winds through mountains and valleys, we saw more of these families, parked by verdant spots and relaxing with a thermos of tea or a more elaborate repast on the edge of the road, some even camping, within spitting distance of a far more agreeable spot.

The Caspian, which is, in a way, the Hamptons of Tehran, makes
for a pleasant weekend excursion, but more for relaxation than anything else, and seeing nature is inherently enjoyable for a Tehran resident. Yet unless one is there for a party, there is nothing to do. The road that runs along the shore is dotted with the kinds of shops one sees in every seaside resort town—stores with souvenirs, gaudy children’s toys, and buckets, shovels, and beach toys displayed outside—and small restaurants and bakeries and ice-cream shops. But the image is deceptive. Little of the jollity that one might observe in seaside resorts elsewhere—families enjoying the beach, couples holding hands on a boardwalk or promenade, people dining at outdoor cafés or drinking at bars—is on display here. Instead, these things are reserved, one imagines, for the privacy of the villas and the apartments that Tehranis repair to, and probably never leave, on the weekend. There is little sightseeing, either, unless one ventures to the cities farther up the coast, where historic buildings, monuments, mosques, and churches can be found.

But I knew that Iran offers incredible sightseeing, so once we were back home, we planned a week’s trip south, to the famous city of Esfahan and, less well known but still impressive, the Silk Road city of Yazd.

Flying anywhere in Iran is cheap and relatively easy, but it was not a risk Karri was willing to take, since domestic flights offered by the national airline and private carriers use outdated equipment. The airplanes can barely qualify as such—the forty-year-old Boeings and Soviet-era Tupolevs have an unfortunate record of falling out of the sky, if they ever make it up there, that is. Sanctions on Iran, both the unilateral U.S. ones and more recently the UN and European sanctions, have meant that, despite its massive wealth in both the public and the private sectors, Iran has been largely unable to upgrade its fleet of civilian aircraft since the revolution—even new Airbuses are off limits due to the percentage of American parts. And far too many airplane crashes occur in a country that should have an impeccable safety record, since its pilots are as accomplished as any in
the West. (Even more stringent sanctions imposed by the West since we departed have virtually cut off Iran’s economy from the outside world, which bodes poorly for transportation and much else.) The trains in Iran are a good, if time-consuming, alternative to flying, as are the buses, which are surprisingly luxurious and ridiculously cheap.

But traveling with Khash and all the impedimenta that this involves meant our best alternative was driving. Yazd is a five-or six-hour drive south on a highway that is essentially a straight line through the desert, once one escapes the southernmost reaches of Tehran, and since my family is from Yazd, one or another cousin would inevitably be driving there—in a very nice and safe SUV to boot—in any given month. Ali Khatami, brother of the ex-president and my cousin Maryam’s husband, insisted that he take us, as in the late summer and early fall he was driving there almost every week to see his elderly mother, who had suffered illnesses all year, and he would be taking with us my uncle’s widow, whom I very much liked and who happened to be his aunt, too. We hadn’t decided yet how we would return to Tehran, other than via Esfahan, but it was going to be either by taxi or by train.

The drive to Yazd was easy, and Khash behaved surprisingly well in his car seat, perhaps lulled by the desert landscape, the rush of speeding along at ninety miles an hour, and the constant supply of snacks and drinks. He was a little too curious about the thermos of hot tea that every Iranian family keeps handy for any trip longer than an hour, but it relieved Ali of the duty of stopping for the obligatory tea breaks. Classical Persian music on the stereo also helped, and we arrived at our hotel on the outskirts of the old town a little tired but no worse for wear. The hotel, which I had stayed in alone before, is a converted old mansion, with acres of grounds. The man-made blue-tiled stream running through it gave Khash endless joy and us endless anxiety. But the oddest sight, one that Khash found curious and a little baffling, was that of the dwarf the hotel had hired since my last visit to greet guests; the man was barely taller
than Khash and was dressed in traditional ancient Persian finery and shoes and hat, just like the other doormen. He seemed unperturbed that he might be an object of amusement if not mockery by hotel visitors and particularly their children, in a country where political correctness, as it applies to the differently abled (excepting war veterans), has seemingly not arrived. Khash kept his distance, recognizing somehow that the man was an adult but not the kind he was accustomed to seeing, and the dwarf, unlike all the other hotel employees who fawned over this
farangi
child, remained aloof, perhaps because of previous less-than-happy experiences with children his own size.