Over time, I saw the grace of the universe and it still pierced my heart, but I kept going. I had term papers to write, books to read. A job to work. People to meet. Arguments to fight, bills to pay, friends to lose and keep. Life pulled me back into herself, and I learned to ignore the moments of devastating beauty so I could keep on going. It wasn’t possible to be awake like that, and live. But once in a while, it happened that I’d be walking in the streets, and suddenly, I’d feel myself rising, above me, above the whole city, and I could see us, all of us, in the apartments and in the stores and in the classrooms, in courtrooms and banks and streets, each of us trapped by the lonely illusion of our own being, until moments of rapture and tragedy broke us open and allowed us transcendence. Sometimes I stopped for it, for the feeling to pass. Sometimes, I ignored it and kept going.
But now I was in Iran. And among the many reasons I was standing where I was standing, on a street with signs in a language I could barely read, was that I felt incomplete. There were the glimpses of something beyond the ego whenever I experienced those moments of rapture, but that didn’t answer the question posed by my family, my professors, my employers, friends, acquaintances, strangers in the street about who I was meant to be. I was twenty-four now, a college graduate, and I had already bounced from an aborted start in a career in teaching to an aborted start in a career in the film industry, and when people asked who I was, I couldn’t very well answer them with I am the stardust of the universe, or I am everything that has and has not been. People wanted specifics. It meant compiling the list of attributes, test scores and transcripts, accomplishments, degrees, debts, economic class, future potential, career path, tastes, the contents of my wardrobe, my politics, the way I spoke, the music I listened to, the color of my skin, the books on my shelf, the style of my worship, the size of my shoe, and clearly stating the summation of all that into the logarithm of a concise identity.
I left Iran as a child and arrived in America when I was almost seven. My identity was still in formation, still green, but I had a sense of the rules governing who I should be. But then, suddenly, I was plucked out of the society where those rules applied and dropped into a whole new one. Tehran to Los Angeles. And those rules didn’t apply anymore. Even the words my parents had taught me sounded like gibberish in LA. I had to discard my identity or hide it, either in shame or to protect myself from the taunts and the jeers about my clothes, my manners, the foods I ate, my inability to pronounce “th.” I had to find, quickly, quickly, a new identity, and since now I had lost all faith in identities, in general, I pulled together a sham of a mask and hoped that it was enough to ward off the jackals.
It never fit. Not the new one I tried on, and not the old one I tore off. So I was left always feeling naked. And naked is vulnerable. I thought that here, in Iran, I might find something of myself, some missing piece left behind that, once found, would complete me. And that rooster, those children and their grandfather . . . that was not a thing of Los Angeles. Inconsequential as it was, it was still a story that belonged to these streets and, perhaps, it belonged to me now, too. So I took it, thinking that if I gathered enough stories, if I lived enough moments within Iran, I might be able to stitch it into a wholeness, wrap it about myself and say, “This, this is who I am.”
I found the bazaar that sold fruits and vegetables. Wooden crates full of tomatoes. Trays piled high with purple eggplants. Mountains of apricots. Rusted scales with weights. Men who shouted out the prices of their produce. I stood there amidst the noisy colors of it, uncertain of what to do. Bell peppers. I had to buy bell peppers for my uncle’s wife. I found a produce merchant who sold them. A handwritten sign displayed the price per kilo. I selected a few, which he weighed on his scale and placed in a bag. My first task accomplished, I turned to walk back to the apartment when an old man with a wheelbarrow started to follow me.
“Miss,” he said. “Allow me to carry your bag.”
“No, thank you. It is light enough.”
“Please?” He had on dusty brown pants, patched, held by a belt of rope. A woolen cap on his head. His hands gnarled, the skin of his face weathered, eyes cloudy. “Please?”
I placed my single plastic bag in the wheelbarrow. “I’m going in that direction,” I motioned. We walked in silence. I watched him from the corner of my eyes, his trudging gait, his shirt too big, his threadbare vest, his body gaunt, his mouth toothless, lips sunken in. “Why are you working still, father?”
“My wife is back in Afghanistan. She is sick. All our children are lost.”
He looked so tired, and I could feel it coming, again, the surge of it, welling up inside me. Not now, I told myself, not here, not in these unfamiliar streets. It was a battle. An existential war. How could I not see him? How could I not allow his fatigue to fill me up, to slow down my own feet? We came to the apartment gate.
“Here?” he asked.
I didn’t know what else to do, so I took out all the cash in my satchel, put it in his wheelbarrow, grabbed my bag, and turned away as fast as I could, rang the intercom, ran up the stairs and into the apartment where I told my uncle’s wife what had happened.
“Well, go down and tell him to wait,” she said. “I’ll pack him some food.”
That afternoon, when my cousin Javid came home from work and heard the story of my first experience in the marketplace, he offered to take me shopping. “How about I take you to a nice store where you can buy a more fashionable manteau?” he said. “What you are wearing is a little outdated.”
Javid and I drove to a part of Tehran that had boutiques in white stone buildings, stylish mannequins in storefront windows, and young women with shopping bags and expensive purses sitting at outdoor cafés, sipping iced coffee drinks, smiling at young men in designer jeans and sneakers. Here, I was safe. Here, I was too concerned by my baggy, shapeless hijab to lose myself. Here, the song of the universe was drowned out by the bugle and horns of the ego. Everybody was so pretty. Everything so shiny. I bought a few linen manteaus, finely tailored. I bought a silk headscarf in saffron red, another in cream. I bought almond oil from an apothecary shop where the salesman promised it would bring out the sheen of my hair. Javid and I sat at one of the outdoor cafés and sipped coffee glacés.
On our way back to the car, we passed an old woman sitting on the sidewalk. She had an embroidered sheet folded before her, and on it were spread bundles of herbs tied with twine. Javid hurried his pace.
“Daughter?” she said.
I stopped.
“I grew these in my garden,” she said.
I knelt down to look at her herbs. She smiled at me.
“Where are you from, child?” she asked. I looked into her eyes. Her eyes smiled, too.
“America,” I said. Her smile was so deep, I found myself drowning, again. I looked away from her, pretended to select from the bundles.
“You carry a sadness in your heart,” she said.
“We’ll take the basil,” Javid said. He picked up a bouquet of opal basil and paid her.
“I will pray for you, daughter,” she said.
“You reveal too much of yourself,” Javid said on the way to the car. “It attracts attention. You can’t be that open here.”
The car smelled strongly of basil, the perfume of it a silent reminder of an old woman’s garden, of seeds sown in the hard earth, of hope, of seedlings crowning through dark soil, reaching for the light.
ON THE THIRD day of my homecoming, I found myself before a police chief, who sat behind an enormous desk of some dark colored wood, cherry or mahogany, in a green leather swivel chair. The office was stifling. Behind the police chief, nailed to the wood paneled wall, hung an oil painting of Ayatollah Khomeini with his signature smile and a pink tint to his cheeks. I saw his image everywhere, on billboards, posters in banks, murals on the sides of buildings. I supposed the artist of this particular painting meant the portrait to look something like the image of a benevolent father, but I not
iced a leer in the Ayatollah’s eyes that didn’t befit the role. Who knows? Maybe the artist meant for the eyes to leer. Maybe the pink cheeks and the terrifying eyes were an intentional, albeit hidden, message by the artist, who created the noble portraiture as requested by the Orwellian state, but included, nonetheless, his own meaning.
“Do you know why you are in my office?” the police chief asked me, again.
I looked away from the portrait of the Ayatollah to the police chief. Bald. Shiny. Small eyes. Trim little mustache. I looked down quickly to my own hands clasped in my lap. This moment afforded no room for error, because the wrong look, the wrong tone, could escalate this little offense, my shameless ankles, to dangerous proportions. I shook my head no.
“Do you understand Farsi?” the police chief asked me. It was hot, he was sweating, and I could smell him in the stagnant air. His eyes bored into me.
“A little,” I responded in Farsi, with an intentionally exaggerated American accent.
“You are here because of your indecency,” the police chief said, then looked at me silently for a long, long while, with his forehead wrinkled, his chin tucked down, waiting for the accusation to sink in. I kept my eyes down, my head lowered. “This is a public space created so the youth can have a place to exercise their bodies,” he said. “And your appearance causes an unhealthy distraction. It ruins the wholesomeness of their endeavors to achieve a healthy body through a healthy mind.”
To escape his interrogation within that suffocating office, I thought back to an evening, less than a week earlier, when I lay partially naked in the grass of a backyard in Encino Hills amidst a group of sprawling, nude strangers. I had told my yoga teacher I was heading to Iran for an indeterminable while to find answers to some indeterminable question, and she said, “Come with me to this sweat hut ceremony. It’ll give you clarity.”
I had driven to San Fernando Valley, up some street that needed paving, through a cluster of dusty eucalyptus, onto the driveway of a secluded home. I rang the doorbell, and there she stood, the shaman. She led me to a backyard, where a bunch of people I didn’t know were contorted into various yoga positions, completely naked. I was the youngest among them. “You don’t have to get naked,” the shaman said. “But that’s how it’s done.”
“The immodesty of your appearance is an affront to our intentions,” the police chief said. The harshness in his voice pulled me back from Encino Hills to that hard chair in the cloistered office, before the enormous wooden desk. I played with a button on my manteau. I was wearing one of the new linen ones I had purchased with Javid, along with my saffron-colored headscarf and a long white skirt, loose enough to hide my curves. I had on tennis shoes. The offense? I hadn’t worn socks. Only a bit of skin was visible between the hem of my skirt and my shoes, just a fraction of ankle. It was hot and, beneath all that hijab, I was sweating something dirty, so I figured I’d allow my poor feet some respite. And the tennis shoes did look better without socks. Ali had called Pouya that morning and invited both of us for a game of tennis at a sprawling park devoted to athletic pursuits. Soccer fields, tennis, rugby, basketball courts. It was the first time I stepped out onto city streets not looking like some village girl from a religiously conservative family. When we arrived at the park, I got out of Pouya’s car, walked with the boys in the direction of the tennis courts and, just then, out of nowhere, the Sisters of Islam, a whole gang of them in their black chadors, formed a tight circle around me, scowling, furious, shrill with indignation.
“How can you leave the house looking like this?” they asked me.
“How are you related to these two boys?”
“Is it for them that you are so shamelessly revealing your body?”
This wasn’t the first time I found myself surrounded by the Sisters. When I was four years old, my mother took me to my first dentist visit. She promised that if I was good, afterwards she’d take me to Shahr-e Bazi to ride the Ferris wheel and eat cotton candy. I was good, and she kept her promise. It was dusk when we left the dentist’s office and arrived at the park entrance. The lights of the Ferris wheel twinkled and, next to that, the cotton candy machine spun. It was the early days of the Ayatollah’s rise to power. The hijab, the Islamic State dictated by sharia, all that was still new. People didn’t really understand what was happening yet. The women were told that they had to leave the house in full hijab, but until very recently, they had been leaving the house in whatever they pleased.
My mother was a young woman taking her daughter to the dentist and the park. She wore a loose-fitting sweater, a belt at her waist, and a scarf thrown over her hair as a nod to the new rules. But the Islamic regime meant business, and my mother’s fashionable interpretation of Islamic law was not appreciated, certainly not by the black chador-clad Sisters.
Just as we entered that park, they surrounded her. They circled tight around us, pushed her, asked her how she could look like such a whore in public, yelled at her. To appease them, she removed her belt so that the sweater was formless. This didn’t satisfy the Sisters. They called over a Brother. A young man, from some far-flung village, outfitted in the garb of authority. He carried a gun. He lectured my mother about her appearance. I tried to pull her out of their circle, toward the light of the Ferris wheel. I tugged at her hand, I whined, I cried. Finally, they let her go. They told her to leave the park at once and never enter the public sphere dressed so shamelessly again. My mother picked me up and rushed to hail a cab. I watched that Ferris wheel grow farther and farther into the distance from the backseat window.
And now, back after nearly two decades, I stood again in the circle of the Sisters, without my mother, trying to defend myself against their accusations. The more I spoke, the louder they yelled, until Ali stepped in and apologized to them, then sat down on the hot asphalt at the hem of their chadors, took off his own sneakers, took off his sweat socks, jumped up, handed them to me and ordered me to go to the car and put his socks on. Barked the order. Because he understood that this was what the Sisters wanted to hear. This was what they wanted to see. My subjugation and shame. I recognized Ali’s gallant move, but a fire raged through me. I turned, walked to the car, put his damp sweat socks on and walked back, visibly angry. I looked ridiculous. I felt humiliated. I stood before the Sisters and asked, perhaps with the wrong tone, if this would do. They turned away from me and held council. After a few moments, they turned to face me to deliver their verdict as one of them radioed the police. Pouya and Ali pleaded for their mercy with an urgency in their voices that frightened me. The police arrived, escorted me to the park station, and here I sat now, before the chief, with the boys outside the door waiting.
“Where are you from?” the police chief had asked.
“I was born here, but grew up in America.”
“And how long have you been back in Tehran?”
“I arrived three days ago. It is my first time returning since I left as a child.” I kept my eyes down, afraid he might be able to see that I was the kind of girl who participated, partially nude, in sweat hut ceremonies with strangers.
“Perhaps you do not understand the importance of modesty, having lived in America for so long?” the police chief said. “Perhaps the lewd ways of America seem normal to you?”
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I thought the long skirt hid my ankles. I didn’t mean to offend anybody.”
He continued to lecture me for a long time on the importance of a girl’s modesty. Perhaps he thought of himself as a benevolent father, teaching the prodigal daughter returned to her homeland after years and years of growing up in the midst of unrestrained sin. While he spoke in that hot office, I thought back to the sweat hut. I had sat there very immodestly, nearly naked, in the dark, among complete strangers, chanting and swaying, waiting for the visions, for clarity, for the point where the body hits a certain threshold and breaks open to the untethered flight of the conscious mind. I didn’t achieve that in the sweat hut, though. Instead, I had s
at there, too, trying to ignore the smell of all those bodies crowded into that tiny space. I felt relieved when the ceremony ended and we crawled back out into the yard. I lay belly down in the cool grass, picked the small daisies that grew there and wove them into a garland for my hair while the rest of the sweat hut cohort stared blissfully at the magnificent orange sunset.
Then, it got too cold to be outside naked, and we all went in for a potluck dinner. That’s when the shaman started to speak, without pause, in a sort of trance. She talked about the great feminine spirit and the imbalance of the world. She talked about how, soon, a great battle would be waged between the feminine and the masculine energies, because the masculine spirit had dominated for too long, grown too immense, and in his hunger for power, he had swallowed forests, consumed whole oceans, left behind in his wake wasted earth and life, poisoned waters and air, death and destruction. This energy needed to be tempered, reeled in, soothed. I listened to her, practically hypnotized, until I shook myself out of that trance, realized it was late night already, thanked her, bade farewell to my yoga teacher, put on my clothes and drove home to pack my bags for my upcoming trip to Iran.
“Do you understand, then, what my job is, what I must do?” The police chief now asked me. “My job is to protect you. To keep you pure. So that when you stand before the gates of paradise, you will be granted admittance.”
Home Is a Stranger Page 6