Censoring an Iranian Love Story

by Shahriar Mandanipour; Sara Khalili

  At two o’clock that afternoon, Mr. P. tapped him on the shoulder and asked him to go for a walk. Mr. P. was one of those rare people who prior to the revolution openly demonstrated his religious inclinations. Even back then, unlike his colleagues, he never wore neckties, always had stubble on his chin, and whenever he came face-to-face with a woman wearing makeup and dressed in Western fashion, he would become terribly uncomfortable. He would blush, sweat, struggle to not look at the woman’s face, and he would turn away. He had once explained to a colleague why he would not even lower his head and look down. “These women … One doesn’t know what to do … Some of them wear such short skirts and sandals without socks that no matter how low you hang your head you can still see part of their legs … I get embarrassed instead of them.”

  During the early months of the revolution, P. organized and led a strike by that bureau’s employees, and for this he was arrested and thrown in prison. After the revolution triumphed, he was released along with other political detainees—some of whom had spent more than thirty years in the Shah’s prisons—and he returned to his workplace a hero.

  Sinbad walked in step with P., who was being very quiet and mysterious. He couldn’t figure out what this important person who always ignored him could possibly want with him. He was scared. He thought P. probably wanted to tell him he was being purged. He had prepared to defend himself if such a remark was made and to complain that they should fire Ms. Roxanna instead.

  A group of a hundred people were walking down the street, hurling their fists at the sky and shouting, “Death to the monarchist, death to the Communist, death to the hypocrite, death to the counterrevolution.”

  P., in a voice that now sounded sad, said:

  “I see you’ve stopped shaving.”

  Sinbad ran his hand over his face. He realized that contrary to what he had thought, he had again not shaved. He now had a five-day beard. He did not answer.

  “It’s very good. Islam disapproves of men shaving their faces and looking like women.”

  “I know.”

  “I know you know … My concern is something else.”

  “I have always tried to be a good employee. If there is any shortcoming in my work, please tell me and I will certainly rectify it. If you take my job away from me, I will be ruined. I have an old mother who worked as a servant in rich people’s homes to raise me, and now she is bedridden.”

  “No one wants to fire you. My concern is that your growing a beard is a hypocrisy and a pretense. In my opinion, in Islam hypocrisy is a far greater sin than shaving. This is what I wanted to tell you.”

  Sinbad looked at P.’s sad face in surprise; P. was looking somewhere far away.

  “These days everyone is a die-hard Muslim. Mr. Kingslave has changed his name to Pious. The man who I do not claim was an informant of the Shah’s secret service, but who we know was a member of the Shah-ordained Rastakhiz Party, has grown a beard and is now more devout than the likes of me. He goes to the director general every day and with half-truths and half-lies he bad-mouths our colleagues, he slanders them, and to show that he is a revolutionary, he recommends that some of them be purged. It was he who made the director general suspect you, even though we all know how very responsible you are … I am struggling to make sure such people do not get ahead and sidetrack the revolution.”

  Sinbad angrily said:

  “I’m not one of these people. I just want to do my job, collect my salary, and live my life … Why are you telling me all this? You should instead go and stop people like Mr. Pious.”

  “I just wanted to tell you that we are all Muslims, but if you, from the bottom of your heart, do not believe in practicing some of the instructions of Islam, then take it easy with your appearance. Let it be your heart that guides you, with purity of purpose, not to shave your beard. If you preserve the purity of your heart, you will be showing God greater love. Hypocrisy will distance you from God.”

  “Why are you so sure that what you are saying is itself not a hypocrisy?”

  Shocked by this question, P. stood motionless. He looked into Sinbad’s eyes. Tears welled up in his eyes, and he looked down.

  “You are right. No one can be completely sure … Hypocrisy has many faces and many shades … Throughout history, all the calamities that have befallen us Iranians have been because of this hypocrisy …”

  Seeing P.’s vulnerability, Sinbad felt sorry for him. He thanked him and returned to the office.

  That afternoon as Sinbad was walking home, very far from the office, he heard Mr. Pious calling him from behind.

  “How are you, my fellow colleague … I haven’t heard from you in a while.”

  “Well, you are very busy.”

  “My brother, what busy! Well, yes, the director general has put some new responsibilities on my shoulders. My duty is to the revolution; I must bear the weight. Otherwise, I am that same old friend of my fellow colleagues.”

  “What are you doing around these parts? Your house is uptown.”

  “My man, what uptown! I inherited that ramshackle hut we live in from my father … But I was born and raised in this neighborhood. I was on my way to my aunt’s house when I ran into you. What’s new?”

  “Nothing. All is well.”

  Pious stared at Sinbad with his sharp and perceptive eyes. Then his tone changed.

  “I saw you walking with P. this afternoon. I wanted to tell you to be very careful around him. Don’t be fooled by his innocent appearance. He is one of those slippery lizards. A long time ago he pulled all our colleagues’ files from the archives and studied them. He has made a long list of people to be purged, and he goes to the director general every day and insists that they are antirevolution elements and must be dismissed.”

  “There is nothing in my file for me to be worried about. I have always done my job, and I have nothing to do with anyone’s good or evil deeds.”

  “Do you really think it’s difficult for them to frame someone? He can easily tell them that you used to be an undercover agent for the secret police … As a matter of fact, given the current situation, the likes of you who are alone and don’t have the support of any group or faction should be even more afraid. We are friends and colleagues. We have to look out for each other.”

  Earnestly, Sinbad said:

  “In any case, I too have worked hard for the revolution, and I don’t want it to suffer in any way.”

  Mr. Pious thanked him for his goodwill and said:

  “I know. What’s important is for us to look out for each other and to be united. One of these days we’ll get Mr. P. fired from the bureau. Then you will understand that I have supported you and wished you well by warning you not to go down the well with his rotten rope.”

  Sinbad thanked this newfound friend, and Mr. Pious, as a gesture of his sincerity, patted him on the back and said good-bye. Sinbad arrived home feeling more tired and helpless than ever before. He warmed up his mother’s food, put it in front of her, and sat cross-legged in the corner of the room to watch television.

  In the television program, one of the revolutionaries who had lived in France for many years and who had returned to the homeland after the revolution was talking passionately about the government’s plan to change Western names. He was explaining that the heads of the Ministry of Arts and Culture—which was later renamed the Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance—had organized a committee and issued a warning to factories that made products with Western names and to shops and especially boutiques that had Western names on their signs. Meanwhile, the committee was taking immediate action to delete the names of streets such as Shah Street, Roosevelt Street, Elizabeth Boulevard, Kennedy Circle, and would instead select Iranian names for them. Suddenly, the spark of inspiration flashed in Sinbad’s mind. Excited, he got up and started to pace around the small room … Yes, this was it. To prove what a good employee he was, to show what a creative and productive mind he had, for everyone to understand that he had never had any fondnes
s for that monarchist regime, he must present the General Register Office with a revolutionary plan that would play a fundamental role in the lives of future generations of Iranians. Given that he had always been a responsible and hardworking employee, he was surprised that he had not thought of this sooner. He quickly stacked up all the paper he had at home in front of him. He divided each sheet into two columns. The column on the right for recommended and suitable revolutionary names, the opposite column for rotten and vulgar antirevolutionary names. In the introduction to his plan he wrote: “It is obvious and apparent that a name plays an essential role in the formation of its owner’s character and his or her future happiness.” Sinbad’s mind had become very active, and it quickly reminded him of different names. Of course, in his proposed plan, which he would have to present to the director general, he would need to point out that the suitable revolutionary names should only be suggested and recommended to parents who apply for their newborn’s birth certificate and that there should be no coercion whatsoever. The rationale behind his plan was that because the Iranian people are extremely logical and steer clear of sentimentality, they would eagerly and wholeheartedly embrace the recommended names and would abstain from selecting antirevolutionary names for their children. The random few who might not adhere to this revolutionary plan would have proven themselves to be spies and antirevolution elements, and their punishment would be left up to the courts.

  Although Sinbad was very happy to have come up with such an original plan, he was only then grasping the magnitude of his real problem. Yes, his beard. On the one hand, his beard was his saving angel, but on the other hand, it had gotten out of control and overly ambitious. Every man’s beard grows an average of 0.02 inch per day, but Sinbad’s beard was growing an average of 0.1 inch per hour. Sometime later, he would come to realize that its rate of growth depended entirely on his state of mind. In other words, sometimes his beard would grow by as much as 0.3 inch per hour. Of course, solving this problem was not as difficult as it first appeared. When Sinbad at last came to accept his beard’s eagerness and energy to grow, it was probably the beard itself that inspired him with a solution: to always carry a pair of scissors in his pocket and to go to an empty place every hour to trim it. Of course, because Sinbad did not, and does not, have any connection to literature, censorship, and the symbol of censorship, he will never know what bitter irony a pair of scissors in one pocket will put in his other pocket.

  Anyhow, Sinbad worked on his plan for a week, and after preparing two alphabetical lists of good names for men and women using the world’s latest scientific methods, and two alphabetical lists of bad names for men and women that should be deleted from the cultural consciousness and the present-day memory of Iranians, he delivered them to the director general’s secretary. And thus, his rise began.

  Just as you have guessed, it was Mr. P. who was purged. Do I need to remind you that purging, or cleansing, is a form of censorship? As a writer who is at times more ill fated and wretched than Les Misérables’s Jean Valjean, I believe that at the time I consented to the deletion of one word from one story, I also consented to the deletion of one human being from his workplace or from his life. Since Mr. P. has been censored, I can no longer help him have an important role in our love story. Therefore, let us with absolute cruelty no longer think of him.

  When I visited the General Register Office for my daughter’s birth certificate, Mr. Sinbad had already occupied the seat of vice president for public and cultural affairs. His innovative and revolutionary list of permitted and prohibited names had been distributed to all the General Register Offices throughout the country, and his plan was being implemented everywhere. But his rise did not end here. One day when Sinbad wanted to write a note in pencil, the tip of his pencil broke at the slightest pressure against the paper. It was a new pencil in a nice color. Sinbad sharpened its tip, but just as he was taking the pencil out of the pencil sharpener, its new tip broke and stayed behind under the pencil sharpener’s blade. Sinbad removed the broken tip with some difficulty and sharpened the pencil again, and the same thing happened again and again until Sinbad was left holding a one-inch pencil without a tip. He took another pencil of the same make and examined it. Yes, as you have suspected, it was made in China. In Iranian graphic arts, in addition to a pair of scissors, a pencil or a fountain pen with a broken tip is a symbol of censorship and restraints on the freedom of speech. However, in total contrast to this symbol, that tipless pencil sparked the second great inspiration of Sinbad’s life in his mind. Without a doubt, the merchant who had imported these cheap pencils from China and sold them at a high price in the Iranian market— which is under U.S. embargo—had made huge profits. Think about it. How precious a commodity pencils must be in a country with a population that has in two decades increased from thirty million to sixty million, with at least seventeen million students in schools and universities … That night, Sinbad wrote another ingenious plan and delivered it to the director general of the General Register Office. According to this plan, he would go on an all-expenses-paid mission to China to research the covert revolutionary techniques used by the Chinese to increase their population and the Red techniques used in their Cultural Revolution to delete the names and symbols of tyrannical Chinese emperors. Sinbad received the monthlong assignment and headed for materialist China, whose relationship with Muslim countries was improving day by day. Well, where do you think the best place is in China to scientifically research techniques for deleting counterrevolutionary symbols and methods of population increase? Obviously in Chinese pencil factories.

  Ask me what I mean, and, by the way, also ask me how all these labyrinthine tales relate to a simple love story. And I will say:

  As a matter of fact, the tales are very much related to our love story. Just as a pencil can freely write the words of a nauseating love story replete with veiled sexual undertones as a service to a corrupt counterrevolutionary culture, it can also be the instrument with which the sentences of that same story are crossed out. The same way that a pencil in the hands of a corrupt-minded writer or spy or traitor can transfer words that, consciously or subconsciously, carry the viruses of a decadent Western culture, it can also, with the sharpness of its tip, like the needle of a syringe, inject the vaccine against the same antirevolution microbes in the population’s veins. On the other hand, think about it, what a highly consumed commodity pencils must be in a country where thousands of writers and poets write to become the greatest writer or poet in the world, and facing them, thousands of people read what they have written to cross out instances of their immorality.

  When Sinbad returned to Iran from his fact-finding mission, in his pocket he had a small contract to import high-quality Chinese pencils to offset the presence of illicit Western pencils. In two years and seven months, through his government position and the friends he had made in the customs department and the marketplace, Sinbad became the largest importer of handsome Chinese pencils. He resigned from his government job to make room for other creative young people to rise. He relocated his import-export business to Tehran and spent all his energy, ingenuity, and experience on importing pencils that did not write at all, and therefore did not burden anyone with the inconvenience of having to cross out and delete any words.

  In the process of this revolutionary service, Sinbad amassed a large fortune. His annual income was far more than the seventy-five million dollars that Mr. Bush’s political machine had once earmarked for changing Iran’s political regime. Sometimes, in the company of his merchant friends, Sinbad would quip, “I can earmark seven hundred and fifty million dollars for changing the American political regime …” But our story’s Sara has yet to make a decision about marrying Sinbad and spending her honeymoon in Paris or at his villa in Spain. This is one of our story’s dilemmas. Sara, just like a decent and virtuous young lady who of course has never worn colorful shoes, who of course has never sewn colorful buttons on her coverall, and who of course has never highlighted
her bangs so that she can let them loose from under her headscarf to lead Iranian men and boys astray, is sitting next to her parents and drinking premium Indian tea with Sinbad.

  As soon as we begin this scene in our love story, Sinbad goes to the bathroom to trim his beard down to the same length as it was when he first arrived at Sara’s house. I take advantage of this brief interruption to think about how I can find Mr. Petrovich and how I can make him tell me what his opinion of Dara’s name is.

  Sinbad returns from the bathroom.

  Sara’s mother, delighted by the honor of having him present in their home, resumes her coquettish verbosity.

  “Oh dear, you haven’t touched your pastry. If you don’t like these pastries, there is an excellent pastry shop nearby. My husband can quickly go and buy some.”

  Sinbad, glancing at a silent Sara, puts the pastry in his mouth, and pretending to brush the crumbs off his jacket he brushes away some of the trimmed beard.

  Sara’s mother asks:

  “May I pour you another cup of tea?”

  “Please. What a wonderful tea this is. It is very fragrant and flavorful.”

  “As you know, these days the market is full of adulterated tea. Even if you put two or three fistfuls of it in the teapot, it still has no color or flavor.”

  “Is it Iranian tea?”

  “Absolutely not… What a question! Iranian tea? All our life we have only bought fine foreign tea. The one you are drinking is a Two-Sword-labeled premium Indian-English tea. My husband buys it on the black market.”

  Sara, angry and disappointed by her mother’s bragging, deliberately coughs. Her mother gets up, not because she has taken her daughter’s warning seriously, but to bring the box of the Two-Sword-labeled premium Indian-English tea as proof of her claims.