Nasrine steered her Kia into the slow-moving traffic of Niavaran Street, the main thoroughfare of north Tehran that ran into the Shah’s summer palace. She and her date had arranged to meet near Book City, one of Tehran’s most popular bookshops, and they traded coordinates by mobile phone. He suggested that she find a parking spot on the street, and that we proceed in his car to a nearby park, where we could stroll and have coffee. Before long, he pulled up alongside us in a gray Peugeot, double-parking so that he could alight and introduce himself properly. He wore a tight white T-shirt that outlined his premature paunch; there was a heavy gold chain around his thick neck, and he smelled powerfully of an unpleasant, overly spicy cologne. From the moment he opened his mouth, we bit our tongues, dug our nails into our palms, to keep from laughing. Nasrine managed to whisper before we climbed into his car, “Are my eyes deceiving me, or is he wearing foundation?” Arash had already scrambled into the backseat, and with a beseeching, hunted look, Nasrine hopped in beside him.
Forced into taking the front seat, I realized with my closer vantage that he was indeed, unfathomably, wearing a thick layer of foundation. He had told Nasrine that he lived in Los Angeles and was only in Tehran to visit family.
“Where do you live in L.A.?” I asked.
“Sort of central.”
“Do you mean Westwood? The Valley?” I prodded, growing suspicious.
“Yes, around there.”
It took me about twenty more seconds to ascertain that he did not in fact know that California is situated on the West Coast. While I attempted to make small talk, Nasrine was whispering furiously to Arash in French about how to abandon her date. The opportunity presented itself not long after we arrived at the park, when he ran back to his car to retrieve his mobile phone. We all felt a twinge of guilt at leaving him that way. But as we hurriedly crossed to the other side of the park, we agreed he deserved to be abandoned, given the foundation and his false biography (likely meant to attract women with the prospect of a green card). Nasrine’s mobile began to ring.
“What should I do?” she asked.
“Just turn it off. What can you possibly say to him?” I said. “He’ll get the message soon enough.”
We retreated to a nearby coffee shop, ordered cafés glacés, and laughed until our stomachs hurt. Once we finished recounting her date’s worst qualities, Arash and I scolded Nasrine for her antics. He advised her to start trying to meet people through friends, an approach that would at least weed out the foundation-wearing charlatans. I told her to have the decency to take the front seat when she enlisted her friends to come along on disastrous dates.
Our conspiratorial escape from Nasrine’s date seemed to seal us as a threesome intent on finding her a decent relationship. Before disbanding that evening, we agreed to meet the next day for lunch. Arash casually asked for my number, and entered it into his mobile phone.
Later, when we were alone, Nasrine said, “See, I told you he fancies you.”
“I’m not so sure. He has such lovely manners that I think maybe he’s just being polite.” I was sincerely uncertain, and preferred not to be too hopeful, lest I be disappointed.
“Whatever. You’ll find out for yourself soon enough. Did I tell you Sonbol’s been calling him ever since they met? She wants his father’s company to sponsor her next race.”
“No, you forgot to mention that.”
“But he hasn’t paid her any attention. Not even polite attention.”
“Good.” If Nasrine was right, I couldn’t wait to find out.
Shortly after noon the next day, my mobile phone beeped with a text message from Arash. “Are you all right? Yr phone appears off. Worried.” I was meant to meet him and Nasrine for lunch, but not for another hour. I called him back.
“Nasrine says you could be arrested any minute. So when your phone didn’t answer I thought maybe something had happened.”
“Her imagination is overactive,” I said, laughing. “Of course I’m not going to be arrested.” I was annoyed at Nasrine for telling Arash such a thing. Overly dramatic by nature, she had surely embellished some aspect of my work—perhaps my interactions with Mr. X—and convinced him I had one foot in prison.
“I was just visiting a cousin, and their house doesn’t get cell reception,” I said. Nasrine called a few minutes later to tell me she would be delayed at work (matchmaker contrivance, I presumed), and so the two of us went to lunch alone, feigning surprise at her unexpected deadline. Arash suggested we go to Café 78, a coffee shop in central Tehran popular with writers, artists, and musicians. Such coffeehouses, the kind that carefully listed the contents of the salads on the menu, were still novel. Most restaurants, in the Soviet manner, listed only the one word, “salad,” as though only one type existed and the desire to know its ingredients was somehow westernized and decadent.
The authorities frowned on establishments that provided thoughtful people a milieu for conversation, so they often needled Café 78’s owner with petty zoning edicts. One week the café had to stop serving lunch, since she had been told that cafés serving coffee were not permitted to also offer food (the state apparently considered lingering a danger). The next week, the café resumed serving sandwiches and salads, but customers found the coffee page of the menu crossed out with a large X and covered with an inleaf suggesting a restorative herbal tisane. Such nuisances were still annoying, but compared with the mid-1990s, when the police would storm cafés and round up women for improper Islamic dress, they were tolerable, even laughable.
Such repression, the kind that sought to serve Islam by preventing the serving of coffee, provided rich material for satire. Like most people who suffer under such regimes, Iranians coped by honing a subversive, mordant humor. When I first moved to Tehran in 2000, this love of irony struck me as one of the most charming aspects of Iranian life, though I knew its purpose was to ease the pain of being ruled by heartless, inept, and hypocritical mullahs. During one of my first afternoons driving in the city, I struggled to execute a three-point turn across lanes of chaotic traffic. Halfway through the turn, my veil slipped off, and I froze, uncertain whether to clear the road or adjust my covering. As a man passing by surveyed the traffic jam I had caused, he noticed me fumbling with my scarf, grinned, and yelled, “Islam is in danger!”
Though the corruption and fundamentalism of Iran’s present rulers was unparalleled in the country’s history, Iranian writers had a long tradition of holding their leaders to account through satire. During the two years that I lived in Iran, I spent many evenings reading aloud to my aunt and uncle the columns of Ebrahim Navabi, the country’s premier satirist. These sessions, during which we laughed, proclaimed him a genius, and repeated certain passages until they were committed to memory, seemed to dissolve the layers of accumulated resentment, providing the resilience that enabled us to make it through the next day.
Though scarcely a month had passed since Arash and I had first met, the Tehran summer had grown unbearable. The dry heat beat down powerfully and the café’s air-conditioning sent out only meek, occasional puffs of cool air. I looked about our surroundings carefully, trying to commit the details to memory. I felt certain that this lunch would matter, and that I would later wish to recall what he wore, what I ordered. We dipped tall spoons into glasses of cool sekanjebeen, a sugar syrup of mint and vinegar over grated cucumber, and began a conversation that would go on for hours.
I started by asking about the photo on his mobile phone, of a little girl in pigtails with a lovable smile. I knew already from Nasrine that Arash had a daughter from a previous marriage, and wanted to create an opening for him to talk about her. “Her name is Amitis and she’s almost four,” he said, gazing at her photo with clear adoration. He told me that she lived in California with her mother, and described the time they spent together on his visits. “She loves the children’s rock-climbing gym. She’s always saying, ‘I want climb big mountain!’ because she knows I go mountain climbing, and wants to come too.” The t
ender way he talked about her charmed me, and I could tell he was a doting, engaged father.
He then asked about my parents, who lived in California as well. Our lives, we discovered, paralleled in their disjointed swings between Iran and the West. While my family’s stay in California was made permanent by the revolution, it was the Iran-Iraq War, which began in 1980, that displaced Arash’s family to Germany.
“Did you miss Iran?” I asked.
“In a way. But more because of how we left,” he said, describing how the family decided to stay in Germany while on what was ostensibly a holiday visit. Arash was nearing fourteen, the age when Iran’s draft laws would prohibit him from leaving the country. “We stayed almost on a whim. My mother was scared that if we went back, I’d have to be smuggled out later. So I never had the chance to say goodbye to my friends.”
At the outset of our discussion I felt thrilling flashes of recognition and imagined that our families and psyches must face similar struggles—fitting in as an Iranian in the West, finding a balance between two cultures. But soon it became clear that being an émigré in California was a different matter entirely from being an émigré in Germany. The émigrés in Europe could travel to Iran more frequently, which helped them stay emotionally and physically connected with their homeland.
“It just seems to me that in Europe, Iranians have a more realistic picture of what Iran is actually like, and how much they actually want to be connected to it,” Arash said, musingly. “Even their homesickness is different, more grounded somehow.”
The diaspora in America had less vacation time and a longer physi cal distance to cover, and many belonged to the various groups (the persecuted Baha’i minority; former political dissidents or officials) whose members could not return at all. These conditions fostered a culture of nostalgia and longing that in turn shaped how Iranians in America assimilated. The exiles in America also had the fraught history of Iranian-U.S. relations to contend with; the fresh memories of the hostage crisis meant most Americans associated Iran with hysterical violence. Iranian Americans often coped with this by either distancing themselves from their background or retreating into it defensively.
Although our experiences as Iranian immigrants in the West had hardly overlapped, Arash and I had shared the impulse to return to Iran as adults. We were both motivated partly by that longing for contact with homeland, that inevitable curiosity that seems to lurk in the heart of most immigrant children (a breathless circuit of thoughts, from “Could I manage?” to “Would they accept me?” to “Would it feel warmer/kinder/homier?”). But more important, both Arash and I believed, perhaps naïvely, that our professional expertise could and should contribute to the country’s development.
Arash, for his part, had sought to bring the world of open-source software to Iran. I had no idea what this meant, so, over our lunch of crepes, he explained.
Free software, as opposed to proprietary software, he said, serves as a framework for sharing intellectual capital. In practical terms, this means a country’s information and communications industry can attend to its needs without expensive licensing.
“When I moved back to Iran, I was hugely enthusiastic about open source,” he said. “I knew that developing countries were embracing it, and almost immediately profiting, both economically and socially. I thought it would be good for Iran, and good for me.”
“What makes it so special for developing countries?”
“Take Iran’s case. Iran has never signed international copyright treaties, and basically endorses pirated software. Before Iran can join the WTO, for example, it needs to clean up its act. It needs to ban pirated software and run a legitimate technology bazaar. This sounds easy enough, but it’s actually a huge challenge. For one, licensed software like Microsoft’s is tremendously expensive, especially in a country where people are used to buying pirated Microsoft Office for a dollar. Even worse, U.S. sanctions mean Microsoft can’t sell to the Iranian market. Even if Iranians had the means to buy a licensed product, there’d be nothing to buy. Why should Microsoft produce a Farsi version of Windows when it can’t sell to the biggest Farsi-speaking market in the world? It can’t and won’t. Open source would bypass all of these problems. You’d have a Farsi platform for computers, it would be inexpensive, and it would be legal under international copyright. Iran could participate in the international community, on international terms, without the pressure of copyright.”
He explained all this so convincingly, with such fluid gestures, that I only nodded for him to continue.
In the first year of his return, Arash and his colleagues had managed to produce the first Farsi version of KDE, the desktop environment that runs on top of Linux, the operating system of the open-source world. They attempted to set up a training center that would certify Iranian software engineers in Red Hat, the largest commercial distribution of the Linux operating system in the world. But because Red Hat is American, and the United States had imposed economic sanctions on Iran, the firm canceled the Iranian project the moment it went online.
“Half the story is about U.S. sanctions, and how awful they are,” he said.
“But don’t you think the Iranian government deserves to be sanctioned?”
“That’s not the point, really. Who suffers as a result of sanctions? Not the government. At the time, Red Hat certification basically guaranteed you a job in Europe. We wanted to bring that certification process to Iran. All these Iranian young people were going to places like Kuwait to get certified, and paying twice as much. That put certification out of so many people’s reach. On top of that, the money went out of Iran and into some sheikh’s pockets. It’s the Iranian engineers who suffer, not the government.”
Next, the Iranian government stepped in to offer resources for an umbrella project charged with oversight of Iran’s open-source activities. Arash’s firm found itself competing for bids with organizations that entirely lacked IT background but were connected to the regime and saw the initiative as a lucrative opportunity. The regime’s aim, as usual, was to control and oversee a realm where it had no place.
I told Arash that his story, its technical aspects aside, sounded overwhelmingly familiar. Many Iranians who had returned from the West seeking to introduce a concept premised on the existence of civil society could relate to such an experience. In these instances the regime usually co-opted the initiative and steered it into the hands of incompetent but loyal cronies.
“I know exactly what you mean,” Arash said. “I was once asked to advise a senior official on open source. He told me very frankly, ‘Mr. Zeini, I don’t believe in technological independence, Farsi-language software, or open source.’ We debated. I told him, ‘But Microsoft won’t do Farsi Windows because of sanctions, and that means Farsi speakers—especially old people, children—can’t use computers.’ He just shrugged at me. Two months later, the same guy was all over the media claiming to love open source.”
It was in such episodes that one could identify the real pathology of the Islamic Republic. Obsessed with security, it preferred to sabotage the future prospects of its young engineers, its own IT sector, than to experiment with endeavors that sounded somehow suspect.
After this, Arash told me, he began working for his father’s textile business. While the work did not inspire him, it was important: textiles had once been the great hope of Iranian manufacturing. “It was always expected that I would work with him someday,” he said slowly. “But fulfilling my duty, that wasn’t really my objective.”
Outside, the sky had begun to darken. Reluctant to part, we decided to drive north to Niavaran Palace, the Shah’s summer complex, for an open-air concert of classical Indian music.
I’ve kept the ticket stub from that evening, a violet slip bearing a bejeweled elephant, for it marks the day we became inseparable. We met again the next day, and the day after that, for weeks. We set out at dawn to climb in the Alborz Mountains, hiked through rugged valleys dotted with springs and waterfalls, and
camped overnight under the cover of pine trees (camping was common, but not so much for unmarried couples). On Fridays we explored the dilapidated neighborhoods of south Tehran, the capital’s historical center, dotted with faded turquoise tiles and arched doorways dating to the nineteenth-century Qajar dynasty. We sifted through the Friday antiques bazaar in search of Turkoman tunics and Afghan string instruments, often finding rare treasures hidden among the dusty junk. We spent a week in Beirut, where Arash charmed all my friends at dinner parties and they whispered in my ear that I was lucky. It was a perfect summer.
No particular conversation or moment determined our plans. We had slipped into each other’s lives seamlessly, as though we had known each other for years. I took his husky for walks through the quiet side streets of Tehran; he covered the Salman Rushdie novel I carried around with newspaper out of concern for my safety, and deleted the ironic call-to-prayer ringtone (installed by a teenage cousin) from my cell phone. By the end of the summer, being children of the western diaspora, we did what came most naturally, un-Iranian though it was: we moved in together.
Up until that point, our relationship had followed the conventions of mainstream Iranian dating. We went out for lunch, attended parties and dinners together as a couple, and once a week drank tea with each other’s relatives. Our decision to live together, however, permanently separated our course from that of our peers. Though nearly all of our friends, and a solid portion of Tehran for that matter, engaged in the behaviors associated with living together—dating, premarital sex—actual cohabitation remained taboo. I had lived in Iran long enough to understand why. While many of my girlfriends might have sex with their partners, this was not a reality their parents (or the boy friend’s parents) openly acknowledged. Some parents even pretended their children did not date. On many occasions, I had watched mothers boldly lie when visitors asked whether their daughter was “socializing with any prospective suitors.” Such discretion, or deception if you like, enabled Iranians to maneuver between their society’s traditional mores and their children’s modern urges.
Honeymoon in Tehran: Two Years of Love and Danger in Iran Page 8