Honeymoon in Tehran: Two Years of Love and Danger in Iran

by Azadeh Moaveni

  “I told you this was a bad idea. You just can’t live in a country like Iran and perpetually conduct your life with the standards of the West,” Arash said. “This was a mistake. We should learn from it.”

  “How can you call it a mistake? We’re providing the best for our son, protecting him from fever.” I looked at Hourmazd asleep in my lap, tranquil and innocent, and imagined him wailing from a fever, his little body burning. “You’re horrid to suggest we should let him suffer.”

  “You’re wrong. Right now, as far as we know, these vaccines are spoiling. Unless there’s some way of checking their potency, we’re going to use them at our own risk, hoping that Hourmazd is protected from various awful diseases. If we had just used the Iranian vaccines, he would’ve had a night of discomfort. But at least we’d know for sure he wasn’t at risk of contracting polio.”

  “But that’s only because we had bad luck and because this stewardess is a rude German who can’t be bothered to listen to an Iranian passenger.”

  “Azizam, listen to me. My sister is just like you. For years I’ve watched her try to live in Iran with German sensibilities. It has taken over her life. When she travels, all she thinks about is filling her suitcase with the right shampoo, cereal, child medicine. She sends her son to the German school because the Iranian ones are terrible. Don’t you see how dangerous it is, getting used to things whose availability is precarious? When she runs out of the German muesli, he refuses to eat Iranian cereal. If one day the political situation turns ugly, the diplomats will send their families home and the German school will close. If you want to live a German life, you need to live in Germany. If you’re going to live in Iran, you need to live as everyone else does. The same cereal, the same schools, the same vaccines. You can’t live like an alien in your own society.”

  What Arash said made sense, though I was too stubborn to admit it at the time, and reluctant to acknowledge the wider implication of his reasoning. It meant, of course, that we would eventually need to decide whether to raise Hourmazd in Iran or move abroad. I had imagined the question would arise years down the line, once we had his schooling to contend with, but it suddenly loomed closer.

  The next day, we took our perhaps potent, perhaps spoiled vaccines to Dr. Abtahi, who assured us they were fine and pointed out that we could always have Hourmazd tested later for the antibodies to the relevant diseases. The rush of relief we felt pushed aside all the uncomfortable considerations of our plane argument. With lifted spirits, we cocooned the un-feverish Hourmazd in blankets and drove out to the footsteps of the Alborz Mountains to walk amid the snow-frosted pines. We stopped along the way to eat steaming bowls of ash-e reshteh, a velvety soup thick with legumes and noodles, topped with minty whey. Hourmazd, generally too squirmy to permit us to eat in peace, scrunched up his face at the sun’s glare and fell asleep. The memories of our harried moments in Europe faded, and we felt, fleetingly, triumphant.

  JTLow can you be a journalist if you don’t dress like Tintin?” Aryo, Arash’s five-year-old nephew and my new primary companion, eyed me suspiciously through long eyelashes. It had occurred to him one afternoon that he didn’t know what I did in life, apart from breastfeed his cousin every hour. “Journalists don’t have uniforms; they wear normal clothes,” I said, handing him a waffle covered in quince jam. We then discussed the feeding practices of killer whales, propped Hourmazd up on a doughnut pillow, and danced to the lemur song from the cartoon film Madagascar. This was my new life.

  As the mother of an infant, I was no longer able to meet for coffee in smoky cafés or attend parties that started at eleven. All the hours in my life previously devoted to conversation, work, and fun were now spent changing diapers and fiddling with the electricity converter on my American breast pump. In time, my single friends slowly disappeared from my life, excusing themselves with gifts of stuffed animals and that frozen, pitying look reserved for those lost in the pastures of motherhood. I began spending time with other mothers, a special caste in whose company my ungroomed eyebrows and wrinkled clothing did not seem so out of place. The venues of my new life—home, other people’s homes, and fast food restaurants—were overrun by children under ten, in whose company I rediscovered the appeal of chocolate milk and gummy candy, and became acquainted with SpongeBob SquarePants, in his Farsi and German incarnations.

  I soon noticed that, despite their innocent pursuits and diminutive size, young children in Iran lived lives of extraordinary complexity. Before I began socializing with the under-ten set, I believed that life in Iran posed intricate and unhappy quandaries only for teenagers and adults, people of an age to contemplate love, work, and higher education, all of which were seriously compromised in the Islamic Republic. But life in a theocracy imposed its pressures on very young people as well. They learned from earliest consciousness to exist in two separate worlds.

  This unhappy reality dominated that afternoon’s conversation, between me, Solmaz, our friend Neda, and Neda’s sister Mina, who lived in the same building. We were visiting them in their neighborhood, Tehran Pars, a middle-class district in east Tehran, on whose outskirts the Revolutionary Guards owned vast tracts of land. The residents of Tehran Pars were typically of average income, which meant they had to save carefully to afford rare vacations or the toys their children demanded. As a rule they were not as deeply traditional or religious as those who lived in south Tehran; they could be described as secular—not that they were necessarily westernized or irreligious, but that they believed in a separation between religion and government. The government knew its unpopularity in such quarters was a major weakness, that it could not forever get by on the support solely of pious, low-income Iranians in south Tehran and the prov inces. It sought to reach out to Tehran Pars, dispatching mobile libraries with “Messenger of the Sun” emblazoned on their sides, a name that meant nothing in particular but that signaled cheerful intent. Smiling women in powder-blue chadors handed out Martha Stewart-like books, many of them free, to housewives and students, but the residents were not won over. Instead, they stood in the street and complained that the library was a waste of money and that they never received help of real significance. It would take far more than free cookbooks to capture the support of Tehran Pars’s residents, so calcified was their resentment.

  We reclined on sofas drinking tea and peeling tangerines, immersed in a discussion about Dr. Holakoee, an Iranian-American thera pist whose advice many Iranians followed avidly. Because he belonged to the Baha’i faith, whose members the regime brutally persecuted, he might never be welcome inside the country. But he still managed, via television broadcasts, to educate Iranians about sibling rivalry, the implications of birth order, and other such concepts that many therapists inside the country either did not believe in or explained poorly.

  Mina’s two-year-old daughter twirled about the living room in a tight embrace with her beloved plastic Elmo, as yet unconfiscated because the Mattel toy recall still lay in the future. Her nine-year-old brother, Koorosh, burst in through the door, flinging off his backpack and rushing over to tickle his sister. He then watched an hour’s worth of French cartoons (he was determined to learn the language, having been convinced by a summer trip to Paris, his first time outside Iran, that France was a superior country). Later he pulled a DVD out of his backpack, a collection of highlights from his third-grade class. Mina popped it in and I hid a yawn, expecting playground scenes and close-ups of elementary school artwork.

  The first minutes captured the class making ritual ablutions before prayer, followed by scenes of the children actually praying together in the classroom, and, finally, a lively segment of them practicing the call to prayer. Koorosh didn’t seem to be attending an Iranian elementary school but one of those scary Pakistani-type madrassahs, where rows of boys sit on the floor memorizing the Koran and names of the alumni who have died at Tora Bora. I was horrified, but wasn’t sure what to say. I looked at Solmaz, who sent her son to the German school to prevent precisely this sort o
f Islamic indoctrination. Mina noticed my expression. “Public schools are much better these days,” she said. “Now they get an hour of music lessons each week, and their textbooks have color pictures.”

  In earlier years, elementary school classrooms, she said, had supplied an opportunity for the authorities to terrorize Iranians who did not abide by religious codes. In the midst of a lesson, for instance, the teacher might craftily say: “Raise your hands if your parents drink alcohol at home.” These days, schools only rarely exploited children’s reflexive honesty this way, but they did send home checklists that asked parents to sign off on their kids’ dutiful attention to homework, grooming, and of course, daily prayers. “Of course, I just sign that he’s prayed,” Mina said.

  “But that sends the message that lying is okay,” I said. “How do you get around that?”

  I imagined trying to teach a third-grader the philosophic argument that breaking the rules or lying might be all right if the rule or the question posed was unjust. Such moral shades of gray required a capacity for ethical and intellectual reasoning far beyond the abilities of someone that young.

  “You know, he’s never really brought it up. We just model the values and behavior we believe in and hope for the best.” Mina said that was the most natural way for them to grow up, by absorbing these kinds of adult intricacies slowly, without too much instruction from tense parents.

  “That’s interesting,” I said. “So you don’t actively teach lying. You just leave it to Koorosh to sort out why you’re committing what is technically an untruth.”

  “He just told his teacher last week that his parents don’t pray, so it might just be that he hasn’t paid attention.”

  I wondered whether I could be so circumspect in Mina’s place. My instinct, probably a foolish one, was to share with children precisely what I thought of the country’s laws. Once when Arash and I took Aryo out for lunch, I let my headscarf slip. Hourmazd constantly tugged it off anyway, and instead of readjusting it every other minute, I sometimes left it around my shoulders. Aryo reminded me twice, and the third time his voice rose nervously. Like many children, he followed rules assiduously, at least in public. You couldn’t even get him to drink from a bottle of water in a store without paying for it first. Unthinkingly, I told him that it was unfair that I had to wear the veil, and that it was all right for it to sometimes fall off.

  Arash later chided me for this. Aryo was too young to understand, he said, and although I thought I was doing the right thing, instilling tolerance and the belief that women had the right to choose whether to cover their hair, I was actually confusing him in a way that might be dangerous. If the wrong person heard him repeat that it was unfair for women to have to wear the veil, he could be punished. Though he attended the German school, there were a hundred other places—the doctor’s office, government buildings—where Aryo accompanied his mother on her daily business and where such a comment would make trouble.

  In most cases, you simply couldn’t measure the future cost of teaching your kids liberal values. The difficulties only grew in proportion to a child’s age. For espousing their real beliefs openly, they might one day be punished by a teacher, expelled from school, arrested by the police, fired from a job. This grotesque dilemma—allow your child to be brainwashed, or teach him otherwise at some risk—was perhaps at the heart of why so many hundreds of thousands of young Iranians emigrated each year once on the cusp of parenthood. They could face the East-West divide in cities such as Toronto or Los Angeles, but at least they would be spared the Iran-Iran divide inside their own country. While Arash’s warning made sense, I still felt that since the regime had no compunctions about brainwashing children, we had the right to counter with our notions of what was right. I said so to Mina, who was calling her mother into the living room to watch the DVD.

  “But then how are we any different from them?” Neda asked. Surely Koorosh had the right to choose for himself the values he wanted to uphold.

  I considered Neda’s position ridiculous. It might make sense in Sweden, but here it amounted to sending your kid off to Jonestown with the Kool-Aid folks, hoping he would emerge an independent spirit. Of course you had the right, perhaps the responsibility, to intervene in the brainwashing of your children.

  Arash and I had understood full well that we would be raising our child with two cultures. Having both grown up in Iranian families living in the West, we were familiar with identities anchored in two disparate worlds. But I hadn’t realized that really we had three worlds to deal with: the West; fundamentalist, public Iran; and tolerant, inside-the-house Iran. Coping with the gulf between Iranian private and public life was an intricate skill that most adults I knew managed with varying degrees of success. Wearing masks or lying when required, all while keeping your core identity intact, was the daily business of adults who lived in authoritarian societies.

  But Mina was right when she said you could not teach children these skills. I began to wonder whether it was even possible to raise an open-minded, healthy child in a culture that was fundamentalist and anarchic. That I had plenty of tolerant, sane friends who had grown up here—witness Neda and Mina sitting next to me on the couch—was proof that it could be done. But I wasn’t sure they reflected a success rate so much as a success story. The very idea that I would be competing with my child’s teachers and other role models over basic values (the role of religion in daily life; whether or not western culture was corrupt) was intimidating. What if they won out, even for a phase? Alongside Neda, Mina, and my other friends, I could also think of cases where the environment had bested the family.

  Take the case of one of my cousins in Tehran, a young man I scarcely saw anymore since he joined a weird militant-spiritual cult. When we first met, he wore polo shirts, studied engineering at Sharif University (whose engineer program was among the best in the world, feeding whiz kids to graduate programs at Stanford and Harvard), and seemed destined to follow in the footsteps of his parents, moderate people who fasted during Ramazan but drank alcohol and kept a residence in Paris. Within a year he grew a beard and started looking like a Basiji, with gaunt cheekbones and untucked shirts. He stopped kissing me on the cheek when we met, and began talking about fighting “the infidels who were occupying Palestine.” He wasn’t the only person I knew who had undergone such a transformation. I could think of friends in Beirut and Cairo from whiskey-drinking, bikini-wearing secular families who, seduced by the militant mood of their societies, went through full-blown fundy periods. These transformations sometimes passed, but in many cases they became permanent, or left indelible marks.

  I suppose the difference was that Iranian society was not in a fundamentalist mood, only the Iranian government, and cases like my cousin were exceptional. Even if he grew up in Iran, it was rather unlikely that Hourmazd would one day grow a beard and contemplate jihad. But the siren call, however muted, of militant Islam was not my only fear. There was the emotional burden of needing to deceive all the time, of having to be constantly vigilant to protect your family and their private world. The behaviors expected of children in Islamic theocracies resemble those of children from abusive or disordered families. We know that such environments deform children’s thoughts and personalities, making them vulnerable to shame, depression, and anger. Indeed, Iran often felt like one vast dysfunctional family. Rates of depression and suicide climbed after the revolution, and young people tended to become either full-blown overachievers or unmotivated depressives. Neda and Mina were examples not just of people who had escaped brainwashing, but also of those who had survived an Iranian youth with their mental health intact. What if Hourmazd turned out particularly sensitive, and lacked the extra layers of skin needed to practice deception each day?

  There was also peer pressure to contend with. The neighborhood boys whom Koorosh played with, for example, might never coax him to go pray at the mosque. But they celebrated religious festivals, wore black, and participated in the street culture of Islamic kitsch t
hat the regime had successfully instilled. These included invented commemorations like Fatemieh, which had no precedent in classic Shia observance. Mina couldn’t keep Koorosh holed up inside, when the boys on the block were dressed in black and raring to go. Would Mina be able to shape the role Islam played in Koorosh’s life? She would do her best. He had already compared France and Iran, and rated secular Europe superior. But the rest seemed to me a matter of chance, in the end—a roll of the dice. Both family and the Islamic state had proved themselves capable of defying each other; you might end up with a freethinker like Neda, or a lost soul like my cousin.

  While Mina, in my eyes, left a great deal up to fate, other mothers took a more proactive approach to the public-private divide. A friend of mine, an Iranian-American who was raising her twin boys in Tehran, had invented the “keeping secrets” method. She taught her sons that the behavior they practiced at home—drinking alcohol in moderation, watching satellite television—belonged to a special, private world of which they should never speak outside. This in turn made a value out of privacy and sidestepped the delicate task of explaining why it was okay to lie in certain situations, but not in others. In the case of this friend, however, the approach had not warded off the day when her son came home from school and informed her that she was immoral in not wearing a full black chador. “You’re disrespecting our culture!” he told her, biting hungrily into the chocolate cupcake she had baked. Not long after, he ran home from school weeping after his class chanted “death to America” at an annual school protest rally. His classmates, being young and therefore casually cruel, told him that because he had been born in America, he would need to die too.