An elderly relative cooked my favorite saffron rice pudding, sholeh-zard, and sent it over with my name written across the surface in cinnamon and slivered almonds. Another aunt mapped out the city for me, with the determination of Martha Stewart on a desert island, and introduced me to the family fruit vendor, tailor, candlestick maker. When I phoned up the fruit vendor for the first time, he greeted me like long-lost kin, trilling with courtly salutations for minutes. We’re so pleased to hear you’ve come back. An hour later, the delivery arrived, and covered every surface of the kitchen with tiny mountains of my favorite fruits—bright green, sour plums; miniature, blush apples that taste like roses; fresh almonds in their furry green skins. The kitchen smelled like summer, and I sat on a barstool at the island in the center, enchanted with the abundance and the knowledge that generations of my ancestors had eaten this precise sort of apple, exactly these peaches.
My grandfather’s house occupied the width of a short block, tucked inside high walls that separated it from the street. The airy rooms were a delicate, pale blue that softened the navy tones in the Persian rugs covering the floor, and were situated around a central dining room with a vaulted ceiling that reached the second story. A curved staircase, the sort designed for young boys to careen down, led to the upstairs bedrooms. Attached to the front house was a separate quarter, where the maid, Khadijeh Khanoum, lived with her husband and daughter.
Khaleh Zahra, my aunt, and her fifteen-year-old daughter Kimia (like me, born and raised in California) had moved back to Iran a year before me, and were also living with Pedar Joon. We formed a motley, impromptu family that became the nucleus of my first few months in Iran. We spent most of our time in the atrium that looked out onto the garden, and the small sitting room downstairs, because Pedar Joon, a widower in his nineties, did not interrupt his tight schedule of naps and herbal tonics to entertain.
Small elements in the house were familiar to me from my childhood summer. I remembered hiding shyly behind the dining room chairs, during the commotion of a family lunch, and perching on the cool stone steps leading to the garden outside. But beyond the walls of the house, lay miles of alien, traffic-clogged Tehran sprawl. I rose each day to a lingering fuzz of disorientation, and the unshakable sense that I was a stranger to my surroundings. Having no real desire to admit this to myself—the agonizing possibility that I would feel transplanted everywhere, just in varying degrees—I focused instead on the steady supply of comedy our household offered.
Of all my aunts, Khaleh Zahra was the most unlikely to have returned home. In her years abroad, from Swiss boarding school to Los Angeles, she had converted to Christianity, officially taken Clarissa as her middle name, and married more than one non-Iranian in poofy church weddings. My defining memories of her date to childhood visits to her house in Tiburon, where she would paint my nails crimson, and let me play in her fur closet with the lights turned off. She was fond of sensational effects, and had decorated the house in all-white, retired all the fur coats save the white ones (which she wore even during the summer), and acquired a mysterious Eastern European husband with a regal air and romantic accent.
Into this world, she brought a string of miniature Doberman pinschers named Badoum (almond), all destined to die when they raced into the blind curve behind the house. After each dog’s death, she bought an identical one, and without bothering to dignify it with a new name, simply called the replacement Badoum II, Badoum III, etc. All these years later, she was still slinky slim, still leaned back with the same posture, legs crossed with a cigarette dangling languidly between her fingers.
When she moved to Tehran, Khaleh Zahra shipped the entire contents of her California house, bedroom furniture, washer and dryer, so convinced was she that she would love Iran, and that Iran would love her back. The move tore Kimia from all she knew and loved, namely the mall and Britney Spears, and she was wretched with homesickness, with a nervous, prancing Pinscher named PJ as her only consolation. They walked down Villa Street together each afternoon, she with a foot of light brown hair hanging out beneath her veil, he with his tiny legs working furiously to keep up, enhancing each other’s oddity.
Pedar Joon was a devout secularist who mocked religion with an enthusiasm most old people reserved for complaining about arthritis. But dogs he considered filthy, in the ritual sense; a ghost of religious sensibility in an otherwise profane person and household. PJ disrupted his peace, trotting into his room at all hours, soiling the august atmosphere of herbal medicine and law books with paws still greasy from his meal of choice, French fries.
My arrival in Tehran had captivated the family’s attention for weeks, until I was deposed in relevance by none other than PJ. One day, on a perfectly ordinary summer afternoon, catastrophe struck. PJ was dognapped. He was abducted while waiting in the car for my aunt, who was calling on her cousin in a neighborhood nearby. Probably he was sporting one of his dog accessories, which alerted the potential thief to his owner’s excessive devotion. His disappearance both thrilled and devastated the household.
There’s a fatwa out against poodles, I said the next day over lunch, which was served at precisely the same time each day, when the grandfather clock downstairs chimed noon. What’s a fatwa, asked Kimia, poking a French fry into ketchup, and painting red circles around her plate. It’s like a law, I said. PJ is un-Islamic. Maybe even counterrevolutionary. It was mean, but I couldn’t help it. The clerics’ hatred for miniature poodles, which they considered bourgeois lapdogs, was one of those ridiculous things about Iran. An aghast ayatollah in the provincial city of Orumieh had even devoted a portion of his Friday sermon to condemning canines. “Happy are those who became martyrs and did not witness the playing with dogs!” he had bellowed, referring to those killed in the war with Iraq, who had luckily been spared the lapdog trend.
Wobbly tears formed in Kimia’s eyes, and she fled to her room. Khadijeh Khanoum, who had been instructed to wait on PJ as a “member of the family,” hid a smile as she cleared the table. That afternoon, Khaleh Zahra, who had, by that time, mastered the skill of throwing money at problems, hired a pet detective to track PJ down. Dognapping, it emerged, was the hot new crime in Tehran. The thieves preyed on thoroughbreds and poodles—the kind of dogs that obviously belonged to women who could afford to indulge their whims—and subsequently held them for ransom, or sold them in the exotic pet bazaar on Molavi Street. To this smelly, loud alley, hopeful owners would come to root out stolen pets amidst monkeys and iguanas.
One lazy afternoon, in that hallowed space between lunch and tea when everyone is meant to be napping and it is exceptionally rude to call people’s homes, the phone rang. “We’ve got the dog,” said a deep male voice. “Oh, well I thank you very much for your help, but we don’t want it anymore,” said Pedar Joon. “Don’t bother to call again; we won’t be changing our minds.” By that point, Kimia was high-strung enough about her nascent social life that she could hear the phone ring from several blocks away, and since it was common practice in our household to listen to each other’s conversations, she intercepted Pedar Joon’s attempt at exiling the recovered dog. After shadowy negotiations conducted by the pet detective, PJ was returned to our household, and for a few days ignored Kimia in a sullen, Patty Hearst-like manner, but then reverted quickly to his nervous, French-fry guzzling ways.
PJ’s recovery, in all its glorious absurdity, revealed a great deal to me. I had suspected the regime’s revolutionary Islamic ethos would be floundering. But I hadn’t expected that mocking mullahs, long a cultural tradition, had become a national sport. Iranians felt a harsh contempt for the clerics, who had taken over an oil-rich country in the name of Islam, sunk its economy, and now spent their days railing against poodles. As Iranians saw it, the revolution had failed in most of its grand ideals—poverty persisted, the Zionist enemy thrived—and yet the clerics hung onto power, accountable only to God. In a hundred small ways, the bankruptcy of this extreme, Islamic ideology manifested itself in people’s lives.
I reeled, not because the chaos of Iran was shocking, but because it was, of all things, terribly foreign. In the twilight hours of those early days, when we gathered in the atrium and played backgammon or cards till it grew dark, I made silent inventory of my conflicting reactions. In private places, inside homes, I felt perfectly at home as an Iranian. At dinners, I knew the ideal texture and color of fesenjoon sauce, a dish of walnut-pomegranate chicken; I could predict the tribal origin of a kilim; I could sing tarof, the flowery, elaborate expressions of courtesy native to Persian conversation. In California, these Persian sensibilities had distinguished me as Iranian. But in Iran, in the bosom of homeland, they were tangential, and reached not even a fraction of the savvy required to live in the Islamic Republic.
It was ten A.M. on a day like most, the hour I usually rolled into the BBC office, where I had a desk and often wrote my stories. I spread the newspapers out before me, traded story ideas with the other journalists in the office, and then started making phone calls. Between an analyst and a diplomat, I checked in with a student activist, and then hung up quickly in time for the official news bulletin. Throughout the morning, I tracked the news of Iran from the office, chatting with my sources and planning longer stories on the dissident clergy, the student movement, foreign policy, and social and cultural trends.
After lunch, a few of us piled into a car to drive to Tehran University, for a meeting of student organizers. Someone always stayed in the office, to alert us by mobile phone in case a newspaper was shut down or an intellectual was arrested in our absence. On the way there, I huddled in the passenger seat over my mobile phone, setting up interviews for the rest of the week. It was late afternoon by the time I got back, and editors in New York and Cairo would be at their desks, dispatching reporting assignments and considering story suggestions. The Cairo bureau chief and I conferred over when I should fly to Lebanon, because quickly my duties had expanded to include Iran’s neighbors as well.
In all respects, it was a typical day, except for the phone call that came late in the afternoon. A mysterious voice instructed me to show up at a government office near the house the next afternoon. I left the office early that day, and arrived at the appointed time. For about fifteen minutes I waited in a stark office until two men entered and sat behind the metal desk. One of them promptly fell asleep, while the other leaned forward, and began dissecting my past with exquisite politeness. It was my security interview, required before the Ministry of Culture could officially grant me a press card authorizing me to work. I thought it was a one-time session, but it ended up being the first in a long series of meetings designed initially to ensure I was not a CIA agent, and later to control my reporting and torment me as a person.
Because I had no idea what to expect, and was covered in cold sweat, my rational brain abandoned me, leaving me prey to a scared and impish imagination. I wondered whether they had a folder of grainy black and white photos of me drinking cocktails and eating ham in New York. “Miss Moaveni, was this or was this not you, drinking a mimosa at an unknown location in lower Manhattan?” I imagined the awake one demanding, waving the evidence in the air. Silently I prepared my plea. “It was, Mr. X, a painful but ingenious strategy on my part, of promoting a tolerant image of Islam and Iran in America. I pretended to enjoy mimosas to gain the trust of influential Americans, to better enable me to defend Iran by stealth.”
Lost in this imaginary defense, I didn’t notice Mr. X had actually asked me a much more mundane question, like, What were you doing in Cairo? As I answered, I could see that he was disappointed in my Farsi, which was too basic for the sophisticated word play of his questions. Do you consider yourself Iranian? What would you do if you were asked to write a story that would damage Iran’s reputation in the world? Do your editors change your work? How much influence do you have over your own coverage? Where are your parents? Why aren’t they here?
It was fair enough that he was asking these questions. The media shaped public opinion, and politicians and powerful interest groups influenced the media, and it was natural enough to wonder how the mechanics of it worked. But couldn’t they try to discover such things in a more subtle way? Couldn’t they put some slick intellectual on their payroll, and send him out to ask these questions at a dinner or a conference? This Soviet-style questioning in a bare room seemed so dated and clumsy. And it was less effective, too, because it freaked me out and inclined me to lie.
The barrage of questions lasted for over an hour, and I stumbled through my Farsi to find words like ambivalence, editorial oversight, and spiritual reservation. Searching my Farsi vocabulary didn’t take very long, I discovered, because it was tiny, limited to the domain of family gossip. I could have easily explained why someone had married above or beneath themselves, or whether the stew was seasoned properly, but the articulation of abstract thought was beyond me.
I searched his expression for signs of approval, but he was impassive, scribbling down notes at everything I said, leaving me with no sense of what was interesting or important. I tried to explain how the urge to return to Iran had come to shape my life, and that they shouldn’t judge my family—the diaspora, for that matter—unpatriotic simply because circumstance had taken us to America. That I, too, wanted to see Iran strong and thriving, not isolated and imperiled. But the sentences came out wobbly and incomplete, in the language of an insightful but illiterate adolescent. His expression remained blank.
You haven’t touched your tea, he said finally, and I obediently raised the cup to my lips. It was flavorless brown water, like all office tea. Finally, several tortured answers later, I saw a flicker of approval pass over his face, and tried to remember what I had just said. I had begun a sentence with “We Iranians think”—not in Iran it’s thought, or just Iranians think, but we Iranians.
Soon after, he ended the meeting, and I rushed home, clanging the white iron door shut behind me. My unconscious choice of pronoun intrigued me, and just as my interlocutor had, I held it up as proof that my subconscious self considered itself Iranian. But that very night, while speaking English on the phone, I found myself saying “We should . . . ” to make a point about U.S. foreign policy, and realized that my word choice was fickle. In truth, the language I was speaking directed my reference points, invoking a set of experiences and accompanying beliefs particular to an American or an Iranian context. In Farsi, the kitchen-table politics of my childhood rumbled quietly in the back of my mind; in English, the countless tracts of philosophy and political science I had absorbed as a student. Depending on what I did on a given evening, the company I kept and what I ate for dinner, I could spend the night dreaming in either language.
Just a handful of weeks after my arrival in Tehran, a cousin from California came to visit. Daria and I had grown up together in San Jose, and like me, he was convinced he was entirely Iranian. His friends in America included other second-generation children of Latin American and Middle Eastern immigrants, Latinos and Lebanese, who were born and raised outside their countries of origin, and chose to identify with African-American culture in America. His friends called him Perz, short for Persian. They wore their jeans low on the hips, and listened to hip hop, the anger and alienation in rap music resonating with their own resentment at being the brown-skinned children of immigrants.
When Daria showed up in Tehran, he brought with him an Eminemflavored American attitude toward guns and the streets—cops were bad, the muscle behind a racist system, and people who took their safety into their own hands were good. He noticed the Basij on the streets of Tehran, the Islamic vigilante thugs used by the regime to harass people, and concluded they were something akin to the Guardian Angels. He didn’t know they were the regime’s shock troops. Who would suspect that, really? Why should a regime that had a standing army, and considerable formal police and security forces, also employ a ragged, thug militia whose only purpose was the crude harassment of ordinary people?
One afternoon, Daria strode into Khaleh Farzi�
��s living room, paced back and forth between the wooden columns that held up the high ceilings, and announced he wanted to join the Basij. “Those guys have it going on,” he said. “I went up to one of them today, and he told me they protect the streets. . . . I’m down with that . . . He was right . . . He said women get harassed . . . That’s not cool. . . .”
“Stop. Stop right there. You don’t get it. The Basij are the bad guys.” I said. “Everyone hates them. They don’t protect people, they abuse them. They’re the ones who break up parties, and raid malls. They sell drugs, take bribes, and run rackets.”
Khaleh Farzi set a bowl of freshly sliced cantaloupe on the glass table, thanked God she’d never had children, and sat down to watch us argue.
“Listen, Daria. Can I just tell you what happened to me last night? Listen, and then afterward tell me if you still want to become a Basiji.”
I had been out with a friend, Nikki, her boyfriend, and one of his friends. Everyone had been raving about the new Chinese restaurant at the Jaam-e-Jaam mall food court, so we had gone over there for dinner. After eating, which involved much chopstick flirtation, we called a taxi to pick us up, and were waiting outside on the corner for it to come. As we chatted under the warm evening sky, one of the dark, menacing Land Rovers driven by the morality police, known as the komiteh, rolled up, and three officers jumped out. (The komiteh were different than the Basij but performed the same functions.)
The two guys turned to face each other, and Nikki turned to me, our body language giving no indication we knew one another. One of the komiteh walked up to Nikki’s boyfriend and asked how they were related. I don’t even know who you’re talking about, he replied. The komiteh then stepped in front of Nikki, got up within two inches of her face, and repeated the question. I’ve never seen him before in my life, she said coolly, without blinking. Don’t lie to me, he hissed, I just saw you standing here together. You must’ve gotten me mixed up with someone else, she said, it’s a busy intersection.
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