On the Noodle Road

by Jen Lin-Liu

  “Has anyone given you a pen?” he asked quietly, in an accent that sounded vaguely British.

  “A pen?” I asked, confused. “No.”

  “Oh good,” he said with a sigh of relief. “You’re probably not bugged.”

  Koshan accompanied me as I took cooking lessons from a rotation of female chefs, they and I in our hejabs. It didn’t seem wise to stand so close to a flame when swathed in so much fabric, but that was the protocol. We cooked in a basement in the middle of the afternoon, when all the hotel guests had gone out for the day. We focused on khoreshts, thick stews of contrasting sweet and sour flavors.

  One woman showed me how to make khoresht kheme, a beef-and-tomato stew with chickpeas (or yellow split peas), onions, ginger, turmeric, and cinnamon. More unusual was a camel stew, in which the meat was sautéed with onions, tomatoes, and potatoes along with turmeric and dried lime powder, the flavors melding with a meat that tasted like lean beef.

  As the chefs cooked, I wanted to learn about them: How did they become cooks? What did they think of the hejab? What about the status of women in Iran? But I didn’t get very far. One morning, after I asked one chef her age and she replied that she was forty-four, she turned the question on me, asking how many children I had to boot. “Thirty-three and no children?” she said, her head scarf pulled tight against her face. “I was almost a grandmother at your age!”

  Meanwhile, Koshan chatted nonstop, so much so that I was starting to get impatient until he mentioned something unusual: he didn’t like beef. As a matter of fact, he added, “I don’t like any meat. Do you know how many sheep they assassinate in Mecca every year?”

  Most Iranians liked meat, he allowed, but he was different, he said, because he was Afghan. “We eat more vegetables,” he said. Or so he’d heard. He’d never set foot in the country of his heritage. His parents had fled Afghanistan in the early 1980s, part of an exodus of more than a million refugees who’d left after the Soviet invasion and before the Taliban’s rise. Koshan was born after his parents crossed into Iran, and he’d grown up on the fringes of Iranian society in a refugee community. The Islamic Republic also discriminated against Afghans because they were Sunni Muslims, not Shia like most of Iran. In recent years, with the American invasion of Afghanistan, more refugees had fled to Iran, only to find a hostile reception—they were refused citizenship and remained stateless. Not only that, but the government had recently begun to deport Afghans back to their homeland, even as the American-led war raged on.

  In addition to living in constant fear of being deported, Koshan had fewer opportunities. He wanted to study traditional medicine, but Iranian universities refused him admission because he was stateless. That also made it impossible to get a passport to study abroad. Employers passed him over for jobs, as it was officially illegal for him to work. He’d landed a job at the hotel only because he’d agreed to a low wage kept off the books, and he worked harder than everyone else. He’d thrived in the job. In a few short years, he’d become fluent enough in English to sound almost like a native speaker.

  Discrimination was rife in Iran, he said. He elaborated on the persecution of Jews and Baha’is, which I’d heard about from Fariborz in Beijing. “And they say there are no gays in Iran!” Koshan laughed and added: “Ha! I think there are more gay men in Iran than anywhere else.” His tone made me wonder if he was homosexual himself.

  Ordinarily I might have asked. But Mr. Sanjar’s warnings stopped me, and Koshan himself pulled back; neither of us felt at home here. He seemed to realize he’d let on more than he should. “If the police found me here working and talking to a foreigner, I could get in a lot of trouble,” he said nervously. That comment lingered in the air as he prepared tea to go with the stew. When he struck a match under the samovar there was a loud thud, followed by a collective gasp from the three of us. Koshan rushed to shut off the gas main as he wiped beads of sweat from his forehead.

  “Maybe that’s a sign we shouldn’t be talking about such things,” I said semi-jokingly.

  Just then, a group of Turkish tourists arrived in the hotel’s courtyard and asked to see the rooms. Koshan went to greet them. Several of the women lit cigarettes and begun puffing away. “What exactly will happen if I don’t wear my head scarf?” one woman asked tauntingly, to nobody in particular. Smelling the tobacco and hearing the defiant feminine tone, I wanted to teleport myself to Turkey immediately.

  On his return, Koshan referred disparagingly to the Turkish tourists as “Mongols!” Iranians had harbored a dislike of Mongolians since the invasion of Genghis Khan, seven hundred years before. “The Turks came in here demanding this, demanding that, as if they’d conquered the place.”

  • • •

  Our hotel was cozy, and eating meals in a large courtyard dining room with long rows of tables, we met adventurous travelers from around the world. Three young Chinese women were backpacking through the Middle East. A twenty-something Dutchman was “couch surfing” the world using a website that connected him with locals who hosted him at no charge. A young Romanian couple, traveling with their infant daughter and five-year-old son, were blogging about their adventures driving from Europe to Asia in an ambulance converted into an RV. “The good thing about driving an ambulance is that no one wants to hit you,” said the wife one afternoon as her husband drove us around town, swerving at an intersection to narrowly avoid a collision. All in all, the hotel company was excellent, and the stews I learned were delicious; it was the first place I’d happened upon that felt something close to what I imagined a caravanserai might have felt like hundreds of years ago, with travelers passing through for a day or for weeks and swapping their wares—these days, stories rather than goods.

  The hotel also had a fair share of Iranians, and the atmosphere made it an easy place to befriend them. One evening, while Mr. Sanjar went to chat up a pretty female guest, an elegant middle-aged woman joined us for dinner. Zari, originally from Tehran, had spent most of her life in Britain but, after a divorce, she’d returned to her homeland. I asked Zari if she found it difficult to adjust to life in Iran.

  “It’s annoying to wear the head scarf,” she said. “I would say the majority of women don’t want to wear it, but it’s just a fact of life.” Before the Iranian Revolution, she told me, only a small percentage of women wore veils. In the 1970s, Iranian society, flush with cash from oil exports, developed strong ties to the West and followed many Western traditions. Since the revolution, the severity of the country’s laws had ebbed and flowed, depending on the mood of the government and clerics. Sometimes draping one’s scarf loosely over the head and showing a little hair was perfectly acceptable; other times, it could get you hauled off to the police. It was all part of the game, a method of exercising control. Nobody knew exactly when they might cross the line.

  “But everyone has a way of getting around the rules,” Zari said. “For example, take liquor. In Tehran, my son talks about the parties kids throw, with DJs and drinks and girls showing up wearing next to nothing. They’re just as wild as they are in London.”

  How did people get away with it? I asked.

  She rubbed her thumb and fingers together. “Money. As long as you give some to the police, you’re fine. Actually,” she added, lowering her voice to a low mumble, “it’s all supported by the regime.”

  And just like that, we’d crossed another invisible line beyond what was permissible. Zari cleared her throat and changed the subject, asking about our travels. “Does your guide have to be with you all the time?” she asked. Yes, we replied, it was a regulation that only Americans had to follow. “That sucks!” she said. Just before Mr. Sanjar came back to join us, she warned, “You should be careful around your guide. Don’t ask him too many questions.”

  A few nights later, we decided to test that invisible line yet again. We climbed to the rooftop of the hotel to smoke a mint-and-tobacco hookah with Zari and Koshan. Nahid, the pretty
woman Mr. Sanjar had been hitting on, also joined us, but thankfully she’d rejected his advances and brought a long-haired musician with her instead. As soon as she sat down, she whipped off her head scarf, and perfectly coiffed locks fell around her shoulders. Our time in Iran had done something: seeing her exposed hair was almost as shocking as if she’d joined us naked in a Jacuzzi.

  “Why should I have to hide such beautiful hair under a scarf?” Nahid purred, playing with her tresses.

  “Iranian women care a lot about their hair,” Zari said. I’d wondered about where women cut their hair. Just like elsewhere, in salons, she told me, but ones that were hidden from public view, in basements or second floors, or in private homes. “Iranian women spend more time in salons than anyone else I know,” she added.

  Nahid inhaled deeply from the hookah, an activity that was also deemed illegal in this conservative town. In other cities, men openly enjoyed the tall pipes in teahouses and at sidewalk cafés; in Mashhad we’d seen two women in the basement teahouse trading puffs. It seemed that many rules in Iran were unclear. But even cautious Koshan seemed to think that smoking a hookah, a minor breach of the law, was acceptable. It was past midnight and the hotel doors were locked. The night was barely illuminated by a sliver of a moon. And it had been very many long days since we’d had a drink.

  Taking a quick glance around, Zari decided it was also safe to take off her scarf, and I followed her lead. But when someone else appeared on the roof, Koshan urged us to cover our heads again. On the scarves went, then off again as soon as the man left. After smoking for a while, we went down to Nahid’s room and listened to Persian music and snacked on pomegranates. We kept the conversation light; we didn’t need to push any more boundaries.

  The next morning in the hotel lobby, our new friends wished us well on our journey, the women’s scarves securely fastened to their heads.

  8.

  After Yazd, Mr. Sanjar resumed his job as translator during cooking classes, lazy as he was. In Shiraz, I persevered and learned how to make several tasty pilafs that redeemed the bad name miserable Central Asian plov had given the dish. In Esfahan, I tolerated Mr. Sanjar at my side and shaped ground lamb and beef into kebabs. But when I got to Tehran, he had worn me down entirely. His constant mantra was a disingenuous “I’m at your disposal,” and after several weeks, I truly wished I could dispose of him.

  One afternoon not long after we arrived in the capital, I reluctantly climbed into his car for the umpteenth lesson and, after battling horrendous traffic, we eventually arrived in a nice residential neighborhood. I was intrigued when Mr. Sanjar pulled up at a gated residence and told me to get out and ring the bell.

  A middle-aged woman poked her head out the gate, exposing her floppy mop of reddish-brown hair while her black head scarf dangled around her neck. She and Mr. Sanjar exchanged a few words in Farsi, then he called to me from the idling car. “Jennifer, since the school is for ladies only, I won’t be able to go in with you.” I tried to look disappointed as I waved good-bye, and he happily sped away, relieved of his duties.

  Come, come, the woman gestured, leading me into a compound that had a familiar suburban American feel. A shiny hatchback sat in the driveway, and fancy patio furniture and a barbecue decorated a pretty garden. She pointed me up a set of stairs and through an entrance to the house on the second floor. In the foyer, I removed my shoes and hung my head scarf on a coatrack. In the kitchen, the woman resumed making pots de crème and assembling a trifle, sans wine or spirits. A half-dozen women sitting at a long table paused in their note-taking to greet me warmly. Some of them wore chadors or dark head scarves while one had gone to the opposite extreme—my eyes settled on the women’s outfit: a blue-and-white polka-dotted tank top that revealed a black bra. A pointy green feather decorated her dyed blond hair. When she stood up, I couldn’t help noticing the black thong sticking out of her jeans.

  With the help of her daughter, Yasmin, the woman who’d greeted me at the gate introduced herself as Mrs. Soltani, the head of the cooking school. A short woman with a beak-like nose, Mrs. Soltani had started this home business more than twenty years before, after quitting her job as a schoolteacher. She’d begun with Persian baking lessons, added khoreshts and polows (rice dishes), and later threw in some international dishes. By the time I visited, she’d taught thousands of women, and some had gone on to successful cooking careers.

  Yasmin, the office manager, translated for me during class. In the confines of her home, she looked like she belonged on the streets of Manhattan. She wore tight jeans, heels, and a stylish top. She decorated her ears with multiple studs and brushed her honey complexion with foundation and blush. Though her English wasn’t as good as Mr. Sanjar’s, her boundless patience made up for it.

  I settled into the class as Mrs. Soltani spread a layer of cream over sponge cake before decorating it with canned fruit and gelatin. She put the trifle in the fridge to set it. As in the Central Asian cooking classes, the Western food she taught was rather lackluster, but the Persian dishes dazzled me. Next on the agenda was tah-cheen, a rice dish I’d tried earlier on the trip; Mrs. Soltani’s was infinitely better. Like the trifle, it involved layers. Tender chunks of chicken sprinkled with sugar, cinnamon, and barberries sat between layers of parboiled rice and a mixture of yogurt, saffron, and beaten eggs. The tah-cheen was baked in a round Pyrex dish. After it cooked, Mrs. Soltani inverted the caked rice, revealing a golden crust that had formed around the sides and bottom of the dish. She cut the cake into wedges and the crust crackled as I sank my teeth into it.

  During a tea break, the women gossiped about recent weddings and Korean soap operas. They shared pictures of their families on their mobile phones. Among the students were an architect, a beautician, and an entrepreneur. The woman with the black thong didn’t work; she told me proudly that her husband was a successful entrepreneur and soon they were moving to Canada. “I can’t have any fun in Iran,” she complained.

  Yasmin invited me to stay after class to learn another dish—the all-important kebab. Though I’d seen plenty of kebabs before reaching the Soltanis, I was impressed with the passion Mrs. Soltani displayed in making them. She mixed ground lamb with saffron, turmeric, minced onions, and the sour red spice called sumac, and kneaded it as ferociously as a lion attacking prey. She scooped up the meat with bare hands, shaped it into a ball, and slammed it against the bowl several times with the force of a baseball pitcher. “Umph!” she exclaimed, before explaining that the motion bound the mixture together, avoiding the expedient of adding a beaten egg. She massaged the meat with well-oiled hands and sculpted it onto wide skewers. Just as my mouth watered in anticipation, though, Mrs. Soltani put them aside and said she was reserving them for her husband, who was returning from work soon. We would be going out for dinner.

  We donned our head scarves and headed out the door, climbing into Yasmin’s new hatchback. Craig had arrived in time to join us, and we sat in the backseat while Mrs. Soltani sat in front with Yasmin. As Yasmin drove, she spoke about some of Iran’s limitations. While she could drive, unlike her female counterparts in Saudi Arabia, for example, she chafed at the dress restrictions and the ban on alcohol.

  They took us to a beautiful teahouse at one of the city’s fanciest hotels. This was the teahouse Mr. Sanjar had mentioned earlier, the one that was “acceptable” for ladies. And indeed, it was a feminine domain: groups of women and children, clustered on sofas in the high-ceilinged room, were attended to by men. A couple of women said hello to Mrs. Soltani, and she hugged them warmly. They were former students of hers, she explained, who’d gone on to become restaurateurs. Yasmin ordered a round of black tea and offered us lollipops of crystallized sugar to put into the drink to aid our digestion.

  As we sipped tea, Yasmin asked the questions we’d come to expect: How long had we been married? Did we plan to have children soon? Yasmin herself was single, and like many young Iranian women we met, she was
in no hurry to get married, wanting to focus on her career. She added that she didn’t like to cook, preferring to leave that to her mother while she focused on the business aspects of the school. After graduating from college, she’d worked as a software engineer, but her company had laid her off two years before, a casualty of Iran’s dismal economy, which was growing increasingly stagnant under bad domestic policies and Western sanctions.

  While we were at the teahouse, Yasmin’s mobile phone rang. It was her brother, Shaheen, who wanted to say hello. Craig took the phone, and Shaheen apologized profusely for not being able to accompany us to the teahouse. We accepted his invitation for dinner another evening. After the call, I asked Yasmin why her family, and Iranians in general, were so friendly and hospitable, when the government had been telling her since the day she was born that America was the enemy.

  Yasmin paused before answering. “We have satellite television, we read the Internet. We know the truth,” she said. Managing to circumvent the government’s controls, they took the onslaught of propaganda with a grain of salt. Although they had mixed opinions on America’s foreign policy, they understood that much of the shouting between the countries was politics. It was ironic: despite the censorship, Iranians were better informed about us than we were about them.

  • • •

  At the teahouse, Yasmin and her mother ordered two large bowls of noodles for us. I hadn’t yet had a notable noodle dish in Iran, and I was eager. But after I tried a few bites of the ash-e-reshteh, long, thin strands of noodle served in a slightly sour broth with chickpeas and greens, I gave up, thankful that I had the excuse that I was full from sampling Mrs. Soltani’s cooking all afternoon. But the truth was, they weren’t very appetizing. The mushy wheat vermicelli floated limply in the soup, the texture of the noodles a marked contrast to how Iranians liked their rice. Chickpeas, lentils, spinach, and dill vied for attention in the bowl and made for an overly busy mixture. The sour taste I’d noted—most likely kashkt, or dried yogurt, the Soltanis told me—had been alien to me. I’d enjoyed noodles salty, spicy, even slightly sweet, but sour was somehow beyond me.