Lipstick Jihad (42 page)

As the weeks passed, it became clear that I would not be going back to Tehran. I called finally to announce this to my relatives. Khaleh Farzi had a spare set of keys to my apartment, and she went over and packed my life up into boxes. The apartment went to Siamak, as we had originally agreed, upon discovering it together, falling in love with its view of Tehran, and co-signing the lease.

Still, five months later, on an exploratory mission to see if the ground had firmed up, whether it might be possible for me to return permanently, I boarded a plane to Tehran. I expected it would still be difficult to work, and that I would have to go through the ceremony of leaving that I had avoided the first time around, with my unannounced, middle-of-the-night departure. So I arrived in Tehran, bracing myself for the emotional drain of multiple good-byes, desolate at the prospect of becoming one of the ones who left for good. But one of my first mornings back, as Khaleh Farzi and I were drinking coffee, the phone rang.

“Your grandfather passed away last night”: it was my father's voice over a crackly line. He spoke in that clinical, over-enunciated tone he reserved for anything Iranian and emotive, as though he was explaining the pathology of a complicated cancer. “The service is in four days. In my opinion, there is no need to interrupt your work to return. You know how I feel about this mourning business. But your mother might feel differently.”

Because my mother was a professional weeper (she had wept her way through the last decade, for Iraq, for Bosnia, for Afghanistan, and, eternally, for Palestine), because she wore all-black for 365 days when her mother had died a decade earlier, I didn't bother to check.

And so I returned to the airport. This time, as I gazed at the city disappearing below, and ticked off another deferred farewell to Iran, it occurred to me that perhaps there would
never
be a proper good-bye. I thought of my Agha Joon, my grandfather, and how strange it was to be leaving Tehran, the city where he spent his career and raised his children, to bury him in California, a land he passed through like a ghost.

He should be buried in Tehran, or in his home province of Azarbaijan, where everyone spoke Farsi with the same gentle, Turkish lilt, or in Shiraz, near the tomb of his beloved Hafez. Certainly not in Los Gatos, at an interfaith
cemetery surrounded by tract homes and a strip mall anchored by a Borders. But perhaps he wouldn't mind, I told myself; maybe he would just blink widely and repeat a few lines of verse about untethered spirits.

I had visited him in the nursing home the last time I was back in California. Oh, how my cousins and I tortured our parents over that nursing home. You said they were only for Americans, for savages who didn't care about their old people, we accused them. Their faces pinched, pale with pain, they blamed each other, and everything else they could think of, for why it had come to pass. The truth was that like most Americans, they had jobs and could not suspend their lives to care for their sick. They were living their American nightmare, at one of those exile crossroads where bitter reality stares you in the face—when you are forced to confront the fact that the temporary stay has become permanent, that you will never smell the old smells again, that there is no other life to regain.

The nursing home's peach, textured walls, its room filled with the shells of men and women, sapped the remains of Agha Joon's spirit. Tacked on the wall behind his bed were instructions, written out by my mother:
Please include yogurt with Mr. Katouzi's meals.
I saw that note, and felt my stomach cramp with pain, because I knew then that he would die. He would rather die than keep breathing with the knowledge that he was a burden.

My mother referred to him pointedly in these notes as Mr. Katouzi, lest some young nurse accustomed to the easy familiarity of such places venture to call him by his first name, Gholam-Hossein. Should this happen, I warned my mother, he might have a stroke on the spot, murdered by indignity.

Frail, surrounded by strangers, unable to communicate in their tongue, Agha Joon was stranded at an antiseptic, alien rest stop on the way to death. And he knew it. When I went to visit him, he played the usual game, decades old, of not recognizing me, until I stepped right in front of him and bounced up and down,
Manam
,
manam!
It's me, it's me. A real fog seemed to have replaced the make-believe one.

I perched on the side of the hospital bed, and pressed his smooth, brown-speckled hand between my own, to draw him closer. Is it you,
dokthar,
daughter, he asked, finally focusing on me. Where have you been? I was in Iran, Agha Joon. This reply intensified the fog. He never really understood that I had gone to live in Tehran; it was a twist too strange for him
to absorb, at the end of his years. The family emigrated en masse to America, adjusted slowly, and watched the second generation put down roots—it was all for them, in the end, so they could bloom and learn in a civilized, modern place. I told you last time, Agha Joon, that I moved to Iran. He just looked at me, tempted into prose by the oddity of my words. His prose was rusty, and came out lyrical anyway: “What were you seeking, in that distant place?”

I took small pride in how his face lit up, when we spoke. I had scarcely seen him since early college, when my Farsi groaned under an American accent, like all of the diaspora's children. This handful of years later, when we sat together, and I recounted where I had been, I could speak naturally, not hesitating each minute for the right word. His eyes glittered, registering that something unexpected and interesting had occurred. Listen, Agha Joon, listen to all the poetry I've learned. And as I recited everything I could remember, his face finally became animated.
Bareekalah dokhtar,
he praised me, beaming.
Ustadat ki bood?
Who taught you?

He delighted in everything we learned. Perhaps it was because he himself refused to learn English, used the same five phrases for thirty years, and in comparison, our easy acquisition of local skills seemed impressive and dexterous. More likely, because he had learned to savor the smallest things—an old tape of Banaan; the postcard of the Blue Mosque I sent him one summer from Istanbul, which he carried in his pocket for weeks; an unlikely new bud on what seemed a doomed plant. When I first learned to drive, and stopped at yellow lights, he said precisely the same thing from the passenger seat, with the same smile. Who taught you?

We took a slow stroll down the hall of the nursing home, an alley of parked wheelchairs, and he guided me to the front lobby with his walker, toward a waist-high cage of canaries. He sat down in the padded, green armchair next to them, gesturing proudly. “Look! . . . What birds! . . . See how they sing!” One of the poems he recited often opened with a couplet about nightingales; “a bulbol bore, in its beak, a petal. . . . ”

As far back as I could remember, Agha Joon had a talent for filtering out the ugliness around him—the suburban sprawl, the gas stations like warts on every corner—and spotting only what he wanted to see. We would be sitting at a traffic light, at the most soulless intersection conceivable, and he would point to a tree in the distance, at a far-reaching branch. See
dokhtar,
this thing of such beauty, that God has created? And I would strain my eyes, and finally spot a nearly invisible bird's nest perched at the end of a distant branch. Even here, at the very, very end, his vision blurred out the foreign trappings of senility and death and strained to admit only the birds.

I arrived to a quiet house, not bustling in preparation. In the two decades since the revolution, enough Iranians had died in America that there were now people to call to handle the elaborate rituals and commemorations. A caterer would cook the feast for the service, would buy and pit the dates and fold them into pale squares of
lavash,
would cook the four-day-in-the-making sweet halvah, and send waiters to circulate with cups of tea. Scratched down in address books was the number of the local Sunni volunteer committee, who offered to wash the dead, even the dead of the Shia, in the ritual fashion Islam required.

The day before the service, we lingered over breakfast, taking progressively smaller bites of toasted
barbari
bread, smeared with sour cherry jam and fresh cream. We were miserable, and chose to provoke one another as a diversion.

“I think I won't wear nylons tomorrow,” I announced, even though it was cold out, and even though I didn't know what I was going to wear.

“I think we should serve wine,” said my aunt. At this we all looked up in surprise, but she immediately turned her back to pour tea, to hide her expression.

“Feri, have you gone crazy!” my mother exclaimed.

“Agha Joon loved wine. He didn't believe in all this pious ritual, and I think if we're going to be true to him, we should have wine,” my aunt argued. This outrageous thought, as it was intended to, short-circuited my mother, who excused herself to make phone calls to Tehran (where people were sane and did not suggest serving wine at
khatms
), punching in the numbers of the international calling card as she cried.

There was nothing for me to do but buy some extra candles and a black dress. Oh welcome task! I could not wait to escape the cloying atmosphere with an afternoon of religiously sanctioned shopping. Everyone was lost in private regrets, angry self-condemnation. As I was about to leave, my mother came back into the kitchen and reminded me, as though this was her first not fifth mention, that I needed to write an elegy for Agha Joon in English, “so the American guests don't get bored sitting through an hour of Farsi.”

“I don't know why we have American guests in the first place. Agha Joon didn't even speak English. How could he have had American friends? Who've you invited?” I asked accusingly.

It turned out my mother and her sisters had invited their friends, some colleagues from work, in the Iranian tradition of expecting even the outer rings of one's social galaxy to make an appearance at a funeral. I was furious. The language in which I loved Agha Joon was Farsi. To speak about my adored grandfather to an audience of American strangers in English was an obscene idea to me.

“It's out of the question. How do you expect me to write a tribute of grief to Agha Joon in an alien tongue?”

“Azadeh, jaan. You're a writer, aren't you? Just write.” Hah! When there were elegies to compose or long complaint letters to airlines or insurance companies, I was elevated to the status of writer. Otherwise, I was a collection of other things: a non-attendee of law school, a gypsy doing “God knows what” in the Middle East, a rejecter of suitable Iranian-American doctors, an exceeder of bank accounts, who liked to write as a “hobby.”

“Can't we just pass out a flier with explanations?” I asked, as we had done for the Iranian wedding ceremony of my cousin to an American.

That night I sat for hours, poring over reams of Persian poetry, trying to find a few stanzas of verse that might be appropriate, that might translate. In Farsi I found the perfect lines—playful, elegant, profound—but they stubbornly refused to be led into English. I traced the Farsi words under my finger, in frustration, wanting to tear them off the page, command them to cross the border and not cling so willfully to just one world. The pile of rejected possibilities grew. Their translation was stale and constricted. So wearily, I sat before the screen, and just let my fingers type. And eventually something came out, mostly on its own, that I did not love, but I felt spoke the truth about my grandfather. And that is what I read.

My cousin Daria stood next to me. After I finished, he talked for a few minutes about our grandfather in broken Farsi, charming the audience with all the love that shone through his jagged words. He didn't think, of course, about what a conventional Iranian gathering expected to hear at a
khatm
. He simply spoke of Agha Joon, as he knew him.

My grandfather, he began blithely, never prayed once, not a single
rakat
of
namaz,
his entire life. The crowd, a hundred Shiites, dressed in head-to-toe
black, prepared to weep in our thousand-year-old tradition of mourning, broke out into laughter instead.

Our mothers, standing next to each other along the wall, eyed each other in alarm. Everyone quickly covered their mouths, peering around, discomfited to have stepped so dramatically out of character. But once they saw that the spirit of Karbala would not strike the room with a bolt of lightning, they relaxed.

Daria continued. He didn't pray, my grandfather, but he was more ethical, more kind, than any other man I have ever known. I smiled, and rested my fingers on Daria's arm, proud of his Iranian heart, and his simple, American naturalness.

That moment resides, a precious still-frame, in my consciousness. Exiles spent so much of their lives adrift through time; grieving for the past, pruning regrets, bracing for a future that was anticipated rather than lived. But in those seconds of surprised laughter we lived, collectively and wholly, in the present, an unfamiliar place we seldom met alone, even more rarely together. Afterward, a stooped-over old woman, wearing a head scarf of black lace, tottered over to us. Good for you,
pesaram,
my son, for not forgetting your culture, she said, patting Daria on the back and swinging the braided chain of a worn Chanel handbag in my direction. Tell that cousin of yours she should learn Farsi.

That night we assembled at my aunt's house in Los Gatos, heaving the towering trays of leftover fruit, herbs,
lavash
-wrapped dates, into the garage. If you had swapped a few of the stews, the menu would have resembled a wedding. I bit into a Persian rice cookie, the kind that immediately crumbles upon contact with your lips. We didn't like to admit it, but these cookies, like many Persian sweets, tasted better here in America. The quality of the butter and flour were finer than what bakeries used in Tehran. The taste buds, at least, can't be tricked by nostalgia.