The Ministry of Guidance Invites You to Not Stay: An American Family in Iran (24 page)

Partying in Iran is not restricted to the secular or Westernized
elite, although the kinds of parties the devoutly Shia—the more affluent ones anyway—throw are radically different, though no less frequent. The first party we went to when we arrived in Tehran was at a cousin’s, and since my family in Iran is politically reformist but also mostly devout, no alcohol was served, and the music was a soundtrack of classical Persian music. It also meant no dancing, although the daughters of a couple of my cousins, hijab-less and decidedly lenient in their views on Islamic behavior, did decide at one point to dance.

Karri was stunned more by the sheer amount and diversity of the food that was on offer than by anything else. Every Iranian house that is about to receive guests will have huge bowls of fruit on every coffee and side table, and bowls of nuts—pistachios and almonds—so huge and deep that it would take ages of snacking to get to the bottom, and other bowls of snacks, and often plates of pastries too, enough food to live on basically, before dinner. Dinner means at least two but preferably three or four completely different main courses—always fluffy white rice accompanied by lamb-or chicken-based stews along with other mixed rice dishes—as well as a handful of different salads and soups and other dishes, plus the obligatory
sabzi
, a plate of washed greens—basil, mint, radishes, watercress, or whatever—with cheese, walnuts, and spring onions on the side. Karri quickly adopted
sabzi
into our own menus at home, and I had to purchase it fresh every day from one or another
sabzi
guy whose specialty it was to sell
sabzi
, and only
sabzi
, on a street in our neighborhood. Each bunch of a specific green cost eight cents or so, making our daily
sabzi
intake far and away the least expensive food we consumed in Iran.
Sabzi
also provides many a less fortunate Iranian’s—those who cannot afford the far more expensive lettuces and spinach—daily intake of chlorophyll.

What struck me, though, about the parties at my cousins’ was the irony that, being known reformists and related to former president Khatami, they were under state surveillance and their comings and goings closely monitored—their homes and telephones were even
bugged—and despite their almost complete adherence to Islamic praxis, we guests were undoubtedly a subsection of an entry in a ledger somewhere in the Intelligence Ministry or the competing Revolutionary Guards Intelligence Division or both, whereas the bacchanalian parties we attended at fully Westernized and completely secular Iranian homes seemed to hold no interest whatsoever for the various authorities whose job it is to protect the morals of society and defend the Revolution from decay and disintegration. And we attended many parties like those, too.

Of course not all parties, whether thrown by the elite or by the middle class, religious and otherwise, are as lavish as some we attended, or are blowouts that would put a Brooklyn rave to shame, but they are all a reflection of the culture, of
ta’arouf
and hospitality, of the lightheartedness of Iranians and their inclination to merrymaking even in the worst of times. Life might be shameful, but boys and girls just want to have a little fun, too. Intensely religious families throw
rozeh
parties with some regularity on religious holidays—frequent enough in Islam, but even more frequent in Shia Islam, with its imams and various other martyrs to celebrate. At such parties a mullah will melodically bespout an episode from Shia mythology, while men and women in separate rooms weep at the injustice perpetrated on their saints and the unfairness, the
shamefulness
, of their own lives. But in the aftermath of the recitation, these parties are usually as merry as any other, and food and nonalcoholic drinks are served, and laughter and jokes, though appropriate and not bawdy, are heard. And as was not the case in the shah’s time, when the wrong word at a party might result in an uncomfortable interview with SAVAK (the secret police that seemed to have informants in every milieu and at every gathering), today’s parties are also a place to freely discuss politics, and that’s true of parties thrown by religious folk as well as by strict secularists.

Soon after our arrival in Tehran, before we had even settled into our apartment, we were invited to a Thursday-evening party at an
estate in North Tehran. Estates are uncommon in Tehran these days, since most were confiscated early in the revolution or split up into many smaller lots and sold by the owners as property values soared in the rapidly growing capital, but this estate was intact. Invisible from the street behind mud walls, the house itself was ordinary: a villa built as a second home, well before the neighborhood, in the foothills of the mountains, was even considered part of Tehran proper. But at nearly five acres, the parklike grounds were magnificent, the pool—invisible to prying eyes—a true rarity, and the small gathering of guests in their finest a sight to clash with whatever notions a Westerner might have of life in the Islamic Republic.

We had brought Khash, for there are no Iranian parties anywhere on the planet where children, from infants to teenagers, are unwelcome, whether the hosts and hostesses are prepared to handle a child in their home or not. This home was most definitely not the place for an infant, from the party setting outdoors by a deep pool, to the baby’s sleeping quarters hastily arranged on the living room couch, within earshot of the patio. Smoke from the barbecue set up to grill kebabs, a staple of almost every party regardless of what other main courses would be served, seemed to waft directly into the room where Khash slept, perhaps inconsequential to Tehran residents who breathe smoke every day—the equivalent of half a pack of cigarettes, according to the Tehran health department a few years ago—but alarming to Karri, unaccustomed as she was to Iranians’ indifference to all forms of pollution, especially the kind they’re responsible for creating.

Karri, to her discomfort, had to obsessively check on Khash—he fell asleep soon after we arrived—whose bed she rearranged on the floor using the cushions from the sofa. But she was rather elated to discover that our hostess, a single woman in her fifties, was serving genuine French wine. Wine is not a popular item for bootleggers or their customers, less popular than even beer, since like beer, it is cumbersome and expensive to transport relative to its alcohol content.
Besides, not many Iranians have a taste for fine wine, since it has not traditionally been an accompaniment to Persian cuisine, and unlike many Americans and Brits but like the French, they do not consider it an aperitif. It was certainly not going to be on my list of items to order from a dealer.

But this glass of wine was Karri’s first taste since flying to Tehran, and she was more than happy to have it. The other enthusiastic wine drinker, aside from the hostess, was a heavily made-up single lady in her forties, dressed in a short dress that didn’t become her figure. She had been invited, we discovered, in an attempt at matchmaking with a single friend of mine who had previously shown no interest in her whatsoever. That is not considered an impediment to Iranian would-be matchmakers, a profession almost all Iranians—from the deeply religious to the Westernized secularists—consider their second, if not first, in a culture where meeting potential partners is limited to gatherings at parties and introductions made by family.

This woman, taken with my friend and unconcerned with his obvious indifference, was a staunch monarchist, not unusual among a certain segment of older Tehran society that clings to memories of the lavish parties they or their parents threw, exactly like the one she was attending this night. She launched into a tirade against the ruling mullahs, people she thought were beneath contempt and certainly not worthy heirs to the empire of the shahs. When one guest reminded her that I was a relative of Khatami’s, she stared at me and asked, in a friendly enough tone, “Why do they hate the shah so much?”

I replied that I didn’t think Khatami or some of the other more enlightened clerics particularly hated anyone, much less someone who had been dead for decades, but I conceded that the Islamic regime was not fond of monarchy, and it (or for that matter any viable successor regime) was unlikely to change its position on that anytime soon. Some Iranians’ apparent obsession with the glory of monarchy, rather than the glory of Iran and its culture, I added, is shared neither
by the ayatollahs nor by the population at large, and I doubted that too many mullahs thought about the shah, or shahs, very much at all.

This woman was a Francophile, spoke fluent French, and visited France every year, but she was either unaware or unconcerned with what the French had done to their monarchs and aristocracy following their revolution, a far bloodier affair than Iran’s. Why, I wondered, given her hatred of Iran as it was, which she willingly expressed, did she not just leave?

“I’m going to,” she declared emphatically. “This country is useless for people like me, and I’m moving away permanently, this year or next.”
Farda
, again.

Another friend, standing behind me, leaned down and whispered in my ear, “She’s been saying that for twenty years.”

A few days later we were invited to another party, also at a North Tehran estate, whose grounds were impressive enough but about half the acreage of our last party. This house, once the country home of a friend’s father, was situated farther north, surrounded by a dense neighborhood of high-rise apartment buildings: hundreds of apartments enjoyed a direct view of the large swimming pool in the center of the estate’s garden, rendering it useless. But the visibility of the entire estate to strangers’ apartment windows didn’t diminish the enthusiasm of the host and hostess, or their guests, for alcohol-fueled parties—they were regular events on the Tehran social calendar, attended by a who’s who of secular Tehran.

Again, and at the insistence of our hosts, we brought Khash, who they assured us would have a nice place to sleep, safe and sound, once he got tired. That place, we discovered, was their own bed, in their bedroom, down the hall from the huge living room. Although Tehran parties don’t get going until way past his bedtime, we finally were able to put him to sleep just as the volume on the stereo was turned up to eleven, and the music changed from a mix of Euro lounge to full-on maximum-beats-per-minute electronic dance. Guests danced
feverishly on the marble floor of the living room, making listening to the baby monitor we carried with us next to impossible. Between getting refills from the uniformed bartender outside (in full view of the neighbors, incidentally), either Karri or I would walk back to the bedroom every five minutes or so to make sure that Khash had not awakened or fallen off the bed and decided to go for a crawl to get away from the infernal noise, or bad music, as the case might be. But he slept right through it, in fact better than he slept normally, not even stirring the entire evening until we picked him up to go home. Our hostess was pleased that she had been right all along to insist that a dance party at her house was a perfectly appropriate place to bring a baby, but I was a little concerned that if we made this a regular affair, he might grow up to subconsciously favor dance music, and not the good kind.

Although the party was designed to be less formal and more about letting loose on the weekend, the guests still talked plenty of politics, and not just because diplomats were present, including Jane Marriott, the British chargé d’affaires (who, like Karri, is gluten-intolerant and so was thrilled to hear from her that one could buy gluten-free baked goods at a certain midtown branch of a Tehran bakery, as long as one ordered them in advance). One of the first people to approach me, drink in hand, was a woman, probably in her late thirties, who said she lived in London mostly and recognized me from some TV appearance or other and had read my books. “You know,” she said, “I voted for Ahmadinejad, but I’m ashamed to say it now.”

Why had she voted for him? I asked.

“Because he was the only one standing up for Iran, telling the West where to get off, and not letting them exploit Iran.”

But then why be ashamed now? That aspect of Ahmadinejad hadn’t changed, had it, even if the election was fraudulent?

“No,” she said, “but after what’s happened …”

I understood what she was trying to say. I had come across Iranians, both inside Iran and abroad, who were completely Westernized,
secular, and liberal, and who yet had voted for the conservative and deeply religious Ahmadinejad, in some cases twice. One would imagine that these Iranians would be in favor of reform (if not revolution), of a type that would allow them to enjoy the same lifestyle in Iran that they did in Europe or America. But they were deeply nationalistic, and Ahmadinejad had always, to the dismay of the ruling clerics, emphasized nationalism, even over faith. Of course, wait—Westernized Iranians
did
already enjoy the same lifestyle in Tehran that they enjoyed in their foreign abodes, as evidenced by this very party, which, judging by the parade of exotic cars, the designer clothes, and the well-stocked bar, could have been held in Beverly Hills or the south of France were it not for the ladies’ manteaus and shawls hanging conspicuously on the rolling rack by the front door.

Not all Iranians who supported Ahmadinejad through two elections were as apologetic as this lady, but some, in the presence of either reformists or antiregime Iranians, were just a little embarrassed by the security state that Iran had more visibly become under their favored politician—with far more political prisoners than during the previous administration. (A fair argument could be made that this wasn’t his sole fault.) Still, the security state didn’t seem to care very much about the goings-on at this party, even as the guest list included expat foreigners (the handful that live in Tehran) and senior diplomats from “enemy” countries, such as Great Britain. I wondered if it would harass some of these people on their drives home, say, if the women were mal-veiled. Jane Marriott, who left at the same time as we did, drove herself off in a Japanese SUV with diplomatic plates—and with no tail, as far as I could tell.