Honeymoon in Tehran: Two Years of Love and Danger in Iran (27 page)

N
othing about the invitation we received that month to a friend’s wedding, not the elegant ecru box in which it was delivered, not
the marbled parchment on which it was printed, and most certainly not the text itself, suggested the reception was to be a sex-segregated affair. All the gossip about the wedding centered around the eight-hundred-person guest list, which was only slightly more extravagant than the four-hundred-person engagement party we had not been invited to. We discovered that men and women would be separated only when one of Arash’s friends phoned to give me the cell phone number of his wife, so that we could find each other among the four hundred women relegated to the female ballroom. We had been invited because Arash was friends with the groom, and the fact that I didn’t know the couple well myself suddenly seemed like a reason to stay home. Among the many indignities posed by the sex-segregated wedding, not least is the plight of the couple only one of whose members is connected to the wedding party. The other person is forced to wander among hundreds of strangers without the social crutch of the spouse who actually knows the pair, while the other’s enjoyment is marred by the certainty that his or her partner is on the other side of the wall seething with resentment.

“Why should I even go,” I complained, “if I won’t know a single woman there?”

“I don’t know, it just feels strange to put on a suit and go to a big wedding by myself,” Arash said. “And you won’t be bored. You can check out the caterer and the flowers. It’ll be like a research trip.”

We were spared the trouble of resolving this when it turned out that a close female relative of mine had also been invited and that I could sit at her table. When the evening finally arrived, as I touched up the polish on my toes and inched into my chiffon gown, it occurred to me that the knowledge that I was dressing up to hang out with four hundred other women somehow took all the anticipatory fizz out of getting ready.

We pulled up outside the venue, the Farmanieh Social and Sporting Club, the Islamic Republic’s answer to a country club, where wealthy ayatollahs took swimming lessons and reclined in saunas. Iranian officials were inordinately fond of saunas. Everyone knew this, but no one could quite put their finger on why. Perhaps it was because they considered sweating in the sauna a quick and painless
means of weight loss. The luxury residential towers that were going up all across northern Tehran, catering to the regime’s new rich, all included master bedroom suites with built-in saunas. Once I had a cleric rush late into an interview, still pink from his sauna session. The Sporting Club contained four oversize saunas; many crucial decisions must have been taken in their wooden, eucalyptus-scented depths. During my brief tenure as a member, I found that women were less fond of saunas than were men. The sauna ruined their hair, and they preferred to converse while ambling on the treadmill or sipping fresh carrot juice at the gym café.

Hundreds of fragile, magenta-colored orchids enveloped the wide staircase that wound up to the women’s level. “Those orchids cost eight dollars a stem,” I informed Arash. “These people are obscene.” I never imagined that importing and exporting paint, the family’s main enterprise, could be so lucrative. I waved goodbye to Arash as he headed for the men’s ballroom; we would coordinate our escape by text message if the evening grew too unbearable.

Inside, the atmosphere was more like a colossal tea party than a wedding, with petits fours and tisanes circulating on trays, except that everyone was wearing floor-length evening gowns. For a good hour, the female guests gossiped listlessly and stared at one another’s jewelry. Shortly before dinner, Arash messaged to inform me their side had a stand-up comic: unfair. Even the bride looked dejected, arms crossed tightly across her designer gown, diamond tiara slightly askew, giving off the air of a recently deposed monarch.

Since the clerical regime forbids unmarried men and women to consort with one another publicly, reception halls and hotels require that guests be separated. One less popular option is to hold a dinner rather than a reception, because men and women may eat in each other’s company. But without music, the dinners end up being solemn affairs, and they don’t include the traditional rites of an Iranian wedding party, such as the “knife dance,” in which the bride must retrieve a blade from carousing guests in order to cut the cake.

As we headed for our table, my cousin and I discussed whether, if given the choice, this particular couple would have chosen a mixed party at home. She had attended the wedding ceremony as well—it
had been held earlier that day at home—and described their elaborate
sofreh.

Pious families have always held segregated parties. Even in private homes, guests are separated, or the men leave after dinner so that the women can take off their veils and dance among themselves. As liberal as this couple was, their parents were traditional, and we agreed they would have held a segregated reception anyway, even were they not legally compelled to do so. The women ululated to signal that the groom had entered (he is permitted a brief visit to the women’s side; the converse does not extend to his bride). The conservative among the guests swiftly reached for their coverings, and now came the most memorable sight of the evening: a Pucci chador.

The groom’s mother began ushering everyone to the dinner buffet, which included everything from Persian sour-cherry rice to prawn kabobs and Thai curry. After this sumptuous meal, which intended to compensate for the single-sex misery but did not, some teenage girls did a perfunctory dance to the Persian pop song of the year, “Khoshgelha Bayad Berakhsan,” “The Pretty People Must Dance,” and everyone filed out to look for their males. Once in the integrated lobby, the guests grew animated, laughed, and displayed other signs of having a good time, and as a result the doormen swiftly herded everyone onto the street. There was whispered talk of an after party at the groom’s parents’ apartment, with a live DJ. But someone had spoken to the bride’s sister, who reported that police had stopped the DJ’s car en route and confiscated the equipment. From the window, we could see the groom on the staircase, his face taut and angry, in animated conversation with his father. Helplessness was written all over the older man’s face. It was one of those moments in Iran that gives even wealthy parents pause, when they realize that their money is meaningless in the face of the state’s decrees, because it cannot buy their son something rather simple, after all: a dance with his bride on the eve of their wedding reception, in the company of friends.

T
he next day my cousin called and asked whether I had admired the pastry and the floral arrangements at the reception. If so, she could
find out who had been responsible. In Tehran, once word gets out that you are planning a wedding, the females on both sides of the couple’s extended family make it their business to help. They draw on the collected knowledge of all their own female friends and acquaintances, so that they can offer you a definitive roster of the wedding coordinator, caterer, and photographer of the moment.

For a full week our phone rang each day with relatives calling to say, “Shahrooz. Shahrooz and no one else.” Shahrooz was the most coveted, most talked about wedding planner of the year, or at least of that spring. He offered a full range of services, including the unpleasant one of security. Anyone wishing to hold a mixed wedding at a private locale requires some form of security, for without it the reception stands to be raided by police. In the rare worst cases, the guests are carted off to the police station, either lashed or charged à la carte for their transgressions (nail polish, ten thousand toman; makeup, twenty thousand; being in the company of the opposite sex, fifty thousand); more fortunate consequences would include the opportunity to pay a sizable bribe, either to be left alone altogether, or for the party to end but without harassment of the guests.

A thriving clandestine industry had emerged in recent years to protect private weddings from such invasions. Like every other trade in Iran designed to supply what the state forbids, it grew ever more sophisticated and expensive. The first wedding I attended in Iran, back in 2000, was held at a rented garden in Karaj, on the outskirts of Tehran. Men and unveiled women mingled freely late into the night, periodically slipping flasks out of their purses and jackets, and the police never showed up. No one knew exactly who owned and operated the rental gardens of Karaj, but it was clear they worked with the authorities’ tacit permission. The rental fee—around $6,000 per eve ning, exorbitant by local standards—guaranteed that the party would be safe from the local police. The Karaj gardens peaked in popularity in the early Khatami era, when security forces generally limited their incursions into people’s private lives. This loosening slowly led to the emergence of wedding planners offering security packages, so that Iranians could hold mixed weddings in private homes with similar assurance. The popularity of this option had grown in recent months, as
young couples, nervous that the Ahmadinejad government would not tolerate the Karaj gardens, were choosing to hold receptions at home.

We had already picked the location for our wedding. The ceremony would be held at my uncle’s house in Shahabad, what had once been a village at the footsteps of the Alborz Mountains, but was now entirely within the sprawling city’s limits. The house had been the family seat for decades, and it was important to me that Arash and I exchange our vows in a place where I had roots. Soaring sycamore trees surrounded the old house, reflected in the shimmering surface of the pool, and trellises of pink bougainvillea leaned against the brick walls. I loved the sycamores’ broad leaves, their mottled, flaky bark, and their quintessential Iranianness. Iran is dense with sycamores, and the ancient Persian king Xerxes found the tree so beautiful that he showered it with gifts and wore an amulet engraved with its image.

My aunt had known most of the neighbors for decades and was certain they would not call the police. But recently, a new glass apartment tower had gone up across the street, home to a number of religious families whose willingness to accommodate the older residents’ style had not yet been tested. After some discreet inquiries, it was concluded they would not pose any problems.

We would hold the reception at the home of Arash’s parents in Lavasan. The expansive garden there would accommodate all our guests, and because Arash’s father was one of the oldest landowners in the district, we did not anticipate trouble from the local police.

Arash and I arrived at Shahrooz’s office on a warm weekday morning, passing through two photography studios—one in Grecian style, including urns and a terra-cotta background, and another resembling a Versailles drawing room—on the way to the reception area, which was crowded by two oversize gilt thrones covered in red velvet. A plate of almond cookies sat on the upholstered coffee table, and we sipped tea quietly until the perfectly coiffed receptionist duo (everything at Shahrooz seemed double or triple what was required) with their identical upturned noses, granted us their attention. From there we were escorted to the photographer’s office, where a middle-aged man in a silk shirt opened a leather-bound album featuring portraits of brides and grooms in various unlikely poses: prostrate on a field of
autumn leaves, perched in a tree, on the verge of rolling into a pool. This was the “conventional portrait” album, which we viewed before one that appeared to comprise stills from some eighties heavy-metal video in which the bride dies during the guitar solo. In this album, there were grooms saving brides from falling off bridges, drowning in murky pools, being lost in wooded grottoes. The last few photos were atmospheric shots of brides in what looked like boudoir settings, and my personal favorite, a bride in the garb and pose of a flamenco dancer.

Since most brides want to appear unveiled in their wedding photos, nearly every Iranian wedding photographer has a private garden at his disposal, the public parks of Tehran being off limits for such purposes. The impulse to appear unveiled (or at least only with a bridal veil) in photos seemed natural enough to me, but I didn’t quite grasp the point of the dramatized portraits until we were shown the optional “couple’s video,” a separate production from the standard wedding video that records moments like the cutting of the cake. The “couple’s video” was a fifteen-minute clip set to pounding club music that followed the given couple as they coyly searched for each other amid sandy ruins, galloped into the desert side by side on horses, rolled around on a sandy beach, and encountered each other on the candelit terrace of a palatial estate. Such heady romance being unavailable to the average Iranian couple, the video and the portraits seemed to re-create in images the carefree adventures and wealth that young people yearned for.

“Fortunately, both our family homes have gardens, so perhaps we could just take care of the pictures there,” I ventured.

“The price of the garden is included in the fees,” the photographer said condescendingly. He apparently thought we were being cheap.

Special effects, or the sorts of touches meant to provide the unsurpassed “Wow” moment when your jaded guests are finally impressed, occupied their own stop in the world of Shahrooz. You could be transported to the reception in an antique Mercedes-Benz; you could have plasma television screens mounted around the property, playing videos of the couple, or even a fireworks display.

By the time we finally reached the private sanctum of Shahrooz
himself, we both wanted to bolt. But I had promised my uncle I would at least check out the security package, just in case. The planner of all planners sat behind a large oak desk, wearing a stylish suit with a striped orange tie; he had the attractive but vacant expression of a cologne model. He snapped open a latest-model laptop and began clicking through photos of other people’s weddings, pointing out the chair backs and flowers we could select. In the waiting room, I had scanned their set dinner menus, the most basic of which included twelve choices of entrée, and asked whether we could have just five or six.