Honeymoon in Tehran: Two Years of Love and Danger in Iran (28 page)

Shahrooz looked affronted.

“Don’t worry,” I said hastily, “we’re happy to pay for twelve entrées, but because we think that’s a trifle overblown, we would want you to serve just five.”

“I am not willing to sacrifice the reputation of my institution,” he said. “People expect a certain degree of quality from a Shahrooz wedding, and I must match that on every occasion.”

“But this has nothing to do with quality. We just want
less.”

Shahrooz was nonplussed. If he had had a button underneath his desk that whisked away undesirable clients, he would surely have pressed it now. I could not imagine him walking into a local police station in his western banker’s suit, but his operation necessitated some form of cooperation with the authorities. He, or someone less conspicuous in his employ, either bribed them directly or somehow made it worth their while to refrain from raiding his receptions. When families coordinated their own weddings, it usually fell to the bride’s father or brother to deal with police who inevitably came knocking. I could see the appeal in delegating this repulsive task, but—even though he promised to bring ten security guards camouflaged as guests in suit and tie and equipped with earpiece walkie-talkies, and to set up a roadblock at the head of my uncle’s street—Arash and I agreed that Shahrooz was not for us. We walked out of his office.

Next, we went to see the city’s top wedding photographer. Photographs occupy an inconceivable degree of importance in the average couple’s wedding. Between the studio portraits, the outdoor photography, and the time allotted to the videographer, most couples spend
several hours of the day amassing an elaborate visual record of their union. It was not considered nearly enough to have focused and well-composed shots of one’s guests and the key moments of the ceremony and party. Rather, the wedding day offered an opportunity for couples to create a glamour portfolio that reflected, in its lavish excess, the financial portfolio of their families.

This impulse seemed peculiar to me, as most people had an approximate sense of the financial position of their extended acquaintances and could guess that a middle-class family had gone into debt or burned through savings to pay for an extravagant wedding. Arash said I was being overliteral and underestimating the extent to which Iranian culture was preoccupied with family dignity. Iranians are notorious, at least among themselves, for their tendency to savage weddings the day after. By noon the next day, the women in attendance will have taken to the phones, excoriating the inadequacy of the dinner, the modesty of the fruit display, the way you needed a magnifying glass to see the gems in the bride’s jewelry. A family would spend well above its means just to preclude this sort of gossip, especially from the bride’s family. The groom’s parents were aware that an event that did not meet the bride’s family’s expectations would entail a lifetime of in-law sniping and patronizing for their son. A wedding that did suffice could be viewed, in the context of such relations, as an investment in a son’s future peace of mind.

Arash and I had no intention of devoting long hours of our wedding day to photography. Besides the fact that the idea was traumatic, it would take all my energy to make it through an afternoon ceremony and an evening reception. Regardless of what appears on the invitation, Iranians refuse to arrive at a private wedding party before nine or ten
P.M.,
and inevitably our reception would last well past the middle of the night. We hoped the photographer we were on our way to see would understand our more circumscribed needs.

His name was Babak, and he came recommended by at least five friends, including one photojournalist who should have known better. In his mid-thirties, with thinning hair tied back in a ponytail, Babak greeted us, or I should say he greeted me, with a leering warmth.
“Don’t worry, I’ll make sure you look divine,” he assured, inspecting me with an overlong glance.

Though I was nearly four months pregnant, thankfully this was not at all apparent. I had agonized over setting the date for the reception, anxious not to show in my wedding dress. Nearly everyone knew we were already officially married, and it was common for couples to hold their reception sometimes months or a year later. But I hadn’t heard of any cases where the wife-bride was pregnant. Tehran was not ready for that kind of reception, and I did not want my wedding pictures to record a stomach bump for posterity. Some who knew me well noticed I looked slightly fuller than usual, but my weight often fluctuated according to how much time I spent at the gym, and my extra four or five pounds went mostly unremarked. I planned to wear four-inch heels to offset this thickening, and Arash’s mother, who knew I was pregnant, had introduced me to her discreet seamstress, who monitored my dress’s fit.

Babak’s cell phone rang; he twisted his chair slightly away from us to hold a loud, five-minute conversation with a woman he kept referring to as “baby.” Once finished with his phone call, he ordered his staff to serve us watermelon, while he sipped a Diet Coke and recounted a recent weekend spent at the Burj al-Arab in Dubai with Kamran and Houman, the Tehrangeles pop duo. I explained to him that we wanted very natural photography, nothing posed or stagey, just black-and-white shots of the ceremony and our guests at the reception. “That’s me, that’s exactly my kind of work!” he insisted, though the albums on the table before us contained photos entirely in the manner of Shahrooz’s in-house photographer. He began pointing to certain photographs. “Do you see this smile? I
want
this smile. Do you see this shadow? I
want
this shadow.”

At this point Arash interrupted him to ask about prices, and whether he took the photographs himself or sent assistants. “It all depends on whether you can afford me,” he said. His assistant flipped through a calendar marked up with bookings, and informed us that he had no weekends free for the next six months. Competition was fierce, it seemed, to have Babak capture one’s perfect day. Once the assistant
handed us his price list, I whispered to Arash that we should leave. Babak charged the equivalent of several thousand dollars, which seemed excessive in a country where a loaf of bread cost ten cents.

That evening, I poured myself a glass of sour cherry soda and settled in to read the newspaper, eager to reconnect with a world that was not preoccupied with weddings. But the front page offered no respite. The government, it seemed, was equally concerned with matrimony. Troubled by the rise in large
mehriyehs and
the growing demand for elaborate weddings that most young people could not afford but sought to hold anyway, it had thrown a major party to promote moderation, advertising the event in newspapers and on state media. A cartoon ran alongside the article I was reading, showing a bride and groom besieged by chattering flies that criticized everything from the groom’s shoes to the bride’s jewelry. Only young couples recently wed with
mehriyehs
valued at less than fourteen gold coins (around $2,400) had been admitted to the government party. Once inside, guests were automatically enrolled in a lottery to win gold coins.

I laughed aloud and began reading the piece to Arash. It captured precisely why Shahrooz, and the entire Iranian wedding industry for that matter, was ascendant, despite the financial strain faced by most of the nation. The regime had chosen as the venue for the party an auditorium adorned with posters of Ali Akbar, the son of Imam Hossein, martyred in the seventh century alongside his father. A mullah had presided over this festive atmosphere, reading for ten minutes from the Koran. He had then introduced a special “celebrity” guest, an actor famous for his appearances in films about the Iran-Iraq War, who quipped, “I’ve been martyred twenty-three times
… on film
!” A smoke-and-light show followed, which, what with all the posters of Ali Akbar, must have lent the auditorium the strange feeling of an Islamic disco. The party favors included Ti-Top, a sponge cake popular as a snack for schoolchildren, and a book of advice for married couples penned by the Ayatollah Khamenei. In this teeming metropolis of at least six million young people of marriageable age, only three hundred had attended. The rest were, presumably, sitting at home with calculators trying to figure out how they could afford Shahrooz.

I
suggested we start seeing a couples therapist over dinner one eve ning. We were at a restaurant Arash disliked, Bix, one of several new Tehran restaurants that sought, through the generous use of white pillows and curtains, dim lighting, and lounge music, to create the ambience of a French Caribbean nightclub. Arash was irritated by the pretentiousness of such places, filled with affected Iranians and arrogant waiters who preferred to speake English even when discussing an order of tea. But Bix was the only restaurant in the city that served salmon, and I was determined to eat a fish high in omega-3 at least once a month (the pregnancy books warned that otherwise one’s baby would end up a dunce). Suddenly all the lights flooded on, the music went silent, and the waiters bustled nervously. The manager came over to apologize, in English: “The police are here, so we’ll need to keep the music off for a while. Can I get you guys starters?”

The idea of seeing a therapist occurred to me when I found myself, for the third night in a row, eating ice cream out of the tub at three
A.M.
In retrospect, the issues we faced seem manageable, but at the time they were beginning to oppress me. The chief source of much of this stress was my mother. She was now insisting that I invite all of her extended family and friends in Tehran to the reception. She herself would not be able to attend, since she had just spent a month in the
country and could not ask for more vacation time so soon. Such wedding stress had begun to affect how Arash and I were communicating.

My mother aside, even small reception details were proving tricky to resolve. For example, we could not decide whether to serve alcohol, and if so, in what manner. Most Iranians don’t openly serve cocktails, or indeed alcohol in any form, at weddings, both because it makes the party more vulnerable to a police raid, and because it increases the likelihood of drunken brawling. At a friend’s wedding recently, the bride’s brothers had pummeled the tipsy groom for calling another sister
nan-e ztreb kabob,
“the bread under the kabob,” a playful but lubricious Persian term for sister-in-law (the bread under a plate of kabob is juicy and especially delicious). Often guests bring their own alcohol in flasks, or they disappear in groups to visit the trunk of a nearby car. While I understood why this happened, it seemed like the behavior of high school delinquents, which I suppose was how the mullahs viewed their citizens. I had chosen alcohol as my battle, and was prepared to sacrifice almost anything else—a butter-cream cake over marzipan; a procession of flower girls—for the sake of a real bar with the best bartenders in Tehran, two Afghan brothers who were in high demand.

To complicate matters, our caterer, an Iranian woman married to the grandson of a former Lebanese president, was a fretful mess over the menu selections. She usually catered parties for European diplomats; would the Iranian guests appreciate her minimalist décor and cuisine? Her father and Arash’s dad were professionally acquainted, and she had developed acute performance anxiety. We assured her that our guests were not terribly traditional and would not complain about insufficient portions or peculiar dishes. This did not calm her, and she often phoned to suggest adjustments, like replacing the Medi terranean salads on the menu with some Iranian lamb stew. One Saturday evening she called to breathlessly inform us that she was adding an “impressive lamb on a spit” and hung up.

Arash agreed to my suggestion of a therapist, so the following week we drove down to central Tehran for our first appointment with Dr. Majidi, a psychologist who came recommended by a family
friend. We selected him from a handful of references, as Iranians had embraced therapy in recent years and the city was brimming with analysts, psychiatrists, and counselors of various specialties. The taboos associated with mental health had eroded over the last decade, partly because of Iranians’ need to cope with their transforming society: its rising rates of divorce, the prevalence of premarital sex, and shifting gender roles. Behaviors considered normal in the context of collectivist Iranian culture—marrying the man selected by one’s parents, devoting time to the care of family members who were not near relatives, following one’s father into the family business—often seemed oppressive to a younger generation of Iranians who had been exposed to the individualist ethos of global culture. These strains were likely felt by young people across the world, but in Iran they were compounded by the social dynamics created by the revolution.

Several of my friends were in therapy sorting out how to reconcile their family’s expectations with their own desires and sense of self—whether to emigrate despite the frailty of the parents living upstairs, whether to cancel the standing afternoon commitment to babysit the nephew downstairs. The impulse to seek out a therapist’s advice was so widespread that one of the country’s most prominent filmmakers, Tahmineh Milani, satirized it in her film
Ceasefire,
which became one of the highest-grossing Iranian films of all time.