Honeymoon in Tehran: Two Years of Love and Danger in Iran (30 page)

“So what you’re telling me is that after all these years, the government is relaxing its controls on music?” I asked. “Are you sure? Why haven’t I read anything about this in the newspaper?” It occurred to me that this would make a very fine news story, another instance of the regime opening up when least expected to do so.

We finally reached downtown Tehran, and Ostad Lotfi climbed into the car. He was nearly six feet tall, with flowing white hair and an aquiline nose, and he wore loose Kurdish pants and elegant loafers. He lit a cigarette and began to talk. His conversation was stunning—witty, erudite, whirling between centuries and hemispheres. We spent the evening on the carpeted terrace of the country house in Lavasan. The air was laced with the perfume of fresh roses and oleaster trees, the nightingales twittered, the frogs chirped. We ate apricots and golden plums and looked out across the dark pool that irrigated the orchards, the moonlight in the willows.

While I knew the religious authorities who came to power during the revolution had dealt harshly with pop and western music, I was not aware that they had also been intolerant of Iranian classical music. They had declared classical musical instruments, as well as a woman’s singing voice, to be
haram
(forbidden), thus extinguishing the classical tradition almost entirely. Museum-quality instruments were burned in bonfires, and instruments could not be shown on television, in films, in stores, or even in classrooms. Iranians born after the revolution couldn’t tell a
tar
(a large, double-bowled string instrument) from a
setar
(a delicate, single-bowled lute). This was as if a western child were unable to tell a cello from a guitar.

The irony was that song—the revolutionary
soroods
(anthems) that Lotfi and others composed—had energized the mass protests that brought down the Shah’s regime. Ayatollah Khomeini, who was known to love Iranian classical music, issued a subtle fatwa just before his death in 1989 distinguishing between
haram and halal
(acceptable) forms of music. This fatwa is credited with resurrecting Iranian classical music, for it created small openings through which music crept back into public life. Arash’s
tar
instructor recounts tales from this period, when it was no longer illegal to possess an instrument, but a permit was required, as though a string instrument might
pose a real danger in the wrong hands. Musicians could apply to perform in public, although only the most committed could deal with the difficulties of renting suitable auditoriums, the censorship of lyrics, and the presence of mullahs dispatched to preach before the concert.

What I realized that evening, listening to Lotfi reminisce, was how these struggles over music reflected a long divide in Iranian history over Islam’s interaction with art. Like most Iranians my age, or with few or wispy memories of pre-1979 Iran, I had assumed that censorship and disapproval of the fine arts began with the Islamic revolution. When I first walked through the sixteenth-century Safavid palaces in Isfahan, the capital of the Shia dynasty, I saw music rooms with ceiling carvings of instruments, and imagined those rulers must have approved of music, despite their piety. The Shah’s government had supported musical broadcasting—a reflection of Iranian sensibilities, I imagined. But none of this was actually the case. The Safavid rulers never brought music out of the private realm—the intimate garden of a house or a palace, the
andaruni
quarters that were off-limits to the public; in the long tradition of cultured monarchs reigning over less refined subjects, they indulged their tastes in seclusion. And while the Shah believed that Iran should have grand European-style orchestras, the average Iranian considered music impure. At that time, even many educated Iranians considered music a low form of entertainment, and would have been embarrassed if their sons played an instrument.

This was as true in 1979 as it had been in 1949, when Jalal Al-e Ahmad wrote his short story “Setar,” which castigates the narrow, puritanical style of Islam practiced by uneducated Iranians. The story follows a musician who has saved for three years to buy a
setar
only to have it smashed to pieces by an enraged perfume seller who catches him entering a mosque with it under his arm (“Atheist! With this instrument of infidels inside a mosque?!”). The tale ends with the musician creeping away, devastated. “The cup of his hope, just like the body of his new
setar,
had shattered into three pieces, and the pieces seemed to be cutting into his heart.” When you considered this history, the revolution did not create so much as reflect a cultural climate hostile to music.

Today, that hostility was gone. Despite the clerical regime’s restrictions, the views of the vast majority of Iranians had evolved and most people considered music both harmless and central to human existence. Even many conservative and religious Iranians now enjoyed music, and only a doctrinaire fringe considered all music sinful. Though it was frustrating that the government refused to fully recognize this transformation and was only slowly softening its restrictions, what seemed most important was that Iranian society had shed its resistance to musical expression. If all the years I had spent reporting around the Middle East had taught me one thing, it was the crucial importance of a society developing secular or modern values from the bottom up. The region was full of conservative countries led by secular leaders, and these countries were inevitably unstable.

“People seem to think that one person can somehow solve things,” Lotfi said, leaning back against the cushions on the rug. “They think, ‘If Lotfi stays, he’ll fix it so that women can sing again, so that there will be concerts again.’ Somehow it has fallen to me to create some solution, for the religious pressure to ease, to open the doors again.” He looked very tired as he said this, as though the burden of rescuing an entire tradition weighed on his shoulders. Which in a way, it did.

The evening grew late, and as our conversation dwindled, Lofti pulled his
tar
into his lap. He looked up as though seeking inspiration from the heavens, and began playing “Navai,” a song from the province of Khorasan, my father’s family’s home. It is one of the most exquisite folk melodies I have ever heard, and hearing it played in the warm dark of the garden, by a master who had returned from exile to rescue Iranian music from extinction, I felt more certain than ever that the country was mending and that we could live here forever.

O
ur wedding took place on an unseasonably warm day in June 2006, so warm I feared my slick coats of makeup would melt before the ceremony began. I had pleaded for Jilla, Tehran’s top makeup artist, to dip lightly into her case of paints. “Usually, I’m a complete frump. I consider lip balm dressing up,” I told her, exaggerating in hopes of not being lacquered beyond recognition.

Jilla, a plump, middle-aged woman from Tabriz, ran a beauty empire catering to the city’s idle female rich. Her salon occupied half the second floor of a towering high-rise in the affluent district of Elahieh, the value of the real estate alone underscoring her accomplishment. Opening a beauty salon was among the most conventional ways for Iranian women to attain financial independence. Oftentimes they turned the basement of a building, or an extra room in the house, into a salon, a form of entrepreneurism that met with the approval of even the most controlling husbands since it kept the wives indoors, close to home, in the company of other women. These in-house salons earned a modest income, but Jilla had created something far more ambitious, an urban retreat that turned serious profit, making her one of the city’s most successful female entrepreneurs.

She did not appreciate being admonished. “Do you think I approve of how our young brides want to be painted like vulgar Arab women?” she chided, pushing a button to release the back of the white leather chair.

Many salons advertised
arayesk-e khaliji,
or the “Gulf makeover,” meaning the very particular, stylized makeup worn by Arab pop singers in music videos. Despite Jilla’s xenophobic dismissal of the Arab-vixen look, I emerged from the salon with overarched eyebrows extending over lids dusted in about ten different shades of pearl. My only consolation was that I had paid just $100 for the application; the cost would have been five times higher had I admitted to being the bride, rather than the bride’s cousin. “Look what they’ve done to me,” I wailed to my father, who had arrived just four days ago and was waiting below to drive me to my uncle’s house. “I look like an insane newscaster.” Apart from a terse assurance that I did not, he remained mostly silent during the drive.

My father had been preoccupied from the moment of his arrival. He considered it bizarre and unwelcome that I was getting married in Iran. He regarded himself as a democrat, in contrast to the authoritarian ayatollahs, and would thus never dream of openly criticizing my decision. But his eloquent silence almost spoke for itself. Why, it said, have you returned to this country everyone sensible flees? Why are you embracing a life under the rule of odious mullahs, when I
built for you a charmed existence in the sunny land of the world’s greatest democracy? His bitterness toward Iran would never let him understand my need to reconcile with the country, despite its rulers and obscene flaws. My father now saw home in the orderliness of America’s traffic, the convenience of its grocery stores, the hush of its well-stocked libraries. He had never understood my longing to live in more ancient places, places whose past bore a connection to my present.

So much had changed in the nearly twenty-five years since his last visit that he spent much of his time gazing at and remarking on the physical transformation of Tehran. “Have you seen what they’ve done with Tajrish Sqaure? With the hiking trail behind Shahabad?” he would exclaim after solitary forays into the city and the mountains, almost boyish in his astonishment. He would never admit that he was enjoying himself, but I hadn’t seen him so animated in years, and I teased him for sounding like a tourist. But these bouts of excitement were punctuated by moody silences, when he seemed lost in thought and vaguely disappointed by what he saw around him. On one occasion he was rudely rebuked by a taxi driver for calling Vali Asr Boulevard by its pre-1979 name, Pahlavi. The driver hadn’t believed that my father couldn’t recall the new name, and their exchange had grown unpleasant. The incident had embodied for him the touchy hostility that characterized the new Iran around him.

“Are you sure it wasn’t like this before, and you just don’t remember?” I had asked him.

“No, it wasn’t. It might have been many other things, but it wasn’t like this.”

Upon arrival at my uncle’s house, I retired to the second-floor balcony, cooled by the breeze through the sycamore trees, to repair my face. That’s how Arash found me, surrounded by piles of tissue, dabbing furiously at my eyes. “It’s not so bad,” he said, reassuringly. “Just keep wiping.” He set at my feet a rose and a tin of Salad Olivier, my favorite potato salad, dense with mayonnaise and peas, and went to change.

My uncle’s living room had been cleared of furniture, and our
sofreb
lay in the corner near the window. The spread was in the traditional
style, the walnuts still in their shiny green skins instead of spray-painted with gold, the candlesticks and trays all antique silver, rather than the now customary gilt. The guests mingled on the terrace drinking champagne, and nibbling on
loz,
almond and saffron pastries delivered fresh from Tabriz. At some undetermined hour in the late afternoon, when most of the guests had arrived, we gathered everyone around the
sofreh, and
the ceremony began.

Arash had asked a family friend to officiate, preparing a few short paragraphs for him to read based on an old Zoroastrian wedding text. Most ceremonies are presided over by mullahs, who bore the guests by droning on in Arabic, which they do not understand. Intrigued at being addressed in Farsi, all our relatives and friends huddled in close to listen to the poetic and intimate text, their expressions rapt. After Arash and I repeated our vows, my female relatives lifted a tulle canopy over our heads and ground together two cones of sugar into its folds, symbolizing a life of sweetness. As is customary, we dipped our pinky fingers into a bowl of honey, and licked the syrup off each other’s fingers. At that moment, as the women wiped away the smudges of mascara beneath their eyes, the
motrebs
slid into the crowd.

Motreb
literally means “one who makes joy,” and the term refers to the musician-entertainers who were long ago a beloved feature of the city’s café culture. Our
motrebs
looked like relics themselves, in ill-fitting pants pulled high at the waist, their hair greased back, as if they were character actors in a Hollywood Mafia movie. To the music of accordion and violin, they began to sing their sly, rhyming verses, playfully slipping to the verge of crudeness and easing right back, and soon the whole room was alive with laughter, the guests chanting back their part in the music, creating a joyous, campy, poetic repartee. Then they played “Hava Nagila”—traditionally, most
motrebs
are Jewish—and everyone moved onto the terrace to twirl under the trees. Our pious relatives in dressy chadors of patterned black silk did not dance, but they smiled happily, sipping fresh watermelon juice and watching the
motrebs
thread through the crowd.

Although I had painstakingly carried my wedding dress by hand to Tehran from California, Arash’s attire eclipsed mine. He had originally
wanted to wear something authentically Iranian, a knee-length, stand-up-collar Qajar-era coat, but we hadn’t managed to find a seamstress who knew what one should look like. Iranians, in their rush to westernize, had discarded indigenous wedding garb generations ago, and now no one could remember what precisely had been worn before the suit and tie and the poofy white dress. The closest thing we found to a Qajar coat was an Indian
sherwani,
which we ordered online—one-week express delivery—from New Delhi. Unlike Iranians, Indians had both retained their traditions and expertly marketed them to the world. Everyone surrounded Arash, playing with the tassels of his scarf, admiring the delicate fabric of his coat, fawning over him as if he were a visiting maharaja. I was only mildly piqued.