Honeymoon in Tehran: Two Years of Love and Danger in Iran (49 page)

We stayed with Arash’s parents, who were elated to welcome the grandson they had seen every day for nearly a year and then not at all. Hourmazd delighted in the company, finding incentive to turn his babble into near words, and was entertained enough to abandon his attention-thirsty naughtiness. Watching my transformed little son play, I wondered whether this is how it was supposed to be—big families living together, generations under one roof, a whole community of
well-intentioned relatives helping raise one another’s children. I believe that children show you what they need in order to be happy, and if Hourmazd’s behavior was any measure, this is what he needed: cousins, aunties, honorary aunties, and grandparents to be in his life
every day,
not just twice a year for a week. Maybe I needed it, too.

That first evening we sat on the balcony and ate sandwiches of roast wild boar on crusty baguettes, delivered by a beloved local sandwich shop that even just a year ago had not served the
haram
meat of the pig. Of course wild boar did not appear on the menu, but in response to the demand of Iranians who liked ham sandwiches, the shop had begun selling them in the guise of “lamb.” As I sipped my tea, gazing at the shadows cast by the Alborz Mountains, an accordion player passed by on the street below, filling the night with a croaking, familiar melody. The warm air carried the soft scent of night-blooming jasmine, and I felt so embraced by Tehran that I thought of calling Arash and telling him that our move had been a huge mistake. Instead I put on my nightgown, ate half a succulent water melon, and read the newspaper until I felt sleepy, sometime near dawn.

Tehran had changed since we had left. The half-finished apartment buildings on the block were now completed, and new craters had appeared in other parts of the neighborhood. The city’s construction boom continued despite the staggering 150 percent rise in real estate prices, which meant a two-bedroom apartment in north Tehran now easily ran over $1 million. Hourmazd was ecstatic at seeing cement mixers and dump trucks at nearly every intersection, his Bob the Builder fantasies coming to real life. He would press his face against the window for long minutes and watch the cranes bobbing up and down across the neighborhood, and then he’d flap his arms when one of them lifted something particularly impressive or heavy.

Though inflation had hit the housing market hardest, even basic commodities cost much more than the previous summer. The next day I picked up some groceries with Eshrat khanoum—a sack of potatoes, some green plums, two cantaloupes, and tomatoes—and the bill came to the equivalent of $40. “Do you realize this would be cheaper in London, the second most expensive city in the entire world?” I said.

My depressive bouts in England aside, the fact was I doubted we could even
afford
to move back to Iran.

Only the truly affluent were unaffected by Ahmadinejad’s demolishing of the economy—the corrupt, upper echelons of the regime, the private sector tycoons who flew business in and out of Imam Khomeini airport. For regular Iranians, money had never been so tight. Even middle- and upper-class Iranians, like many of my relatives, were finding their material lives deteriorating. Things they used to take for granted, like vacations and keeping the house in good repair, were now becoming insupportable luxuries. Low-income Iranians, like my former babysitter, could no longer afford to eat red meat and were being forced to relocate to cheaper neighborhoods.

Before arriving, I had told my sister-in-law Solmaz that I wanted to see how Tehran had changed, especially everything that had opened since I left. She had taken this quite literally, and planned two days’ worth of outings that left me astonished at how decadent this city, the capital of Khomeini’s populist revolution, had become. We drank “virgin mojitos” in an exquisite garden café on the former Elahieh estate of Dr. Mahmoud Hessaby, the legendary, Sorbonne-trained scientist who studied with Albert Einstein. In the shade of the sycamore trees, matrons in Hermès scarves escaped the heat and a table full of Iranian-American entrepreneurs plotted a luxury bridal spa. We ate a proper brunch of fluffy pancakes and caviar toast, which was a first for Tehran, offered by the kabob empire of Nayyeb in a setting that evoked, well, Versailles. We dunked lobster tempura into delicate Japanese bowls at the remodeled Monsoon on Gandhi Street and enjoyed ravioli with truffle sauce at the new French restaurant La Cheminée, alongside the famous television actor Mehran Modiri and the singer Assar. As we flitted between these places, I noticed that the BMW SUV had been supplanted by another imported car of the moment: a magnolia white Mercedes-Benz with cartoonish curves.

In all my years I had never seen Tehran like this before. So urbane and openly hospitable to people with money to spend, yet so hard-edged and ungenerous to those who were struggling. After my round of sybaritic tourism, I spent a day visiting two girlfriends who had just had babies. Neither were particularly well-off, and both seemed
downright nervous over the state of the economy. One had a daughter who was suffering allergies from the polluted air of central Tehran, the other a son who could only take a certain brand of expensive, imported formula. Five years ago, neither of these problems would have been such a big deal. The first friend could have moved to a less congested neighborhood, the second would have absorbed the cost of the formula. Now, moving was out of the question, and inflation meant that the formula cut into their monthly savings.

A week into our trip, Solmaz called to warn us that the police were sweeping the neighborhood to confiscate illegal satellite dishes. I climbed to the roof to remove the coding device out of my parents-in-law’s dish. It was costly to replace, unlike the dish itself, and the raids of recent months had made us expert in such matters. Now accustomed to such invasions, Arash’s nephew Aryo sulkily announced that “the stupid people are back,” and popped in a Tom and Jerry DVD—already world-weary at the age of seven.

Our two weeks in Tehran quickly drew to an end, and I found myself satisfied only on two scores. First, Hourmazd’s pediatrician had examined his underarm and concluded he didn’t need surgery. Such reactions to the tuberculosis vaccine were commonplace, it turned out, and in most cases resolved themselves without such intervention. Second, I hadn’t contacted Mr. X, and he had left me alone; I had already decided that I would never consent to deal with him again, and it was a great relief not being forced to enact that resolution. But otherwise, I felt frustratingly unresolved. I had imagined that visiting Iran would somehow be a corrective journey for me. I would either conclude that we had misjudged our priorities and would have been better off staying, surrounded by relatives who would give Hourmazd perhaps the strongest life foundation of all, or I would be abruptly reminded of how awful the country was, how inconvenient, poorly run, starkly divided, even dangerous. Instead, though, I felt all of these things in equal measure. Not being able to reach a well-defined conclusion frustrated me. I didn’t want to go back to London with my mind rehearsing its familiar, tiring dialogue (“I don’t like London … but Tehran is unlivable, right? … Remember how cars wouldn’t stop when you were trying to cross the street with Aryo and Hourmazd?
… You can’t live in such a ruthless place! … but what if we stayed at home more?”).

On our way back, something terrible happened at the Imam Khomeini airport that would silence these deliberations forever. I was rushing to reassemble Hourmazd’s stroller after passing it through the second X-ray machine (he was possessive of his “car” and wept each time it disappeared, however briefly). He had placed his hand on its side when I wasn’t looking and one of his fingers caught in the hinge as I pulled the stroller open. He screamed in pain, and by the time I managed to pry the hinge apart, his tiny finger was crushed. It was purple and pressed sickeningly thin, so thin I was certain he would lose at least the tip. As he gasped, screaming in short, staccato bursts, I asked the attendant to call the airport emergency line. In tears myself, I tried to distract him, but there was nothing on the walls but posters of mosques and ayatollahs. I think you can only absorb the full absurdity of these images when trying to use them as a distraction for a wounded, frantic child.

As five minutes turned to ten and no one arrived to help, I grew desperate and angry. Why did the airport need a second X-ray check? We had already dismantled the stroller once upon entering the departure terminal. Even at Heathrow, the airport of a nation that was a victim rather than a purveyor of terrorism, we had only gone through one check. When fifteen minutes passed, I became desperate. What if he needed immediate first aid to save the finger? I had given him a double dose of Tylenol already, but he still seemed in agony, writhing in my arms and drenched in sweat. I decided I had to save him, and ran toward the information desk. Along the way, I saw two men carrying a small leather box that looked like a doctor’s bag from the nineteenth century
walking unhurriedly
toward the women’s security check. I rushed toward them, yelling, “It was us, it was us who called you.”

I was very polite. I didn’t ask them why it had taken so long, and why, as emergency first-aid personnel, they had been walking instead of running or riding a trolley. One of the paramedics examined the finger and said there was nothing to worry about. “At this age, babies don’t really have bones so much as cartilage, so there’s actually nothing
you can do. He’ll be fine. Just give him pain medication if he needs it.”

“That’s all?” I couldn’t believe that a finger so thoroughly crushed required such little attention.

Zoned-out from the Tylenol and drained from so much crying, Hourmazd slept all the way to London. I spent the flight consumed with anger, raging silently at all the various historical forces and individuals who had brought about the Iranian government in its present form. I cursed the Islamic revolutionaries, the radical Mujaheddin who assassinated the few moderates among them, I even cursed Yasser Arafat (the first foreign leader to visit Khomeini). I had no doubt that the Islamic regime was responsible for Hourmazd’s injury, which shows just how irrational and stupid my anger had become.

Back at home, I dropped off our bags and took Hourmazd straight to the doctor, who immediately sent us to the hospital for X-rays and prescribed a course of antibiotics. Smashed fingers, it turned out, do require medical attention. Antibiotics are required to prevent seri ous infections, which are not uncommon in crush injuries, and even a slight bone fracture can retard the growth of a child’s finger if left untreated. We walked home together, breathing in the cool spring air, past the leafy square where Virginia Woolf used to live, past the corner where Islamic extremists blew up a bus during the 2005 bombings.

During this walk, all the doubts and longings of the past few months seemed to fall into order. Perhaps the shock of what had happened cut through my confusion and forced upon me a preternatural clarity. I had spent nearly a decade living in one place and pining for others, utterly perplexed over where I truly belonged, what place would make me truly happy. I realized, that day, the astonishingly simple truth was that I needed to stop thinking about where I might achieve mythical, perfect happiness and just choose to live in a country that did not make me crazy. This would probably not be the place where I felt most at home, the most comfortable, or the most loved. But no matter, because that place, Iran, also denied me balance.

The rage I had felt on the flight back had reminded me of how angry I had always been in Iran. I didn’t realize until we left, until a
whole continent separated me from the sources of my anger, how that corrosive emotion had become part of my experience of life. If I wasn’t boiling mad at Mr. X, I resented the officials at the press office who disapproved of his invasions but did nothing to prevent them. I fumed at the censored Internet and the jammed satellite signal, and spent hours brooding over all the horrible things the regime had done through the years to people I cared about.

As though this constant outrage wasn’t punishment enough, I had also found it compromised my ability to perceive life around me properly. I had blamed the government for everything—traffic, the stuffy nose I got from the pollution, boredom, my cousins’ lack of motivation, my inability to show up anywhere on time, the apathy that afflicted everyone from street sweepers to engineers. At heart I had known the mullahs
were
at fault, and this conviction had sapped my will to do enough, or anything at all, about those things.

It had also encouraged me to widen the net of my blame, holding the government responsible for most of the dilemmas and challenges that befell me. Not being able to realize this properly had, I felt, lessened my person. I was smaller for losing perspective, and for not taking more responsibility for my actions. I could and should not have blamed the Islamic revolution for Hourmazd’s finger, because accidents are exactly that, and bad medicine is as common in the West as it is in countries run by bearded ayatollahs. Just before I had left for Iran, I had seen a news headline about a woman who had died in Britain after a nurse incorrectly administered an epidural into her
arm.
Upon reading that, I hadn’t condemned the Queen and Gordon Brown, but rather winced at the dreadful cost of human incompetence and the vagaries of fate.

Living in Iran, I had lost that kind of perspective altogether, and I knew that staying away was the only way to try to regain it. I might be lonely in London for a long while yet, but compared to permanent anger and myopia, loneliness was something I could conquer. Outside Iran I was a more composed person, and that soundness was what my life—my family, my writing, my journalism—needed the most.

On quiet evenings, when Hourmazd slept, I still gazed out the window and imagined the life we might all have had—all the Iranians
in my life, in the world—living in one country, instead of scattered across the globe. It is a fantasy that all exiles indulge in, and perhaps the only recourse is the refuge Iranians have sought for centuries: literature. Persian poets of centuries past often roamed great distances, and their work traces the effect of migration on the imagination, its curious ability to both estrange and inspire. In London, I found myself reaching for these volumes more frequently than ever, grateful for the heritage in books that offers Iranians a place to retreat from the uncertainty of the present. They are a reminder that though today Iranians are diminished by the cruel laws of unjust tyrants, it has not always been so, and thus will not always be.