Honeymoon in Tehran: Two Years of Love and Danger in Iran (6 page)

A
week into my trip to Iran, I felt vexingly uncertain about my big Iranian youth story. The only thesis I could come up with—that young people were unhappy but also disinclined to revolt—struck me as limp and obvious. It occurred to me that I could test the theory of Kambiz Tavana, the Rafsanjani hack, who argued that the regime was easing young Iranians’ discontent by loosening social strictures. While that sounded reasonable enough, especially considering young Iranians’ rebelliousness and their taste for western culture, I felt the point needed refining. I decided to investigate further by spending some time with a twenty-eight-year-old professional race car driver named Sonbol, Tehran’s reigning It Girl and a symbol of the regime’s new tolerance.

Nasrine had suggested right away that I interview Sonbol, but I had resisted. Every foreign correspondent in town covering the election had already written about her, using her as an example of how Iranian women were among the most sophisticated in the region. In Saudi Arabia, women were forbidden to drive altogether, while in Iran they were literally racing ahead. It was a useful point to make, given that many in the West saw the situations of Iranian and Saudi women as comparable, but I was more interested to know whether
such liberalism was winning over restless young Iranians, or at least keeping them quiet.

We planned to meet Sonbol one evening at Parkway intersection, one of north Tehran’s busiest interchanges. Nasrine idled her car near where Vali Asr Boulevard tangled with multiple cement overpasses, and we watched cars pause to pick up discreetly dressed prostitutes. Though it was difficult to tell from a distance, what with the women’s thick makeup and the homogenizing effect of their veils and manteaus, the average age of the city’s prostitutes had fallen to about twenty, by the government’s own published calculations. Young girls who ran away from home often resorted to selling their bodies, as did drug addicts, who numbered in the hundreds of thousands in Tehran alone. The rush hour traffic of early evening was the prostitutes’ busiest time; indeed, there was nothing any woman could do to avoid being propositioned, if she found herself walking outdoors between five and eight
P.M.

Half an hour after our appointed time, Sonbol screeched up alongside in a silver BMW. She had pouty, collagen-enhanced lips and a nose job better than most, and seemed to be wearing a velvety hunting manteau, if such a garment existed. She leaned over the passenger seat, raising her voice above the din of traffic. “I forgot my riding lesson! Follow me out to the stables.” With that command, she must have floored the gas pedal, for in seconds she was lengths ahead of us.

We sped in the direction of Behesht-e Zahra, the sprawling cemetery on the southern outskirts of the city, where the approximately 500,000 young men who had died in the eight-year war with Iraq were buried. Somewhere in the vicinity of the Imam Khomeini’s shrine—its ornate gold and turquoise domes designed to convey the ayatollah’s divine status—she called Nasrine’s mobile phone. “Do either of you ladies want a drink? Hurry up and catch me!”

The speedometer on Nasrine’s Kia quivered as she yanked the wheel right and left to avoid the slow-moving Peykans on the highway.

“This is ridiculous,” I said, unable to look ahead. “What’s wrong with you two?” Since Nasrine had met Sonbol the previous month, they had become party friends. Sonbol was clearly a bad influence, a
point I would make as soon as their obnoxious race concluded. Nasrine pressed on, and soon we were speeding alongside Sonbol, who stretched her arm out the window, waving a plastic cup of honey-colored liquid. We barreled down the highway side by side, swerving to get close enough to pass the drink, so close that I could hear the insipid Lebanese pop song Sonbol was playing. (In our car, you could hear only the dignified bass rumblings of Shaggy.) Tehran, with its “I Love Martyrdom” murals of suicide bombers, Versace billboards, and rickety buses adorned with portraits of Shia saints, slid by in a smoggy blur. As we veered close, I looked down at my lap, too nervous to watch. “You can’t do this properly if you keep closing your eyes,” Nasrine snapped.

At last we got close enough. I grabbed the cup and leaned back in my seat with great relief. I tasted the liquid. “Something alcoholic with mulberry juice,” I announced. “Is that a good mix?” Nasrine grabbed the cup and nearly emptied it. I was aghast.

Fortunately, we were not far from the stables. Within a few minutes, we pulled up beside the barn, parking near an old Toyota Land Cruiser.

“Is that his car?” I said. For weeks, Nasrine had insisted I meet a close friend of hers, a man named Arash. She had invited him along to the interview with Sonbol and had phoned him en route to the stables with directions. “You’re perfect for each other,” she had insisted. “Both of you act like you’re already retired, always stuck at home reading books.”

In anticipation of the meeting, I was wearing a new sea-green manteau and a cashmere shawl. “You look like a grandmother,” Nasrine said, yanking it off.

Sonbol was already in the ring, lit by fluorescent lamps, cantering a sleek mare. A long plastic table bore mezze, olives, chips with yogurt, and falafel, and her instructor and a few friends were smoking and mixing drinks. Arash sat slightly to the side of the group, legs crossed, listening to the frivolous chatter with an amused expression. He wore a dark red plaid shirt, jeans, and leather sandals, all of which immediately conveyed long years spent in the West—the luxury of being casual, of not having to impress anyone. His black hair, wavy
and nearly to his chin, complemented his relaxed bearing. Though I found him quite attractive in general, his eyes were his finest feature. They were immense, rimmed with a sweep of dark lashes and set under elegant, winged eyebrows, their expression both playful and serious. His skin was olive, like my own, and his slender fingers tapped rhythmically on the table. Nasrine introduced us, and I liked him from that first moment. As we made introductory small talk, I noticed the deep timbre of his voice, and a formality that seemed a cover for shyness.

“Nasrine says you’ve just been to Tajikistan. Was that work-related, somehow?” I asked, fishing for something interesting to talk about.

“It was meant to be a trekking trip, actually. But most of the routes I had in mind were blocked by snow, so I spent a week in the capital, instead.”

“And how was it?”

“Frankly, totally depressing. And nothing at all like I had expected. Lots of run-down Soviet architecture, all cement of course. I don’t think Tajiks are very accustomed to western-style tourism, and twice I was called a spy for writing in a journal.” He went on to describe how the Tajiks seemed to consider all Iranians sex tourists and crudely plied them with women.

His experience reminded me of Afghanistan, and soon we were engrossed in a lively discussion about the ethnic mélange and violent ways of Iran’s neighbors, the post-Soviet ’stans.

“Aren’t you supposed to be working?” Nasrine nudged me, glancing toward Sonbol, who had dismounted and was now striding toward us.

Maybe I could get the interview over with quickly, and go back to talking with Arash. I pulled out my notebook and asked Sonbol whether her ability to have a racing career made life in Iran more palatable, hoping to direct the interview toward the subject of youth frustration. She evaded this with a bored mention of the upcoming Istanbul Grand Prix, and then dispatched one of her friends to the stable’s kitchen. “Egg rolls please!”

Constantly batting her eyes and holding side conversations with
the others at the table, Sonbol seemed as impatient as I for our interview to be over. I asked her whether she had always wanted to be a race car driver; mistaking herself for a head of state, she sighed loudly. “I’ve been asked that
so
many times, can’t you just read what I’ve said on the Internet?”

Though annoyed, I explained politely that I couldn’t filch material about her from other news stories, which she interpreted to mean I was done bothering her with intellectually taxing questions. She launched into a wandering aside about her hobbies, especially her heartfelt wish to go trekking in Nepal. It finally occurred to me that all the eyelash batting, the dreams of roaming through the Nepalese mountains, were directed at Arash. “She’s using my interview to flirt with him!” I whispered to Nasrine. “She probably thinks Nepal is a mountain.”

A question about state television’s refusal to broadcast images of her receiving winner’s ribbons caught Sonbol’s attention, and she finally warmed to the topic of women versus the Islamic state. Curiously, her sympathies lay with the latter. She told me that Iranian women had somehow been too lazy to push for equitable rights—that if they had sufficient courage, like her, they would find that it was actually quite easy to secure new freedoms.

Her comment reflected how little she knew about the women’s rights movement and its long history in nearly every domain of Iranian life. If women had made too few inroads, this spoke to the immensity of the challenge, not a deficit of courage. But Sonbol was a twenty-something party girl, full of herself and indifferent to such context. If she had been a more important contact, a senior official or an influential cleric, I would have circled back only at the end of the interview to probe what she had said. Since I doubted I would ever need her expertise again, I decided I could challenge her right then.

“Sonbol
jan,”
I interrupted, “I’m surprised to hear you think Iranian women aren’t using sports to pursue access to public space.” The ruling clergy forbade women to attend sports matches, ostensibly because the unruly atmosphere was unfit for them but in reality because they frowned on women and men mixing in public and on women participating in sports. Earlier that spring, a group of about a hundred
women had blocked the entrance to the Azadi soccer stadium before a match with Bahrain, chanting “Freedom is my right, Iran is my country.” They scuffled with police and chanted for five hours before finally managing to storm the stadium gates in time to watch the second half of the game, the first women to openly enter a sports stadium since the revolution. The breakthrough had taken place under Khatami, who was present at the game that day and ordered that the women be given seats. Perhaps only a handful of Iranian women were drawn to auto racing, but hundreds of thousands were passionate lovers of soccer, and having fought their way into the stadium was a significant achievement.

“Nothing that happens to me here is affected by the outcome of an election,” Sonbol said, munching on an egg roll. Arash followed our exchanges with twinkling eyes.

Night had fallen, and mosquitoes were preying on my exposed ankles under the table. I leaned toward Nasrine and suggested we head back to Tehran. Sonbol seemed not to notice our move to leave, though Iranian hospitality demanded she attempt at least twice to detain us.

“I should be getting back, too; I have guests waiting for me at home,” Arash said, rising from his chair. Sonbol suddenly remembered she had brought lamb kabobs to grill, but the three of us insisted we really could not stay, and began walking toward the parking lot.

Nasrine asked Arash to join us for dinner, but he said he actually did have houseguests he couldn’t abandon. After conferring over the best route back to Tehran, we shook hands and parted ways. I was pleased enough with the evening. As I saw it, Iran might have its own Danica Patrick, but this fact mattered little outside Sonbol’s privileged world. Even she, who should arguably have been grateful for the state’s magnanimity in letting her race, seemed not to consider her career meaningful. If, as Kambiz Tavana argued, Rafsanjani’s strategy for Iran was to toss young people scraps of liberalism—a female race car driver here, a female deejay there—I saw no great hope for his candidacy. Most young Iranians considered the revolution an abject catastrophe, and sought to leave for other lands where they could
have a future. Convincing them otherwise would take much more than any ayatollah would be willing to give.

T
he next morning, I went to see someone who understood Iran better than almost anyone. Shirin Ebadi lived in Abbas Abad, the neighborhood in north-central Tehran where my mother had grown up in the 1950s. Back then, fruit orchards and two-story houses covered most of the district. Now, like the rest of the city, Abbas Abad featured many oversize apartment towers unsuited to its narrow streets. The unfinished minarets of Mosallah—the city’s colossal ceremonial mosque, forever under construction—loomed over the neighborhood. I jumped out of the taxi a block ahead of Shirin khanoum’s street, near the local pizza shop that borrowed its pizza descriptions and menu graphics from Domino’s.

In 2003, Shirin khanoum won the Nobel Peace Prize for her work defending human rights in Iran, and two years later she and I began collaborating on her memoir. I had been familiar with her efforts before she received the Nobel, as she had represented the families of the victims in Iran’s most recent, prominent trials—the notorious 1998 murder of a dissident couple by state agents, a 1999 police attack on a student dormitory, and a brutal child abuse case that highlighted Iran’s terrible custody laws. In 2005, the year we met in New York and began working together, Shirin was in her late fifties. She wore her dark hair, tastefully highlighted with streaks of golden brown, practically short, and her rounded eyebrows emphasized her soft, pleasant features. She was a small woman, but her assertive stride and intense manner lent her a more sizable presence.

I found her mercurial, constantly shifting between the many facets of her complex life and persona: she could be warm and winsome, radiating the inviting grace of an Iranian hostess, or as tersely combative as a seasoned trial lawyer. At times the depth of her humility moved me, while on other occasions I found her almost arrogant, prone to over-swift judgment of people and their circumstances. With time, I came to understand her better, and realized she had grown into precisely the person her work demanded she be. If she was tough, it
was because she must be to fight against her everyday opponents, the unscrupulous, brutal authorities of Iran. If she was a touch paranoid, it was because she had been hounded by the regime for nearly two decades. Despite all the edges of her personality, Shirin khanoum was also deeply generous and lots of fun.