Read Online The Ministry of Guidance Invites You to Not Stay: An American Family in Iran by Hooman Majd - Free Book Online Page A

bazaar was no place to bring a child. “Mind your own business!” I finally yelled, not for the last time on our visit.
    But of course she was right. Here it was, the unique beauty of contradictoryIranian behavior: simultaneous extreme concern and complete disregard. My friend Khosro, cynic that he is, recognizes the contradictions inherent in Iranian culture and in societal norms, but he was convinced that the only reason that woman chased us down was to practice, or to show off, her English, as loudly as she could. And that, sadly, was probably partially true, because for an Iranian there is almost no greater contribution to a sense of self-importance and vanity than to be seen in public comfortably conversing with a foreigner in his or her language, English ranking highest. Oddly for an Islamic country, it’s usually women who insist on striking up a conversation with farangis (foreigners, from the root word farang , which once meant “France” but now denotes “anywhere not Iran”), even when it’s just to berate them.
    The combination of traffic and children is a whole other story, perhaps the single most disturbing aspect of Tehran, to any foreign mother and probably to some Iranian ones, too. I had experienced, naturally, the city’s horrific traffic and, more important, the aggressive driving that makes it a requirement for any pedestrian to undergo a course on how to cross a street, but I hadn’t imagined that Tehran’s drivers—men, women, and in some cases children, yes, children sitting in their fathers’ laps and actually driving; one time we saw one as young as Khash doing so, with a wide grin matching his father’s—would not only be discourteous to someone crossing the street with a baby stroller but would actually in some cases accelerate, as if the child were an obstacle to be avoided at top speed or run down if collision was unavoidable. By the end of our stay, after almost a year of crossing streets at clearly marked crosswalks, often while a traffic policeman viewed the parade of cars refusing to slow down for anyone unless they flung themselves into traffic (as I had been taughtto do by Khosro years earlier), it was still unclear to me whether the drivers thought more points were to be gained in that unique Tehran derby by avoiding a baby or by slamming into him.
    Karri, needless to say, was purely horrified. How, she wondered, could a people so polite, so gracious, and so orderly in normal life turn into Nightriders of Mad Max fame and transform Tehran, with its utter ordinariness and occasional beauty, into a dystopian nightmare of homicidal drivers and impotent cops? After a while, she developed her own method of crossing the street with Khash, a peculiarly New York method that involved raising her hand palm outward, as if she had the full authority to halt traffic, and yelling at the top of her voice, in English, as she made her way across. Always her screams would involve profanities, of the “What the fuck!!” and “Shit!!” and just plain “Fuck!” type, reminding me of Ratso Rizzo in Midnight Cowboy and his contretemps with a Manhattan cabbie: “Hey, I’m walking here! I’m walking here!” If only Tehran could be as civilized as New York—in the driving habits of its citizens, I mean.
    It soon became routine: me trying to use my “pedestrian ed”—far more important in Iran, it seems, than “drivers’ ed”—and gingerly cross, holding my hands down low and waving to indicate to the drivers aiming for me what my next move would be; Karri insisting, with raised arms, on her right to cross; and Khash, after numerous experiences, thinking that yelling at the top of one’s voice was just something one did when one crossed the street, a habit he kept up long after we returned to New York. Fortunately he was too young to understand his mother’s cursing, but on the occasion now when he says something that sounds terribly like “fuck,” and we wonder where he could