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

have possibly heard such an utterance, I can’t help but think he’s retrieved a distant memory of crossing the streets of Tehran in his stroller—and not from the drivers. In Iran, as in New York,I occasionally would get into a screaming match with a driver if he or she actually slowed down enough to hear me. Sometimes my pushing Khash along forced a car to come to a complete stop, and I was often taken aback by women drivers’ vehement insistence that it was me and my baby who were the inconvenience, and not them and their cars accelerating through the crosswalk—they would even curse me as they drove by. Karri came to believe that women drivers, socially oppressed in many ways, act out their frustrations when they are behind the wheel, exercising one of the few powers they have in Iran. I tend to think of the behavior less in feminist terms; loving children and running them down in the street is just one of those Persian contradictions that is probably impossible to understand or explain.
    One time, near our own apartment when we first moved there, a taxi with four women passengers was moving slowly, very slowly, out of a parking spot. Karri held up her hand as usual and continued to walk in front of it. The taxi didn’t stop. “Hey, hey, hey!” she shouted, as it almost hit her and Khash’s stroller.
    “ ‘Hey, hey’?” the driver mocked at my wife through his open window. “What do you mean ‘hey, hey’?” he sneered.
    “She means ‘stop,’ you ablah ,” I said, using a word that emphatically denotes an idiot. “It’s people like you who make foreigners think we’re a bunch of savages.”
    That set the man off. He stopped the car and got out, ready to fight, an occurrence unfortunately far too common on the streets of Tehran, where tempers flare at the slightest perceived insult. “Come back here if you’re a man!” he shouted, as the women in the car remained silent. “They think we’re savages?” he cried. “We are savages! Don’t you know that?”
    I kept walking, now pushing the stroller, as he continued his rant, insisting that yes, we Iranians are savages, and how could I think otherwise? “Yes, we are savages!” he yelled, again and again, his voice fading as I climbed the hill to our apartment, wondering when he’d give up or when the women in his car would finally insist he drivethem to their destination rather than engage in verbal battle with someone who had married a farangi and had been foolish enough to bring her to Iran.
    “Savages” is exactly how Khosro often describes his fellow residents of the city of his birth. He bemoans the loss of Persian farhang , the culture he claims we once had, lost forever in this impossibly overcrowded and chaotic, haphazardly expanding capital of a rapidly developing country. He still loves his hometown, more as a concept—the romanticized quiet and beautiful place he grew up in—than as a functioning, modern city whose more than twelve million residents all fight for a small piece of whatever it can offer. But unlike Khosro, I have little nostalgia for the city of my birth, and once established there, I began to feel that his sense of the place and the culture was not unlike my own (and other New Yorkers’) sense of New York, a sense that the changes we witness over the years are not happy ones, that a once-livable city is no longer so, and that new generations of residents have little in common with us, the long-term and older citizens. Tehran has changed dramatically in a short period of time, and the sense of loss for people like Khosro, and even the taxi driver who wouldn’t stop yelling at me, is palpable. Traffic, or dodging it and its attendant clamor, is only one element of Tehran that is disturbing to its residents and visitors alike; the city is also an architectural disaster: a hodgepodge of the monstrously ugly new and the gracious but deteriorating old—like Khosro’s house—lends the city an unfinished quality,