Honeymoon in Tehran: Two Years of Love and Danger in Iran (11 page)

He then asked about my parents, who lived in California as well. Our lives, we discovered, paralleled in their disjointed swings between Iran and the West. While my family’s stay in California was made permanent by the revolution, it was the Iran-Iraq War, which began in 1980, that displaced Arash’s family to Germany.

“Did you miss Iran?” I asked.

“In a way. But more because of how we left,” he said, describing how the family decided to stay in Germany while on what was ostensibly a holiday visit. Arash was nearing fourteen, the age when Iran’s draft laws would prohibit him from leaving the country. “We stayed almost on a whim. My mother was scared that if we went back, I’d have to be smuggled out later. So I never had the chance to say goodbye to my friends.”

At the outset of our discussion I felt thrilling flashes of recognition and imagined that our families and psyches must face similar struggles—fitting in as an Iranian in the West, finding a balance between two cultures. But soon it became clear that being an émigré in California was a different matter entirely from being an émigré in
Germany. The émigrés in Europe could travel to Iran more frequently, which helped them stay emotionally and physically connected with their homeland.

“It just seems to me that in Europe, Iranians have a more realistic picture of what Iran is actually like, and how much they actually want to be connected to it,” Arash said, musingly. “Even their homesickness is different, more grounded somehow.”

The diaspora in America had less vacation time and a longer physi cal distance to cover, and many belonged to the various groups (the persecuted Baha’i minority; former political dissidents or officials) whose members could not return at all. These conditions fostered a culture of nostalgia and longing that in turn shaped how Iranians in America assimilated. The exiles in America also had the fraught history of Iranian-U.S. relations to contend with; the fresh memories of the hostage crisis meant most Americans associated Iran with hysterical violence. Iranian Americans often coped with this by either distancing themselves from their background or retreating into it defensively.

Although our experiences as Iranian immigrants in the West had hardly overlapped, Arash and I had shared the impulse to return to Iran as adults. We were both motivated partly by that longing for contact with homeland, that inevitable curiosity that seems to lurk in the heart of most immigrant children (a breathless circuit of thoughts, from “Could I manage?” to “Would they accept me?” to “Would it feel warmer/kinder/
homier
?”). But more important, both Arash and I believed, perhaps naïvely, that our professional expertise could and should contribute to the country’s development.

Arash, for his part, had sought to bring the world of open-source software to Iran. I had no idea what this meant, so, over our lunch of crepes, he explained.

Free software, as opposed to proprietary software, he said, serves as a framework for sharing intellectual capital. In practical terms, this means a country’s information and communications industry can attend to its needs without expensive licensing.

“When I moved back to Iran, I was hugely enthusiastic about open source,” he said. “I knew that developing countries were embracing
it, and almost immediately profiting, both economically and socially. I thought it would be good for Iran, and good for me.”

“What makes it so special for developing countries?”

“Take Iran’s case. Iran has never signed international copyright treaties, and basically endorses pirated software. Before Iran can join the WTO, for example, it needs to clean up its act. It needs to ban pirated software and run a legitimate technology bazaar. This sounds easy enough, but it’s actually a huge challenge. For one, licensed software like Microsoft’s is tremendously expensive, especially in a country where people are used to buying pirated Microsoft Office for a dollar. Even worse, U.S. sanctions mean Microsoft can’t sell to the Iranian market. Even if Iranians had the means to buy a licensed product, there’d be nothing to buy. Why should Microsoft produce a Farsi version of Windows when it can’t sell to the biggest Farsi-speaking market in the world? It can’t and won’t. Open source would bypass all of these problems. You’d have a Farsi platform for computers, it would be inexpensive, and it would be legal under international copyright. Iran could participate in the international community, on international terms, without the pressure of copyright.”

He explained all this so convincingly, with such fluid gestures, that I only nodded for him to continue.

In the first year of his return, Arash and his colleagues had managed to produce the first Farsi version of KDE, the desktop environment that runs on top of Linux, the operating system of the open-source world. They attempted to set up a training center that would certify Iranian software engineers in Red Hat, the largest commercial distribution of the Linux operating system in the world. But because Red Hat is American, and the United States had imposed economic sanctions on Iran, the firm canceled the Iranian project the moment it went online.

“Half the story is about U.S. sanctions, and how awful they are,” he said.

“But don’t you think the Iranian government deserves to be sanctioned?”

“That’s not the point, really. Who suffers as a result of sanctions? Not the government. At the time, Red Hat certification basically guaranteed
you a job in Europe. We wanted to bring that certification process to Iran. All these Iranian young people were going to places like Kuwait to get certified, and paying twice as much. That put certification out of so many people’s reach. On top of that, the money went out of Iran and into some sheikh’s pockets. It’s the Iranian engineers who suffer, not the government.”

Next, the Iranian government stepped in to offer resources for an umbrella project charged with oversight of Iran’s open-source activities. Arash’s firm found itself competing for bids with organizations that entirely lacked IT background but were connected to the regime and saw the initiative as a lucrative opportunity. The regime’s aim, as usual, was to control and oversee a realm where it had no place.

I told Arash that his story, its technical aspects aside, sounded overwhelmingly familiar. Many Iranians who had returned from the West seeking to introduce a concept premised on the existence of civil society could relate to such an experience. In these instances the regime usually co-opted the initiative and steered it into the hands of incompetent but loyal cronies.

“I know exactly what you mean,” Arash said. “I was once asked to advise a senior official on open source. He told me very frankly, ‘Mr. Zeini, I don’t believe in technological independence, Farsi-language software, or open source.’ We debated. I told him, ‘But Microsoft won’t do Farsi Windows because of sanctions, and that means Farsi speakers—especially old people, children—can’t use computers.’ He just shrugged at me. Two months later, the same guy was all over the media claiming to love open source.”

It was in such episodes that one could identify the real pathology of the Islamic Republic. Obsessed with security, it preferred to sabotage the future prospects of its young engineers, its own IT sector, than to experiment with endeavors that sounded somehow suspect.

After this, Arash told me, he began working for his father’s textile business. While the work did not inspire him, it was important: textiles had once been the great hope of Iranian manufacturing. “It was always expected that I would work with him someday,” he said slowly. “But fulfilling my duty, that wasn’t really my objective.”

Outside, the sky had begun to darken. Reluctant to part, we decided
to drive north to Niavaran Palace, the Shah’s summer complex, for an open-air concert of classical Indian music.

I’ve kept the ticket stub from that evening, a violet slip bearing a bejeweled elephant, for it marks the day we became inseparable. We met again the next day, and the day after that, for weeks. We set out at dawn to climb in the Alborz Mountains, hiked through rugged valleys dotted with springs and waterfalls, and camped overnight under the cover of pine trees (camping was common, but not so much for unmarried couples). On Fridays we explored the dilapidated neighborhoods of south Tehran, the capital’s historical center, dotted with faded turquoise tiles and arched doorways dating to the nineteenth-century Qajar dynasty. We sifted through the Friday antiques bazaar in search of Turkoman tunics and Afghan string instruments, often finding rare treasures hidden among the dusty junk. We spent a week in Beirut, where Arash charmed all my friends at dinner parties and they whispered in my ear that I was lucky. It was a perfect summer.

No particular conversation or moment determined our plans. We had slipped into each other’s lives seamlessly, as though we had known each other for years. I took his husky for walks through the quiet side streets of Tehran; he covered the Salman Rushdie novel I carried around with newspaper out of concern for my safety, and deleted the ironic call-to-prayer ringtone (installed by a teenage cousin) from my cell phone. By the end of the summer, being children of the western diaspora, we did what came most naturally, un-Iranian though it was: we moved in together.

U
p until that point, our relationship had followed the conventions of mainstream Iranian dating. We went out for lunch, attended parties and dinners together as a couple, and once a week drank tea with each other’s relatives. Our decision to live together, however, permanently separated our course from that of our peers. Though nearly all of our friends, and a solid portion of Tehran for that matter, engaged in the behaviors associated with living together—dating, premarital sex—actual cohabitation remained taboo. I had lived in Iran long enough to understand why. While many of my girlfriends might have
sex with their partners, this was not a reality their parents (or the boy friend’s parents) openly acknowledged. Some parents even pretended their children did not date. On many occasions, I had watched mothers boldly lie when visitors asked whether their daughter was “socializing with any prospective suitors.” Such discretion, or deception if you like, enabled Iranians to maneuver between their society’s traditional mores and their children’s modern urges.

Living together was far too unsubtle, and none of my friends in Iran had even considered the idea. The enraged parents, the dashed marriage prospects, the perhaps vengeful backlash from a culture still hung up on the “honor” of its women aside, living together was also financially out of reach for most couples. Part of the reason young people uniformly lived at home until marriage, even if they married in their thirties, was to save money for an apartment. Very often couples who wedded late still needed help from their parents to start an independent life, and the notion of living together unwed … well, it just contravened sensibility and practicality too much to be considered by even the city’s most notorious playboys and party girls.

Arash, like most Iranians who had returned from the West as adults, lived alone. But his apartment was on the third floor of a building in which his parents and sister also lived. After the revolution, when single-family houses were razed in favor of apartment blocks, and traffic made the city unnavigable, many families opted for such living arrangements. Most of my married friends lived in family buildings or at least on the same block as their parents.

Neither of us really took our parents’ reactions into consideration when we decided to cohabit, probably because I was twenty-nine, Arash was thirty-five, and we were both westernized enough to think this meant we were beyond parental oversight. His parents, though far more traditional than my family on the surface (they spoke undiluted Farsi at home instead of English, were fond of Iranian culture, and did not affect the lifestyle of the international elite), took the news with rather elegant composure and warm acceptance. His mother invited me to lunch as though it were the most natural thing in the world, noticed my favorite things to eat, and wordlessly added them
to her shopping list and cooking menu, as though she had overnight acquired a third child who deserved to be doted upon.

My parents reacted less sanguinely. “They will hunt you down in the street and throw acid on your face,” my father warned ominously over the phone from California. “You will be disfigured for life.” He had only visited Iran once since 1979, a brief trip during the grim 1980s. He thought Tehran was overrun by Taliban-esque fundamentalists who had nothing to do but detect and purge sinful living-together couples. My mother’s concerns, predictably, focused on propriety over safety. “I warn you, Azadeh, his parents may
act
like they don’t have a problem with it, but deep down they consider you
loose,
a girl of easy virtue, and they will never, ever permit their son to marry you.”

Though my mother had spent the majority of her more than sixty years in California, and though she was at home driving to and from the organic grocery store on its spacious freeways, she had never quite come to terms with the essential Americanness of her personality. Her identity remained a puzzle to many who knew her, and probably to herself. In some respects, her biography was American in its show of independence. She asked for a divorce when I was only a few months old, launched a second career in psychiatric nursing when I started elementary school, and lived with seeming disregard for everything that was expected of her as an Iranian woman. She did not keep house with particular tidiness and she failed to match her china, preferring instead to visit the local ashram and participate in a local peace network that promoted better ties with the then Soviet Union. She might have been a character in a Woody Allen film, so thoroughly did she embody the neurotic charm of a hypereducated, urban American.

I told my parents they were being absurd and paranoid and, worst of all, were cloaking their own disapproval in safety concerns and worry over the hypothetical, imagined disapproval of Arash’s parents. “It’s really very amusing that after three decades in California, after attending Berkeley and studying gestalt and becoming American enough to obsess about food, you are still as conservative as the most conventional Tehrani parents,” I said during one conversation. They
maintained their stony, long-distance censure, and I ignored them, preferring to concentrate on do-it-yourself sponge painting, my antique kilims, and other elements of apartment décor.