Honeymoon in Tehran: Two Years of Love and Danger in Iran (23 page)

F
inally, having cleared the many religio-bureaucratic obstacles in our way, we were ready to get married. My father had returned from the mountains and faxed us his permission. My mother still demanded we wait for a propitious date on Islam’s calendar, but I assumed her dissent was mostly for show. Meanwhile, Hajj Agha had disappeared. I tried phoning him, but his mobile phone was either off or out of range. Eventually, sometime after nine in the evening, Arash got through, but the line crackled with so much static he could barely make out what Hajj Agha was saying.

“You’re where? Khorramshahr?” Khorramshahr! What was our mullah doing hundreds of miles away, in a war-ravaged city on the border with Iraq? We called Mohammad for an explanation. He said his father was on his annual sermon tour of southern Iran. Why could he not be in Tehran like most proper mullahs, busy attending passion play reenactments with their families and enjoying the stew of lamb, split peas, and dried lime that was traditional Moharram fare? Hajj Agha perhaps still subscribed to the Ayatollah Khomeini’s view that “every day is Karbala” and believed the holiday was a time to rekindle Iranians’ Shia zeal. He would not return for at least a week.

“But I don’t think Hajj Agha would have performed your
aghd
anyway,” Mohammad said. “This is not really our line of work.” It
turned out Hajj Agha had been planning all along to refer us to another notary, one who was not above entering a slightly irregular marriage into his oversize book of contracts. By assisting us in this way, he was both doing us a good turn and securing for himself a sizable commission. Mohammad told us he knew a mullah in Khorasan Square, a grimy neighborhood in south Tehran, who would be pleased to perform our
aghd.
We phoned my uncle to apprise him of the change of plans, but he refused to venture anywhere south of central Tehran. “You will do yourselves no good starting your life together in such an area,” he sniffed with a patrician finality.

This did not deter the resourceful Mohammad, who summoned the backup mullah uptown, reminding us that this would require more generous
shirini,
the literal term for sweets that was also a euphemism for a bribe. We arranged for everyone to assemble at the office of Hajj Agha’s notary at four o’clock.

I phoned my mother two hours in advance to give her directions, assuming that her protests were mainly melodrama and that she would show up when she was supposed to. But she refused to come to the phone, conveying through auntie emissaries that she was napping. I knew she was not asleep. Probably she was taking revenge, in hopes that her absence would disrupt proceedings whose timing she considered a slight. I wanted to hide my exasperation from Arash, preferring him to believe that my mother’s pleasure at our marriage was undiluted, but he could hear me exclaiming (“Napping? That’s the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever heard. You should be ashamed to repeat it. Tell her to come to the phone
now”), and
later, as we drove through the eerily empty streets, I disclosed that my mother would not be joining us. He saw how upset I was, and patted my hand. “Don’t worry about it. She’ll come around eventually.”

On the way we stopped in Qeytarieh to pick up Arash’s best friend, Houshang, who would serve as his witness. He jumped into the backseat, observed our tense expressions, and quickly adjusted the iPod to a Manu Chao album. “Smile, please, you’re both far too solemn.” He offered us some of the
noghl
(sugar-coated almond slivers) he had brought along, and then recounted the details of his niece’s job interview earlier that day with Iran Air, the state carrier. Many
government-owned institutions still asked religious-ideological questions during interviews, as a way to screen out the impious or hypocrisy-averse. The interviewer asked Houshang’s niece for the average length in meters of a
kafan,
the shroud used for Islamic burial. She told him that an airline should be asking questions about safety and first aid, not burial attire, and walked out.

At the age of forty-seven, Houshang devoted most of his affections to his nieces and nephews. He had vowed never to marry, squirmed out of any relationship that lasted longer than a month, and regarded us, on the brink of permanent entrapment, with affectionate sympathy. His
gargonnière
loft studio, embedded in a particularly conservative corner of Qeytarieh (a neighborhood near our own), could not accommodate a wife, and that was as he had designed it, along with the rest of his life. When I first met him and heard him hold forth on the incompatibility of marriage with a life devoted to Art, I assumed it was the sort of cocktail chatter one could expect from any artsy photographer-filmmaker wearing a lime-green Lacoste polo shirt and drinking mango-infused
aragh.
Freelance art photography was a favorite path of bored, affluent twenty- and thirtysomething socialites; once a year they held gallery parties to exhibit their work, and they affected “careers” that did not require them to rise before noon. But Hou shang, though fond of grand pronouncements, was not a north Teh ran dilettante. The males among that company had either been shipped off to the West during the war with Iraq, or managed to buy exemptions from military service. Houshang had enjoyed no such privilege; he was, in fact, a
shahid-e zendeh,
literally a living martyr, an appellation bestowed to war veterans who had survived the gravest dangers.

Sometimes when he told stories of the war—how soldiers harassed scorpions into biting them, for instance, because a scorpion bite earned two weeks’ automatic furlough; how during long sieges he and his troop mates subsisted on the leaves of onions they had planted earlier—I could not quite believe such hardship had been endured by the urbane, Luis Buñuel-obsessed man before me. I wondered whether Hou shang’s time at the front had made him wary of emotional entanglements, but he never let on, even to his closest friends, always deflecting intimate
questions with glib asides, claiming he could not be bothered to drink tea and make provincial small talk with a wife’s relatives.

My uncle Shahrokh called to say he was just a few blocks away, and by the appointed hour we were all in place save my mother, whose absence no one remarked upon. The backup mullah arrived ten minutes late, dressed in a frayed, mustard-colored robe that cloaked his generous proportions. He addressed us in the nasal tones of a lifelong opium addict, and oozed into Hajj Agha’s chair, listlessly playing with his prayer beads. His assistant, an energetic man with wiry black hair, took charge of our papers.

“You aren’t related to Mr. Ali Moaveni, are you?” he asked my uncle.

“Yes, he was my father. He passed away three years ago.”

“May God bless his soul, and what an honor this is indeed, this opportunity to be of service to his kin!” The assistant beamed, examining us all with new respect. Arash, Houshang, and I exchanged amused glances. We often said that in a Tehran of fourteen million, Iranians were linked by only two degrees of separation.

I took it as an auspicious omen that in this overflowing city someone who remembered my grandfather Pedar Joon would by chance preside over our marriage. In 2000, during his final days, when the pace of his daily walk down Villa Street had slowed and he grew forgetful, my elderly grandfather’s dying wish had been to see me married. To advance that goal, he had pressed me to enroll in classes at the University of Tehran (“no place like college to find a husband”), and, when I showed no signs of progress, to list the qualities I required in a mate, so that he could more effectively take up the search on my behalf. At first I had taken the list as a joke, but during a summer trip to the Caspian he demanded it in earnest, pausing near the spot where I read Rohinton Mistry’s novel
A Fine Balance
in the shade of a palm tree, shaking his wooden cane with a sly smile. “You are neither fat nor ugly, and both your family and career are distinguished,” he often repeated, baffled by my spinsterhood.

The assistant briskly placed a marriage contract before us and asked which provisions he should amend. A generic contract leaves
space for a husband to accord his wife certain privileges which the law enabled Iranian women to secure from their husbands: typically the right to divorce under particular terms, to travel out of the country alone, to acquire a passport. The basic contract, I noted, granted me the right to petition for divorce only under certain conditions, including “the husband’s committing bigamy without his wife’s consent, or unfair treatment of his wives;” “the husband’s involvement in harmful addictions that would make life difficult for the wife;” and, curiously, “engaging in occupations found inconsistent with the wife’s prestige.” The juxtaposition of such abstruse language, alongside notations such as “the husband has no other wife,” struck me as particularly Islamic Republic: at once prudish and indecent.

We spelled out that I would retain the right to a divorce based on any condition of my choosing, and to travel freely “without any preventions.” Though these provisos should have been legally binding, they fell far short of actually guaranteeing what they implied. To renew my passport I would still need to acquire from Arash a separate, notarized document, and if I sought a divorce, I could easily be entangled in a court battle lasting years. Though I knew that by signing this contract I would be taking an immense risk—essentially gambling that Arash would never, in the throes of even the ugliest discord or divorce, choose to revoke the rights he had granted me—I felt no apprehension.

Female Iranian veterans of acrimonious divorce would likely consider my decision foolish; every family had instances of soured marriages in which the secular, civilized husband used the country’s discriminatory laws to exact revenge or harass a wife. But for every such case, there was also an Iranian wife who had invoked the laws to her own advantage. My mother’s cousin, married to a woman who had turned out to be a greedy mercenary, had been barred from leaving the country for five years. The wife had invoked her claim to her enormous
mehriyeh,
which is something between a prenup and alimony—a contractual pledge of money or property made by the groom to his bride; she can seek to collect on the pledge in the event of divorce. Men who can’t pay can be punished with prison time or
travel bans. My mother’s cousin, unable to produce the thousands of gold coins foolishly pledged as
mehriyeh,
now suffered the consequences.

Meanwhile, Backup Mullah lazily turned his oversize head toward Houshang. “So what is it that you do?” he drawled.

“I’m a filmmaker,” Houshang replied.

“I hope you don’t make those sexy films … you know, the ones that people manage to get their hands on and watch.” This question, which did little for the dignity of the proceeding, was the only thing I recall him saying, apart from the reading of the Koranic sura of marriage.

“No, no,” Houshang said. “I produce documentary films about classical musicians.”

Backup Mullah raised a doubtful eyebrow, as though this were scarcely better.

“And now,” said the assistant, “we arrive at the question of
mehriyeh.”
The most contested line of any Iranian marriage contract, the
mehriyeh
has roots in something like a concept of back wages, for work performed while married. Today its legal role has become somewhat muddled, as civil law theoretically grants women the right to petition for assets accrued during the marriage.
Mehriyeh
is legally adjusted for inflation—a significant battle won by female legislators—and arguments over its size are the undoing of many affianced couples. For some
bazaari
families, the size of the
mehriyeh
reflects the status of the bride’s family. A showily enormous
mehriyeh
—the bride’s weight in gold, or gold coins in an amount equal to her birth year—is especially prized by nouveaux riches families, irrespective of whether the groom would ever actually be able to produce such sums. The engagement of two of our close friends was on the verge of collapse over
mehriyeh,
as she demanded “at least a house,” and he insisted that the custom was vulgar and unfit for two modern, educated individuals.

In my mother’s generation, when the binds of tradition began to loosen and urban middle-class women began working and choosing their own husbands, modern couples rejected the notion of
mehriyeh
altogether. They would write something symbolic into the contract—my mother chose a Koran and a string of sugar crystals—to signify that their marriage was a love match, that they refused to measure the bride’s worth in grams of gold.

Those involved in preparing the contract hoped for a substantial
mehriyeh,
as this would inevitably trickle down into a heftier
shirini.
I had forgotten the symbolic number Arash and I had agreed upon, and whispered for him to remind me. He held up seven fingers.

“Seven gold coins,” I said. The equivalent of about a thousand dollars.

The assistant was visibly disappointed. Perhaps he was concerned that Arash hoped to marry Mr. Ali Moaveni’s granddaughter on the cheap. He looked to my uncle for approval. My uncle nodded, and the assistant scribbled furiously. Backup Mullah was apparently asleep, his eyes half closed. I crossed my arms over the slim hunter-green dress I was wearing over dark jeans. I didn’t consider this our wedding, and had dressed casually to underscore the point.

The assistant opened the Koran to a particular page, placing it in our laps. He nudged Backup Mullah awake to read the appropriate sura. The mullah intoned the Arabic words with such a heavy Farsi accent that I could scarcely understand them. When he was done we were officially married. Mohammad passed around a bowl of chocolates, while my uncle opened his wallet, distributing
shirini
to those assembled.

In the end, we paid three times more than the standard fee (about five hundred dollars), to enable a man of God who indulged in opium to overlook our flawed paperwork and marry us anyway. Though we held a Koran on our knees and were wed by one of its prayers, the
shirini
extracted lent the proceeding a dodgy air. We emerged feeling as though we had just sold the title to a stolen car or hoodwinked someone into buying a faulty apartment. If we had bribed ourselves into wedlock anywhere besides Iran, I would have felt quite upset. But here, bribery was a fact of daily life. Even everyday matters—from a new passport to a postal address change—often required the discreet exchange of a few notes; otherwise, your name was likely to
be misspelled, and the process would take months. Our ceremony, what I considered our actual wedding, would remain untouched by hypocrisy.