Lipstick Jihad (12 page)

A
Basij
raced up to her from behind, and cracked a baton over the back of her head. She doubled over, and hung like that for a full minute. Then she drew herself up, and charged headfirst into a line of approaching policemen.
Her parted arms forced them to break rank. Behind her a chaotic crowd of several hundred watched her, stunned. Some of them started to run into side streets, to escape the
Basij,
who by that point were swinging their batons around at will and gunning their bikes up and down the street. Others lingered to see whether the vigil would go on. Twenty minutes later, the corner was deserted, and I crawled out from my stoop, tiptoeing around the cooling wax puddles left behind by the teenagers' candles.

I found a taxi to take me home, and as we inched through the clogged streets toward the expressway, the driver talked morosely about
Ashoura
past, and
Ashoura
present. No one has their heart in it anymore, he said, recalling the cathartic, sincere emotionalism of
Ashoura
during his youth. His sons had also been at the vigil. I told them to stay home, but they said they had to go, he said. Last year they called it a “Hossein Party,” but this year they're saying “techno-
Ashoura
.” What's techno? he asked shyly. He was worried about his sons, so I lent him my cell phone to call home and check on them. Clashes between socially deprived teenagers and vigilante thugs were always volatile, and black eyes and broken arms were not uncommon.

Often their worried parents accompanied their teenagers out on such evenings, and when a riot threatened to erupt, matronly moms with gray hairs peeking out from under flowered headscarves beseeched the vigilantes—with the cultural authority an Iranian woman of fifty-five should have over a boy of fifteen—to put their clubs and chains (their weapons of choice) away. Their efforts met little success. The
Basij
were carefully selected in the poorest of neighborhoods and were cultivated to violence with a skillful balance of brainwashing and small incentives. I hated watching these scenes. I hated how I could scarcely recognize the traditions I grew up with in the Iran around me. I hated how the Islamic Republic not only dissolved the ties between exiles and Iran, but those between Iranians and their own culture.

A few days before the start of
Norouz,
Persian New Year, an old friend of Khaleh Farzi—my aunt from California who had moved back to Tehran a few years earlier—called to invite me over for
chaharshambeh-soori,
the night that opens the cycle of Persian New Year festivities. Come over, Azi
jan, we'll talk a little politics, have a few drinks, jump over a couple fires. Bring whoever you want, he said. Of course I'll stop by, I said. I have to cruise around the city first, but I'll definitely come.

Unconsciously, I had internalized the nightlife-as-obstacle-course mentality of young Iranians, and I knew it could be an evening rife with both parties and raids. Once the sun set, I set out with two reporter friends in search of celebrations. Rumors had been circulating that the celebration would be banned this year, since it fell too close to
Moharram,
and we were curious to see whether the regime would dare sacrifice
Norouz
to
Ashoura
.

Norouz
originates from ancient Zoroastrian rites, and falls each year on the vernal equinox, celebrating the arrival of spring. Persians practiced Zoroastrianism before Islam's conquest in the seventh century, and it irked the ayatollahs that people held Persian festivities, with their pagan origins, closer to their hearts than Islamic holidays. In origin and ritual, the holiday is delightful. Ancient Zoroastrians worshipped fire, for its purifying properties. To symbolize the regeneration of new life after a long winter, they lit a row of small bonfires, and skipped over them, singing a poem about fire. Traditionally, they also set out special
ajeel,
a colorful mixture of pistachios, dried mulberries, walnuts, and green raisins, in large bowls with delicately painted wooden scoopers.

As colorful and lively as it is all meant to be, as a child it filled me with dread. My father, ever keen to embrace anything the mullahs opposed, loved
chaharshambeh-soori,
and insisted we celebrate it in San Jose. He spent the week beforehand collecting tumbleweed from the deserted railroad tracks behind his house, arranging them in huge piles in the backyard. Without fail, the plumes of smoke from the fire would curl up high into the air, and some well-intentioned neighbor would call the fire department on us.

As we drove around the city, the neighborhoods looked like battlefields. Immense bonfires lit up the night sky, and young men ran about exploding fireworks that were more like Molotov cocktails. The streets were filled with smoke, and the women who were out cowered near buildings for shelter, afraid one of the firework-bombs would blow off a limb. Holidays like this gave young men, seething at the double humiliation of economic and social privation, an outlet to release some of their anger with satisfying loud noises and bangs. For one night, they would be the ones making things go pop and terrifying passers-by, not the militia.

We drove away from the wide Tehran boulevard, with snaps and pops and explosions going off on all sides, toward the family party, where only the embers of the fires remained. Inside, my aunt and uncle were standing with their friends at the bar near the kitchen, sipping pink drinks and smoking miniature Bahman cigarettes. Everyone held out their face for double kisses, and then offered me what happened to be in front of them:
ajeel
? Tea? Vodka? Potato salad? A joint? I want the pink stuff, I said, sniffing my aunt's glass. It was
aragh-saghi,
homemade vodka mixed with sour-cherry juice. Apart from a handful of
ajeel,
I hadn't eaten all day, and the drink quickly softened my jagged nerves.

Someone tried to engage me in a discussion about the speaker of parliament, and the cleric's name suddenly escaped me. Please, please don't make me think about clerics, I said, savoring the cool, sweet juice trickling down my throat. People still didn't know what to think about the reformists, and in all honesty, neither did I. At parties such as this, people lingered in each others' living rooms late into the night debating politics. The reform movement had awakened in Iranians two sentiments rare in the Middle East: hope and high expectations. That combination meant everyone—from grocery store clerks to snobby intellectuals—discussed the future constantly. The conversations, though peppered with the political squabble of that particular day, always ended with the same wistful conclusion about the reformists: They're not great, but we must back them, since they're our only hope.

What confused people, kept them up holding the same conversation night after night, month after month, was the knotty question of how much credit the reformists deserved for the tangible changes coinciding with Khatami's presidency. Whether or not to vote in elections (for city councils, for parliament, again for the presidency in 2001) hinged on this answer. At the top, within the strata of officialdom, the degree of change was slight—the mullahs had reshuffled their positions, improved their marketing by rebranding themselves as progressive or pragmatic, but the rotten structures and attitudes were firmly in place.

When Iranians stopped to scrutinize exactly how and where these transformations had taken place, they concluded it was from below—in people's behavior and dress, their ideas, spirits, and conversations, attitudes and activities. At some historic moment impossible to pinpoint, around the turn
of the millennium, Iranians' threshold for dissimulation and constriction sank, and people simply began acting differently. Women started wearing lipstick, exposing their toes and curves, wearing their veils halfway back, “as if” they had a right to be uncovered. Writers and intellectuals wrote vicious satire and stinging commentary, “as if” it was permitted to criticize the regime. People of all ages turned up music in their cars, caroused with the opposite sex, “as if” people could listen to whatever they wanted, “as if” young men and women had the right to go out for coffee. All of these “as if” acts became facts on the ground, and the authorities knew it would be foolish and impossible to stand in the way. While they were still happy to appear comical, hysterically condemning “decadent, immoral, Westernized ______ [fill trivial noun in the blank, e.g.: poodles, CDs, ties],” over time they recognized cultural rebellion as a force beyond their control.

Iranians felt they were the ones responsible for all of this, since they were the ones who began flouting the rules and speaking openly, waiting up worried while their teenagers tried to be carefree and adolescent on the streets of an unpredictable city. When the reformists were unable to fix the most urgent problems facing the country—from corruption to the poor economy, from lawlessness to urban traffic—the people dismissed them as spineless collaborators, and cursed themselves for ever having vested hope in Khatami, interchangeable with all his turbaned predecessors.

Reformists, in turn, reproached Iranians for being ungrateful and impatient, like children who demanded everything but understood the cost of nothing. They counseled that change would require time and patience, and predicted ominously that Iranians would regret the day they withdrew their support.

During such debates, I argued both sides. Yes, the reformists had serious and potentially fatal flaws. But they had also created an atmosphere hospitable to all that change from below. They were the ones who issued the permits for independent newspapers, and campaigned to redefine Iran as a relatively normal country, rather than a rogue menace. Beneath the flowery rhetoric, they were helping to dismantle the taboos of thought and behavior entrenched since 1979. They had inspired hope and active debate, and given people the sense (however mistaken) that their votes might count for something. In contrast with the flat despair and apathy that prevailed in the other living rooms where I had held such discussions—in places like
Cairo and Beirut, where change seemed so improbable, the leaders so uninspiring, that internal politics was hardly worth discussing—the Iran of the reformist era seemed less bleak to me.

Around two in the morning, my feet started to feel like cement blocks, and I decided I had to go home immediately. Waiting for a taxi would have taken ages, and since home was just a twenty-minute walk away, I blithely put on my
roopoosh,
tied my veil around my head bandanna-style, and lurched toward the door. My friend Dariush was aghast.

Dariush was a photojournalist, an unrepentant snob, and attached to his cell phone by umbilical cord. We lived in the same neighborhood and often carpooled on reporting assignments. Eventually, we began dating, not because we suited one another, but because he was a still a teenager in spirit, and I had to be an adolescent in Tehran before I could be an adult there. We were carefree and innocent together, scampering about the city drinking fresh juice, taking walks through old neighborhoods, hunting for antiques, and lunching in the garden of our favorite restaurant downtown. We were having so much fun that I didn't notice initially how little I liked him.

When he saw me ambling out, Dariush hung up reluctantly and spread his arms out in front of the door, blocking my exit. You, you who aren't standing so much as swaying, you want to
go walk down the street?

Flopping home drunk, a regular ritual for young people all around the world, was a dangerous proposition in Iran; if you were unlucky enough to be picked up by the police, or run into a
Basij
checkpoint, you could spend the night in prison, or get beaten up on the street. The breathalyzer test was usually a Kalashnikov against your throat, and much suspicious sniffing by a bearded eighteen-year-old vigilante from impoverished south Tehran, who despised you for having all the economic and social privileges denied him. If you were a woman, urban legend held that you might have your virginity checked at the local precinct. Equally horrid, and far more common, was one punishment for being found with a man not your husband: forcible marriage.

But I insisted on walking home, and so Dariush put on his coat too, in a rare act of gallantry. Open your mouth, he said. I parted my lips slowly, hoping guiltily he was going to give me a cigarette, since I was too uncoordinated to get out my own. Instead, he stuffed three pieces of gum into my mouth, to cover the smell of the alcohol.

As we ambled down the dark street, it became clear I would have a hard time walking unassisted; Dariush had to take my arm, which made us conspicuous. I remember finding the situation very funny, but he thought it was disastrous. A garbage truck was slowly making its way down the hill, and he flagged it down, pumping a frantic arm into the air. Can you give us a lift to the bottom? He grabbed my arm and hauled me onto the edge of the truck, our toes shoved perilously close to the wheels. We occupied the stinking, one-foot gap between the trash and the cabin, commanded by Afghan workers. Do. You. Realize. What. You've. Done. I screamed. This is garbage! I'm being transported with
refuse
. This is madness. Why don't you people revolt or something?