Lipstick Jihad (28 page)

At dinner that night, I raved about my discovery to my aunt. “Why didn't you say before you were interested?” asked Khaleh Farzi in exasperation, spooning sour cherry rice on my plate, poking through the fluffy, saffron-specked mounds for extra cherries. “Everyone we know does yoga. But I thought you didn't like it.”

As it turned out, not only did everyone do yoga, but Lily, a distant relative, even held classes at her home in Aghdasieh, a neighborhood near the tip of Tehran. We called her after dinner, and she invited me to attend the next day.

Sandalwood. The plumes of the sweet-smelling incense overpowered the snug apartment, lined with tatami mats and decorated with portraits of multi-limbed Hindu gods and goddesses. I walked in to find the class, composed of a cult of women dressed identically in snowy-white tunics and pants, drinking tea in the kitchen. They looked like martial arts practitioners or a Mormon sect of housewives, until Lily dimmed the lights, clucked them into silence, and took her place at the front of the room.

At the end of class, we lay on our backs, hands and feet spread apart, as though poised to make angel imprints on a field of snow. Lily instructed us to curl our toes and then tighten our calves, and we tightened and released each muscle working our way up the body. I ran my hands back and forth over my stomach, willing my internal organs to cooperate, to produce an egg and be done with it. I hadn't menstruated regularly since leaving Cairo, and four months had passed since my last cycle. Unless I had immaculate
conception to add to my worries, something was definitely wrong with my ovaries. The worry turned to alarm one night, when a tingly heat welled up from within my body, and I woke up to find dusky-red hives growing all over me. The doctor detected nothing perceptibly wrong with me, and suggested I eat less sushi. But I knew what was wrong. Iran was slowly making me sick.

The women in the room rested peacefully, with blissful smiles on their faces. I could not recall ever seeing such a relaxed crowd of Iranian women, who typically began to provoke one another in groups larger than five. The general stressors of Tehran life—toxic smog, traffic jams, fundamentalist theocracy, inflation, unemployment—together with the special burden of the veil made Iranian life particularly wearisome for women, who were depressed in large numbers. The depression had a major, physical component, in that it was compounded by the clothing regulations of the regime.

Ayatollah Khomeini probably did not consider the damage the veil would inflict on women's hair, when he mandated Islamic modesty. Besides split ends and a perpetual lack of volume, the veil intensified the general sadness many women were prone to feeling over all the things that were wrong in their personal lives, and in the country at large.

Why do your hair if it's going to be covered all day? Why watch your figure if it gets lost in the folds of a cloak? And in fact, it really
didn't
make sense to spend half an hour blow-drying your hair only to cover it up. And in the heat, as well as in the cold, it was exponentially more comfortable to wear sweats or leggings or nothing at all underneath the
roopoosh
. As a result, women often found the fine line between a practical approach to Islamic Republic grooming and slovenliness blurred. Before you knew it, you had devolved into a sloppy version of yourself, with unkempt hair (oh, skip a washing day, no one'll see it anyway), alternately clad in mumu-like
roopoosh
outside, and messy house clothes inside. On the occasions when Khaleh Farzi and I tended to our appearances for dinner parties, we would check each other out and exclaim, ahhh! I forgot what you looked like!

This phenomenon afflicted younger women much less dramatically. They were more inclined to exploit the fresh permissiveness in the dress code and quickly adapted to the new reality of being able to wear whatever they wanted, as long as it skimmed their upper thighs. Since they were coming of age in a
roopoosh
that revealed, instead of cloaked, they had the
dubious privilege of becoming preoccupied with body image. The fret of their mother's generation (“Am I letting myself go under this tent?”) was replaced with a more universal, modern concern (“Is my butt too big?”). Perhaps in its own strange way, this counted as progress.

I sat in Khaleh Farzi's living room, munching on roasted chickpeas and dried mulberries, pondering the nature of change. It was all a matter of perspective, I decided. To me, Iran's future looked bleak. Bad economy, spineless president, pissed-off populace, entrenched hard-liners, spiraling heroin addiction. It was fashionable at the time, in the West, for analyst types to say Iran's demographic time bomb made change inevitable. I had trouble buying that. As far as I could tell, the Islamic Republic could experience a succession of baby booms and stay exactly the way it was. Obviously not for fifty years, but easily for ten or fifteen. The only way in which a huge and young population could directly destabilize the system would be for everyone to go stand outside on the street at exactly the same time, and that wasn't about to happen.

Looking at the big picture—the laws and policies and grand structures of state—the political situation had not altered in a truly meaningful way over the past five years. But from the vantage point of the living room and the park, life was different in the ways that mattered most. My friends now had the freedom to sit around watching American television, give each other rides home at night, sneak pecks on the cheek in public, and dress as fabulously or dowdily as they wanted. No longer forced to fret about things that should have been irrelevant (to wear or not to wear lipstick), there was now mental space for more interesting matters, such as choosing one's weblog pseudonym.

As this kind of change became ordinary, the gulf between Iranians of my generation and those of Khaleh Farzi's widened. She belonged to a type of older Iranians I came to think of as purists, because they applied the Purity Test to every facet of life in the Islamic Republic. Every time a lifestyle choice presented itself—Should I have lunch at the new Italian restaurant? See the new comedy everyone is raving about? Buy a new linen button-down shirt to wear as
manteau?
Try the homemade wine made by the local
Armenian vintner?—they asked themselves how it compared to its equivalent before the revolution.

The answer usually failed the Purity Test, because of course the restaurants were now mediocre, the comedy banal, the wine sour . . . and the
manteau
question was not applicable. Picky and scarred, the purists estranged themselves from the rhythm of the younger generation's life. It was as though the intolerable years had left a mark on them, and now they resided permanently in that old state of mind—a powerful assurance in the bottomless awfulness of being in Iran.

The purity business always led to arguments between Khaleh Farzi and me. Often, the disagreement centered on lunch, and whether we should go out or not. “I don't have the patience to eat wearing a veil; you know I don't enjoy it,” she would say. I hated eating in a veil too, worried the ends would fall in the soup, unable to get past the odd sensation of chewing with my ears covered in cloth. As annoying as it was, I still occasionally wanted to go to lunch. Unlike Khaleh Farzi, recollections of vintage, veil-less Tehran lunches did not color the decision for me.

Khaleh Farzi settled in next to me on the couch, and dialed the rotary phone with a pencil. Ever since she had moved to Tehran, she had developed a habit of directing her contempt for the Islamic Republic at inanimate objects, as though they were contaminated by the regime. She opened car doors with a handkerchief, poked squash at the vegetable stand with a gloved finger.

That afternoon, we were planning to address a major crisis: my wardrobe. One of Khaleh Farzi's chi-chi friends, a woman who spent her summers in the south of France and the rest of the year in a Frenchified bubble in Tehran, knew a designer who made swishy, smart
roopooshes
inspired by that season's couture collections. Khaleh Farzi was calling to get his address and held the receiver away from her ear as soon as it was answered.

“No, I said, pluck in the
direction
of the feather . . .
with
the feather! . . .
imbecile!”
Her friend was screaming at her cook for improperly cleaning the bird that would become that evening's duck à l'orange. She gave Farzi directions to the designer's atelier, a second-floor apartment on a back alley in Elahieh.

I owned exactly three
roopooshes,
and I had worn them so frequently they had become uniforms. The standard, black
roopoosh
Khaleh Farzi handed
down to me the day I arrived in Tehran was spectacularly frumpy. It reached my ankles, and when I wore it I hallucinated that my thighs were expanding and that my hair smelled of fried onions. If I were unfortunate enough to catch a reflection of myself in a window in that
roopoosh,
I had to go immediately to bed and stay there for the rest of the day. The indignity of this
roopoosh
was even worse for being unnecessary. It made me look like one of those poor, shrouded tourists, who had clearly packed according to the dated advice in a Lonely Planet guide, and gazed in amazement at Tehrani women scampering around in stiletto sandals and short tunics that cinched at the waist.

The designer's atelier was nearby, so we walked over through the sycamore-shaded back alleys and rang the bell. An assistant opened the door and led us down a tangerine hallway into a bright studio space with custard-colored walls and a vaulted ceiling. A broad antique oak table stood in the center, strewn with fabrics and European fashion magazines, and there was a sitting area to the side with plush sofas and a glass table set with yellow roses floating in a bowl. Arash fluttered in, wearing a lavender linen shirt and khakis, apologizing for keeping us waiting. He turned down Ella Fitzgerald, and immediately began fussing over my aunt.

“I've heard
soooo
much about you,” he said to Khaleh Farzi. “I hear you love to hike . . . just like me. . . . I adore nature. . . . People who like nature are usually very sensitive, don't you think? . . . You're so adorable!”

An assistant tottered over with a tray of tea, served in slim, gold-rimmed cups, and Marie biscuits. Arash talked for a good half hour about how much he missed Paris (he had moved back to Tehran two years before), the Louvre, and how much he adored the new “know thyself” classes he had just started.

“By nature,” he explained, “I'm a pacifist.” But in Iran, he was a foot soldier in the struggle against the regime's assault on beauty. He wanted to reclaim the
roopoosh
, make it exquisite and flattering, turn the Islamic uniform into a garment of aesthetic resistance. Khaleh Farzi nodded her head politely, and then buried her face in French
Vogue.

“That's really great, Arash. I really respect what you're trying to do,” I said. “I need something functional, but attractive. I sit down a lot in front of clerics, so no front slits.”

He clapped his hands together joyfully. “I know
exactly
what you want.”
He stood up and began circling the couch, eyeing my shoes and my bag. “I'm thinking feminine but minimalist. I am thinking Armani. I am
not
thinking St. John.”

He unraveled a roll of grayish, sea-foam green chiffon, and draped it over a square of the same fabric, in a pearly, light beige. “We'll do this cut like a toga, in two tones, so that when you walk the beige will peek out underneath. It'll be so elegant. So subtle. So modest.” He shrugged his shoulders lightly, shivering with delight. He then dropped a stack of Italian fashion magazines in my hands, and said his tailors could reproduce anything I wanted down to the stitch. I was bewitched. It might be worth it to stay in Iran after all, I thought, if I could acquire a custom-made, designer-inspired wardrobe at J. Crew prices.

Fashion as resistance. What an intriguing concept, and how heartening to find style in the land of everything-must-be-as-ugly-as-possible-at-all-times. Immersed in her magazine, Khaleh Farzi looked up to weigh in on color choices, but she couldn't be bothered to have a
manteau
made for herself. For her part, she had worn the same shapeless, navy-blue
roopoosh
every day for the last four years. It looked atrocious the day she bought it, and four years later, it resembled a worn grocery sack. Am I
khar
(an ass), she said each time I nagged at her to buy something new, that I should spend money on this regime's uniform?

The wardrobe she had accumulated throughout her life, the piles and piles of silk scarves acquired during two decades in America, reposed in her vault-like closet, wrapped in tissue. Many of her friends were similarly disinclined to prettify their
roopoosh
wardrobes, as this meant engaging with the Islamic Republic, something they avoided at all costs. They preferred to cloister in the company of old friends, in worlds carefully constructed to turn inward, and deflect the reality of the present as much as possible. That could mean wearing just one
manteau
for years, staying inside all day endlessly redecorating apartments, or supervising the denuding of a leathery old duck. But young women my age weren't prepared to do that—there were parties to go to, hobbies to explore, men to flirt with, personalities to refine. In all likelihood, there would be no other world in which to do all this, and it made no sense waiting the system out, with so much living to do.