So, as you probably know by now, I was traveling in Iran for two weeks in late March. I didn’t blog about it or publicize it much, given that as a dual-citizen (I can be drafted into the Iranian military, although I have a short-term exemption) and a journalist (I didn’t do any reporting while I was there), there was a very small possibility that I’d somehow get into trouble. You never know. Fortunately, I made it back without incident.
Anyway, I will be posting journal entries that I kept on my computer throughout this week and next week, and hundreds of more photos. Comments are always welcome. Enjoy!
-C
Music: Blue Scholars – Morning For America
10:20 am Pacific Time
8:50 pm Iran Standard Time
March 21 2008
Tehran smells of warm, dry dust and exhaust.
It wasn’t but a few days ago that I was celebrating Charshanbeh Souri in Berkeley with hundreds of Iranian-Americans and their loved ones. We jumped over the fire and celebrated the New Year with $10 “kabob wraps”, bastani and Persian techno music.
About 24 hours later, I’m in my grandmother’s Tehran apartment. It’s here, it’s real. I can’t believe it myself. One of the things that I’ve always wanted is now finally here, under my feet. I’ve read about this country, its history, its literature, its art and now I’m here to breathe the polluted air, and walk upon the soil that the Shah carried a pocketful of just before his flight into exile in 1979.
Somehow though, it still doesn’t feel real. But I guess the pictures of Khamenei and Khomeini (Double K, anyone?) above the baggage claim at the sparkling new Khomeini Airport give it away. Once we got our bags last night, we met a man who came to pick us up. There’s some random-and-yet-totally-expected connection to us. This man somehow was connected to our family decades ago back in Arak, and yet, he gladly came out at just before midnight, holding a handwritten sign reading FARIVAR to come pick us up and drive the 30 kilometers back to the city.
The man’s car is similar to thin, but functional cars that I’ve seen in West Africa. This car probably is many years old, and wouldn’t stand a chance in an accident with the new Peugeots zipping past us. As I close the door, the window handle falls to the floor and I grin while quickly replacing it — yep, I’ve seen that before.
The highway (“autobahn” in Persian) is well-paved and has roadsigns in both English and Persian. The billboards advertise for cellphone companies and imported cars before we hit the overpass that reads, in English, “WELCOME TO TEHRAN.”
At some point, my father points out four green lights off in the distance, which he explains mark the Tomb of Khomeini. As we approach, the four green lights suddenly appear on the four minarets that flank the main ostentatious building, which looks like an oversized mosque, gleaming with white marble even in the middle of the night. As we pass the facility, there are dozens, possibly hundreds, of people camping out on the edge of the land, near the highway. Modern REI-style dome tents are set up, nearly each one with a car next to it. No explanation is given for Tent City.
The roads after midnight are mostly empty, and as we get closer to the city, the traffic lanes start to fade away — not that our driver was following them that closely to begin with — and some pedestrians begin to appear. A few late-night shops are open, and I’m pretty sure that I caught a glimpse of a kabob shop as we rounded a corner.
Rounding a raised road on a slight hillside, my father points out a series of 10 distinctive buildings that have their roofs diagonally lopped off.
“That’s where Zarijoun lives,” he says from the backseat.
I remember the name, having sent a few letters in years past to the “Ahtisaaz Apartments.” Our driver loops down the hill, and passes a security kiosk, whom he waves to as we drive through without rolling down the window. We roll up to one of the first apartment blocks and take our stuff up to the third floor, walking past the haft seen set up in the lobby.
Zarijoun opens the door with a big smile and says to me: “Welcome to your country.”
The first thing I notice about Zarijoun’s apartment is how many photos there are of our extended family all over the place. There’s a prominent photo of my cousin Babak at a younger age near the door. On the china cabinet, there’s a recent photo of Zarijoun, me and my parents taken at a Chicago architecture conference from a few years back. Across the living room, in the opposite corner, there are photos of my uncle Behzad, probably in his 20s, with big hair, looking like he could easily fit in a 1970s rock band.
Atop this shelf of photographs is a one that I’ve only heard about — a photo of my grandfather, Babajoun, as a younger man, escorting Prime Minister Mohammed Mossadeq. It wasn’t until I was in college that my father told me that Babajoun served as Mossadeq’s Chief of Staff, before Operation Ajax. After that, Babajoun lived on a government pension for the rest of his life and found his refuge in books and long walks in the park.
Seeing this photo makes me feel like I am personally and directly connected to this history — the history of these two countries whose passports I hold. Scholars agree that America’s contemporary political problems with Iran can directly be linked back past 1979 all the way back to 1953 when my future American grandparents’ tax dollars paid for a coup that left my future Iranian grandfather out of a job, and reinstated Iran’s monarchy. Then, their tax dollars paid for a brutal secret police to keep Iranian dissidents at bay and military weapons to stave off the USSR. This little arrangement didn’t quite last three decades. And now look where we are.
* * *
After barely a night’s sleep (I slept most of the way to Paris, and then to Tehran), I awoke at 4:30 am. I killed the next few hours by reading Stephen Jay Gould and finishing up some podcasts. A few hours later, my father was awake, and we stumbled around this unfamiliar kitchen. Zarijoun got up soon after, and fixed us tea, brought us cheese, and took out some “sangak” (flatbread cooked on heated pebbles) — which my father proclaimed as being “really good.”
Following a leisurely breakfast, and showers all around, we headed over to my great-grandmother’s apartment, in an adjacent block. Various extended family and friends came to visit, celebrate the second day of the Persian New Year, and to pay their respects for my recently deceased great-grandmother, who was always referred to in our house as “Khanoom”, or Madame.
Some of the family I’ve met before on various occasions either in California or in Europe, but some of them I hadn’t met, like my father’s uncle Saeed. He’s the only member of the family that I’ve ever seen who has a full beard, or as Uncle Madjeed joked: “A Hezbollahi.” It was a relief to finally see my cousin Amir, who I’ve seen in California many times (he was a PhD student at Caltech in recent years). He’s probably the only one in the room who has the best idea of who I am and what I’m about — and he’s the only one in the room who made a concerted effort to speak simple and slow Persian to me.
Persian takeout was served for lunch, with sabzi polo, grilled trout, a couple kinds of kabobs, and some astonishingly good olives doused in diced garlic. (As expected, my great aunts insisted that I take more kabob, as I wasn’t eating enough.) After lunch, there were endless rounds of tea, fruit and large trays of half a dozen types of sweets.
I mentioned to Amir that I wanted to get an Iranian SIM card for my iPhone so that I could have a local number (and more importantly, Internet access), and he gladly took me on a short walk to find one. But the two shops between the apartment blocks didn’t sell SIM cards, only recharge cards. We’ll try again tomorrow, I hope.
Despite such hospitable and welcoming family around me, I feel very isolated and dependent — I speak only a little Persian, and after 24 hours of being here, I have no local currency, no local mobile phone, and no Internet access. Plus, I have no idea what part of town that we’re in (I’m guessing the northwest corner, based on the sun), but from my bedroom window I can see some snow-capped hills that seem very close.
My father says that the walnut-producing village of Darakeh is just on the other side.
