Lipstick Jihad Read Online Free PDF

considered this an offering from God. Besides the fact that everyone knew he shunned religion, the sad, valiant garden seemed more a cause for sorrow than thanks. But seeing the world gently was how Agha Joon coped, and what protected his spirit from a change that had crushed stronger men. This is how he kept the shame of these new circumstances from eating away at him, as it did my grandmother. He ambled around the neighborhood, praised America for its vast malls, the quality of its television channels, the orderliness of its traffic.
Eventually he abandoned prose altogether, and began communicating exclusively in verse, remaining connected to us only by the vast stores of poetry in his memory. In each conversation he would dip into his reserves, and find a suitable line or couplet to voice his thoughts. When Maman and I bitterly fought over some new restriction, he refused to take sides. With eyes twinkling through his thick glasses, he would elusively repeat the verse reserved for our arguments—“with the way illuminated, why do you take the darker path? Go then, for you deserve the consequences!”—leaving it intentionally unclear to which of us it was directed.
    Only at rare moments did I suspect that Agha Joon was not entirely preoccupied with his flowers, but felt the sting of loss—on those days he would ask Maman to play Banaan, the classical Persian singer whose voice ached with melancholy. He would sit on the couch, pouring his tea into a saucer so it would cool more quickly, sipping it through the sugar cubes held between his teeth. He would sit like that for hours, as the tape played over and over. I would try to turn it down—my friends from school were calling to discuss field hockey, and lip gloss, and I didn’t want them to hear foreign wailing in the background. But Agha Joon’s hearing was starting to go, and he would look up with such desolate surprise that I quickly turned the volume back up.
    As detached as my grandfather was— dar alam-e khodesh, in his own world—or had managed to make himself, my grandmother was alert. My cousins and I stopped watching television in her presence, frustrated by her constant demand for translation. What are they saying, she would ask, even if she was in the kitchen, her hands stained with green juice, wrist-deep in colanders of minced herbs. To her mild irritation, Agha Joon was content to watch only animal world programs, whose stalking lions and hatching eggs rendered words irrelevant.
    Mornings, in the sunlight by the window, my grandmother sat me down to teach me a set of unfamiliar sounds— al-fatiha, the opening sura of the Koran. But how can God be good, if he invented Khomeini? I asked, trying to evade the lesson. I didn’t want to learn these unintelligible words; I already had my tap-dancing routine and piano scales to memorize. Khomeini has never done anything bad to me personally, she said. Well, duh, that’s because he didn’t know you, I replied, rolling my eyes.
    She always had a tin of French raspberry pastilles in her bag, and had
named all her children with names beginning with F. Like all Iranian grandmothers, she never called out the name of one per se, but a staccato string of all their names (Fariba, Ferial, Farzi, Fariborz) one of which would inevitably be correct. When we would set out together from the apartment, for the short walk to the grocery store, she slipped her hand into mine, and said, Asay-e dast-e mani, you are my hand’s cane. I felt this as both a privilege and a burden, knowing that I, barely in second grade, would have to defend her honor at the checkout line. Her acuity was a hundred times more painful for me, because I knew with dread that she felt every backward glance, was stung by every rude word from a pimply, ignorant teenager who only saw a strange old woman in a veil in the line at the grocery store, taking too long to fumble the bills out of her clasp purse,