Lipstick Jihad Read Online Free PDF Page B

counting them out slowly.
    My grandmother cooked often, exclusively Persian food, and in that manner typical to immigrants, exerted some control over her transplanted life through purity of the palate. Since she refused to eat in restaurants, the kitchen became her domain, from whence she spun fantastically delicate custards and fluffy cakes. Katouzi, she would call out to my grandfather, come eat. And he would assume his usual place at the table, making his way through a heaping pile of my favorite dish, adas polo, fluffy rice with cinnamon, lentils, and raisins drizzled with saffron. Then he would remind us—as usual, in verse, with a couplet that says when the appetite dwindles, the end approaches—that at his prime, he could eat four times the amount of whatever he had just consumed, and drift into his bedroom for a nap.
    My mother modeled herself after Agha Joon, seeing only what she wanted to see, impervious to everything else. I was like my grandmother, proud, thin-skinned, sensitive to every backward glance. And so it was with us, as it was with them—a constant friction, a dismay with the other’s approach to the world. As Agha Joon planted his garden, enraptured by the petals and leaves, my grandmother ignored it icily, disdainful of its modest size, preferring not to have one at all. As my mother dragged me to operas, where we had to stand because seated tickets were too expensive, I fidgeted sullenly, mortified at being relegated to the serf quarters in the feudal system that was opera house seating. I’d rather stay home and rent a movie, I insisted, than endure that sort of humiliation. But she wouldn’t hear of it, and so we went, planted on our feet for hours on end, weekends in a row.

    The apartment complex was overrun with other Iranian exiles, and the shoved-up-against-each-other intimacy of condo life—to the chagrin of Khaleh Farzi, who lived with them—erased the social distinctions imposed in Tehran by neighborhood and district. There were Iranians we could associate with, adam hesabi (good families), and a slew of undesirables who I wasn’t sure whether I should say Salaam to. The bogey man of the émigrés was a man who I remember as Mr. Savaki. He had been an official in the SAVAK, the Shah’s brutal secret service, and he now spent endless hours by the pool, turning his body on the beach chair as though he was on a rotisserie. I didn’t know what savaki meant at the time—didn’t know it was a byword for torture—except that every grown-up’s face drew tight and grave when the word was uttered. When my cousins and I spotted his leathery, wrinkled body stretched out on a pool chair, we would stare briefly at the tattoo of the Shah’s face on his bicep, and then flee. On the days he would come by for tea, sitting with Agha Joon to enumerate the flaws of Ayatollah Khomeini, Khaleh Farzi would fume. Maman, I don’t understand why you let that man into our house, she complained to my grandmother.
    Perhaps the only person more offensive than Mr. Savaki was Mrs. Bazaari—a vulgar rug merchant who prowled the complex in search of adam hesabi to terrorize into having tea. We secretly thought she was pleased with the revolution, because her husband could stay in Tehran and sell rugs to the newly rich revolutionaries, while she attempted to social climb among the old guard abroad. Despite the fact that she was now working at Woolworth’s, Khaleh Farzi stood her ground; our transplanted circumstances might make us vulnerable to every sort of indignity, but nothing could force her to consort with bazaaris. Occasionally the cunning Mrs. Bazaari would find pretexts to gain a foothold in the house, kidnapping Agha Joon in the neighborhood, driving him home, and then claiming she had found him lost, wandering miles away. Khaleh Farzi would wordlessly serve her a cup of tea, in silent protest against the transgression.
    That we lived near