The Ministry of Guidance Invites You to Not Stay: An American Family in Iran by Hooman Majd Read Free Book Online Page A

check. Modest clothing and the obligatory manteau (a coat, of any fabric, that covers a woman’s behind and extends to the knees): check. Not shaking hands with and not embracing men (one of them a former president’s brother and someone who is carefully watched and monitored) in public: definitely no check. It would take time, I knew, for Karri to remember all the rules, and I suspected that she would never quite adjust.
    As I slowly put each heavy bag on a cart, two extra-large carts actually, and made my way to customs, I started to worry anew. Each bag had to be unloaded and pass through an X-ray machine—the equivalent of a lie detector for one’s luggage—and as I received the assistance of a young man whose sole job is to help with the oversize and overweight bags Iranians always seem to travel with, I watched my wife and son with my friends and family and wondered if this had been a big mistake. Was I incredibly irresponsible, as my friend Glenn had suggested, or was I just selfish? I was a new father at an advanced age; had I given enough thought to the well-being of my child? What if his mother got herself arrested by the morality squad tomorrow for some unintended infraction? What if I got myself arrested for sayingsomething not to the liking of one of the many authorities in charge of the national security of the Islamic Republic? Looking at Khash through the glass made me panic for a moment. Had my years of being childless made me completely ill suited to fatherhood?
    I had spent the first half century of my life—I’m not suggesting there will be a second half century—childless. It’s not that I was against having a child or children, although I did spend part of my youth clinging to the tired cliché that bringing yet another life into this shameful and overcrowded world was an act of supreme vanity at best and completely irresponsible at worst; it’s just that I never gave it too much thought. My friends had kids, some while in their thirties, others later; my siblings and cousins had children of their own, and I loved them all. I always enjoyed seeing them—really I did—and I could recognize the joy they brought to their parents’ lives. But somehow I didn’t see myself as someone who needed to experience that particular kind of joy. Having a baby is an act of selfishness, I thought when I wanted to rationalize my hesitancy, but of course it is simultaneously an act of supreme selflessness. I recognized that, too, but the idea of selflessness wasn’t enough to make me want to be a father. You can be selfless in other ways, perhaps even by contributing in some way to the part of mankind that’s already been born. Plus, as a perpetual worrier, I knew that worrying about mankind in general was probably a little easier on the nerves, having practiced it from an early age, than worrying about my very own little mankind.
    Once we had our son, all those ideas went out the window, and worrying about my child didn’t seem a big deal anymore; it was simply no longer something to actively contemplate. The worry is just there, accepted, a new constant, like breathing, involuntary and not worthy of thought, for the rest of one’s life. But here I was consciously worrying about my son, Khashayar, the guy with the cool name, according to one government official, who like all infants was just happy he had woken up to his parents still being around, and who seemed to also be happy with the attention my friend and familywere paying him, but who had no inkling of what his father might be subjecting him to. The idea of selfishness and selflessness crisscrossed my mind, and I was suddenly sure I’d be condemning myself later for depositing my family in a strange country where the rules of the West did not all apply.
    The water filters in our luggage, along with the baby food, the diapers, the medicines, and all the other personal belongings, passed the X-ray test with flying colors. The machine operator looked