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

bored as he glanced at the see-through bags on his screen, and I wondered what he was looking for, if not strange-shaped charcoal filters and plastic packages filled with gooey substances. Alcohol? Subversive literature? I had magazines, as I always do, in my carry-on, along with my laptop, and Karri’s Kindle had books loaded on it, so that couldn’t be it. Alcohol, although banned in Iran, is readily available everywhere, so I couldn’t imagine anyone bothering to smuggle in a few bottles of booze. It remained a mystery to me what exactly would trigger suspicion at customs—except for weapons, of course—if not a solo man with six heavy suitcases and three carry-ons.
    It was fortunate, in the end, that both Khosro and Ali Khatami had come to the airport. I had known Khosro was coming (we were going to be staying with him at his house until we found our own apartment), since he had insisted that with all our luggage we’d need the use of his truck. But not even his vintage Nissan Patrol could accommodate everything, so we split our belongings between his truck and Ali’s SUV and headed to town. I sat in the passenger seat of Ali’s car, with Khash, Karri, and Ali’s daughter Nasseem in the back, while Khosro and his sometime employee Ali Amreekayee (Ali the American, known for his love of all things United States) rode in Khosro’s truck with most of our luggage.
    We approached the city on a clear moonlit spring night, speeding through empty streets, passing through tunnels, on and off overpasses and the highways that ringed and bisected Tehran. Garish neon lights everywhere illuminated fluttering flags on every bridge.With twinkling lights extending as far as the eye could see, I turned to ask Karri how she felt, now that she was finally in the country she had heard and read so much about. “I feel like I’m in a cartoon,” she said. A cartoon? It was alien, yes, with the fancifully colored lights, the flags, the strange writing everywhere, and that’s what Karri, ever the visually oriented person, meant. But Iran, the country I was born in, a country I always thought of as sophisticated, cultured, and my home, reduced to a cartoon on first impression? Yes , I thought, but that won’t last very long .
    International flights from Europe arrive in Iran in the early hours of the morning, usually between midnight and six, ostensibly for security reasons, but I’ve always thought it was to spare poor travelers from having to spend as long in Tehran daytime traffic as they did on the flight over. We breezed into town in the middle of the night, and perhaps what made the place seem cartoonish, beyond the goofy and garish neon colors or the alien alphabet on the billboards, was the speed with which we made turns, crossing one highway after the next and ending up on a narrow street in the middle of the city.
    We were at Khosro’s house a good fifteen minutes before he made it back, his vintage Nissan no match for Ali’s late-model Toyota SUV. I had a key, and we went into the house, slowly carrying each overweight suitcase up a flight of stairs to the private apartment Khosro had set aside for us. Karri seemed relieved that we were in a comfortable home, but at the same time she was looking around for every possible danger to Khash—first the stairs, then the wall sockets, and finally every piece of furniture, especially the glass-topped tables. But it was time to put Khash, whose sleep had been interrupted by our arrival at the airport, to bed, so I left Karri to that thankless task and went downstairs to chat with Ali and Khosro, who had just arrived.
    “So,” both of them said, almost simultaneously, “you’re here!”
    Yes, we were in Iran, and while they expressed it in a happy, pleasant, and welcoming way, I panicked for a moment. Now what? I wondered. How would I even begin to organize our life in Tehran? Onmy previous trips, sitting with Khosro in his living room after I had arrived from the airport had