Free Lipstick Jihad by Azadeh Moaveni Page B

Jersey. During the first year that my uncle had floated the idea of relocating, she would only say—in a nod to my grandfather’s refuge in poetry—“I will only move to places that rhyme with Tehran, such as Milan.” This awkward relationship with reality also characterized her life in Iran, where she spent most of her time reminding us all that “this is not a country, it is hell.”
    She thought if left to my own devices, I might forget we lived under an Islamic regime and stride outside in a tube top. Are your ankles covered? Elbows? Khaleh Farzi would call out a checklist of body parts from wherever she was in the house, as I headed for the door.
    Mercifully, by the time I began living in Iran, the Khatami spring had
made it possible to wear roopoosh (a long, loose coat also called by the French term manteau ) that did not make one look like a great-aunt. Just one year before, going outside had meant draping oneself in banal and anonymous folds of cloth. Every morning, getting dressed had involved a me vs. the regime calculus. Shall I look remotely like myself, or shall I pass through all this unpleasantness as a ghost, invisible in a wash of grey or black? One’s relationship to the veil had been a truly existential question: How important is it to be myself, to have my outside reflect my identity? When faced with this choice, only the true radicals and street warriors chose to flout the dress code. Because it was a fight, they applied war-paint—coats and coats of makeup—and aggressively risqué clothes. But ordinary women who just wanted to go to work, rather than be Rosa Parks through their choice of dress, simply accepted the erasure of their personality through the roopoosh uniform.
    But by 2000, a roopoosh as concealing as the chador, the billowing, all-encompassing black tent that only very traditional women and government employees wore, was no longer required apparel. The middle part of the spectrum—between washed-out ghosts and angrily painted peacocks—had grown. The stark contrast between how one looked in public and private faded. Isn’t it lovely, I said to Khaleh Farzi happily, we don’t look like crows anymore. Come on, she replied, running her fingers over the rainbow of colors in her drawer, it’s just a prettier cage. Like so many small freedoms that Iranians began experiencing that year, it registered as miraculous progress for about ten minutes, and then was deemed no progress at all.
    Still, once the costs of disobeying the regime were reduced, people began steadily pushing the limits. My great-aunt, who had no patience in her dotage for purchasing something that would be confiscated the next day, went out and bought a banned satellite dish. We stopped carrying socks in our purse, reasonably sure we could bare our toes in sandals without hassle. My uncle stopped watching basketball on satellite television each and every night, and began reading the newspapers instead, stopping every ten minutes to read aloud a particularly amusing criticism of the ruling clergy. The changes were modest, and no one pretended they were nearly enough or nearly secure; but they made life, compared to the gloomy years of pre-Khatami privation, infinitely more livable.
    My family in Iran still amuse themselves telling stories about the first
weeks I moved to Tehran, in the early months of 2000. My patience for this humor is limited, because in the end, no one who feels imbued with serious purpose enjoys being mocked for verbal slips, such as confusing the Farsi words for “speech” and “cabbage,” which were unhelpfully distinguished only by a twist of a vowel. But there was such an entertainment deficit in Iran that the bumbling first steps of a newly returned relative offered a welcome distraction from the dulling routine of daily life. I was like a running sitcom played for their amusement, Azadeh in Ayatollahland: Watch her accidentally