Outliving Iran: A Memoir (Part 2)
The significance of a car, dial-up, and tear gas
It was 5:00 p.m. on a Wednesday in May. The temperature outside had reached 110 degrees, and my mother arrived home from work drenched in sweat. She wore a maghnae—a baggy black garment, similar to a nun’s habit, tightly cinched around her face. It was the uniform of her progressive employer, a style virtually unseen in our part of town, and she was wearing it now because she had a car.
It was a secondhand 1976 Renault 5. It was a true museum exhibit, but without exaggeration, it was the best thing to ever happen to our family. It gave us a tremendous amount of freedom and mobility. The car lacked air conditioning, but it made hours of waiting in crowded bus stations under the desert sun a thing of the past. It took minutes to start, but it unlocked better job opportunities for my mother. It broke down often, but it made it possible for us to afford luxuries like a table, chairs, a television, and meat. It did not have functioning seatbelts, but it made going out much safer for my mother and me. Above all, it saved us money and humiliation by allowing us to drive to the bazaars instead of haggling with local grocers.
There is no telling how difficult it was to shop in our neighborhood. You walked in, picked up what you wanted, and asked the counter for prices.
“These onions?” a neanderthal-looking shopkeeper with an unkempt beard would ask, eyeing our clothes to calculate how much he could squeeze from us. “500 toman.”
“You know us, we live in the next alley. Hajji Abdullah’s family,” my mother would plead, only her eyes and nose visible, pointing at my bony figure hiding behind her chador. “We’re pious Muslims like you. God is witness we can’t afford 500. My child is hungry. Please, go lower. Give us a little discount.”
“400 toman for you, and I swear to my wife’s honor I can’t go any lower,” the grocer would reply.
The same onion was 50 toman at the bazaar.
My father would beat my mother when he heard how much she paid. “Why didn’t you haggle enough? You spineless good-for-nothing!” he would yell. But he didn’t understand. A woman was called a whore if she raised her voice. A woman had to wear heavy layers of hijab. A woman had to sit at the back of the bus. A woman received beatings from men. Her confidence and self-assertion were bled dry by a thousand tiny cuts, and shopkeepers weaponized that exhaustion to take advantage of them. The same dynamic applied to children.
In the bazaar, however, the price was the same for everyone. There was no haggling, and no discrimination. The society outside was still oppressive, but when it came to the business of the bazaar, every customer was an equal. For us, this was a profound quality-of-life improvement.
The bazaar had previously been too far away, but thanks to the car, my mother and I could drive there and bring home an entire week’s supply of food. It was hot and humid inside. The ‘Safa’ bazaar, where we usually went to shop, was filled with flies and smelled of spices, rotting fruit, and sweat. It was a single, continuous, crowded corridor illuminated by bright neon shop signs. Indistinguishable black figures in chadors shuffled past, swiping one another with the plastic bags they hid beneath their cloaks. Men sat on stools munching sunflower seeds, waiting for delivery trucks to arrive.
What might seem like a bleak environment to someone from a wealthier country was my absolute favorite place in the world. As a nine-year-old, I learned to talk to storekeepers, handle currency, trust adults, and bag groceries myself. It produced a transformation inside me. I could not allow myself to steal from the bazaar. It was my sacred wonderland. It was a place of endless possibility, where new products appeared behind shop windows daily. And it was here that I found something that changed my life.
My grandfather, who had recently returned from Saudi Arabia, had smuggled a brand-new television into the country for us. I was desperate to watch something on it. I thought about borrowing a CD from my aunt, but then I heard a cloaked man with a brown suitcase calling out: “Tapes. CDs. Music. Foreign movies. Cartoons.”
“Can we get a cartoon, please?” I meekly asked my mother.
“Why are you little devils always wasting my time?” she sighed. Then she turned to the man. “Sorry, sir, what’s your latest cartoon? Chef Rat? And how much?”
It was the equivalent of 20 cents. I begged her to buy it. “Mother, I promise I will eat less so you get the money back. It won’t cost you anything if you don’t have to buy food for me.” She relented.
I had watched enough domestic television to know the national channels had nothing to offer me. The airwaves in Iran belonged to the Supreme Leader. The state-owned channels broadcast austerely religious, locally produced programs. Non-Muslim countries were portrayed exclusively as cesspools of crime and vice. If a foreign film was ever shown, it was the most terrifying or depressing one available—images I couldn’t stomach as a child.
The movies found on smuggled discs and tapes were different. They were engaging and colorful. I knew this because my aunts watched them in secret. The suspicious-looking dealer discreetly produced two unmarked discs from his suitcase and scribbled on them: Chef Rat.
We drove home. I dashed inside, slid the disc into the player, and, with the infinite excitement of confronting the unknown, watched Ratatouille. I have watched many movies since and forgotten most of them, but Ratatouille has lived in my heart as vividly as it did that first day. Initially, I was simply mesmerized by the animation and the music. But as I watched it repeatedly, the core narrative crystallized: a boorish rat gets swept into a city, sneaks into a restaurant, and against all societal logic, becomes a successful, happy chef. I felt a deep kinship with the protagonist. It was clear the movie had a message specifically for me, even if I could not yet fully decipher it. The dialogue was in English, which was all Greek to me.
When I turned ten, my mother—who was working more reliably thanks to her car—was promoted to a full-time employee at her travel agency. She was ambitious. She wanted to open her own agency one day and needed the ability to book tickets from home. Recognizing that computers were becoming indispensable in her field, she emptied her savings to buy one.
I still remember the day she brought it home: a giant CRT monitor, a tower, a mouse, a keyboard, and two speakers. My mother, my aunts, my grandmother, and I unboxed it with reverence while my uncle connected the wires. We had no desk, so we crouched around the machine on the floor like it was a bonfire. We watched it boot up—a process that took five minutes. We were mesmerized when the Windows XP logo appeared, taking turns simply opening and closing random windows. My mother produced a floppy disk from work, installed her booking software, plugged the tower into the phone line, entered a code from a scratch card she’d bought at the grocer, and connected to dial-up internet.
In that moment, our humble household became perhaps the first in our part of town to connect to the World Wide Web. This computer, much like the car, was a flywheel. It unlocked a higher income for my mother and, ultimately, acted as the vehicle that brought me to the United States.
Because we had nothing to put the computer on, our backs ached constantly. Desks were still outside our budget, so we eventually bought an old table and a single wooden chair. Bill Gates’ vision of a computer on every desk came true in our home, but in reverse order: the PC arrived before the furniture.
Initially, I was forbidden from touching the machine. I couldn’t read English letters. “What if you unwittingly destroy my work?” my mother reasoned, and she was right. But my curiosity to understand Ratatouille, combined with the magnetic pull of the computer, forced my hand. I had to learn English. My mother had recently started taking English classes herself, so I followed her. I sat outside her classroom, straining to hear the teacher. I borrowed her ESL textbooks and meticulously copied the vocabulary onto sheets of paper.
I learned quickly, but my lexicon was bizarre. Armed with our massive physical dictionary, I learned every technical word I encountered on the operating system, yet I had no idea about ordinary words like “yesterday.”
Despite my informal language training and our dial-up connection, I had no concept of how vast the internet actually was. I used Yahoo Messenger strictly to text my mother while she was at the agency, and I clicked through the strange thumbnails from abroad on the Yahoo News homepage. I mechanically read through articles, laughing with glee whenever I successfully recognized a word.
The true scope of the web was revealed to me by my uncle Sadeq’s friend, Farshad. He had left Iran to study abroad and was visiting home. Going abroad had fundamentally altered him. He possessed a youthful optimism and lightheartedness I rarely saw in adults, or even in older children. When my parents mentioned my fascination with the computer, Farshad grew animated. Having seen the digital revolution elsewhere, he was incredibly bullish, predicting that the internet would eventually transform Iran.
“Already, some people in uptown Tehran spend more time on Facebook than watching the national TV,” he explained. “They talk about democracy and listen to American music. You see them and it’s hard to tell they’re not European. Boys and girls are even meeting each other on the internet.”
“Astaghfirullah! (I seek refuge in God!)” my grandfather exclaimed.
“What has the world come to?” my grandmother asked wearily.
“We may not always like it, but the world still changes,” Farshad replied smoothly.
After dinner, I approached him and asked to learn more.
“Do you have an email address?” he asked.
“Yes,” I replied proudly. “I created it myself. No help from anyone.”
“You’re already a man!” he laughed. “I’m teaching your uncle Sadeq how to use the internet. Give me your address, and I’ll copy you on the emails I send him.”
Every week, I received an email detailing a new website, explaining what it did and how to navigate it. He forwarded content from Iranian educational hubs, introducing me to Wikipedia, YouTube, and early science and technology blogs. At the time, there was immense fear surrounding the internet. People thought it caused brain damage, that its signals induced infertility, or that it turns youth into Satan-worshippers. My family, particularly my father, heavily surveilled my screen time, terrified the web would “westoxify” me. Farshad likely understood their sensitivity, so he never forwarded cultural material—no music, no movies, no images of unveiled women. He sent nothing my parents could deem un-Islamic.
Gradually, my parents’ fears subsided. Farshad instilled a love for science and technology in me that endures to this day, and I remain forever grateful to him. Every afternoon, I would return from elementary school, excitedly press the large silver power button, and immerse myself in the digital world. In the computer world, I was in control. The disparity between the grinding poverty and oppression of my physical surroundings and the pristine, logical world of the internet was immense. Consequently, I lost interest in the theft and vandalism that had so soothed me. The behavioral problems that had appeared after that long hospitalization faded away. My parents, despite their initial objections to me “staring at a screen all day,” accepted the compromise. They preferred me sitting quietly at our makeshift desk over stealing, vandalizing, and throwing fits.
Then came the infamous 2008 presidential election. I was too young to have any concept of politics, but the noise was too loud to ignore. Everyone talked about it with a strong opinion, even my elementary school classmates. The poor and strictly religious working class backed Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the conservative populist. The more educated, reform-minded citizens rallied behind Mir-Hossein Mousavi.
My parents leaned toward Mousavi. Despite our poverty and their deep religiosity, they were college-educated and sought to reconcile Islam with the 21st century. They followed pseudo-modern clerics outside the regime’s hardline establishment, seeking a more tolerant and loose interpretation of their faith.
Our slum was extremely pro-Ahmadinejad, but Mousavi’s supporters were highly visible across the city. They knocked on doors, distributed pamphlets, wore green wristbands, and hung massive banners. Judging by the sheer volume of their supporters’ energy, it felt certain the moderate candidate would win.
When the election concluded, the adults around me gasped in shock as state television declared Ahmadinejad the landslide victor. Everywhere I went—from our home to the schoolyard to the bazaar — it was said that the election had been stolen. Protests erupted in the city.
I remained largely insulated from the political reality until the day my mother and I unwittingly drove straight into a demonstration on our way home. Rows of men in anti-riot gear marched through the streets, beating people indiscriminately. A baton smashed against my mother’s windshield. I was terrified, but I forced myself not to cry, knowing it would only panic her further. Then, a sharp, chemical sting bit into my lungs. I began to cough violently as thick white smoke rose in front of us. It was tear gas.
Some in the surrounding cars abandoned their vehicles and fled on foot. But my mother couldn’t risk losing her car, nor could she sprint through a cloud of gas with a ten-year-old. She pulled her chador tightly over her nose, drove the car over the curb onto the wrong side of the road, and leaned on the horn, speeding away from the chaos. As soon as we were safely out of range, she pulled over, washed my burning face with a water bottle, and pulled me in tight.
“It’s okay to cry,” she told me. “It will help your eyes.” We sat there in the car, held each other and wept.
Iran descended into mayhem. Broken shop windows, graffiti, and daily clashes became the new normal. Overnight, sentiments that had previously been tolerated became dangerous to whisper. The moderate clerics and Islamic intellectuals whose lectures my parents attended were imprisoned or forced into exile. The vibrant downtown streets emptied out, replaced by a suffocating, omnipresent police force.
Through it all, Farshad continued to email us the news. It was attached to one of his emails. The video clip of Neda Agha-Soltan, a young violinist, being shot in the chest by government forces while walking home. I watched the blood spurt from her nostrils and pool across her face. I was ten years old—far too young to fully process the footage. But as I sat in front of the glowing CRT monitor, I felt a deep, visceral certainty that something was deeply wrong with the country I called home.
(to be continued in Part 3)