Reading Lolita in Tehran_ A Memoir in Books - Azar Nafisi [131]
After the war, Islamic Jihad, the student association that Mr. Forsati belonged to, became more open, and also came into more open conflict with the members of the more conservative Muslim Students’ Association. Once the classes resumed, I began to see Mr. Forsati more often. Films were his passion, and he wanted to start a company related to videos and films. It was with his help that I managed to organize a series of cultural programs for the university at large. He was not very creative himself; his creativity went into a benign form of self-promotion and self-improvement.
At first it seemed to me as if gradually, like an old film’s fade-out, Mr. Ghomi disappeared from my life. He had not disappeared: he continued to come to class, and was no less virulent in his assaults against James and other novelists I taught. If anything, his resentment and anger grew, degenerating into almost childish outbursts. The difference was in the rest of us. Somehow we did not pay much attention to him anymore; when he talked, others answered back. He and his friends had to remind us daily that although Saddam was gone, the threat of the West, of imperialism, of the Zionists and their internal agents, had not vanished. Most of us were too tired even to respond.
In the next-to-last row on the window side, where Mr. Ghomi and Mr. Nahvi would sit, I find a quiet young man, an elementary school teacher. Let us call him Mr. Dori and move on. My glance hovers over Mr. Forsati, and Hamid, and then moves to the other side of the room, the girls’ side, past Mahshid, Nassrin and Sanaz. In the middle row, the seat on the aisle is occupied by Manna. I pause for a moment on Manna’s laughing face and then glance sideways towards the aisle—it is Nima that I seek.
As I shift from Manna to Nima and back, I remember the first time I saw them in my class. Their eyes were shining in unison, reminding me of my two children whenever they entered a conspiracy to make me happy. By now, more than a few interested outsiders audited my classes. They were former students who continued to come to classes long after they had graduated, students from other universities, young writers and strangers who simply drifted in. They had little access to discussions about English literature and were prepared to spend extra time for no academic credit to attend these classes. My only condition was that they should respect the rights of the regular students and refrain from discussion during class hours. When one morning I found Manna and Nima standing by my office door, both smiling and eager to audit my seminar on the novel, I agreed without much hesitation.
Gradually, the real protagonists in class came to be not my regular students, although I had no serious complaints against them, but these others, the outsiders, who came because of their commitment to the books we read.
Nima wanted me to be his dissertation adviser, because no one in the faculty at the University of Tehran knew Henry James. I had promised myself never to set foot again at the University of Tehran, a place filled with bitter and painful memories. Nima coaxed me in many different ways, and in the end he convinced me. After class, the three of us usually walked out together. Manna was the quiet one and Nima would weave me stories about the absurdities of our everyday life in the Islamic Republic.
Usually, he would walk beside me, and Manna would trail at a slightly slower pace by his side. He was tall and boyishly good-looking; not overweight but bulky, as if he had not yet