Reading Lolita in Tehran_ A Memoir in Books - Azar Nafisi [37]
That night, as my husband and I were drinking tea at yet another meeting convened at our neighbor’s house, the children, intrigued by the events of the day, decided to inspect all the scenes of the skirmish. In the process, they discovered in the toolshed a small tape recorder in the arrested man’s black leather jacket, which he had hidden there. We were law-abiding citizens and, after listening to an incomprehensible conversation about some trucks, we handed the tape recorder and the jacket over to the Committee, despite passionate protests from the children.
This story was repeated many times, including the following Thursday, when Tahereh Khanoom and my children, who had by then lost their shy curiosity—and with it the necessary decorum to keep them off the premises during my class—re-enacted the scene to an eager and smiling audience. It was interesting to see that “they,” the Committee men, were so helpless, so bungling and unprofessional. As Yassi pointed out, we had seen better action movies. Still, it was no consolation to learn that our lives were in the hands of bungling fools. Despite all the jokes and the power we felt then, the house became a little less secure after that, and for a long time we were startled by the sound of the doorbell.
In fact, the bell became like a warning from that other world we had tried to turn into a joke. It was only a few months later when the sound of another bell brought two more Committee members to our house. They were there to raid our house and to take our satellite dish away. This time there were no heroics: when they left, our house was in semi-mourning. My daughter, in response to my admonition about her spoiled attitude, asked me with bitter disdain how I could possibly understand her affliction. When I was her age, she said, was I punished for wearing colored shoelaces, for running in the school yard, for licking ice cream in public?
All this was discussed in my class the following Thursday, in detail. Again we skipped back and forth between our lives and novels: was it surprising that we so appreciated Invitation to a Beheading? We were all victims of the arbitrary nature of a totalitarian regime that constantly intruded into the most private corners of our lives and imposed its relentless fictions on us. Was this rule the rule of Islam? What memories were we creating for our children? This constant assault, this persistent lack of kindness, was what frightened me most.
20
A few months earlier, Manna and Nima had come to me for advice. They had saved some money and had to choose between buying some “necessities of life,” as they put it, or a satellite dish. They had very little money and they had saved what little they had from private tutoring. After four years of marriage, like many other young couples, they could not afford to live on their own. They lived with Manna’s mother and younger sister. I don’t remember what advice I gave them that day, but I know that shortly afterward they bought a satellite dish. They were euphoric about their satellite dish, and every day after that I would hear about a new American classic they had watched the night before.
Satellite dishes were becoming the rage all over Iran. It was not merely people like me, or the educated classes, who craved them. Tahereh Khanoom informed us that in the poorer, more religious sections of Tehran, the family with a dish would rent out certain programs to their neighbors. I remember that when I was on a visit to the United States in 1996, David Hasselhoff, the star of Baywatch, bragged that his show was the most popular show in Iran.
Manna and Nima were never, strictly speaking, my students. Both were working towards their master’s degree in English literature at the University of Tehran. They had read my articles and had heard