Reading Lolita in Tehran_ A Memoir in Books - Azar Nafisi [90]
5
The government didn’t take long to pass new regulations restricting women’s clothing in public and forcing us to wear either a chador or a long robe and scarf. Experience had proven that the only way these regulations would be heeded was if they were implemented by force. Because of women’s overwhelming objection to the laws, the government enforced the new rule first in the workplaces and later in shops, which were forbidden from transacting with unveiled women. Disobedience was punished by fines, up to seventy-six lashes and jail terms. Later, the government created the notorious morality squads: four armed men and women in white Toyota patrols, monitoring the streets, ensuring the enforcement of the laws.
As I try now to piece together the disjointed and incoherent events of that period, I notice how my growing sense that I was descending into an abyss or void was accompanied by two momentous events that happened simultaneously: the war and the loss of my teaching job. I had not realized how far the routines of one’s life create the illusion of stability. Now that I could not call myself a teacher, a writer, now that I could not wear what I would normally wear, walk in the streets to the beat of my own body, shout if I wanted to or pat a male colleague on the back on the spur of the moment, now that all this was illegal, I felt light and fictional, as if I were walking on air, as if I had been written into being and then erased in one quick swipe.
This new feeling of unreality led me to invent new games, survival games I would now call them. My constant obsession with the veil had made me buy a very wide black robe that covered me down to my ankles, with kimonolike sleeves, wide and long. I had gotten into the habit of withdrawing my hands into the sleeves and pretending that I had no hands. Gradually, I pretended that when I wore the robe, my whole body disappeared: my arms, breasts, stomach and legs melted and disappeared and what was left was a piece of cloth the shape of my body that moved here and there, guided by some invisible force.
The beginning of this game I can trace back quite specifically to the day I went to the Ministry of Higher Education with a friend who wanted to have her diploma validated. They searched us from head to foot and of the many sexual molestations I have had to suffer in my life, this was among the worst. The female guard told me to hold my hands up, up and up, she said, as she started to search me meticulously, going over every part of my body. She objected to the fact that I seemed to be wearing almost nothing under the robe. I explained to her that what I wore under my robe was none of her business. She took a tissue and told me to rub my cheeks clean of the muck I was wearing. I explained that I wore no muck. Then she took the tissue herself and rubbed it against my cheeks, and since she did not achieve the desired results, because I had not worn any makeup, as I had told her, she rubbed it even harder, until I thought she might be trying to rub my skin off.
My face was burning and I felt dirty—I felt like my whole body was a soiled, sweaty T-shirt that had to be cast off. That was when the idea of this game came to me: I decided to make my body invisible. The woman’s coarse hands were reverse X rays that left only the surface intact and made the inside invisible. By the time she had finished inspecting me, I had become as light as the wind, a fleshless, boneless being. The trick to this magic act was that in order to remain invisible, I had to refrain from coming into contact with other hard