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My mother’s unveiled hair was illegal under Islamic law. I knew that her halfhearted obeying of the Revolutionary Guards’ order was her attempt at defiance. She was telling them that while they might be able to control her body, they could never control her mind. The Guards rightly thought of my mother and me as parts of the “other Iran,” those citizens who did not want to be the subjects of an Islamic ruler and would have preferred to determine our own destinies.

“I am eighty-three years old. Why should I put on my scarf?”

My mother’s name is Molook. Growing up, we called her Molook joon, which in Persian means “dear Molook.” Because my older brother, Babak, couldn’t pronounce the k, he called her Moloojoon. The name stuck, and it was this name I used as I called out to her, doing my best to keep my voice from trembling: “Please, Moloojoon. Don’t argue with them.”

I heard her quick steps, and a few moments later she walked past my room, a blue floral scarf covering just half of her hair.

“Fine,” I heard her say with polite disdain.

My room had a large bookshelf full of Western novels and music, with volumes signed by prominent Iranian reformists on one side and HBO DVD box sets and copies of Vanity Fair, The New Yorker, and Newsweek stacked sloppily on the other. It was surely foreign territory to Rosewater. He continued to thumb through my papers and books, despite the look of obvious bewilderment on his face.

I sat on the bed watching him until, a while later, he told me I could go to the kitchen and eat breakfast while they continued to search my room. In the kitchen, my mother poured me a cup of tea and placed a few dates on a small china saucer. She then took a seat across from me at the breakfast table and silently pushed the dates toward me. “Bokhor,” she said with a smile—“Have some”—hoping, I knew, to assure me that I would find the strength to survive this ordeal, whatever was to come.

I was humbled by her courage, though it didn’t surprise me. My mother’s strength has been a source of inspiration throughout my life. But I felt guilty as I thought about how painful it would be for her to watch yet another member of her family being carted off to prison for defying an Iranian regime.

· · ·

It had been December 1954 when they came for my father. At the time, Iran was ruled by the shah, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, a pro-Western autocrat. Of course, my mother didn’t like to speak of the experience—of what it was like for her on that cold winter night when the shah’s secret police and soldiers of the Royal Iranian Army raided their house. She was twenty-nine and my father twenty-seven, and they had been married for just two years. They lived in my mother’s family home in the Sangalaj neighborhood of south Tehran with their first child, my older brother, Babak, who was then only ten months old, and two of my aunts. I was told that while my father’s future interrogator, a thuggish man named Rezvani, insulted my father in front of his wife, child, and sisters-in-law, the soldiers ransacked the house, taking whatever they wanted for themselves. “They even went through your father’s clothes,” my mother remembered with her unfaltering sense of humor. “I caught one of them stealing some of his underwear.”

For many years, my father had been a member of the Tudeh Party, the communist party of Iran. The party had been banned a few years earlier, after one of its members had been accused of an assassination attempt against the shah. But my father had continued his party work, organizing strikes and demonstrations against the government on behalf of the Union of Metal Workers of Iran, and finding hideouts for persecuted party leaders. After being held for many months, during which he endured solitary confinement and torture, he was charged with belonging to a treasonous organization and sentenced to fifteen years in prison.

Each week of my father’s incarceration, my mother carried my brother, Babak, to one of two prisons, Ghezel Qal’eh or Qasr, and waited outside for hours to find