The Ministry of Guidance Invites You to Not Stay: An American Family in Iran by Hooman Majd Page A

build a cheap but modern scooter?
    Karri remarked on the cacophony the moment we woke up.“What’s with all the motorbikes? It’s worse than in India.” She had spent months at a time in Mysore studying Ashtanga yoga, which she teaches in New York while also designing and manufacturing her own active-wear clothing line. In fact, she always rented a scooter herself in India as her sole means of transportation. “It’s only like this in this neighborhood,” I assured her, “and we’ll find an apartment where you won’t hear a single bike.” But it was the pollution that seemed to affect her most. Her throat was already itchy, she complained, and it was only her first day. Khash, in his new pajamas, was black from the soot that settles on the floors within minutes of mopping them. And Khosro obsessively mops every day, sometimes twice. I hadn’t noticed that in my previous trips, having not ever gotten down on all fours, and it suddenly gave me a new appreciation for the plastic slippers that Iranians wear indoors. Karri was terrified by the amount of dust and soot Khash was collecting—just as much was entering his lungs, she said—and by his cheerful attempts to pull at every electrical cord and glass object on any table within his tiny grasp.
    “My throat is swelled up,” Karri announced for the second time, as we drank Nescafé, the coffee of choice in Iranian households, where tea is taken far more seriously. Even top hotels in Iran proudly serve Nescafé, I had warned Karri—almost certainly a remnant of the days when instant coffee was viewed as a miracle of modern science—but we’d be able to get good coffee at the numerous coffee shops that have sprung up around the capital in recent years, like the Starbucks knockoff Raees Coffee, which has a litigation-worthy logo and actually serves Starbucks coffee beans imported by individuals in suitcases (as do other coffee shops).
    “Your throat?” I asked. “Do you think you caught a bug on the plane?”
    “No!” she cried. “It’s all the pollution.”
    “And this is the good time of year,” I said. “Just wait until winter. But we’ll be in a part of the city that’s less polluted, I promise.”
    The noise from the traffic outside was now compounded by the screams and cries of hundreds of little boys playing in the courtyard of the kindergarten and elementary school, Payam Ghadir, across the street, waiting for class to begin. Payam Ghadir is a highly regarded and expensive institution, academically rigorous, but because of its religious leanings and its location, it mostly serves the sons of the wealthy religious classes, including a good number of mullahs, some of whom drop their kids off and collect them personally, highly conspicuous in their priestly garb to any Westerner and an exotic first sight for Karri. Incessant traffic noise, screaming schoolchildren, pollution, and dust, dust everywhere: this is the bristling metropolis on any given day, and it’s a less-than-pleasant welcome for visitors from afar.
    On that very first morning in Tehran, and well before we had become accustomed to the vagaries of Iranian traffic, Karri decided we needed to get a car to take us to a market she had found on the Web, a market that supposedly carried organic products, which she was desperate to prove existed in Iran. “Organic?” Khosro had said questioningly. “Everything is organic here. Nobody wants to spend the money on pesticides or stuff like that! It’s cheaper to let half the crop go bad than to spray it with chemicals.” He was half right—some produce, particularly from smaller farms, is indeed “organic,” or close enough. But Iranian farmers do also use pesticides, probably some that are banned in the West.
    The efficient local car service, Safi Cars, sent a car around right away, a small Iranian-made Kia Pride, and I noticed the dismay on the driver’s face when I walked out of the house carrying a car seat,an object I now