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

despised even more than I had in New York for having lugged it across continents. He opened the back door, and I set it down on the seat, realizing then that there were no seat belts in the back to secure it.
    “Passengers don’t like the seat belts,” he explained, as Karri looked on with a horrified expression to which I was soon to be accustomed. “The clips dig into their backsides, so we stuff them under the seats.”
    I looked at Karri imploringly, but her expression was firm. It’s our first day , I thought, and I’m not going to disappoint her . “Yeah,” I said, “but we need them for the child seat.”
    He shrugged and opened the trunk, dug around for a few minutes under the backseat for the belts, and finally pulled them through the seat from inside the passenger compartment, sweating profusely and looking a bit unhappy. Seat belts are mandatory for front seat passengers in Iran, and most people wear them (I even got ticketed once for not wearing one), but the idea that one would fasten a seat belt in the back is completely alien, even if a baby is involved. In fact, although car seats are readily available in the shops—at twice the price of the same ones in Europe or America, too expensive for most Iranian families—I realized that I had never actually seen one in a car, and I also soon realized that Iranians carry their babies in their laps. The way everybody in the world did when I was growing up.
    “That’s not going to happen,” said Karri firmly, when I opined that car seats were impractical in Iran, unless we owned our own car, and that we might want to leave ours at home. I knew better than to argue, but I was also confident that after this first experience, Khash would be riding in our laps. And I was right. Iran is like that. It makes you adjust, quickly, no matter your life philosophy.
    The organic market turned out to be a complete bust, a small store that carried very little of anything, let alone anything genuinelyorganic, but after some prodding from Karri, I asked the driver if he knew where we could get sheep’s milk yogurt. I had promised her that all Iranians ate sheep’s milk cheese and yogurt, which by definition would be less hormone-and antibiotic-laden than cow’s milk equivalents, but having never before shopped for groceries in Iran, I had been wrong. Iranians used to eat sheep’s milk dairy products, but times had changed, and the bovine dairy industry had effectively promoted its products as safer, more sanitary, and “better” than the traditional ones. Even the famous Iranian feta cheese, a staple for many families, was now mostly hermetically packaged in plastic tubs and made from pasteurized cow’s milk rather than raw sheep’s milk.
    The driver, though, knew of a labaneeyat , a dairy shop, nearby, where sheep’s milk products might be available in season (which we discovered later is rather short and depends on the sheep’s natural cycles rather than on the demand of the market). Iran, despite its modern supermarkets and grocery stores, still has traditional shops such as butchers, dairy markets, and bakeries in every neighborhood, although they are rapidly decreasing in number. But the idea that we could get fresh yogurt from a specialty store appealed to Karri. Early spring is when the sheep-milking season begins (another fact I was previously ignorant of), so I was ecstatic to discover that indeed, large buckets of locally made sheep’s yogurt were available at the shop, and at a decent price, too.
    The yellow-tinged rim of fat on the lip made me hesitate for a moment, and I asked the shopkeeper if the yogurt was pasteurized. Laughing, he replied, “Yogurt is by definition pasteurized, or at least free of harmful bacteria. That’s the whole point of yogurt, isn’t it? It’s safe.” Of course, I thought, somewhat embarrassed. When we arrived home from our last trip in a taxi with a car seat, we all ate the yogurt except for Khosro, who refused to have