new experiences.
Not too new. Bita is wearing her headscarf. She’s careful not to put out her hand to shake Mr Zarif’s. She helps Mrs Zarif get out of her black chador for outdoors, and into her colourful indoor chador. Mr and Mrs Zarif look around for indoor slippers to put on. But we don’t ask people to take off their shoes when they enter our house. There aren’t any slippers available. Mr and Mrs Zarif take off their shoes and walk on in their socks.
‘What a house!’ they both say it at the same time. They look at Bita. (She’s the interior designer.)
The hall is burgundy. (My father-in-law says it looks like a nightclub.) There is a batik wall hanging depicting the Hindu goddess Durga, wearing a necklace of human skulls.
The sitting room is two shades of tangerine. There’s a picture of a woman in a bright red dress and a challenging stare, standing next to an androgyne with diaphanous blue skin and yellow hair. There are red-backed chairs and an Indian sari turned into curtains, and a dark green sofa from the 1940s, and a green tribal tunic with red paisley lining put in a frame and attached to the wall. The bolsters are richly coloured and patterned. There are riotous Baktiari carpets, Armenian rugs.
Mr Zarif is wearing a grey shirt, and grey trousers, and white socks. His house has white walls.
As we sit down to eat, I wonder whether he ever threw acid in the face of a girl who had red on her lips, or hair escaping from her headscarf.
[*] ‘You should know about ta’aruf In Arabic ta’aruf means behaviour that is appropriate and customary; in Iran, it has been corrupted and denotes ceremonial insincerity. Not in a pejorative sense; Iran is the only country I know where hypocrisy is prized as a social and commercial skill.
Three examples:
When the taxi driver offered us tea and cigarettes, and we refused, this was ta’aruf. He had no intention of giving us tea and cigarettes, and we reacted accordingly. A man may propose that his son marry the daughter of his impoverished younger brother without having any intention of permitting the match; the son is already engaged to the daughter of an ayatollah, and the brother’s daughter is a repulsive dwarf. But the quintessence of ta’aruf can be found in the behaviour of a mullah I once observed entering a Tehran hospital in the company of several other men. As the mullah crossed the threshold, he said to the men waiting behind him, ‘After you.’
If, through some mistake or misunderstanding, an offer extended through ta’aruf is accepted, it will be retroactively countermanded. I remember reading somewhere of a foreigner who was arrested for theft after being denounced by a shopkeeper who had repeatedly refused to take his money.
[*] I have a book, Celebration at Persepolis, that commemorates this party, which was held in celebration of what the Shah arbitrarily judged to be the two thousand five hundredth anniversary of continuous Iranian monarchy. The book relates that some sixty tents the size of villas, designed by a Parisian firm in beige and royal blue, were erected to house the guests, and that a hatter was on hand should one of the guests squash his topper. Haile Selassie brought with him a Chihuahua wearing a diamond-studded collar. A breakfast of raw camel meat was made available for the Arab emirs. The dinner menu included quail eggs stuffed with Caspian caviar, saddle of lamb with truffles and roast peacock stuffed with foie gras. The vin d’honneur was Château Lafite Rothschild 1945. Representing the Vatican, I learned, was Cardinal Maximilian de Furstenberg, a relation of my Belgian grandmother’s. Although he was only a few years older than her, my grandmother always referred to him as Uncle Max, possibly because he worked for the Pope.
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