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spirits—the people had resolved this was their first “spring in freedom.” But my family was lost and confused. We had a piece of land in Karaj near the palace of the Shah-Dokht Shams Pahlavi, bought from the private office of the princess, and we planned to build a new home there. My father believed this neighborhood would come to be much more convenient and fashionable than the desert where my cousin Omid lived. The first Tehran metro line would run right by our house—assuming that we were allowed to hold onto our land. But we had to wait and see how the Imam would decide our future.
    My extended family was split as their fortunes radically changed. Large quantities of money and property were being seized by the Revolutionary Courts.
    My father was a shareholder and director of the sales department at a dairy plant called Shir-e Pak, half of whose shares had been held by an American company. Those shares were taken over after the revolution by the Mustazafin Foundation. Many in the factory where my father worked had become revolutionaries and joined the Hezbollah and were keeping tabs on one other. At the factory, a new office of supervision had been instituted by the new government’s internal intelligence division, and the director, Agha-ye
Khabiri, a well-educated, competent, and respected man who was my uncle’s brother-in-law, had been dismissed and Agha-ye Mutlabi, who was the driver of the doogh vending truck, had been made the director of the factory. Agha-ye Mutlabi, a chubby man with an enormous gut who twirled a tasbih around his fingers and spoke Persian with difficulty through a heavy Turkish accent, had connections to relatives of Ali Khamene’i, an important revolutionary figure and close friend of Ayatollah Khomeini.
    Those who participated in the revolution were reaping the benefits, but we, like many others, were slowly losing grip on our wealth. My mother’s aunt Fakhri had her home repossessed for the crime that her husband had been Agha-ye Khan Malak Yazdi, the chief of the wealthy association, the Pious Department. In contrast, my maternal uncle Ali, by virtue of being with the Revolutionary Guard, ended up with a fine piece of land behind the Shah’s palace on Niyavaran in Shemiran, and brought his young wife, Iran-Dokht, to live there.
    He’d fallen in love with her a few years before, at the beginning of the revolution. He was fixing Mader-jan’s rooftop in Jamaran, when he spied a green-eyed fair-skinned girl visiting a neighbor. Fair skin is very unusual in Iran and considered highly attractive. My mother and Mader-jan refused at first to go and ask for her hand. She wasn’t Jamarani nor Tehrani, so she was a peasant to my mother. Finally the rest of “Jamaran” convinced them. At that time, it seemed everyone was related to each other in some way, so Iran-Dokht was literally marrying into the town, not just the family. The whole family followed tradition and went to propose to the northern people of Shahsavar. Everything was arranged quickly, maybe within a week, when usually even a fast wedding would take months (my sister’s would later take a year). Iran-Dokht’s step-mother immediately agreed to send this seventeen-year-old girl to marry—though she hadn’t even finished high school. Her parents
wholeheartedly gave their innocent daughter to one of the Imam’s guards. I liked her as soon as I saw her; she was so beautiful, and I pitied her for not having a mother. Her beauty charmed us, and our prejudices turned to sympathy as the Jamaran family opened their arms to her. At first Ali and Iran-Dokht moved into a small room in my mother’s cousin’s apartment. They didn’t mind the cramped conditions because they were so revolutionary. But then this attitude was rewarded with a splendid plot of land.
    In contrast, my aunt Turan, my father’s sister, was afraid to go out in her chic peach-colored