It occurred to me the other week in the sauna: if what I needed wasn’t in the archives, then why not simply manufacture the archive?
I shouldn’t have been there—here—in the first place, not in Mashhad and certainly not at the sauna. Possibly, the two offenses must be ranked in reverse—which is stupider, coming back to the Third World to move in with one’s mother after earning two Masters and a PhD from a first-rate, First World university? Or, willingly submerging oneself in a secretly open, currently unlicensed, room steamy with possibly poisonous breath in the thick of a global pandemic we can only hope time will dilute? I felt the sweat bubbling through my pores, getting caught in the long swaths of hair by my ears that are so black and abundant, so manly, that they can only be called sideburns. I’m here in the Third World, or the Global South, or whatever it is we’re supposed to call the place nowadays, because I have nowhere else to go.
“Lucky you, I’d love to tour Iran someday,” my colleagues used to say in the halting, academic English that I learned to parrot. “Me too,” I’d say, but the Americans always misunderstood me, thinking I meant that I was permanently exiled. “You can’t go back? How awful!” They were a people accustomed to letting their imaginations run free, why stop them. “I wouldn’t have thought your research was quite—weighty enough to be considered such a threat,” a man in my department once deigned to continue the conversation, an assistant professor, and the department’s only Iran specialist—that is, except for me, but I was still just a lowly, seventh-year graduate student, not a wunderkind who’d landed a tenure track job under thirty. Worse, I was a woman who researched the history of makeup, or rather, the long durée of bodily modification in the Persosphere, as my yet unfiled dissertation claimed. Between a Fulbright and his dissertation, this bright young man had spent years of his life circling the borders of our beloved country, digging his nose into the most obscure and useless archives. Ankara, Tashkent, he even went to Baku at some point—those poor Americans, they really do find themselves in the worst shitholes. Perhaps for good reason: what bureaucrat at the consulate will grant a visa to a blonde man from Minnesota who’s fluent in Farsi? It’s only natural to assume he’s a spy. How awful. I could see the pity in his eyes, as if he were staring into my drained coffee cup and seeing before him my future, my imagined impending airport arrest meticulously outlined in the crusty leftover grounds. (This was his favorite party trick, this blonde Minnesotan: falsifying our fortune readings after a round of Turkish coffee.) How awful, they all used to say. How awful. As if you needed to travel all the way to Iran for that sort of abuse—I supposed they’d never been stuck behind the poor souls coming back from Islamabad or Ramallah when standing in line at JFK. Flying through the citizens and green card holders’ line, they knew nothing of such hassles. They took it for granted, that navy passport with its embossed eagle that is so strangely un-regal, splayed flat like a bird on the butcher block in need of a good gutting, not to mention a proper pluck. “I’d love to tour Iran someday”—yes, my friend, me too, for by definition a tourist is not an Iranian; in such ill-fated cases as that, one cannot “tour Iran,” one merely comes home.
My groin was now wet through and through, the cold water from the freshly washed tiles mixing with the sweat oozing from my inner thighs. I made a note to take care to dry off later, though at this point a yeast infection was practically guaranteed. Wiping off the sweat that had gathered in my brows and lashes, I looked around the room at my compatriots. The woman sitting on the tiled bench directly opposite was leaning back with her eyes closed. Mascara streamed down her chubby cheeks. Didn’t she know that wearing makeup to the pool will clog your pores? The woman was about the same age and size as my mother. Like my mother, and indeed, all the rich middle-aged women in our city, she had at some point had her natural eyebrows permanently and expensively erased with a laser so that a second professional could then tattoo two razor-thin lines in their place. If it weren’t for those awful eyebrows, the old woman would have looked as pretty as Khorshid Khanum, would have been sunshine herself. As it was, in place of the single stroke of a thick, archetypically Persian unibrow hung two thin crescents that could neither wax nor wane, doomed to fade into oblivion.
Even the spaces between my toes were now slippery with sweat. How many minutes had it been? I looked at the smooth black face of my Apple Watch. Five. Just five? Enough to get a yeast infection at any rate; there was no turning back now. My own beloved mother had undergone the procedure twelve years ago—the brave woman is always at the vanguard of every beauty trend—not long after I went abroad. I didn’t witness the catastrophe she now called a face first-hand for some time, but she generously enclosed a photograph of herself in the card she sent me for Nouruz. My father was still alive at the time, and she, in turn, still bothered with housewifely pleasantries like holiday cards, preferably those printed with the smiling black face of Haji Firuz, which my racist mother has always considered the most festive of the variegated new years’ motifs. That was then. Soon after she’d simply shoot off a selfie on WhatsApp. And too soon after that—by which I mean eight or nine years, bringing us to the present—she can, in order to solicit my congratulations, simply barge into the extra bedroom in her apartment, which was never my bedroom, opening the door immediately after knocking, or sometimes, rather deftly, while she’s knocking, to find me lying on the bed with a lemonade, peacefully scrolling through Instagram in order to admire the ads for local designers,—what can I do but mumble the requisite “mubarak”? So it’s some months ago, on June 2, 2020, when I finally arrived after a daylong journey and too many hours lost to an inhospitable time difference, having stayed in America as long as I could, the evening of May 31st—I’d paid rent for all of May, so why not get what I paid for, as they say there, in America—only to have my mother shove her fake nails in my face as I struggled to force my eyes open from a nap, unsure whether it was the jetlag or the double-dosed extra-strength melatonin that weighed me down.
It was getting difficult to breathe. Now how many minutes? I checked my Apple Watch. Seven. If only I could get to fifteen minutes, last week’s record. I closed my eyes. It never failed to impress me, this feature of the Apple Watch: waterproof, just as advertised. I’d bought the gadget as a graduation gift to myself my penultimate year in America. I’d spent a great deal on it, indeed, a significant portion of the final installment of my stipend—too significant a portion, to be precise. What a waste. What’s there to celebrate in the end? That pretty man from Minnesota who pronounced the short kasra in “nah” as if a horse neighing—“na!” I corrected him time after time, hard stop, not “nay,” not “nāh,” this isn’t Urdu or the bro vernacular—that professor of Persian culture and civilization who couldn’t even pronounce the word “no,” would be a tenured Associate Professor in a year’s time, and here I was—here I am—living with my mother in Mashhad without a penny to my name, as they say, without a qiran of my own (the stipends in America are not much to speak of; one earns in dollars but also spends in dollars) stuck in the Third World because I had been unable to convince an American university, indeed, any American university, that my research was worth a green card sponsorship after the expiration of my F1 visa. Living not only in my mother’s apartment, but just above an apartment that had once been my own, but I sold to my brother, thus getting rid of my inheritance at market rate the day after the funeral—all too happily and naively, pissing away all my inheritance before my father’s body was cold, leaving my brother free to collapse whatever walls and ceilings were necessary so that he and his homely housewife and two children could now run amok in a sprawling duplex apartment as I slept in the extra bedroom in the unit upstairs, contemplating the day I thought I would never have use for an apartment in, of all places, Mashhad, an at best third-rate Third World city. What’s more, here I am: single, alone, in my mid-thirties, wasting away in, struggling to fend off wrinkles with laps in the pool and sweating in the sauna to prevent a few pimples, indeed, suffocating in the sauna to melt away a kilo at most (I’d settle for a portion), as a few kilometers across the seas, the dapper Assistant Professor toted his boyfriend from conference hotel to conference hotel, all paid for, cocktail party to cocktail party, pretending to read one’s fortune in the Turkish coffee he’d let burn on the stove before packing his thermos for a midnight unveiling, spinning no less than total bullshit, as they say, when what is truly bullshit, as they say, is the fact that I, a healthy, educated woman from what my fellow unfortunate Mashhadis would call a good and, frankly, rich family is single, whilst the pretty soon-to-be Associate Professor is in possession of both a penis and a boyfriend.
Opening my eyes, I pulled off my rubber cap and leaned forward. My hair didn’t fall forward with me; the curls I’d stuffed under my swim cap were drenched through, stuck to my skull like maggots in a potato. The eclipsed Khorshid Khanum was still there, leaning back, head against the cool tiles, eyes closed. What a way to wreck a face. You’d think a religious city like Mashhad could avoid just one or two of the asinine trends that swayed women back and forth, up and down, left and right in the capital, but no, instead the city that had served as a refuge to the sixth Imam had to follow those idiots’ dance to a tee, two steps behind. But thick eyebrows were back in, not only here or in Tehran, but in America. What will they do, all these hajj khanums that have made themselves up like clowns? My brave, beloved mother is considering her options.
With two hands I wicked the sweat from my face, desperate for some small comfort. I hadn’t rinsed them, and the gesture was sure to clog my pores. No matter. Ten minutes. Right on track. Beneath my fingertips the coarse hairs lay slick along my jawbone, from my ears to my chin. “Trim that beard, hajj agha!” my mother was wont to yell whenever she caught sight of me before her second cup of tea, on the off chance I woke up before noon. It was a good joke, not despite but because of its cruelty. Months had passed since she’d tricked me into getting my face threaded by asking for a ride to her hair appointment: “In this traffic,” she said as I pulled up to the salon, all too innocently, “you’ll have to turn right back to get me as soon as you’re home.” Never mind that taxis in this country are, as they say, a dime a dozen, but I was in a good mood. (More likely, just lonely.) I slumped into the sofa by the reception desk and made a show of checking my email on my iPhone—as if anyone across the seven seas has reason to contact me—when one of the girls called out, “I’m ready for you, Khanum Doctor.” She stood stationed by her white pleather salon chair, a spool of white thread in hand. “Khanum Doctor!” she repeated. I looked around—how many credentialed women could there be in a single salon on a weekday afternoon? “Khanum Doctor, please,” she gestured to the chair. Me? “Yes, you,” the girl had giggled. Oh no, not me, I don’t need to get any work done. Least of all on myself. My beloved mother had no choice but to rise from her pleather throne to fetch me. “They did me a huge favor, squeezing you in!” she threatened in a hoarse whisper while simultaneously pinching my fat through my manteau; in short I had no choice but to submit. Like my mother, the girl had fake nails. And like my mother’s, hers were filed into square edges, and emerald green. It was a sayyid’s green—was this some newfangled way of celebrating Eid-e Ghurban? Everyone knows you can’t pray with a full set of fake nails, it annuls your ablutions. A sacrilegious rite for a religious holiday seemed fitting: Mashhad is a pious city, after all.
The last time I’d been threaded was for my brother’s wedding, also by coercion, incidentally, and as a result, my skin was so sensitive that the tears wouldn’t stop. Every so often the girl’s fake nails clicked together as she worked the white thread across my face. It was a wonder she could do anything in those fake nails; they must have stretched what, three or four centimeters each, at least. Here was some girl without a high school diploma working magic with a kilogram of acrylic glued to her fingers, while I, Khanum Doctor, couldn’t stop crying from a few uprooted hairs. This girl who just forty or fifty years ago would have been completely illiterate—our country was at least developed enough that she, of course, was not—was making her own way in the world, and me? Me, a person who had gained admission to not one but two American PhD programs (the first one hadn’t been a good fit, as they say), obtaining no less than two Master’s and one PhD; a person who had given enough conference papers and received enough grants and taught enough courses and learned enough languages to fill out a five-page CV, who had honed and re-honed cover letters and dissertation abstracts and research statements and teaching statements and diversity statements and writing samples that totaled fifty pages-plus of job market materials—such a person, me, I was living with my mother, a ridiculous rich widow with tattoos for eyebrows who hadn’t cracked a book open since high school, with one single exception, the Qur’an, which she’d opened exactly once, at my father’s funeral. What’s more, I was certain that after this girl had successfully uprooted every last strand of hair on my face that didn’t grow in the thick of my eyebrows or the depth of my nostrils, my brave, beautiful, beloved mother would have the decency to pick up the check, as they say, without a peep, paying for the work that had been done on me as well as that done on her, the latter much more extensive than the former, and all from the allowance allotted from the profits reaped by my late father’s company for as long as she lived, as dictated by his will and executed by my brother, a percentage of profits that would after her own passing, God forbid, revert to my brother—my father’s primary heir—for how could he, my poor, late father, have predicted this, this shame, that as late as her mid-thirties his daughter, a highly educated daughter, no less, would remain unmarried and thus unprovided for? Click, the girl pulled the white thread. “So they haven’t discovered threading abroad,” she said, objecting to the difficulty of her work, undoubtedly, and not without reason. “Is that it, Khanum Doctor?” At least my mother had mentioned my doctorate to the women at the salon. This title was, as they say, all I had to show for it.
My lungs were heavy with water. I put a hand on my diaphragm and tried to breathe. Deep, deep into my belly. Breathe in, breathe out. Just like the instructor said at my mother’s semiweekly yoga class, which I’d started to attend religiously—if at first reluctantly—since coming back home. How long had I been melting in this hell? I checked my Apple Watch. Fifteen minutes. I’d made it. The Islamicized Khorshid Khanum was still cool as a cucumber, as they say. Now to push past fifteen. Her cheeks were black with mascara. She must have tried to wipe herself clean and it had only backfired. But those eyebrows! She really should consider her options. What were my options? I’d gone to America as an electrical engineer and come out—what, a humanist, I supposed, in other words, a scholar whose value runs a dime a dozen.
“Are you drunk?” my mother had screamed over the phone when I announced I was quitting the first PhD. “I’m so sorry, Baba jan,” my father had taken a conciliatory tone, as if I’d just said my dog died; in fact the beautiful old bitch was just fine (she didn’t croak until May 1st, a timely departure, considering I hadn’t found someone willing to take in a three-legged orphan from the pound). “Are you drunk—or just crazy?” In the end they weren’t wrong. I’d spent my youth’s beauty, my youth’s brains, in order to become a wrinkly old maid who was, according to one of those cruel ironies life affords us mortals, an expert in makeup. I can tell you the material history of kohl production across the Persian empire, periodized, but give me a bottle of liquid eyeliner and I’ll blind myself before managing a smooth line.
I stood up. “Careful, my daughter, you’ll faint,” the ruined Khorshid Khanum called without moving a centimeter. Evidently her eyes weren’t completely closed. She was right. I sat back down, and for a split second the tiles felt cool again. A fresh spurt of steam issued from the vent. How fresh was it, I thought? A month ago, when I was buzzed in in order to make my inquiries, I knew the receptionist was sure to lie when I asked how often they changed the filters—my countrymen are stingy and my city-men worse—and she knew that I knew she was lying when she responded every week, for we both knew that there was no way any Mashhadi paid to change the filters every week, and acting in this shared knowledge, I paid for a ten-session pass and she punched the card once to admit me, just as today, this afternoon, the same receptionist, or maybe another, had punched my card for the tenth time and thrown the used-up card in the waste basket. So here I was, in a wet sauna that may as well be my coffin, fighting wrinkles with the sweat of my hard-earned feminine suffering.
My breasts were two lumps of dough, slack, sticking to my ribs. In my last year of graduate school, they had begun to sag. Yes, they were right to balk, my poor parents. Even my widowed, tattooed mother was right, if for the wrong reasons. Americans, I learned over the course of a PhD in History, don’t care about history, period, as they say. Never mind that they also don’t believe in the idea of Islamic civilization. If only I’d taken an interest in our beloved mullahs’ Twitter feeds like that asshole from Minnesota, if only I’d come up with the “fresh” idea of using social media as an interpretative lens for the archives—then I’d not only have secured a tenure track job, but universities from California to Chattanooga would now be courting me with competing offers. Breathe in, breathe out. The archives had failed me. If only I’d found some sort of centuries-old makeup treatise or beauty rubric instead of getting stuck with those faded bazaar receipts and apothecary recipes and handling, with white gloves, all those damn combs and bronze kohl bottles. The archives had left me high and dry, as they say. What I needed, I’d learned in the hallowed halls of a historic department at a historic American university, was the predecessor to a YouTube tutorial on highlighting; what I needed was the beta version of a Buzzfeed quiz on skincare; what I needed was to make history hot. What I needed didn’t exist.
I checked my Apple Watch. Nineteen minutes. I could hardly believe it. But could I capitalize on the work I’d put in to squeeze out one last round of toxins? I vowed to stay one more minute, resting my elbows on my knees and my head in my hands. The hair on my face had long grown back to its natural state, that is, as black and thick as a man’s due to a genetic condition an of-course-not-American doctor in America had diagnosed, finally putting a name to the excessive hair growth that had plagued me since my girlhood—but I couldn’t stand to face the girl at the salon. I looked up. Khorshid Khanum was gone. My lungs were about to collapse under the weight of this toxic wet air, available to me due to the avarice of a handful of sick capitalists and corrupt officials. What ever happened to the public good? Even here in the Third World, neoliberalism was taking root.
I rose. Slowly, deliberately, I took the few short steps required to reach the sauna door. I opened it. The cool air cut through my lungs. It was then that it came to me. If what I needed wasn’t in the archives, then why not, as they say, rework the archives? To the Americans Iran was a blackhole; bona fide or fake, who’d know the difference? A little silicone never killed anyone, as they say.
