Camelia by Camelia Entekhabifard

squat by the radio listening intently. But there were other ears at work in the dead of night, listening for the familiar music through cracked windows and doors, and suddenly shadows would fall on the walls of the courtyard.
    When we had parties, my father would check the street outside every half hour to make sure the Sisters of Zeinab and the brothers weren’t about to stage a raid on our house. My mother, my sister, and I would keep our head scarves and overcoats close to our chairs so we could put them on immediately if needed. The words “they’re here” would throw a party into disarray, as guests ran for the door. Anyone who’d been drinking would swish cologne around in their mouth, and women and men would quickly separate. But there was never enough time to get rid of corroborating evidence. The armed Pasdars would burst inside and the Sisters of Zeinab would round up the women before they could throw away the prohibited playing cards, alcohol, music cassettes, videotapes—anything that would boost the severity of charges in court. Family gatherings were routinely broken up, but it was especially bad if
mixed groups of young people were caught. Teens caught drinking were in some cases publicly flogged, and girls could be sent to the government hospital for verification of their virginity. Girls who failed the exam were forced into an engagement with whichever boy they’d been caught with. Anyone arrested could be kicked out of their high school or university, and for an extra measure of humiliation, the boys had their heads shaved to the scalp with an electric razor.
    It became obligatory for women to wear the hejab in the middle of 1981. Shopkeepers put signs in their windows that read, “We reserve the right to refuse service to women without hejab .” And menacing jeeps appeared roving around Tehran, monitoring public decency. My father would say, “If you touch your head scarves in front of them, you’ll catch their eye. Pretend you don’t see them when you’re in the street.” I called them “Tripods.” The Tripods was a series of science fiction novels— The White Mountains , The City of Gold and Lead , and The Pool of Fire . As a child and as a teenager, I must have read this trilogy a hundred times. Tripods were fearsome three-legged beings that would lay waste to Earth. In the books, these metallic overlords enslaved humans by putting caps on their heads that would make them instruments under the tripods’ control. These books inspired me during the gray years of Khomeini’s rule. I can still shut my eyes and lose myself in the story, as the hero, a fourteen-year-old boy, escapes and finds his way to other freedom fighters in the white mountains of the north. I’d put the book down on the couch and stare out the sitting-room window at the white Elburz Mountains to the north of Tehran, and I’d ask myself, “Are there freedom fighters waiting up there for me?”
    The official names for the Tripods would change over the years, but in essence they remained the same. The squads were first called Ya Sar-e Allah! , then their name changed to the Authority for the Detection and Prevention of Vice, then the Vice Squad, the Guidance,
and so forth. My mother tells me that today they’re called the Thunder. On the back of their jeeps, “4WD” was written for “four wheel drive,” but they’d say this stood for four slobs (W for velgard ) whose wives are sleeping around (D for dawyus ). Two armed Pasdars sat in the front of the jeep and two women in the backseat. One of the Pasdars was the driver, and the other was the guardian of the sisters. When men resisted arrest, the escorting brother would get to shine, dragging the captive into the car and kicking him in the process. In accordance with Islamic law, the sisters couldn’t lay their hands on an unrelated man.
    We rarely left home except for simple