To get to the Abadan Bazaar that August morning in 1976, we had to leave our quiet green-hedged neighborhood of the National Iranian Oil Company, and travel across town. From the front passenger seat of Moman's light blue VW bug, I could see across the wide Arvand River, all the way to Iraq. On our side, the modern road snaked along the sparkling waterway, away from the refinery towers belching the nation's wealth into a cloudless sky, away from the sedate British-era residential complexes that now housed the more privileged families like ours. On the other side of the river, dense forests of date-palms stretched out to a green horizon. In the light breeze off the calm waters, wispy fronds barely moved.Whenever we passed this way, my teenage mind wondered how all of those palms, so nearby, could be in a different country. And even though we never crossed to the other side, as we neared the bazaar a feeling grew in me that I was about to enter a different land.The streets were filled with cars, honking, exuding fumes. People in a hurry went in and out of shops and offices. Outside the entrance to the bazaar the hive came to a boil with humans spilling every which way. Anything could happen in this fantastic chaos. It was all so different from the quiet wide streets of our suburban neighborhood, Braim, where summer afternoon bike rides with friends were only interrupted by the predictable—an occasional car slowly driven by someone's mother who waved at us and smiled reassuringly.Going to the bazaar meant you had to pick up your pace, physically bump into strangers, and get down to the business of shopping. Moman enjoyed all of it. The mayhem, the haggling, the inviting smells of roasted meat and Indian samosas, the air spicy with fenugreek, cinnamon, and saffron.Baba, on the other hand, preferred to stay home on his one day off from the Oil Company Hospital and soak in the tub. “My dear duck,” morghabi, Moman teased him affectionately. Submerged chin-deep in water was the way my father forgot his worries, whether they were from his work week running the hospital, or how he and Moman had to constantly watch what they said about the King, to avoid trouble with the ever-present SAVAK—the Shah's intelligence service. The last thing Baba wanted to add to his preoccupations was the hustle of back-to-school shopping with his 14-year-old royalist daughter.Moman found a tiny parking spot and squeezed in the VW, like she had always lived on this side of town. As we walked beneath the arched entrance into the bazaar, my mother purposefully clutched her list and led the way. To get to the booksellers we passed through my favorite area, the food section. The smell of shawarma, this wonderful Arabic food known to us because of our proximity to the border, made me stop. The thick cylinder of glistening meat slowly rotated on an electric skewer. A waft of its savory fried aroma made me hungry, even though it was only mid-morning. I watched the vender slice off pieces dripping with beef juices mixed with oil. Moman noticed me staring.“You know what your father says. No outside food. Especially meat. You can get food poisoning. And look at all those flies!” My biased eyes only saw a couple of small flies buzzing around the meat, but I knew my health-conscious doctor-parents would not bend on this rule. They could see dangers that were invisible to me.We walked on. Who needed shawarmas, I consoled myself, when new books and pens were to be had? We turned down an alley strung with naked lightbulbs, where textbooks and school supplies were sold. My mother kept looking at the address scribbled on her list and went past several shops before we finally stopped at one. The front of this ordinary-looking store was taken up by a long glass case. In it were displayed drawing pads with thick paper, watercolor sets, fountain pens of the kind I had just received for my birthday, and bottles of ink in black and blue. To me, it was like all the other bookshops we had just passed.What I did not know then was that certain places in the bazaar, like this shop, carried smuggled speeches by an exiled ayatollah. This man dared to criticize the Shah and his dictatorship. His talks were popular among diverse groups, from intellectuals, liberals and lefties, to devout Moslems. My mother, a closeted leftie since her medical student days in the early 1950s—when she had met my father—somehow knew exactly where to stop.The walls were floor to ceiling textbooks, arranged by educational stage, Ebtedaee, Nazari, Rahnamaee. “Beginnings,” “Outlook,” and “Guidance” were the names for Iran's elementary, middle, and high schools under the Shah. Printed in each textbook before the title page was a black-and-white photo of the King. His serious eyes peered out from beneath bushy eyebrows.Like all good students, I had absorbed all the contents approved by the ministry of education every year and admired the King without question. My parents, despite what they secretly thought of the Shah, never criticized him in front of me. They did not want their daughter to one day grow into an anti-regime university student, in trouble with the SAVAK. Still they could not help themselves. They bought and brought home books. Books with hidden and not so hidden narratives of societal justice. As a result, I had read Hans Christian Andersen, Charlotte Brontë, and Mark Twain, and knew about mean Danish ice queens, cruel British schoolmistresses, and American slavery, but was ignorant about the Iranian King, beyond what was in the state-controlled media, and in our textbooks.The shopkeeper approached, eyed me briefly, then addressed my mother.“What grade are you looking for, khanoum, lady?”“Guidance, first year of high school please,” Moman answered. “Science branch.”The man walked to one of the walls and began pulling out books from various sections. By the time he returned, he was carrying a towering pile, with impressive titles like Physics, Pre-calculus, Literature, Religion, and Government. I inhaled the new paper–ink smell. The height of all that printed paper. By the end of the academic year, I would know everything from the bottom to the top of that pile. Moman was not pausing to smell anything. All business, she went on.“Also, one notebook to go along with each subject, a packet of BIC pens, one of pencils, two erasers, and two sharpeners. Come to think of it, please add four extra notebooks, just in case.”My mother was always prepared with extras. Supplies of all kinds lived in her locked pantry, which was only opened to judiciously dole out items. Boxes of sugar cubes, cardamom-flavored tea, gunny sacks of rice, white flour, and beans, canned pineapples, English chocolates, red wine from the city of Shiraz, as well as writing supplies for “just in case,” lined the shelves. I understood that my mother's well-supplied pantry was a product of being a child during World War II.“You never know when you'll have to be ready in our country,” she would say. “Your grandmother was prepared in 1941, when the war came to Iran. Most people were not. I was eleven and remember.” She'd then look out the window, as if the British army's Indian soldiers were still occupying the streets.“And still, we had to eat that awful sobousy bread, made of brown flour with vermin, and pebbles that could crack your teeth.” Her belief that you had to anticipate and prepare for the next surprise of life seemed a good philosophy to me for everything, including notebooks. The Iranian Girl Scouts also said to “be prepared,” so I took it as a good motto. I never thought to ask her what she meant by adding “in our country.”“I think we have everything now,” Moman said to the man. “Please wrap it up.”I was looking at the Parker pens in the glass case, when my mother suddenly bent close to the man's ear and dropped her voice.“Hmmm, by the way, do you happen to have any of those . . . you know . . . by the Agha . . . the gentleman?There was too much noise from coming and goings around us for me to pay attention to everything my mother was saying. The shopkeeper held Moman's gaze, just like the Tehran booksellers had done during our summer trips north, before they disappeared in the back of the store for special books—banned ones, I would learn years later.Seemingly satisfied with what he saw in her eyes, the man quietly nodded and disappeared through the small door on the other side of his shop. After a few minutes he was back, holding something in his right hand, palm down so it did not show. When he got to the counter, he stepped close to my mother and quickly slipped what looked like a cassette tape across the glass countertop. As soon as the shopkeeper lifted his hand, my mother slapped hers down over it, then swept the tape into her already-open purse. I thought they both acted like they were in a 007 spy movie. And all this for what looked like a music tape!I wondered what she had bought in such a strange way. Hopefully, more ABBA, the Beatles, or maybe even the pop singer Googoosh's latest.“What is that cassette Moman?” I asked in my normal voice which apparently was too loud for my mother. Moman turned slowly and rigidly toward me. She laid her eyes on me with an odd mixture of emotions I could not read well. Anger, worry, fear whirled together in her face. I was sure I had not broken any rules of politeness, but when I opened my mouth to protest, she cut me off with a sharp hiss.“Shhhhh! Basteh! Enough!”I was stung. What had I done? The shopkeeper pretended to ignore this exchange between us and got busy wrapping our purchases in paper, tied with red-and-white string. I licked my wounds silently. Moody Moman. A moment later, more charitably, I thought perhaps this cassette tape was a surprise for someone in the family, maybe even for me, and I was not supposed to know. But still, no need to say basteh! like that, on top of shushing me in front of a stranger. Did she notice how upset she had made me? She was not even looking at me. Her eyes were elsewhere, rapidly scanning the people within earshot.Moman paid quickly and thanked the man, a little too profusely, I thought. We picked up our parcels and retraced our steps back to the food vendors’ section of the bazaar. I was still brooding when in front of a kiosk, I saw a beautiful array of baghlava laid out in rows. Phyllo dough dripped with rosewater-scented syrup, layer upon layer so thick, one would need a sharp knife to cut through it. Over the sweet stickiness were crushed pistachios, almonds, or hazelnuts. There were thin baghlavas, thick baghlavas. Extra drippy with lots of syrup, medium wet, and dry ones. All promised a sweet crunchy taste on the tongue, but all unfortunately were “outside food” and dangerous by my parents’ standards.But wait. My mother had also stopped at the kiosk. She caught my eyes and smiled with what I took to be a gesture of peace. Then she asked the female vendor where the baghlavas came from.“They are all home-made, khanoum,” the woman answered proudly. “I make them myself.” My mother nodded at her, impressed. I knew Moman liked women who stood up for themselves, and having a business in the middle of the mostly male bazaar was like standing up.“Barak Allah! Well done, khanoum,” Moman praised the woman, also using the deferential title “lady.” “Please wrap up some of the thick ones with extra nuts and syrup. About this much,” my mother stretched her arm and indicated the length of her forearm. Right then I forgave her. In my teen brain, the cassette began to sink down toward the murky depths where unexplained events of my childhood-in-a-dictatorship went to disappear, only to be dredged up years later.As we walked toward the exit of the Abadan bazaar, I was simply happy. Moman walked next to me, carrying the box of heavy sweets and her cavernous black handbag. I knew my Baba might not approve of one of our purchases, but I still carried our bookshop packages smiling. On the drive home past the river I watched the sun wink off the water and felt glad to have finally left that wonderful bazaar with something deliciously forbidden. I just didn't know it was not baghlava.