At Tehran garage, Iranian woman polishes cars and her dreams

At a garage in Iran's capital of Tehran, a female car polisher has battled skeptics and stereotypes to live out her dream of working as a professional detailer

TEHRAN, Iran -- It’s a men's-only club in the tangle of auto repair shops on the traffic-clogged streets of Iran’s capital, Tehran. Among them, workers toil in dim garages, welding and wrenching, fabricating and painting. That’s until Maryam Roohani, 34, pops up from under a car’s hood at a maintenance shop in northeastern Tehran, her dirt- and grease-stained uniform pulled over black jeans and long hair tucked into a baseball cap — which in her work, replaces Iran’s compulsory Islamic headscarf for women, or hijab. Buffing a blue BMW sedan in the shop until it shines, she couldn’t be farther from the farms of her childhood. In the rural, tribal village of Agh Mazar near Iran’s northeastern border with Turkmenistan, girls get married after hitting puberty and devote their lives to raising children. “I have sort of broken taboos,” Roohani said at the garage, where she carefully coats cars with attention-getting gleams and scrapes sludge from their engines. “I faced opposition when I chose this path.”