by Ramita Navai
They wound their way through the snaking alleys to the main road. The city was already at full throttle, roaring into the morning. There was never a gradual awakening in this part of town, just a sudden bang of activity that burst onto the streets. A line of shopkeepers were hosing down their patches of pavement. The day’s newspapers were piled in stacks on the ground next to the tobacconist’s stand; the Supreme Leader’s face stared up from some of them, headlines speaking of martyrs, Zionists, blackmail and America: IRAN’S HEAVY FIST SMASHES THE FACE OF IMPERALISM and IRAN’S MILITARY EXCERCISE STRIKES FEAR IN ITS ENEMIES’ HEARTS.
Meydan-e Khorasan is a small island, and Somayeh had seen its shores slowly eroded by waves of modernity and youth. Shiny marble slabs and glossy stone cladding have risen up from the ruins of old houses, oiled by backhanders to foremen and civil servants to avoid expensive earthquake building codes. Yet religious, working-class values remain at the core of Meydan-e Khorasan; its residents battle to keep social strictures in place. For families like Somayeh’s, religion means living by the words of the Koran and the Supreme Leader’s fatwas to earn a place in paradise. In the knot of streets surrounding Somayeh’s home, most of the women still wear chadors, as they have done for hundreds of years. Somayeh’s family have been rooted in Meydan-e Khorasan for generations: it was the only world that Somayeh had ever known.
At school, the lessons were predictably uninspiring and Somayeh concentrated on her daydreams of life as an actress, an absurd fantasy considering that she was in agreement with her parents that acting was a dubious profession suited to those with loose morals. At break time the girls discussed the latest gossip. They were hooked on the Islamic-approved soap operas, where the evildoers were clean-shaven Iranians with old Persian names like Cyrus and Dariush and the heroes had Muslim names and beards. About half the pupils had satellite television at home and obsessively watched Latin American telenovelas on Farsi1, the Dubai-based channel part-owned by Rupert Murdoch. Satellite dishes are all over Iran, from Tehran to rooftops of remote villages, hanging off the homes of those from all classes, secular and religious alike. Even a member of government announced there were 4.5 million satellite television receivers in Iran. Somayeh’s father declared foreign television an unnecessary and un-Islamic extravagance, and no amount of pleading could change his mind.
At two o’clock, just before the end of school, the girls were summoned by the headmistress they called Dog-Duck, an angry woman with the face of a bulldog and the waddling gait of a duck.
‘Tahereh Azimi has been expelled for having improper relations with a boy,’ barked Dog-Duck. There was a collective gasp. Everyone knew about the incident, Tahereh had not been to school since it happened, but nobody had been expelled before. It took over five minutes for Dog-Duck to calm the girls. She shuffled her big bottom across the room and launched into a lecture about modesty and God, lying to your parents and the corrupting influence of satellite television. It did not matter that Tahereh Azimi’s hymen was still intact, that she rarely lied or that her family had never owned a satellite dish. The fact that she had been caught leaving a boy’s house while his parents were out was enough to brand her a whore, which is what her teachers, classmates and it seemed most of the neighbourhood intimated. It did not help that Tahereh Azimi was beautiful, a fact that no hejab and lack of make-up would ever hide.
Dog-Duck soon ran out of steam, her crusade interrupted by stabs of hunger brought on by the succulent smell of grilled shishlik that was wafting through the windows. The girls grouped urgently outside the school gates.
‘She’s a jendeh through and through,’ said Mansoureh, spitting out the word jendeh – whore – with surprising force. ‘You can see it in her eyes and the way she walks. And she has a collection of red headscarves in her room, I’ve seen them. I find the whole thing really quite base.’ Mansoureh’s words triggered vigorous nodding.
‘She’s perverse. Remember her notebook, the one filled with porn,’ said Narges, referring to Tahereh’s pencil sketches of nudes.
Even though all the girls in Somayeh’s year were virgins, a handful had experienced illicit encounters, mostly with their cousins, who were the only males they were allowed to be in contact with. Mansoureh and her cousin had fondled each other a year ago, and afterwards she was convulsed with shame. She took the palliative measure of viciously condemning any turpitude she encountered; she was in a perpetual state of disgust.
‘I always thought it was weird the way she made such a point of telling us all she didn’t like make-up, it was like she was trying to prove something, hide something,’ batted Nika, whose real name was Setayesh, which she had deemed ugly and old-fashioned. Nearly half the girls in Somayeh’s class had adopted names they thought sounded more chic than their own.
Jealousy quickly turned to outrage, a more palatable and acceptable response. Tahereh Azimi had broken the rules; but more than that, she had done something that they all longed to do.
‘And I never saw her with a chador. Well, this serves her parents right, because if they don’t even care if she wears a chador or not, how can they expect their daughter not to turn into a jendeh?’ said Vista (real name Zohreh) whose bazaari father had promised her a nose job for her eighteenth birthday. Vista’s father sold copper pipes, and even though he did not work in the bazaar itself, he was still referred to as a bazaari, which usually meant a merchant with strong traditional values. Bazaaris vote according to their personal interests and are never seen as any higher than middle-class, no matter how much money they make.
Tahereh’s sartorial habits were carefully dissected. The girls concluded her clothes were suspiciously tame for a girl who sneaked into a boy’s house behind everyone’s back.
‘Just because you wear a red headscarf or you don’t wear a chador the whole time doesn’t mean you’re a bad girl,’ Somayeh said, too prudish to use the word whore. ‘She just has different values.’
‘Yes, Western values,’ said Mansoureh using one of their favourite euphemisms for ‘slutty’. ‘Her parents should move to bala shahr, north Tehran, where she can act all Western.’ The girls laughed. It was a cruel joke, for Tahereh’s parents were poor and everyone knew they had struggled to keep afloat. Moving to a chichi neighbourhood in north Tehran was about as likely as them buying a second home in Paris.
Somayeh was as troubled by Tahereh’s behaviour as her friends; she was devout and religious; morals mattered to her. ‘Let’s face it, she dressed modestly, and I don’t think there was any ulterior motive to that. But we’re missing the point here, I think we all agree that having sex before marriage is just sinful. Very, very sinful.’ The group cooed their approval.
Somayeh had a flair for appearing tolerant without sabotaging her own moral reputation. This made her popular with everyone, not just her own kind. Strong principles, a demure appearance and religious fervour meant that the Hezbollahi girls counted her as one of their own, and they were always the hardest to crack. Hezbollahis are the most zealous defenders of the regime, using religion and politics to ensure its survival. Somayeh never looked down on the poorer girls. Even the Western-looking girls who tried to emulate the uptown girls – and there were only a few of them in this school – did not feel judged by her. But Somayeh did judge them. She avoided being seen with them because she was embarrassed of the image they portrayed. Embarrassed that others might think she was cut from the same (inappropriate) cloth. Somayeh believed the way you clothed yourself was a litmus test for morality. The brighter and tighter the dress and the thicker the make-up, the higher up the jendeh scale you scored.
Somayeh and her friends strongly believed that the hejab should be enforced. They agreed with the law, which states that if your make-up and clothes are contrary to public decency and you intend to attract attention, you can be arrested and taken straight to court. The sexy excuses for hejab being paraded on the streets confirmed their suspicions that a dress code free-for-all would result in a speedy degeneration of morals an
d would be the undoing of the city. ‘If the hejab wasn’t compulsory, these women would be walking around half naked, men wouldn’t be able to help themselves and we’d all be in trouble,’ as Vista put it.
The girls were not to blame for their misogynous views. They had been fed the regime’s line on hejab, which was usually touted around the city via huge billboard advertisements, since birth. The government had two basic tactics: to warn of the physical dangers of bad hejab (which was judged to be ‘asking for it’), and to disseminate a culture of shame. A recent campaign showed a picture of two boiled sweets, one that had been opened and one that was still in its wrapper. The sweet that had been opened was surrounded by three flies looking ready to pounce. Underneath were the words: VEIL IS SECURITY. Some were not so subtle: ‘We ourselves invite harassment’ was the strapline on another advert. Some posters purported to use science. Underneath a picture of a couple of girls looking decidedly Western (lashings of make-up; blonde hair falling out of brightly coloured headscarves that were pushed back as far as they would go; short, tight manteaus) were the words: ‘Psychologists say those who dress inappropriately and use lots of make-up have character issues.’
Most of north Tehran looked like a whorehouse to Somayeh, but she accepted that it was impossible for all these women to have loose morals. She accepted that they were not as devoted to God as she was. But the Tehran around her was changing so fast, it was hard to tell who was a real prostitute and who was not. There was bad hejab everywhere. Somayeh also knew that a chador could hide many sins. Her brother had once pointed out a spot near Shoosh Street, at the southern tip of Vali Asr, where chadori women were real-life jendehs. Poor souls selling their hidden bodies for the price of a kabab. Somayeh cried when she first saw their sullen faces and dead eyes.
Somayeh loved her chador, for it was part of her sonat, her culture. It symbolized far more than a respect for tradition. The simple black cloth stood for modesty and piety; for supplication to God and a spiritual, ordered world where rules were in place to protect. It was all these things and more. It was her oversized comfy cardigan, hiding her when she had her period and she was feeling bloated. It was her protector, concealing hints of curves from men’s lustful stares. Her favourite look was black chador, skinny jeans and Converse trainers, the juxtaposing of old and new – a dual-purpose ensemble that kept her simultaneously connected to God and fashion. But most of all she wore her chador because of her father, Haj Agha. For him, it was the only acceptable form of hejab. ‘A girl in a chador is like a rosebud, the beauty hidden inside, making it all the more beautiful and closer to God,’ he would say.
Modesty was a serious business in Haj Agha’s household. The only men who had ever seen Somayeh’s hair or even her bare arms were her father and her brother Mohammad-Reza. In Somayeh’s Tehran, it was inappropriate for even her dearest uncles to set eyes on her slim body. Sometimes, instead of a chador she wore a headscarf and manteau, mostly for practical reasons, when she went hiking in the mountains with her friends and on family picnics. Her manteau was always loose, below the knee and coloured dark. Underneath she wore the benign uniform of the high-street chain: Zara, Mango, Topshop and Benetton.
Some of the girls decided to go back to Mansoureh’s house after school as her family had a big living room. There were few public places to hang out in this part of town. The nearby parks were mostly full of drug addicts and there were no cool coffee shops. The traditional tea houses were men-only dens, full of hookah-pipe smoke and banter.
Somayeh left the other girls; she had to help her mother prepare for a party. Tonight was a big night, they were celebrating Haj Agha’s latest pilgrimage trip and all the neighbours were invited. As she turned the corner into her street she saw them. Tahereh Azimi and her elderly parents were standing by a small van laden with their possessions, fleeing in shame, back to the village they came from.
Tahereh Azimi had never fitted in. Her parents seemed normal: poor and working-class. They prayed and her mother only ever wore a chador in public. Tahereh’s mother was nearly fifty when she had given birth to her, after thirty barren years. Tahereh’s father, Sadegh, had endured decades of pressure from his family to leave his sterile wife for younger, more fecund ground. Sadegh had refused. He was a good man who could not stand to cause pain. Tahereh was their miracle baby, even if Hazrat Abol Fazl had responded to their nazr prayers with perverse delay.
They were sturdy country people, but the city had sucked the vitality out of them. Tahereh’s parents had moved to Tehran in their youth when their village had crumbled to mounds of rubble after an earthquake had rumbled its way up from the earth’s crusty layers. Half their house had smashed in on the ground in less than six seconds. Whole lives were reduced to particles of brick and dust. A few scores were killed, including Tahereh’s extended family. Their bodies were buried in the cemetery under the orange trees. A village that had once been so vital, on a fertile plain, encircled by mountains that gushed water and fed orchards near where wild horses roamed, became a sad, forgotten place.
The transition to the city had been less painful than they had expected. Although Tehran’s brash, ugly urbanity, its motorways, concrete high-rises and festering underbelly suggest an impersonal metropolis, it can still feel like a village. In Tehran, urban privileges like privacy and anonymity are still Western concepts. Hidden in its seams is the stitching that holds the city together: the bloodlines, the clans, the kindness, the prying and the meddling.
Tahereh’s family soon stumbled on distant relatives and friends. But their new community did not last long. Many around them were felled by heart disease, cancer and medical incompetence. As their lives contracted, they became more solitary, leaning in towards each other, with Tahereh at their centre. The net began closing in on them too. Tahereh’s mother suffered a stroke. They had no medical insurance and Sadegh juggled three jobs. Tahereh began working as a seamstress in the tiny back room of a dressmaker’s shop in a shopping mall on Vali Asr, a job that was kept a secret. There would have been whispers if the neighbours found out that Tahereh was a working girl at sixteen, even if her time was spent with a Singer sewing machine sitting opposite an Afghan tailor in his seventies. Vali Asr opened a new world for Tahereh, where teenagers hung out in coffee shops and fast-food joints. Super Star and Super Star Fried Chicken were always brimming with teenage boys and girls flirting with each other, exchanging numbers and setting up dates.
Tahereh spent all her free time walking up and down Vali Asr, marvelling at its beauty, which seemed to intensify the farther north she ventured. She started walking up as far as Bagh Ferdows near the furthest reaches of Vali Asr. She would sit on a bench and watch the city; people here seemed to come from a different race. It was on one of these trips that she bumped into Hassan, the son of a neighbour. He had come to look at football kits in the sports shops on downtown Vali Asr, near Monirieh Square. Away from family and neighbourhood spies, they spoke differently to each other, at once understanding the other’s need to discover a world outside the Meydan. The chance meeting became a treasured weekly tryst. Tahereh started reading Zanan, a daring women’s magazine that covered everything from literature to sex and argued for gender equality. Tahereh visited exhibitions and plays. She was a gifted artist; but her teachers were not interested in drawing and painting. Only her parents understood the remarkable talent of their girl, but they had neither the money nor the education or foresight to encourage her.
Tahereh’s parents were religious and traditional, but they came from a liberal village where men and women celebrated weddings together, where chadors were white and where it did not matter if your hejab slipped off your head. Sadegh thought the revolution had been a big mistake and he still lamented the fall of the Shah. He believed that the hejab should not be compulsory; it was a matter of personal choice and one’s relationship with God was private. He never drank, but was not against alcohol. He thought modernity was not at odds with Islam. Sadegh also believed that people s
hould be virgins until marriage, but he thought that relations between men and women were nobody’s business but their own. Sadegh soon realized his views did not belong in Meydan-e Khorasan, so he kept them to himself, truths only shared with his wife and child.
When Sadegh found out about Hassan, he believed Tahereh when she said her honour was intact, but he was devastated that her reputation had been shredded to worthless pieces.
When Hassan’s mother returned home she was so enraged that she called the police, telling them there was a prostitute in her house. The police took Tahereh to the station and summoned her father. He told the officers his daughter was pure and begged them to release her. They mocked his village accent, and spoke down to him as though he were a simple peasant.
‘Your daughter behaves like a whore and you defend her! Where’s your honour? Is that what they do in the villages? They’d have stoned her from where you come from!’ They all laughed, not knowing that life in his northern village had not changed much since the revolution – in some ways it was more liberal than the laws enforced by the police in Tehran. As for Hassan, he got a few hearty slaps on the back from his friends. Only his best friend knew the truth: that he and Tahereh had fallen in love, that they spent their time visiting art galleries and listening to Pink Floyd. They had only ever dared to kiss.
Tahereh did not notice Somayeh loitering at the corner of the road, waiting for her and her parents to leave. It would not have surprised her; since the episode everyone had cut her off.
The smell of saffron and buttery steamed rice filled the flat and vats of rich stews bubbled on the stove. Somayeh’s mother, Fatemeh, had been cooking for the last two days. Any morsel of food that passed through her soft, plump hands was transformed into succulent dishes. Fatemeh’s mother had told her that if you kept your husband well fed, he would never leave you to taste forbidden fruit. Fatemeh had learnt her skills from a young age. She was famed for her cooking and their parties were always packed. Fatemeh stirred and fried and washed while Somayeh set out bowls of fruit, cucumbers, walnuts and pistachios. She cleaned the dust off the plastic maroon flowers that were displayed around the room. Even with windows closed, the dust somehow worked its way into apartments and houses across the city, sheeting everything in a fine grey powder.