by Rory Maclean
In front of the closed door, Babak said, ‘This is a historic evening in our lives.’ At first, his voice wavered but, as he spoke, he gained confidence. ‘Tonight, a new life begins.’
Babak announced he had resigned his bus-driving job that morning. He had decided to emigrate to France and, because money was needed for fares and to arrange the visas, he had arranged for the house to be sold. Although she would miss her many dear friends, he went on, Laleh would be coming with him. As a single woman, she could not remain alone in Tabriz, nor could she choose a fate apart from him.
‘Now, friends, eat and laugh,’ he said. ‘Enjoy the music and be happy for us.’
Few guests were surprised by the news. To escape the confiscated revolution, about 200,000 Iranians emigrate every year. The men shook Babak’s hand. The women embraced Laleh. Only her teacher hesitated at the back of the room. All assumed Laleh had known of the plan.
‘You must visit us in Paris,’ Babak said to me.
For her part, Laleh said nothing. Babak could act alone. I looked at her and imagined the strip of masking tape over her mouth. When he cranked up the music, the guests wheeled back on to the dance floor. Laleh stared in the mirror, reeling in shock, full of inward rage. ‘I hate my feelings,’ she said.
I followed her into the garden.
*
She’s by the pond, her body turned away from me, sheltered in darkness.
‘You said that you would never leave Iran,’ I say to her back.
‘This is where I was born, where I grew up. How can I leave my father’s garden?’
‘Can you stay?’
‘Without parents or relatives?’ Her laughter mocks my naivety. ‘You, as a foreigner, will never understand.’ Her voice cracks in frustration at the contradictions. ‘I chose not to have a boyfriend. I didn’t want to be trapped. Now, my own brother…’
Laleh – whose name means tulip, the symbol of martyrdom – turns to face me. Her blanched face seems to shimmer in the shadows of the trees. She is angry, desperate, bitter: at her bondage, at my freedom, at her brother.
‘Who do you – in the West – turn to for moral authority?’ she demands, no longer speaking in polite half-truths. ‘To answer your questions and to know yourself?’
I turn the question over in my mind. I realize that she has touched on my dilemma. ‘Mostly to ourselves,’ I say, choosing my words with care.
‘Hence your dislocation and fragmentation,’ she hisses at me, her mouth so close that I feel her breath on my ear. ‘You lost your way, forgot your God and now belong nowhere. You wander alone in a spiritual desert. You are a cancer.’
10. Turn Turn Turn
Iran has struggled for security throughout its history. The Persians built an empire stretching from the Mediterranean to India only to surrender it to Alexander the Great, the Parthians and then the Sassanians. In AD 637, five years after Mohammed’s death, the country was conquered by the Arabs. Persian society flourished under the caliphs and the Seljuks, until destroyed again by the Mongols.
In modern times, Iran has continued to be a battleground for foreign and internal rivalries. The CIA helped to topple a democratically elected, nationalist prime minister in 1953. Both Washington and London had disapproved of the nationalization of the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company, forerunner of BP. But the new Shah’s brutality and impatient reforms inspired anti-American Islamic fundamentalists to hijack the 1979 revolution which overthrew him.
That February, 3 million Iranians took to the streets to celebrate the Ayatollah Khomeini’s return to Tehran. Many considered him to be God’s envoy. All knew he was a ruthless leader. He seized real power for the clergy. He permitted the execution of the Shah’s generals, praying on the spot where they were shot. He ordered the killing of ‘anti-Islamic’ modernizers, adulterers and homosexuals. His Revolutionary Guards – an elite parallel army – stormed the American Embassy to prevent the CIA from plotting another coup, holding US diplomats hostage for 444 days. His regime exploited the Iran–Iraq war, initiated by Saddam Hussein, and the Shia ideology of martyrdom to consolidate its grip on power. Khomeini changed the balance of power in the Middle East and introduced a new ideological force into world politics. His pursuit of security even led him to incite murder beyond Iran’s borders, innovating a death sentence against a foreigner – British author Salman Rushdie – for expressing contrary opinions, spreading seeds of fear into the century ahead. Today his successors build nuclear weapons to protect clerical rule.
I put down my pen, turn off the Byrds, gaze out of the window of my Partisan Black Super Saloon. ‘GOD’S TRUCK’ flashes past me on the electric name-board above a driver’s cab. ‘Allah Akbar’ is painted in green lettering along the flank of a government oil-tanker. ‘Victory is Ours’ proclaims a Shiraz Turbo bus, lying on its side among scattered suitcases, limping passengers and thick black skid marks.
Babak and Laleh are on my mind. Her unhappy, angry words ring in my ears. She’s right, despite all her insecurities. Western society is dislocated and fragmented. We’re dismantling the social order of civil society. Our God is all but forgotten. But it wasn’t always so. The counterculture tried to reform the West in the sixties. A generation rebelled against institutional authority, espousing communality without ideology, confronting spiritual emptiness by pursuing a collective dream for self-knowledge. Youth wanted to change the world.
Which was why one of the first actions of Khomeini’s Revolutionary Council in 1979 was to close the trail. The Intrepids – liberal, curious and often stoned – weren’t welcomed in the Islamic Republic. Not that any of them set out to influence Iranian self-determination. The overlanders were, after all, the first movement of people in history travelling to be colonized rather than to colonize. But travel opens minds. As I had witnessed in Turkey, visitors’ values and comparative wealth did – and do – change places. The irony is that the very people Khomeini locked out may have helped to kindle his revolution.
The first European tourist bus to cross Iran was probably Société Dubreuil’s La route des Indes. In the spring of 1956, its Chausson coach left Porte d’Italie in Paris under police escort with two well-known actresses – Danielle Delorme and Micheline Presle – and fourteen passengers on board. Two engineers and a complete set of spare parts accompanied them on a second coach. The 2-month, 8,733-mile journey to Bombay, which apparently went as per timetable and without a single mechanical incident, also took in Italy, Yugoslavia, Bulgaria, Turkey, Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, Iraq and Pakistan. After its return Dubreuil never attempted to run another trip, even though 22,000 people watched the film of the journey at the Gaumont cinema in Place Clichy.
The next year a British travelling salesman, Paddy Garrow-Fisher, established the first regular coach service to the subcontinent. For almost a decade, ‘The Indiaman’ operated the world’s longest bus route from London King’s Cross and across the Middle East to Bombay and Calcutta.
‘Whoever had this brilliant idea deserves some sort of memorial,’ wrote the editor of Meccano magazine in 1959, ‘and I believe he finds it in the minds of those who travel with him. Anything may happen on such a long land voyage, and those who venture on it accept cheerfully any discomfort that may arise, whether caused by a dust storm in a desert or by such a misfortune as sticking in the mud of some primitive road.’
‘The Indiaman’ and its twenty-six tourists shuddered over stony tracks and sank in loose sand. Its tyres had to be deflated to cross the Iranian deserts. In the absence of road signs – and sometimes roads themselves – navigation through Iran was often by the Safavid towers which once guided camel caravans. After forty-eight days or so, its AEC Regent rolled into Pakistan.
Dozens of cheap tour operators followed in Garrow-Fisher’s rutted trail. In 1960, the first backpacker hostel – the Overseas Visitors Club – opened in London. Young Australians, the real Barry McKenzies, sailed to England on one-way tickets, served in pubs, slept with New Zealanders, then headed for home. Aut
o-tours, Exodus, Intertrek and the Beesley brothers showed them the way with inclusive camping trips via the bulls in Pamplona, the beer halls of Munich and the Asia overland trail. Ford Transit vans loaded and unloaded punters at all hours of the day and night along Earls Court Road. Penn Overland ran two new coaches to India. Swagman used dilapidated bangers acquired from nationalized companies. A young Australian vet bought a lumbering green Bristol double-decker to drive to Morocco with his mates and within a few years built up a hundred-strong fleet of converted ‘deckers’. Top Deck and Hughes Overland then pushed the trail beyond India, across the Bay of Bengal and south-east Asia all the way to Sydney. The caravanserais and doss-houses of the old Silk Road echoed to the strains of ‘Waltzing Matilda’ and ‘Kumbaya’.
At the same time, British freaks were reading Hugo Williams, grooving on Siddhartha, following the Beatles’ procession to Rishikesh. They hitched to Istanbul to link up with the other tribes of independent travellers. Americans tended to start in Paris. In the late fifties, in the Latin Quarter, the Beats had sketched out the road map for the hip generation: eastwards towards mysticism, inwards to creative expression, out of this world with the recreational use of drugs. At the fractured, transatlantica bookshop Shakespeare and Company, Ginsberg had slept among the stacks and Burroughs researched Naked Lunch. John Lennon had dropped by the shop in October 1961. Now boys from Queens and girls from Sarah Lawrence began their journey sitting in Henry Miller’s chair, stroking the press on which the first edition of Ulysses was printed, scoring a dime bag of Paris’s cheapest marijuana in dingy Chez Popoff’s before heading to the teeming bus depot at Porte d’Italie.
‘Where’s you guys going?’ shouted hopeful travellers into the open passenger doors of idling vehicles.
‘Nirvana,’ came the reply.
The original Magic Bus operated from a cockroach-infested office on Amsterdam’s Dam Square, carrying students, lone voyagers and brigades of hippies to India. Its buses were diverse and decrepit, especially after financial troubles forced the company to subcontract. Not that hard seats and broken springs lessened the pleasure of the journey. The secret for a successful trip was to get the passengers smoking chillum dope pipes before breakfast. In the early days, the buses almost levitated across border posts. On their return, so much Afghan hash was stashed in their tanks that regular smokers in Europe became accustomed to the aftertaste of diesel.
Magic Bus spawned many copycat operators, one of whose coaches was held to ransom for almost six months during the first Lebanese civil war but, in the early 1980s, the original company met a prosaic, unenlightened end when forced into bankruptcy.
In the seventeen or eighteen years of the trail’s existence, before the Iranian border was closed, the land of extremes was baking in the heat of the Shah’s White Revolution. The Shah – installed by the CIA coup – wanted his country to embrace Western values without bloodshed, to forsake religion for capitalism. He listened to Dolly Parton records. He drove a Cadillac convertible and a Rolls-Royce. He drank a glass of wine on national television. Most Iranians were unsettled by the speed of change. They mistook the Intrepids – the first Westerners that many of them had met – for ambassadors of the capitalist world. In the tense political climate, their casual morality and liberal humanism must have insulted – even enraged – traditionalists and zealots alike. These breezy unorthodox travellers, hitching across Iran on a shoestring, helped to stir the stern Islamic reawakening.
South of the highway, a scorched, stony plain unfolds toward Iraq. Power lines loop above parched squares of fields, between mud-brick settlements and distant grain silos. Distant flames of oil refineries plume on the horizon. A greenhouse catches the sun, flashing semaphore signals across the land, and the bright light sears my eyes.
Khomeini’s portrait looms above a bustling chemical factory. The military guards wear white spats. At a highway checkpoint, a well-spoken young man in neat black trousers and pressed shirt studies my passport, asks the purpose of my visit and wishes me a safe stay in Tehran.
11. Magic Carpet Ride
Tehran. Capital of revolution. Shrine to martyrs. Home to the Revolutionary Guard’s nuclear-weapons programme. An urban disease fed by anger, despair and pollution so thick it tints the air. Once the most westernized city in the Middle East, it’s now a sprawling cemetery to tolerance.
I push out from the pavement in a clump of riders, calling out my destination to the trawling drivers. With four other men, I snatch a shared taxi downtown, spiralling into a coil of roundabouts, chaotic concrete flyovers and filthy squares. On the heaving streets, muscular paramilitaries hold hands, beggars intone prayers, young women promenade in tailored rupushes, tight on the rump, drawing attention to their figures. Flights of mopeds congest the grids between identical grey tower blocks, squeezing the wrong way up bus lanes, racing into littered bazaars. If the Americans ever try to invade Iran, goes a current joke, their tanks will get stuck in Tehran’s traffic jams.
In the sixties and seventies, after the Gülhane and Doğubeyazit, travellers headed for the Amir Kabir; the place to stay in Tehran. ‘Dirty, only one sheet per bed, but at the very heart of the soulless, tinsel and glitter Coca-Cola city,’ according to the trail’s first guidebook, published in 1971. The hotel occupied the top two floors of a concrete horseshoe of balconies and walkways. Downstairs was a tyre emporium. Sixty rials – about a dollar – bought a mattress in the dorm. The toilet was at the end of the hall.
‘The Amir Kabir?’ remember trail veterans. ‘That’s where you contracted real dysentery.’
Today the tinsel and glitter has been dulled by the search for moral purity but Amir Kabir Avenue remains, and still satisfies Tehran’s huge appetite for motor parts.
On foot, I press along its length, through the roar of raised male voices and the stench of old Ford Falcons. The pavement is lined with racks of Volvo bus springs, sets of Torx wrenches and rolls of sheet metal. A shopkeeper leans against the bars of his display window as if imprisoned by pistons. A mechanic repairs mopeds under a flyover. A tinsmith makes throttle cables on his lap. Above him, behind enclosed concrete balconies, shrouded eyes watch, women’s lives unfold and the songs of caged birds lift to the tall blue sky.
I climb the steep stairs to the Hotel Mashhad, ducking because of the low ceilings. Its owner thinks I want a room.
‘Only Western tourists stay here,’ he assures me. ‘Last night there were twenty: Norway, Sweden, Canada.’
Young Pakistanis peer over his shoulder. I see no Westerners, not here or on the streets. ‘And the hippies?’ I ask. ‘Did they stay here too?’
‘They date back to the period of the diseased person.’ The King of Kings. The American snake. The Shah. ‘Maybe this hotel was then called Amir Kabir,’ he says, trying to oblige me. ‘Maybe not. Everything change. You want see room?’
I don’t.
Next door, the Goodyear Guest House has been driven out by Caspian Tires. Toora Wheels have run over the Youth Hostel Ferdosi. At the Hotel Arman, where the arguments of Russian traders funnel down the lift shaft, the duty manager simply shakes his head. He tells me that all the old overland hotels – the Toos, the Mehr and the Amir Kabir – have gone, their dormitories now stacked floor to ceiling with corroded batteries and inner tubes.
‘Could I meet someone who worked at the Amir?’ I ask the manager.
‘No Tehrani can remember those days.’
Of course. Too much history has passed since the last Magic Bus was hurried out of town by an adolescent guardsman waving his Kalashnikov.
I drop back down to the street. A prehistoric Oldsmobile rams an ancient Volkswagen, spilling its load of newly picked oranges. They scatter across the tarmac like fugitives, rushing for freedom until their sweet sticky juices explode beneath tyres. Swarms of flies sizzle in the pulp and under the midday sun.
‘It’s gone,’ says Rudy.
‘The Amir Kabir?’ I guess. What else would a sixty-year-old Englishman with a pier
ced ear and bandanna be looking for here? Except perhaps a Rover fuel-injection pump.
‘What a drag,’ he sighs. Hooded eyes stare at me from under thick eyebrows. And at my notebook. ‘You look like someone who knows where a man could buy a beer.’
‘A friend in Tabriz told me that Iran Air stewards smuggle in duty-free to sell uptown.’
‘Then I’m out of here.’
Rudy’s face is thin and dry, hatched by laughter lines, thatched with sparse red hair and spiked by a majestic, bulbous nose useful for sniffing out artificial stimulants. His lanky, hard-muscled frame bespeaks a life unhindered by moderation. As he strides back toward Khomeini Square, I tell him, ‘The uptown neighbourhood’s called Zaferanie.’
‘Zaferanie?’ says Rudy. ‘The drive-in used to be there. I’d park the Bedford sideways so everyone could see the film.’
‘What Bedford?’
‘The Silver Dart. We’d drop the windows, put up our feet and watch Yellow Submarine.’
‘When was this?’
‘I started driving to India in ’66.’
Rudy was a bus driver. Forty years on – with kids grown up, wife enrolled on an OU course and his Cornish tourist coaches sold to a local entrepreneur – he, like Penny, has returned on a sentimental journey.
‘My Bedford was a tatty Barnstable school bus with bad brakes,’ he tells me. ‘The idea was to drive to Pakistan and flog it for a profit. I got to the Maidstone bypass and the brakes caught fire. Bam! “How far you going in this thing?” the fireman asked. I told him Lahore. He said, “You won’t reach Southend.”’
‘So the Silver Dart didn’t make it?’
‘It made Istanbul,’ says Rudy, flourishing his hands, uttering wide-mouthed automotive sounds. Narcotics alone could not account for such frenetic energy. ‘I was about to leave for Pakistan when I noticed that the other buses driven by Europeans were taking passengers. I thought, just a minute, never mind selling the blinking vehicle, I’ll fill it to the gunwales with freaks. $25 to Tehran. $50 to Kabul. I mean, we’re talking about absolute nu’pence but when you’ve got thirty or forty people onboard and you’re doing your backwards and forwards, you can make beaucoup bucks.’