Stranger to History

by Aatish Taseer

  Gulbadi, her teacher, had reached her through vegetarianism. He gave cooking classes in extreme vegetarianism in which eggs, onions and garlic were prohibited as well as meat. Nargis didn’t seem to know it, but the diet was classically Jain, a derivative religion of Hinduism that practises extreme non-violence. For fear of the regime Gulbadi devised an ingenious way of reaching people – ingenious because the emphasis on eating meat, especially red meat, was part of the culture of the faith, part of its seemingly limitless compass. And yet, vegetarianism was not prohibited; it was just unusual for Muslims. Gulbadi, knowingly or not, walked the finest line between the commandments of the faith and its culture. He drew people to his classes who, if considering extreme vegetarianism, would in all likelihood have also had doubts about Islam.

  ‘What is the punishment for apostasy?’ I asked Nargis, who was watering the plants now. I was trying to broach the subject of the risk she took in embracing ‘Krishnaism’.

  Her eyes showed white. She looked at me in disbelief as if I were considering this path. ‘In Iran,’ she whispered, looking up from a money plant, ‘they kill you for it. If Muslims change their religion, they are killed. They believe here,’ she added, by way of gentle explanation, ‘that Islam is the last religion, so if you are a Muslim, you have the best religion. That is their mentality.’

  Nargis slipped on a white muslin ‘manteau’, a long coat with buttons down the front, and threw a purple scarf over her springy black hair. She was ready to take me to meet the other Hare Krishnas. We went down to the ground floor in a very small lift, then raced across a cemented driveway in the rain. Nargis drove a jeep, which was parked in the street. The sight of her wet, white manteau clinging to her, the coils of black hair pushing up the purple scarf and the dark, delicate Nargis behind the wheel made me wonder if we weren’t committing some kind of offence; cars had been pulled over for much less.

  The rain made the traffic worse and I stopped paying attention to where we were going. On a busy main road, Nargis veered left and parked at the side. A gushing open drain, clean as ever, divided the main road from a narrow service lane. Nargis moved stealthily across the lane. I followed her as she slipped behind a black gate on to the paved drive of a low, double-storey bungalow with tinted sliding doors. The rain fell lightly around us and there wasn’t a sound. It was still very early and it felt as though everyone was asleep in the house. We made our way round an empty swimming-pool in the garden towards the sliding doors. Outside them, on a veranda, were the first signs that the house was not asleep: dozens of shoes and sandals were strewn about.

  As Nargis approached, the doors opened and we were ushered into a dark anteroom by a tall, smiling man with a short grey beard. The little house was crowded, and after the silence outside, I suddenly found myself in a warren of rooms alive with murmurs, chanting and clashing cymbals. My eyes had not adjusted when I lost Nargis. The man who showed us in took my wrist and led me into a blue room with a dim green chandelier. Inside, forty or fifty people sat, rotating rhythmically, in front of a painting of the blue god, his head cocked to one side, a peacock feather in his crown. At one end of the room, two women in white, one with a drum round her neck, were singing and gently rocking forward and back on the balls of their feet. ‘Hare Krishna, hare rama’ went through the room again and again. Some faces watched the women, feeding off their ecstasies, others looked ahead at Gulbadi, a little bespectacled man with a greying crew-cut and a youthful face, chanting behind a low desk with a book on it. Outside, through the tinted glass doors, the garden was quiet and wet, revealing nothing of the warmth and throng within.

  From Nargis, I had gained the impression that the Hare Krishnas would be like her, young, rebellious, slightly new age. But the faces I saw in the blue room were nothing like what I expected. Though there were several young people, there were also older women, mothers and wives, some fully covered. On the other side of the room, I saw balding, middle-aged men, who looked like bankers and shopkeepers, in beige trousers and checked shirts, with gold rings on their fingers. The average age of the men was well over forty. Somehow the middle-aged, middle-class aspect of the crowd, the men’s slightly embarrassed faces, brought vulnerability to the group – the vulnerability of people making a great change late in life. As though submitting to some hidden desire, balancing something that felt right yet seemed wrong, they let their voices catch the increasingly rapid pace of the chanting. One or two eyed me with suspicion. The energy between Gulbadi’s chanting and the two musicians was building.

  The room was covered with stylised pictures and icons in vivid colours, of Swami Prabhupada, the twentieth-century founder of the Hare Krishnas; of Krishna as a child playing with butter; Krishna, in a Bollywood-style love scene with his girlfriend, Radha; Krishna with his flute; Krishna in grand format; Krishna in a small, makeshift temple with fake yellow flowers placed outside; and, most significantly, a picture of Narasimha, the god Vishnu’s half-lion, half-man incarnation tearing to pieces a king who won’t allow his son freedom of worship. It was not an image I had seen often, even in India, and I couldn’t help but think that its presence in Tehran was Gulbadi’s own private stab at the Islamic Republic.

  Gulbadi, caught up in a chanting fever, was now hardly able to separate consonant from vowel. The ‘Hare’ had gone and the blue god’s name was now just a breathy whisper: ‘Krishna, Krish-na, Krish-na, rama, rama, rama.’ Just at the point when it seemed the momentum had to break, it got faster and louder. I was watching Gulbadi when someone walked into the room behind me. It was the expression on his face, of fear and resignation, that made me turn. I saw a tall man with a stoop, and a short, salt and pepper beard, come in and sit down. His entry coincided with Gulbadi upping the ante: ‘Krishna, Krishna, Krishna, rama, rama, rama, Ali, Ali, Ali, Allah, Allah, Allah.’

  What?

  I didn’t know it then but the man who’d just walked in was the regime’s spy. Gulbadi had been closed down, put in jail, faced court trials, but he hadn’t given up. The Islamic Republic, at last, acting always with the subtlety of which Amir had spoken, decided to use him rather than silence him.

  Soon after his arrival, the chanting died down and Gulbadi began a sermon in Farsi. I got up and went to find Nargis. A number of people were sitting round a dining-table next to a refrigerator, listening to the sermon; it was just an ordinary house when it wasn’t a temple. Nargis was listening from just outside the room. When it was over, Gulbadi fielded questions. He made a comparison between Kalki, the final incarnation of Vishnu, who comes on a white horse to bring in a better age and the Shia Mahdi, who also comes on a white horse at the end of the world. A schoolteacher was asking if, perhaps, they might come sooner. ‘No,’ Gulbadi said, and Nargis translated, ‘He must take his time.’ With this, the meeting was dismissed and tea and sweets were served on the dining-table. Nargis took the opportunity to introduce me to Gulbadi.

  He was nervous. He gave me a long, involved speech on how he hadn’t rejected Islam. ‘People in India ask me if I converted,’ he said, ‘but Prabhupada’s instruction is about the love of God and he has many names. I am a Muslim, I love God and Muhammad. I didn’t reject one for the other, I accepted them all.’ Then he came out with what was really on his mind. ‘He is a judge of the courts,’ he whispered, looking at the man who had come in late, ‘and a very Islamic person. He became interested in our classes. I had a case in the courts, but by his mercy he talked to the other officers and saved us.’

  This was not quite true. The man was a government monitor.

  On the way to Gulbadi’s vegetarian restaurant, Nargis told me that the judge often disrupted Gulbadi’s sermons by saying that Islam was superior to Krishnaism and suggested books that showed how the Koran was more powerful than the Bhagavad Gita. That morning his presence led Gulbadi to make an energetic sermon cast in Hindu terms against democracy, America and the material world. ‘How can they bring democracy when they don’t even have it in their own countries?’ he had ask
ed. ‘They are in passion, and passion makes anger, which makes war. That’s why America makes these wars against Afghanistan and Iraq.’

  Gulbadi’s vegetarian restaurant was on the veranda of an attractive red-brick building, near the embassies. This was an older part of town, with wide boulevards and low, heavy bureaucratic buildings. The old American embassy was just next door, its walls now covered with vivid, anti-American murals and slogans, the faint outline of its defaced crest still visible at the gate. Houshmand, a friend of Nargis, had joined us. He was a slight, fine-featured student with dark, intelligent eyes.

  ‘In this country, the government can do what they like,’ Nargis explained, referring to the earlier episode of the government spy.

  ‘Did Gulbadi switch to saying “Ali” because he came in?’

  ‘You can make this connection,’ she laughed.

  Houshmand looked at me intently. Minutes ago he had also been laughing, telling me how they had picked up his brother and given him a full eighty lashes because they had found a picture of him at a party from the year before in his car glovebox. ‘We have a thousand experiences like this. Maybe I do a business with the government and make them whips for lashing.’ Now, becoming serious, he said, ‘You must understand the difference between the real Islam and what you see here, which is not Islam, and the real Muslims and these Muslims you see here. All religions try to give you inner peace, but only a few intelligent people understand the real religion. Even with Hindus, you have the bad ones, who tell me to go out of the temple, but with our Muslim religion, we have more of a problem.’

  ‘Why?’

  They talked between themselves for a few seconds, Houshmand arranging the words he wanted to give me. Then he looked up and said, ‘I think Muslims are more strict because, I don’t know when this happened, they started to feel danger from other religions, maybe three or four hundred years ago. And the father started telling his son that you must fight the other religion and the son tells his son the same thing. And now, today, we have this.’ Arm outstretched, he pointed at the city around us, still drying after the morning shower.

  The ‘other religion’ was the growth of the West and the dates were roughly right: between two and three hundred years ago European powers, charged with new learning, grew stronger and Muslim empires everywhere began to fail. The faith’s response was to retreat behind the purity of its Book and Traditions and to assert its simplicities more forcefully. Wilfred Blunt, writing in the interim between what seemed like the end of the Wahhabis and their resurgence in the twentieth century, had seen in their literalism a spirit of reform, but felt that their two mistakes, which were really the same mistake, were an over-insistence on trifles, the letter of the Book, and the attempt to Arabianise the world. But to be in Iran, and Saudi Arabia, more than a century after Blunt was writing, it seemed as though the trifles, rather than holding back the literalist imposition of Islam, had become the instrument by which regimes that sought to execute these programmes could control their population. But an entity like the Islamic Republic, perhaps many hundreds of years in the making, had, in imposing the modern tyranny of trifles, opened itself up to the charge of not representing the ‘real faith’ and, more importantly, of being mired in the corruption that lay behind the insistence on trifles.

  Nargis wanted me to meet another friend, called Desiré. We drove over to her flat later that evening. Desiré was always in trouble with the regime, and within minutes I could see why: she was eccentric and outspoken. I could barely make out her features because her flat was in darkness. The whole place was lit with dim ultraviolet light. The walls were painted white and mauve, and the seating consisted of several fat saffron-coloured cushions. All the colours glowed. On the wall there was a huge painting from the Hindu epics of Krishna driving Arjun’s chariot into war. Incense sticks burnt in the fireplace, a wide-screen Panasonic TV sat darkly on one side of the room, and under a reading lamp, the only real light, a DJ’s mixing equipment was laid out.

  Desiré was dressed in a red, sleeveless vest and tight beige tracksuit bottoms that followed her legs closely to the knee, then flared. Her hair was short, but with bleached dreadlocks tied into it. In another country, she might have gone to music festivals and raves, or hung about on beaches in Goa, been at Burning Man, or known full-moon parties in Bali, but in Iran the tyranny of trifles had made something of her. She was far too essential to their programme to be ignored and she, as if addicted to the attention, violent as it was, couldn’t get away. They picked her up all the time, sometimes just for laughing in a public place. But the most recent episode had been the most serious.

  Desiré spoke in a torrent of chaotic accented English, stray laughter and impassioned exclamation marks. ‘So many times! So many times, I’m telling you!’ she cried, when I asked her if she’d been picked up before. ‘But the thing is that every time I knew how to get away. I look like a foreigner, I don’t look that much like an Iranian, and so many times I would start pretending that I am French, that I am Indian maybe, too. I knew how to bribe them and talk to them, but this time it wasn’t talkable.’

  ‘Why did they come?’

  ‘Because my friend and I, we wanted to go and party in Shemshak.’ The place she spoke of was a ski resort north of Tehran. ‘And my friend, she wanted some drugs, you know, and there was this guy who used to always come and give it to her. But this time he arrived at her house with the police because they had taken him.’

  ‘This is the dealer?’

  ‘Yes, they took the dealer and came to my friend’s house, and they were there waiting when I arrived, waiting, talking, speaking to my friend. My friend had called before to say, “Come pick me up and we’ll go party in Shemshak for my birthday.” So I went to pick her up and suddenly I come in and see this guy with a gun to my head.’

  ‘Was your friend also in the room?’

  ‘Yes, they were searching her house when I rang the bell.’

  ‘She didn’t call to say don’t come?’

  ‘She couldn’t! She can’t! They don’t let you do anything. So, anyway, they’re standing there all rough and tough. You see, most of these people, they grow up in these houses without their mother and father . . .’

  ‘Orphanages?’

  ‘Yes. Or even if they have parents, in their . . .’ she paused in search of the right word ‘. . . culture, beating a woman is very easy. From the time a boy is a little boy, the father says, “Beat your mother,” so he starts beating his mother, his sister, anybody. So, beating us is nothing for them.’

  ‘Did they beat you?’

  ‘Of course!’ she said, with near-jubilation. ‘Once we were in Shemshak. Nargis was there.’ Nargis, sitting on a saffron cushion, looked over. ‘We were walking,’ Desiré continued, ‘it was night time, and we were going from my house to Nargis’s house. I had a car, but I just felt like walking. And a car, not even a Komiteh car or a police car, just a white Pride, came near us. We saw them, but thought they were these guys who say things to girls. OK? Suddenly we see four big guys come out of their car and come to take us. They take one of my friends and they want to put her in the car. She was like, ‘Aein, aein . . .’ She emitted a girly nasal noise to indicate that she had put up no resistance. ‘But I wasn’t . . . I said, “Leave me alone! Don’t touch me! Don’t touch me!” I wanted somebody to help us because I didn’t know these were police.’

  ‘Were they Basiji?’

  ‘No, no! They were so clean, in their white shirts, nothing. Normal people. I tell you, after that night I was scared of everybody because those men were so normal. You might even party in front of them.’ Desiré said ‘party’ with special emphasis, drawing out the word, as if the world was divided into people who partied and people who didn’t. ‘We didn’t know where they were from! I was scared that these were people who wanted to steal us and rape us, you never know! I was screaming, “Show me your paper, show me something,” and they were like, with their big batons, beating us! Nargis was
funny,’ she chuckled. ‘She’s big, you know, so when they wanted to put her in the car, I was screaming, “Nargis, don’t get in, don’t get in!” So she put her hands up and they were pushing and pushing, but they couldn’t get her into the car.’ Desiré laughed out loud, and for the first time I could make out her features, her strong, square jaw, her red lipstick, her light, tanned skin. She was right: she could have been from anywhere. ‘And they were beating me and beating me like hell!’ She said it with so much energy and lightness that it didn’t feel real.

  ‘With a baton?’

  ‘Yeah, with baton. I swear if I didn’t do this,’ she said, raising her arms over her head, ‘I would be dead because my arms were black. Suddenly I saw Nargis was getting away and the baton guy was going to hit her on the head. I jumped in front of him because I thought maybe it would hit me somewhere but not on the head. So I jumped in front of him. I screamed, “Don’t touch her, don’t beat her,” and I went in front of the Komiteh. Nargis was smart, she used that, and she started running. Running and running! The Komiteh was yelling, “Stop, stop,” and she was running. I was yelling, “Run, Nargis, run, Nargis,” and – and, oh, stupid Nargis! After running, she comes back! Running back! I said, “What the fuck is she doing? She’s coming back!”’ Desiré was reliving every second, laughing now, sipping vodka and cranberry juice with ice, standing in front of her refrigerator. ‘She came running back to me, screaming, “Listen, listen, your car is there, I saw your car.” I said, “Fuck the car, just run, man, run.” And she was worried about my car!’