Revolutionary Ride

by Lois Pryce

  ‘Yes, the election was a fraud,’ my schoolgirl revolutionary continued. ‘This was the biggest protest in Iran since 1979, since the Islamic Revolution. It started because of the election but it became a big movement, the Green Movement, for democracy, human rights. It is a peaceful movement, only non-violent protests, you know, like Gandhi.’ She came over all dreamy for a moment. ‘He is my hero!’

  ‘Wait a minute,’ I said, doing some rough calculations. ‘How old were you in 2009?’

  She gave me a cheeky smile. ‘Eleven years old. I protested with my parents.’

  ‘So what happened?’

  ‘People were killed, shot in the street, you know they used snipers? I saw them, people bleeding in the street. Then afterwards it was terrible, so many people were arrested, questioned, tortured, sent to Evin Prison, hundreds of people. Sometimes they come out, sometimes they disappear. Many people, they have never been heard of again. Young people, young women and men, their families do not know what happened to them.’ She shook her head. ‘But oh! You should have seen it, such a beautiful sight, millions of us. We filled Azadi Street, all the way from Azadi Tower to Enqelab Square. You do not know Tehran yet but you will see, this is a very long road!’

  ‘I remember seeing the pictures.’

  ‘And do you know what these words mean, Azadi and Enqelab?’

  I nodded, remembering my maps, past and present.

  ‘This is, how do you say … ironic, yes?’

  ‘So do you think it will happen again? Could there be another revolution?’

  For the first time in our conversation she looked defeated. She slumped down in her seat, shaking her head. ‘I hope. All the time I hope. But no, I do not think so now. The protests, they lasted for many months. But people became scared and tired of fighting. There are still some who believe it can happen. The Green Movement is still alive but our leader, Mousavi, he is under house arrest and the people, they have much to lose. They are scared for their lives and their families.’

  ‘By the way, my name is Aheng,’ she said, offering her hand. ‘It is a Kurdish name, I am Kurdish. Aheng means “harmony”.’

  ‘Your parents must be very proud of you.’

  Her family had retired to their room with a casual wave, seemingly relaxed about leaving their teenage daughter in the company of a foreign stranger.

  ‘Oh yes, my parents are very progressive. They like to encourage me to do what I wish with my life. If I want to be a doctor and go to America, they will support me. But of course they will miss me too. And I will miss them.’

  ‘Are your friends like you? Involved in politics? Campaigning?’

  ‘I guess so, most of them.’

  I told her that back home she would be considered unusual, that most people of her age had little interest in politics.

  ‘That is because in Britain you are free,’ she said simply. ‘It is impossible for us not to be interested, do you see? To not care, that is a luxury only for the free.’

  When she got up to go to her room she offered me a surreptitious view inside her shoulder bag. ‘Look,’ she said with a giggle that was more naughty schoolgirl than subversive revolutionary. ‘I smuggled in fashion magazines from Turkey!’

  The following day I was on the road as dawn broke. My surroundings changed fast as I descended the mountains and headed towards the desert, with Mount Damāvand dominating the scenery for miles around. Its influence was apparent in the small towns that sat in its foothills, with their climbing outfitters, hiking tour companies, and even statues of mountaineers, celebrating Iran’s long and illustrious history in this field. As my route took me closer to the capital, the roads became faster, more congested and polluted. But the upside was an increased sense of anonymity. I was beginning to realise that I could never be truly anonymous in Iran; as a woman riding a UK-registered motorcycle I was a constant source of interest, bemusement or excitement, depending on who had spotted me and my unusual form of transport, but as is the case anywhere in the world, the nearer I got to the metropolis, the easier it was to slip by unnoticed. This rule was, however, negated any time I took a break, at petrol stations, truck stops and toll booths, where, just like in the small towns, I would be stared at and questioned, but often fed and watered with genuine concern for my well-being. The interest was almost always friendly but it was hard not to feel self-conscious, as so many pairs of eyes invariably turned in my direction.

  This incessant attention meant that hotel rooms became my only harbours of sanctuary, as well as the one place I could find freedom from my restrictive clothing. Half a day’s ride from Tehran, I stopped early, with the plan of tackling the capital the following day. Releasing my hair from its confinements, I collapsed on the bed, revelling in the visual assault that can only be found in cheap Iranian hotel furnishings. On this occasion, a gold nylon bedcover that when pulled back revealed a faux fur zebra print blanket and beyond that a Barbie-pink sheet. None of it was too fresh but still, it livened up the otherwise drab little quarters.

  Flumping back on the shiny gold satin, I turned on the television. The hotel manager at the checkin desk had told me with great pride that his establishment was the only one in town with an English-speaking cable channel. I didn’t catch the name of it but I was pretty certain it wouldn’t be the BBC, which is denounced, and therefore banned by the Iranian government, along with CNN and most other western news sources. I messed around with the bewildering selection of remote controls, twiddled some knobs on the ancient set, but couldn’t get anything on the screen except a black-and-white strobe-fest of horizontal lines with a soundtrack that sounded like the call to prayer put through a revolving Leslie speaker.

  After ten minutes of faffing I was no closer to the reruns of Lovejoy and the Miss Marple marathon that were forming my homesick-induced television fantasy, but the bit was firmly between my teeth now. I would conquer this Iranian television, dammit! So I nipped down the two flights of stairs to the lobby and asked the manager how to make it work.

  ‘I will come and show you,’ he said and followed me up to the room.

  There was nowhere to sit except for the bed, but when I perched myself on the edge he sat next to me, very close. His thighs were touching mine. He picked up the remote controls and smiled at me, leaning in, his brown eyes and white teeth just inches from mine. It was at this moment I had a sudden and horrible realisation. I had forgotten to put on my headscarf. I felt a wave of shame and horror wash over me. It had completely slipped my mind, caught up as I had been with trying to get the television to work. Without thinking, I had merrily popped out of the room, down the stairs, and, with red hair flowing, had essentially invited a strange man up to my room. ‘Ooh, Mr Manager, my television doesn’t work, please can you help me?’ It had all the hallmarks of the opening scenes of a bad porn film. I tried to calm my imagination; maybe I was overreacting, maybe it wasn’t as bad as I thought. The problem was that I still had no real sense of the social nuances between men and women in this country. I truly had no clue as to how inappropriate my behaviour could be considered. Was I worrying about nothing, or was it wildly provocative? Then an altogether different wave of shame hit me. Ashamed at how quickly I had subscribed to the idea that to be seen without the hijab deserved this reaction. Now I felt annoyed with myself about that. But what to do right now?

  I could see my headscarf lying on the floor next to my motorcycle helmet in the corner of the room. But to get to it I would have to squeeze past my over-attentive hotel manager, who was still sitting on the bed, idly fiddling with the remote controls. This little manoeuvre would essentially involve me shoving the supposedly irresistible curves of my bottom in his face, unless he had the good grace to stand up and let me pass, which didn’t seem likely. Gold and fur bedspreads, headscarf tossed aside, my arse, your face; there was nothing about this scene that suggested it was going to end well.

  Suddenly a loud, abrupt crackle burst out from the television. The horizontal lines morphed into
some shaky footage, and noisy chants of ‘Death to Britain! Down with Britain!’ came blasting out of the speaker accompanied by the image of a group of men burning the Union Jack. A voice-over in accented English followed: ‘In 2011 protestors gathered at the British Embassy in Tehran to protest over Britain’s hostile policies against the Iranian government. They called for the British ambassador to be expelled and for Iran to cut all diplomatic ties with Britain.’

  ‘Death to Britain! Death to Britain!’ the chanting continued, filling the tiny room. Could this situation get any more awkward? I wondered. The manager grinned, slightly uncomfortably, to give him credit. What was I meant to do now? Say ‘Er, yes, well, sorry about the sanctions, stealing all your oil, deposing your favourite prime minister and all that, but can you stop rubbing your thigh against mine now please.’

  ‘Television all good!’ he said.

  I assumed he meant its function rather than its content, but I couldn’t be sure. He was still sitting there.

  ‘Er, yes, great, thank you.’

  Still sitting.

  ‘Um, just got to get something from my bike,’ I heard myself saying as I attempted a vault across the bed to avoid the embarrassing squeeze-past. My foot got tangled up in the frilly edging of the gold bedspread and I landed awkwardly on the floor. Whatever allure I may have once held was definitely eliminated. I made a lunge for my headscarf and bundled it around my hair as I ran down the stairs to the underground car park.

  I dilly-dallied with my bike until I felt enough time had passed to make it clear that I definitely wasn’t planning on returning for some sanction-busting hanky-panky. On my way back to my room, I cringed as I passed through the reception, feeling the manager’s eyes following me.

  ‘Everything fine, madam?’ he asked coolly from behind the desk.

  ‘Ah, yes, fine, fine, thank you. Just, er, needed to get this.’ I waved my Iran road map ostentatiously to show the purpose of my visit to my bike.

  ‘Got to plan my route for tomorrow, going to Tehran, lots of roads, very confusing …’ I was talking too much. As I continued up the stairs he started laughing and called after me, ‘Death to Britain, ha-ha-ha!’ The Iranians certainly weren’t lacking in a sense of humour.

  The television was still blasting away. It turned out I had stumbled upon a programme all about Britain’s negative influence and destructive relationship with Iran. And the scriptwriter had not been sitting on any fences. The station airing this enlightening show was PressTV, a controversial English-language news channel funded by the Iranian government that had broadcast from London until recently, when some decidedly suspect reporting had seen it banned from operating out of the UK. It now beamed its propaganda from Tehran but still featured several British presenters, including politicians Ken Livingstone and George Galloway, whom I imagined welcomed the opportunity to give the finger to the British government, even if that meant taking the ayatollah’s shilling. PressTV’s official manifesto was to provide English-language news from an Iranian/Islamic perspective, but controversies surrounding accusations of anti-Semitism, the airing of forced confessions and giving airtime to extreme right-wing commentators had not helped its cause in the global media and had seen its licence revoked in Europe and the channel removed from certain satellites.

  I watched the show with an interest verging on morbid fascination, following Iran’s official version of our countries’ stormy history over the last two hundred years. Although the timeline was factually accurate, and one couldn’t condone Britain’s interference and skulduggery, the tone and language of the narration was so bitter and aggressive I felt almost personally under attack, irrational as I knew that to be. I was surprised to find myself taken aback at the unadulterated vicious manner and opinions of the commentary. I suppose I had been raised on the more restrained tones of the BBC, which arguably had its own agendas, but at least promoted them with a little more subtlety. Forthcoming shows were trailered in the breaks, each one focussing on a current international news story or a documentary about an historical event, always serious in style and with professional production standards, but no matter what the specifics of the programme, the theme was always the same: the West in disarray. Race riots in Sweden, British student protests, the rise of the far right in central Europe, chronic shoplifters in France. The voice-overs were grave and loaded: ‘Once again, American police brutality make the headlines …’ There were news items on Saudi meddling in the Middle East and plenty of not-so-subtle highlighting of the misdeeds of Sunni Muslims in the region, and occasionally a rent-a-cleric talking head would pop up from some shabby studio: ‘The arrogant powers cannot control what happens in Iran!’

  Here was the rhetoric of the revolution, still going strong after thirty-five years. But who really cared about all this now, I wondered? Who watched this stuff? Not the people milling around the boutiques and electronics stores in the bustling towns. Not Aheng or the petrol-pumping psychology student. Not Hossein, despite his loyal passion for his country. Not the young guys manning the motorway toll booths who donated me their lunch, not the persecuted Bahá’í or the truck drivers giving me thumbs-up out of their windows, nor the chador-clad women who stopped me in the street and welcomed me with curious, open faces and eager questions. From the little of Iran I had seen so far, PressTV’s message seemed outdated and irrelevant, the background noise of a tedious old man ranting on about the olden days. Unfortunately, the ‘old man’ was running the country and could have you tortured and killed if he so desired.

  Next morning at breakfast I had the good fortune to be able to get some of the answers to my questions when I was approached by Raha, a glamorous, confident woman who was staying at the hotel on a business trip. It was unusual to see women alone, but I had noticed that it was more common the closer I got to Tehran. Raha certainly didn’t operate like someone living under oppression, with her tailored suit, Macbook and designer sunglasses.

  ‘I saw you arrive yesterday, I wanted to speak to you,’ she said, inviting me to join her at her table, ‘but I had to go for a meeting over dinner. I saw you and I was very interested in you! I wondered where you were from.’

  I told her about my journey and asked her what she did for work.

  ‘I am from Tehran. I studied luxury brand management in America, but I came back after university, so now I am working with showrooms, galleries, boutiques.’

  As our conversation unfolded, I mentioned the programme I had watched the night before.

  ‘Oh, PressTV!’ She rolled her eyes. ‘Yes, it is the English mouthpiece of the government. Nobody watches that rubbish! We all watch Manoto. It is broadcast from London, but it is against the regime.’

  ‘It’s a satellite channel?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I thought that satellite TV was illegal in Iran, but it seems to be everywhere, quite openly,’ I said.

  She gave a cool shrug of her shoulders. ‘Yes, technically it is illegal. The same as alcohol and many other things, but you can get all these things easily. You can call someone and order vodka or whisky and they deliver it to your home. You just have to know who to call.’

  ‘So there are illegal satellite TV installers in Iran?’

  ‘Yes, of course. And most of them work for the government!’ She laughed at the irony. ‘It is the same with the alcohol smuggling. It is profitable to control the supply of illegal goods, so why would the government let the criminals take that trade?’ she said with the authority of a business consultant. ‘The Revolutionary Guards make a lot of money from smuggling alcohol.’

  She shrugged her shoulders again. ‘Everyone knows this. Sometimes the police will make a show of arresting people. They used to come to people’s houses and take their satellite dishes and look for alcohol, but they do not do this so much now.’

  ‘But in Sharia law, isn’t it wrong to drink alcohol?’ I wasn’t sure where Sharia law stood on watching satellite television, but the Islamic views on boozing were clear. ‘And most p
eople in Iran are Muslim, so they support Sharia law, presumably?’

  ‘Well, yes, we are Muslims, but Iranians love to party!’ she laughed and added in a serious tone, ‘I love vodka; Stoli is my favourite but it is hard to get here.’

  ‘I see.’ I said.

  But I didn’t. The hypocrisy of the authorities was not surprising, but the whole story was confusing. Who really believed in what? Did anyone believe in anything? I recalled the similar conversation with Hossein. The contradictions of Iran were still churning in my head and I was waiting for them to settle into something clear and ordered, something from which I could create theories and see patterns that made sense to me. I feared I would be waiting a long time.

  I asked her if she wanted to return to America or work somewhere else abroad, as so many educated Iranians seemed to. But she looked unsure.

  ‘I thought I would. I didn’t want to come back but you know, it feels different here now. Things are changing in Iran. Tehran is a fun place to be right now, and of course it’s always good to be close to Dubai in my line of work. And’ – she gave me a conspiratorial look – ‘that’s where all the best parties are, obviously.’