by Lois Pryce
I sensed that Raha and I attended very different parties.
At that moment we were interrupted by the familiar voice of the hotel manager, who was striding towards our table with a pot of tea in his hand.
‘Ha-ha-ha! Death to Britain!’ he declared, almost doubling up with laughter as he splashed the tea into our cups.
Raha gave me a quizzical look.
‘It’s just our little joke,’ I said as he wandered off, still laughing to himself.
Raha was talking about television again.
‘If you watch the news stories about the UK and America on the Iranian channels, you will see they change what people say to suit their message. The subtitles in Persian are not always the same as what the people being interviewed are saying. You can only notice if you speak English well.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Well, when your royal baby was born recently, yes?’
‘Prince George?’ I had never thought of him as my royal baby, but I suppose technically, I was contributing to his upkeep.
‘Yes, Prince George. The Iranian television channel showed interviews of British people in the street, in London, asking what they thought about the new prince. The subtitles on the screen were saying bad things as if the people didn’t like the British royal family. But I could see the people were saying something different to the words on the screen. I could hear them saying they were happy about the new baby.’
I was astounded and burst out laughing. It seemed such an underhand yet silly thing to do. But propaganda takes all forms and I supposed insidious, subtle messages like this were as powerful in some ways as the upfront, hardline documentary I had watched last night.
‘I am able to see it, to hear it, because I know English, because of attending university in America,’ she said. ‘But if you are an uneducated person, who speaks only Persian, you will not be able to hear the truth. You understand?’
I understood only too well.
8
Tehran: Politics, Pollution and Parties
TO ARRIVE IN Tehran on a motorcycle is like being pressganged into playing a relentless video game. Constantly forcing you onwards and upwards, level upon level. You must keep moving, keep up the pace, never stop. If you drop your guard, just for a second, you’re done. It’s a commitment; once you’re in, you’re in and if you’re lucky, you’ll be spat out at your destination, trembling and disorientated, and fundamentally altered on some molecular level. Many don’t make it, as is apparent by the roadside displays of mangled car wrecks, mounted like billboard ads in an attempt to temper the Iranian driver. It hasn’t worked.
Like a wild animal preparing for attack, teeth bared, all senses on overdrive, I charged into the Tehran-bound traffic. Every muscle in my body tensed, switched to fight or flight mode, until I realised my mistake – it was fight and flight that was required here. At top speed, one eye on my maps, the other pretty much everywhere else, I weaved, ducked, dodged and yelled my way into this most unholy of capital cities. Twelve million people in their horn-blasting, fume-spewing bangers, all playing the same fast violent game. It’s hard not to take it personally, but once I had altered my western road user’s mindset and understood that none of Tehran’s drivers were actually trying to kill me, it made it slightly easier. I simply had to learn to ride like an Iranian. This meant the only rule I needed to understand is that there are no rules; red traffic lights are advisory rather than obligatory, four lanes marked on the road actually means seven in reality, and no vehicle should ever be further than one inch away from another. Breathing deeply as another maniacal taxi driver hurtled towards me, I trawled my past travels for motivation and reassurance. Remember Kinshasa? Guatemala City … C’mon, you can do this! Istanbul, just a few weeks earlier, had seemed like hell on earth but now felt like a dawdle through Toytown. None of them compared to this insanity.
But today Allah was on my side. I pulled up outside Sina’s house breathless, shaking, grimy with sweat, dust and diesel fumes, but triumphant and euphoric. When Sina opened the door, with his warm smile and familiar accent, the sound of home, I made an instinctive but fundamental error. I gave him a hug. There was just a moment’s hesitation as he hugged me back, but I sensed him looking over my shoulder. We were on the street, his neighbours were coming and going from their houses, they could see us. I had broken not just a social code but the law of the land. Men and women who are not married or related are forbidden from touching each other in public; they will never greet each other with a hug or even a handshake. My arrival at Sina’s house would raise eyebrows and it was entirely possible that having me stay could attract unwanted attention from the authorities. I had known of other western travellers who had used couch-surfing websites to find accommodation in Iran, only to discover that their hosts had later been interrogated and warned by the police.
It was easy to forget, amongst all the bustle and noise and the easy-going hospitality of the Iranians, that a large chunk of the population are paid to keep an eye on the rest. These guardians are easy to spot when they take the form of uniformed police, but the Gashte Ershad, Iran’s infamous ‘morality police’, go about their business in plain clothes, scouring the streets for un-Islamic behaviour. Their unmarked vans, the bane of liberal Tehranis, cruise the streets with a team of wardens including a chador-cloaked female assistant whose job it is to bundle young women into the back of the van, take them to a holding facility, remove their make-up and lecture them on the evils of ‘bad hijab’. They are then forced to write an apology before being returned to their parents, invariably angry and resentful and no doubt keen to reapply their lipstick and nail varnish as soon as possible. In recent months, President Rouhani had made public requests to the Gashte Erhad to ease off on the harassment of young Iranian women, but as Aheng would have been quick to point out, his words had little power, and the ‘morality police’ continued their rounds, taking their orders from the Supreme Leader and his clerics.
Luckily, no one had seen my faux pas, and Sina took it in his stride, ushering me graciously into the garden of his villa-style home where his wife, Avid, rushed out to greet me. They were the picture of relaxed Iranian hospitality, proffering cool drinks and a tray of snacks as soon as I crossed the threshold, with Sina offering me any assistance I could wish for. It was a relief to be insulated in this safe haven with its leafy garden, down a quiet side street, knowing that the madness continued to rage outside. I had to savour it while it lasted; sadly Sina and Avid were due to leave town a couple of days later, so I couldn’t allow myself to get too comfortable. But I would not be leaving Tehran right away as I had another friend of a friend to look up.
‘He lives in an area called Vanak,’ I said to Sina, reading out his address.
‘Very nice,’ he nodded approvingly. ‘That’s a posh neighbourhood, not far from here. Who is he?’
I explained I didn’t know him either, only that his name was Omid. It was another loose connection through a British-Iranian acquaintance of mine in London. Omid was an old business colleague of his from years back who had made a similar life journey to Sina, returning to his homeland after spending time in the UK and America as a restaurateur. My friend had told him about my journey and he had insisted I come to stay with him and his family while in Tehran.
‘He’s quite a character,’ my friend had said with a grin. ‘He’ll show you a good time.’ So far my only contact with Omid had been by phone from Tabriz, just to let him know I had arrived in Iran, and even in that short conversation I had found his enthusiasm and humour infectious. His chirpy cockney accent, from a youth spent in south London, put me instantly at ease and he chatted and laughed easily. I was looking forward to meeting him.
The following day, before Sina left town, he helped me with my truncated visa as promised. It had felt like a gamble to set off with such uncertainty but now I was here, I was relieved to find that Sina knew where to go and what to do. My first day in Tehran was spent in a windowless basement, f
illing in forms, having my offending wisps of hair tucked under my headscarf for my ID photos, and finally, waiting for hours alongside clusters of thin, silent, weary men. They wore shabby loose-fitting cotton trousers and construction boots, and sat with their heads bowed to their knees, resigned to the bureaucracy.
‘They are Afghans,’ Sina explained. ‘Migrant workers, getting visas to work in Iran, for building sites, and cleaning, street sweeping, all the dirty work.’
I was granted thirty days to roam freely in Iran, no questions asked about my form of transport, and the next day I was moving on once again, but only a few miles this time. It was just a short hop along the Chamran Highway from Sina’s home in Shahrak-e Gharb to Omid’s in Vanak, but even that small burst of Tehran driving was enough to send me into sweats and palpitations. When I arrived at Omid’s house I was ready to lock myself in for the duration.
As soon as I pressed the buzzer I could hear him approaching, an excitable London accent calling my name from behind the locked gate. I felt immediately cheered.
‘Lois! You made it!’ He exuded enthusiasm. Commandeering my bike, he pushed it into the courtyard and as the gate shut behind us, I stepped into a secret pleasure zone. Helmet, headscarf and manteau were cast aside and illegal pastimes reigned. BBC World chattered away on the television and behind a corner bar, in a nod to Omid’s former life in London as well as a defiant ‘up yours’ to the Iranian authorities, a row of optics lined the wall. Omid’s wife, Tala, a warm-hearted, supermodelesque Iranian beauty and their delightful eight-year-old daughter, Sorena, welcomed me like an old family friend and I felt all the tension of the past few weeks melt away. In their company Tehran became a source of excitement and fascination, rather than the overwhelming monstrosity it had seemed just minutes earlier. After the obligatory tea and sweets, with energy levels high, we hit the streets of the city in their car, heading for a late evening meal in the northern suburbs. Before we set off, Sorena stood beside me in front of the mirror by the door, frowning at my reflection.
‘No, no. This is all wrong,’ she said, tugging at my headscarf. ‘Let me show you.’
She removed it and draped it artfully and loosely over the top of my head, flipping one end back over my shoulder, adding a much needed fashionable edge to my weirdo white Muslim convert look.
‘Yes, that’s better,’ she said nodding in approval, with the authority of a professional stylist, then she looked up at me, eyebrows frowning. ‘Do you like it, wearing the scarf?’
‘Well, no …’
‘I hate it. It is stupid. And I hate him!’ She opened a school exercise book that was lying on a side table, showing a full-page portrait of Ayatollah Khomeini on the inside cover. Picking up a pencil, she drew fangs on his mouth and wrote Na-na-na-na-na. BAD MAN next to his head, giggling uncontrollably. I loved her immediately.
Omid, with a foot and a passport in both Iran and England, proved to be an illuminating and insightful companion, able to view his home country with typical Iranian passion and patriotism but also the detached, sardonic eye of a true Brit. One thing quickly became clear; the disdain for the regime was a family affair. This was made obvious as we set off into the streets of north Tehran and a robed mullah crossed the road in front of us, head down, scurrying along with a pile of books under his arm. Omid blasted the horn and banged on the window.
‘That means FUCK YOU!’ he shouted, roaring with laughter, adding, ‘And he knows it!’ as the beleaguered cleric gave a jumpy glance in our direction and hurried on, scowling under his white turban as he dodged the traffic. The Iranian drivers showed no mercy, not even for a man of the cloth.
As we cruised the heaving streets, Tehran began to take shape, transforming itself from a howling mess of concrete and metal into a city with a distinct form, character and even charm. Orientation was easy, with the snow-topped mountains dominating the northern skyline and, in the west of the city, the Milad Tower rising up out of the low-level chaos. A relatively recent addition to the skyline, the 435-metre-high structure is a telecoms tower, cultural and convention centre and revolving restaurant, mainly used as a highly sanitised social hub for Tehran’s well-behaved citizens and visiting tourists – the public face of state-sanctioned leisure in modern Iran. These two beacons kept me orientated and once I had become acquainted with Tehran’s central artery, Valiasr Street, an eleven-mile tree-lined boulevard that runs north–south along the entire length of the city, I was beginning to get my bearings.
Over the next few days, as we drove and tramped the streets of Tehran, it became obvious that this was a divided city – one divided not just physically, by Valiasr Street, but on its other axis by something less tangible. The north of Tehran is home to the wealthy and westernised. Bountiful restaurants, glitzy shopping centres, blacked-out SUVs and elegant, bejewelled women fill its streets. Homes are villa-style behind high walls or anonymous apartment complexes, and the ski slopes of the mountains are in easy reach. In the south of the city, beyond the railway station and the bazaar with its hustling money-changers and swaggering bazaaris, are rundown dirty streets where the poor and, by default, the pious reside. Here, the women are hunched under black chadors and bearded men sit in groups outside scruffy little grocery shops, grizzled and suspicious of outsiders. The homes in the south of the city are low-rise, built of breezeblocks or crumbling brick and whole families are transported around the dirty streets on whiny mopeds, while in the parks and squares drug addicts and prostitutes do their best to keep a low profile. But the defining features of Tehran, the brownish yellow smog and the anarchic traffic, know no physical or social boundaries; they cannot be escaped by the rich or the religious.
In the city centre these two worlds merge in a whirl of commerce and feverish industry among a mishmash of majestic old buildings and shabby concrete decay. I took a cab into the centre of town and listened to the driver’s running commentary on all that ailed his beloved city, on the good old days when he could have a beer and a dance, and how he had escaped to America to study engineering but couldn’t afford the university fees and was forced to return home after a year.
‘Now, drive taxi in Tehran. No beer. No fun.’
He shrugged, resigned to his fate. After about twenty minutes, once his English vocabulary had been depleted, his analysis of Tehran’s problems was distilled down to two descriptions as he pointed at buildings in turn as we passed by.
‘Reza Shah!’ he would shout triumphantly at anything remotely grand or old.
‘Islamic Republic!’ he spat at each shoddy concrete office block.
‘Reza Shah! Islamic Republic! Reza Shah! Islamic Republic!’
It was strangely catchy and became my Tehran mantra, repeating tirelessly and soundlessly in my head for the rest of the day.
Just over a mile apart in the city centre the American and British embassies, two buildings that are decidedly ‘Reza Shah!’, stood uninhabited, each comprising an entire city block. The British Embassy had been shut since the 2011 spat that had spawned this journey of mine, but the American Embassy’s closure dated back to the year that changed everything, 1979. A group of students, hopped up on revolutionary fervour and angry that the USA was harbouring the Shah, stormed the embassy and took fifty-two members of its staff hostage. It was the harbouring of the Shah that clinched it, one of the hostage takers later admitted. The Islamist radicals had long memories. They recalled that the last time the Shah had fled into exile, in 1953, just before the CIA coup of Mosaddegh, the USA had returned him to the throne, along with several million dollars to keep him in their pocket. Seeing history repeating itself, Khomeini’s revolutionaries feared that the USA was about to return the Shah to power once again; the storming of the embassy was their response. It was the last straw in the volatile relationship between Iran and the Great Satan. Four hundred and forty-four days later, when the hostages were eventually released, it was obvious that diplomatic relations between the two countries could never resume. Sanctions were imposed and the
big freeze began.
The embassy complex had certainly not been neglected by its hosts in the intervening years. I was surprised to see that the exterior was in good shape and in particular the colourful murals that adorned its long low walls. The Iranian government had been busy and imaginative; a skull-headed Statue of Liberty leered over the American flag, its red stripes morphing into barbed-wire as they extended over a map of Iran. A black-gloved hand bearing Israeli and American flag wristbands gripped the globe, and just in case you were in any doubt about the overarching message, freshly painted bold capital letters screamed DOWN WITH USA.
There was no denying that the artwork was well executed. Under the suspicious gaze of twitchy guards with their AK-47s, I studied the murals, wishing I could have been a fly on the wall at the brainstorming sessions that resulted in these images. Whoever the artists were, they certainly had their work cut out; these vast anti-US murals appeared across Tehran, usually featuring the Stars and Stripes, images of bombs, guns and other symbols of military oppression and the ubiquitous slogan Down with USA. But despite the fresh paint the message felt antiquated and tired. There was something passé about the whole thing, but charmingly retro too, as if the Islamic Republic had employed Wolfie Smith as their copywriter. Nobody says ‘Down With’ anymore, I wanted to tell the gun-toting guards, it’s just so seventies.
Back in the northern suburbs, Omid and Tala plunged me into their social whirl. By night we dined, danced and partied with all the illicit accoutrements one could hope for. Jack Daniels and Smirnoff were easy to come by, gin and decent wine not so much.
‘I do miss a good French red,’ Omid told me, with a mournful smile, recalling his days as a London restaurateur.