by Lois Pryce
Hash, heroin, ham, hip-hop and heavy metal were all equally illegal, and just as accessible, if you knew who to call.
‘I can get you bacon if you want,’ offered Omid with the sneaky wink of a playground drug dealer. I almost felt I was disappointing him by being a vegetarian.
Living day to day with Omid and his family, meeting their friends and colleagues, I became fully aware of, and immersed in, the low-level subversion involved in everyday life in Iran. Sanction-busting business deals are facilitated through Dubai or Turkey, the internet is accessed by VPNs – Virtual Private Networks that reroute your server to a different country in order to circumvent the state censorship. Low-cut tops and tight skirts are hidden beneath shapeless manteaus and blonde highlights beneath plain headscarves. Parties and gigs are strictly word of mouth in private homes, and special buses with curtained windows are chartered by night to take groups of young ravers out to the desert to secret locations.
‘The authorities know exactly what goes on,’ said Omid, echoing the words of Raha, the young businesswoman I had met in the hotel. ‘They’re in it up to their necks. They organise all the smuggling, the booze, the satellite TV, prostitution; it’s a big racket run by the Revolutionary Guards. And everyone knows it.’
I was stirred and inspired by all this subversive defiance. No amount of revolutionary rhetoric blasting from the radio and television, or moralistic messages bearing down from billboards and murals around the city, seemed to make a dent. After thirty-five years the weary Tehranis had heard it all and it had become no more than tedious background noise. Human desires cannot be contained so easily, and it seemed that nothing would stop the inhabitants of this city squeezing the joy out of life, as if the repression and constant hectoring made them even more intent on living every moment. But Omid was growing weary of it all.
‘We want to leave Iran,’ he explained as we drove home one night, slightly drunkenly, from a birthday party in the northern suburbs. ‘Get out before Sorena has to wear the veil at school – nine years old they make them wear it. It’s bullshit.’
We shot through some red lights and found ourselves stationary, stuck in a lengthy traffic jam.
‘And also, so she doesn’t have to do this kind of thing …’ He was pointing out of the window at the multiple lanes of traffic that had slowed to a virtual standstill. I noticed all the cars were brand new luxury SUVs and sports cars, many with blacked-out windows and tricked-out features. We crawled along, suddenly conspicuous in our little Peugeot saloon among the Porsches and Maseratis.
‘What do you mean?’
‘I wanted to show you this,’ Omid said. ‘This is Iran Zamin Boulevard, this is a Tehran phenomenon. This is how young rich kids in Tehran get laid.’
I looked at the scene around me and spied a few glamorous girls peeking out of their car windows behind giant designer sunglasses, despite the fact it was two o’clock in the morning.
‘This is the pick-up strip,’ said Omid. ‘Groups of boys, groups of girls all come out in cars that Daddy bought for them, they drive up and down for hours, checking each other out, then they pass notes with their phone numbers. Half of their fathers will be working for the government,’ he added.
It was a sight to behold. Some of the fancier cars had pulled over, holding up the traffic while their drivers lounged, peacock style, on the bonnets. Flashes of bling sparkled under the streetlights as girls craned out of their windows for a better look, eyeing up the goods on offer.
‘Or sometimes they drive off somewhere and do it in the back of the car,’ said Omid with a grin.
The whole futility of the Islamic Republic was embodied in this most blatant celebration of consumerism and carnal desire.
‘Will you ever move back to London?’ I asked him as we snaked our way through the hormone-fuelled congestion.
‘Maybe, but it’s too expensive there now. We’d like to live in Thailand. We go there a lot, we love it there. The people are so friendly.’
I said that I had been moved by the kindness and hospitality I had encountered here in Iran, but he was sceptical.
‘Yes, people will be friendly to you because you are a foreigner, a visitor. That is part of our culture, to welcome strangers, but if you are an Iranian, it is different. We have to be careful with people we don’t know. We cannot just make new friends with people we meet. In Tehran people have their own group of friends they can trust and they keep it like that. It’s the same everywhere in Iran. You don’t know who is involved in anything. There are informers all over, and you can’t always tell by looking at them.’
‘It seems like clothing is a kind of code here, how women wear their scarves or if the guys wear jeans and trainers?’
‘Yes, you know that a woman in a black chador will be religious, an Islamist. We wouldn’t mix with people like that, I hate to even see these idiots! You know, I’ve seen these women attacking young girls in public, actually fighting them in the street because of their clothes and hair. Crazy!’ He shook his head. ‘But you can’t ever be too careful. One time I was in the police station, just to see a guy I know who worked there, and I saw their undercover agents being briefed. They looked like these kids …’
He motioned out of the window at a group of overly groomed young men strutting past in distinctly un-Islamic tight T-shirts bearing designer logos, skinny jeans and expensive Nikes. Their hair was gelled and spiked, gold chains glinted at their necks and wrists, you could almost smell the aftershave.
‘The guys in the police station, they were young, dressed like that, wearing I Love NY T-shirts, you know? They were being sent out as a set-up. No, you can’t trust anyone.’
He shook his head again and flung the car sharply to the left to avoid a motorcyclist who was careering towards us, simultaneously texting on his iPhone while smoking a cigarette.
‘Look at that nutter! Classic!’ He roared with laughter. ‘Don’t get me wrong, I love Iran in many ways, but not what it’s become under these donkeys. But I don’t like what England has become either. So many rules now in Europe, different kind of rules to here but so much restriction compared to when I was there in the eighties. It sounds crazy, I know, but in some ways we are more free here. It’s more real here. Look!’ He gestured around him at the heaving streets and the honking horns. ‘This is real life, you feel alive here! When I visit England it is like people are walking around half dead the whole time! This is real!’
Real. It was the same word that Hossein had used to describe his reason for returning to Iran from Canada. I was beginning to understand what they meant. I could feel this ‘realness’ around me all the time in Iran, and it was energising. It felt like it was how humans were supposed to interact with each other; look each other in the eye and talk about the things that really mattered, really feel everything, and not worry about the little things. I suddenly had the chilling thought that maybe this joie de vivre was because of living under an oppressive regime, rather than in spite of it. But when I put this idea to Omid he disagreed.
‘No, this is how it is to be Iranian. We were like this before the revolution and we will always be this way. We love life.’
‘I need to show you something’ he said suddenly and swung the car around. We began heading into the steep streets that snake out of north Tehran and towards the foothills of the Alborz. After a while he pulled over and pointed across the road.
‘Look. Do you know what this is?’
I stared out of the car window, seeing nothing but high concrete walls stretching down a dark, shabby street.
‘Evin Prison,’ he said. ‘This is the other side of life in Iran. If you’re not careful.’
I studied the plain anonymous walls. You could walk past and never know. In the dark of the night the scene took on an even more sinister edge.
‘Don’t take photos,’ said Omid. ‘You know what happened to that Canadian journalist? She took photos of the prison. Next thing, she’s dead. Tortured, raped, beaten to death.’
The prison had been built in the 1970s, under the reign of the Shah, and run by SAVAK, to house a few hundred people. Now its population is in the thousands, and the reports from the few that have been released are chilling. Rape, torture, beatings and even enforced druggings are used to elicit confessions once prisoners are addicted and left to go cold turkey. Iran’s government does not recognise the category of political prisoner, but by all accounts there is an entire wing created solely for dissidents, the notorious Section 209, a top-secret detention area allegedly run by Iran’s Ministry of Intelligence. At any one time it contains hundreds of journalists, bloggers and anti-regime activists, members of banned political movements, lawyers and intellectuals; even students and foreign tourists suspected of spying are considered fair game. Anyone arrested for criticising the regime ends up in Section 209. Many never see trial, some are never seen again.
Unsurprisingly, conditions at Evin are brutal, with prisoners crammed into tiny spaces, either in total darkness or under flickering strip lights twenty-four hours a day, unable to wash or even lie down. Illnesses such as hepatitis are rife and medical care basic at best. Food is poor and when prisoners are released they return to the world broken in all senses of the word: deafened and blinded from beatings, malnourished, sick and mentally and emotionally damaged by the psychological torture. I recalled Hossein’s story of his work colleague who had disappeared for two weeks and returned a ruined, silenced man. I wondered if this is where he had spent that lost fortnight. A chill ran through me as I stared at the high walls. What freedoms I took for granted back home.
‘I spent a night in there once,’ said Omid.
‘What for?’
‘I was a teenager. A bunch of us were out driving around, messing about. The police picked us up and put us in a cell for a night. My dad got me out the next day. I was lucky. It’s a different story these days. It’s been packed since the 2009 protests, after the election. Thousands of people were arrested after that. Hundreds have just disappeared. People don’t even know if their own kids are in there, if they’re alive or dead. This is why we have to get out of this country.’
‘They execute people here too,’ he continued. ‘They hang them. It used to be firing squads and even stoning, but these days it’s always hangings. They used to do public hangings, I remember that when I was a child. I went to see one, once. Lots of people turned out to watch, but they don’t do it in public anymore.’
‘Will Rouhani try to change this? Surely he can’t be seen to be bringing Iran in from the cold, doing trade deals, speaking at the UN, and still be allowing this to be happening?’
As I spoke I knew it was a naive question, and that I already knew the answer.
‘Rouhani is just a sop,’ said Omid. ‘He’s been put in place to keep the masses happy, to stop more protests like the ones in 2009. He can’t change anything, even if he wanted to. But the idiots have fallen for it, they think he’s going to save Iran!’
I thought of my hopeful psychology student, working hard, studying, pumping gas, predicting a great new dawn for Iran under the new president. And of glamorous Raha and her brave new world of luxury brand management. Had they been duped?
We drove back through the dark streets. Behind the locked door Omid poured drinks and we sprawled in front of the television, flicking between channels, catching up on world news and casually browsing the internet. Normality and domesticity reigned once again but outside the machinations of deceit, intimidation and fear continued to churn. Behind the locked doors of Evin Prison, hundreds of men and women who had dared to speak the truth awaited trials that would never come and wondered if they would ever see their families again.
9
All Different, All Relative:
Iran’s Forgotten Explorer
WHILE IN TEHRAN, I had some detective work to do. Somewhere among the twelve million inhabitants of the city was an elderly gentleman in his eighties that I was keen to track down.
Issa Omidvar had been something of a celebrity in pre-revolutionary Iran, appearing weekly on national television until 1979, when Khomeini’s new regime crushed his career overnight. Now he lives in relative obscurity; only a few Iranians of a certain age still recall his exploits, but I was on a mission to introduce him to a new generation of fans. Issa is one half of the Omidvar brothers, Iran’s only global explorers and self-styled anthropologists who spent a decade travelling the world by motorcycle and filming their adventures. Between 1954 and 1964 they crossed every continent, documenting endangered tribes in a style that fused gonzoesque immersion with scholarly sensitivity. Nothing was too outré, dangerous or extreme for the Omidvars, but their gung-ho approach was tempered by what I was now beginning to understand as a particularly Persian phenomenon; a unique blend of humanity, humour and razor-sharp intellect.
I had become aware of Issa and his brother Abdullah a few years earlier, while researching an article I was writing about early overland expeditions. It was easy enough to find British, Americans and Europeans who had pioneered long-distance overland travel in the colonial era, but upon digging a little deeper I came upon a grainy black-and-white photograph on an obscure German website. It depicted two dashing young men wearing casual shirts and goggles, astride 1950s motorcycles. Further digging and some sketchy translation revealed them as the Omidvar brothers of Iran, who, according to the caption, had made a circumnavigation of the world on two British-made bikes. This discovery led me to a web page in Persian that looked as though it had been designed, and subsequently abandoned, in the early dawn of the internet, but beyond that, the trail went cold. Who were these mysterious Iranian adventurers? Were they still alive? How had their story been forgotten so quickly? Intrigued, I rounded up a Persian-speaking friend in London who called her aunt in Tehran, and we set about trying to find anyone in Iran who knew anything about the Omidvar brothers.
We discovered that Abdullah had been living in Chile since the 1960s but Issa was alive and well in Iran, serving as keeper of the Omidvar brothers’ flame. After many phone calls and emails between London and Tehran, I could hardly believe it when an envelope bearing Iranian stamps arrived in my letterbox. It contained a home-burned DVD of the brothers’ documentaries. The footage was almost unreal, a 1950s Boys Own comic come to life; the brothers deep in the Amazon transporting their bikes in a dug-out canoe, eating maggots and monkeys with a tribe of headshrinkers; in Alaska watching Eskimos catapult their children into the air to seek out animals to hunt, and taking part in African tribal rituals involving Abdullah in a trance-like state spearing his face with metal spikes. Wearing my other hat, as a founder of the Adventure Travel Film Festival, I emailed Issa to ask if we could show the film at our UK festival. He agreed. It was the first time their documentaries would be screened in the West.
Omid was too young to remember the Omidvars’ weekly television show, but when I showed him the footage he became equally intrigued by their story. With a few phone calls he discovered that Issa now curated a mini-museum about his travels, based in north Tehran. Further investigation revealed that he attended his museum once a month and that with serendipitous fortune, his next visit was planned for two days’ time, just before I was due to leave town.
The Omidvars’ treasure trove was tucked away in a leafy corner of the grounds of the Sa’adabad Palace Complex, another of the Shah’s former homes, comprised of eighteen suitably grand buildings scattered across more than 100 hectares of mountain parkland on the northern edge of Tehran. Here the excesses of the Pahlavi dynasty are available for all to see, frozen in time, as if it was only yesterday the Shah had hotfooted it to the States. It was through these gates that CIA agents had been smuggled, hidden under blankets in the back seats of cars, arriving in the dead of night to brief the Shah on the details of the plot to oust Mosaddegh, and in these sumptuous rooms that the details of the coup were hatched. While it was fascinating to examine the furnishings, paintings, collections of photographs, letters and personal effects, i
ncluding the Shah’s car and motorcycle collection, the most striking sight in the entire complex stood outside the palace: two giant, disembodied bronze legs, the remaining half of Reza Shah’s statue, the head and torso having been felled during the revolution when protestors stormed the palace and sawed the figure in two. Now his legs stand Ozymandias style, vast and trunkless, at over eight feet tall, the top of his Cossack boots level with my armpit.
Omid and Tala, both true bon vivants, took the nostalgic view of the Shah’s era, and as we toured the site they talked wistfully of the old days of freedom and fun. I could see that between the two regimes, the Pahlavis must now seem infinitely preferable to the reality of the Islamic Republic. If oppression is a dish that must be served with a side order, then let it be glamour and excess rather than religion and hypocrisy.
A steep, winding trail took us to the small outbuilding that contained the Omidvars’ collection. Through the trees, outside the entrance, I caught a glimpse of the brothers’ road-weary motorcycles that I recognised from the films, displayed alongside a 1960s Citroen 2CV they had used to traverse the Sahara, bleached and battered from the desert sand and sun. The front mudguards of the motorcycles still bore the message they had taken around the world, hand-painted in both Persian and English, All different, all relative, and on the rear, simply the word Peace. It seemed a world away from the stance of the Islamic Republic, and even from the bombastic pomp of the Shah’s era, but in another sense it was an embodiment of the time when Iran was a world player. In many ways the Omidvars’ timing had been perfect; with colonial rule discredited and unravelling, their non-European status and open-minded, gentle approach, ‘neither East nor West’, proved a great asset to their explorations, especially in their interactions with native tribes. Sadly, the Islamic Republic put paid to all that; a young Iranian wanting to follow in the Omidvars’ footsteps these days would not get far. As everyone I met was keen to tell me, to travel with an Iranian passport nowadays means an onslaught of searches, suspicion and declined visas, but sixty years ago it was positively an advantage.