by Lois Pryce
I’d chewed coca leaves in Bolivia, eaten camel in Algeria, drunk moonshine in the Appalachians. Hell, I’d even had colonic irrigation in Los Angeles. Once again, it was time to do as the Romans do … I exhaled down the pipe, watching the sudden burst of oxygen give life to the lump of charcoal that Nahid’s brother held, gripped by the tongs, carefully over the end. The opium softened, melting under its heat. He was giving me instructions.
‘Now breathe in,’ translated Nahid.
As with most substances that make you feel good, the taste was unpleasant. Bitter and pungent. I kept going. I took my time, making my breaths slow and steady, but Nahid explained I was doing it wrong, translating her brother’s directions: ‘It is better if you breathe more hard, more fast.’ I had been approaching it as one would smoke a joint, but apparently the more effective method was to exhale and inhale with shorter, quicker breaths. ‘But not too much, because you have not done this before, it might make you sick,’ Nahid warned.
While the pipe was passed between the three of us, Nahid went to the kitchen and returned with plates of sweets, pastries and fruits. ‘The opium make your blood pressure low, it can make you faint. So you must always eat sweets and drink tea when you are smoking it.’ Next she brought glasses of tea with sticks of crystallised sugar. They looked like little magic wands of precious jewels, coloured pink and yellow and flavoured with cardamom and cinnamon. She stirred them into the tea and they melted away. The sugar brought a welcome, heady rush to my bloodstream.
A knock on the door brought some friends of Nahid’s father, who joined in the smoking without ceremony. They were an elderly couple too and this was obviously part of their culture; it was not seen as a big deal or a source of illicit excitement in their world – it was no different to passing around a joint or, indeed, sharing a bottle of wine. They laughed and chatted in the way of people who have known each other a long time, and Nahid’s father admonished them for smoking cigarettes. They were arguing good-naturedly. Nahid was translating for me.
‘He is saying to them it is bad for them to smoke.’
The irony of her father lecturing them on the evils of tobacco while sucking on an opium pipe was not lost on Nahid, and she smiled, shaking her head.
‘And he will not eat salt in his food, he says it is bad for his health!’
For the first time in a while, I felt pleasantly relaxed and at ease. All the tension in my road-weary muscles was seeping away and I was aware of a dreamy sense of well-being. Nothing mattered now. I leaned back on the cushions and suddenly understood why in all those pictures of antique opium dens, people are lying down on beds. A mild euphoria washed over me. But I didn’t feel spaced out or trippy, I was still coherent, and everyone else was chatting away as normal, nibbling on sweets and sipping at their tea. It was as though life’s edges had been sanded away, no aches and pains, no anxieties, no problems … what a wonderful world! After the third round of the pipe I succumbed to the overwhelming desire to get horizontal. My bed had never been so appealing, even the slightly sagging, fusty one that awaited me. Thanking my hosts, I returned to my room and lay down, no longer worried by the past or the future. I wasn’t bothered by the attack at the petrol station, or by the thought of getting out on the road again tomorrow, or whether my bike was making funny noises, or any of the usual things that eat away at one’s night-time mind on a lonely road trip. I zoned out in front of the television, no longer perturbed by the weirdness of Hugh Bonneville speaking Arabic; I wasn’t even fussed by Arabs Got Talent and their crimes against punctuation. All was well with the world.
15
Yazd: How Iran Lost Its Religion and Found Air Conditioning
I WAS ROUSED from my opiated sleep the next morning by a knock on the door. It was Nahid, saying her father had spoken to his friend in the police. I snapped awake, excited for news of the manhunt. But her voice sounded apologetic rather than triumphant.
‘I am sorry, Lois. He told him what had happened, and the policeman, he said, “Well, what does she expect if she goes riding around Iran on a motorcycle by herself?”’
We looked at each other. Neither of us said anything; there was nothing else to say. As I packed my bike outside the hotel, I asked her if the policeman’s response was typical. Nahid shrugged, apparently resigned to the reality. As an Iranian woman she had no expectations of equality or justice, but neither did she show any signs of outrage at her second-class status.
‘Yes, what the policeman said is not a surprise to me. Once, in Tehran, I was on the Metro, and a man, he is touching me, but people say it is my fault for being in the mixed carriage. If I don’t want to be touched, they say, I should be in the women’s carriage.’ She shook her head and shrugged again.
I loaded my luggage on to my bike, aware that in the last forty-eight hours I had just got a little closer to unpicking the reality of women’s lives in Iran.
I busied myself with preparing my bike – checking the oil level, chain tension and tyres, focussing on methodical, practical tasks. It was my daily routine and an effective way of distracting my mind from any anxiety about getting back out on the road. Nahid insisted on flitting around me with well-meaning warnings, interrupting my Zen-like attempt at motorcycle maintenance.
‘Do not stop until you get to Yazd,’ she said as I packed away my tools and made my swift swap from headscarf to helmet. I started up the engine, keen to get moving now. ‘Do not speak to anyone. Sometimes they will wave and try to stop you, they pretend they need help. But if you stop they will rob you. There are many robberies on this road. You remember what I told you last night, about the shishe?’
I nodded, knowing she was trying to help, but wishing she would stop talking. The opium-induced bliss had most decidedly worn off, and it had taken all of my will to force myself out of my room and back out on the road again. Truthfully, another day of Arabs Got Talent and some nish-nush was far more appealing than braving the desert meth-heads. My trip was coming towards its end, these next few miles to Yazd and then on to Shiraz would be my last days of riding in Iran. I wanted to go out on a high! What I needed right now was an air-punching pep-talk about what a great day I was about to have, not all this anxious soothsaying.
‘Please be careful. It is not safe for a woman alone’ were the last words I heard as I rode away.
I waved Nahid goodbye, faking a winning smile as much for my sake as hers. The sun beat down, the heat fierce and angry, even at this time of the morning. Leaving behind the small town, the road was as bleak as before amid the scorched, rubbish-strewn desert. I had only gone two miles from the hotel when I realised I was being followed. Over my shoulder I could see two men in one of the blue Zamyad trucks that I had come to associate with either reckless manual labourers or smugglers. I was one of the slowest vehicles on the road, the highway was empty, and there was no need for them to be tailgating me. They could have easily overtaken my bike but they stayed close, just inches away. I couldn’t tell who they were, or what they wanted. Were they shishe guys after money, or were these finally the angry Islamists I had been warned about by everyone back home? Yazd was supposedly a more traditional, conservative city than Tehran or Shiraz, and maybe I would not be so welcome here. As usual, it was hard to judge the situation. All I could do was ignore them, staring doggedly at the road ahead. I had enough fuel to get me to Yazd, and once I was in the thick of city traffic I would shake them off easily enough.
My plan would have worked if they hadn’t started a cat-and-mouse game. My heart quickened as they overtook me before suddenly swerving into my path, trying to force me to stop. I dodged around them and kept going. They dropped behind again but stayed close, sticking behind me for another mile or so. Then they were pulling in front of me again, giving me no choice but to veer off on to the rocky verge. The road was empty, no other vehicles, no signs of civilisation in sight. I felt sick with fear, wondering what to do, imagining the worst and reliving the attack at the petrol station. I wanted to scream Just le
ave me alone! Then they came up alongside, lowering the window, shouting and motioning for me to pull over. They were so close, I could have reached out and touched them. Suddenly, without warning, they swung in front of me, forcing me to plunge down the bank to avoid smashing head first into the side of their truck. I came to a wobbly halt at the bottom of the ditch and looked up to see that they had stopped ahead of me and were now reversing back at speed. I was stuck in the gulley, trapped. Then the two men jumped out of the cab and came running at me.
In moments of fear, time can seem to freeze or go into slow-motion, but in this instance, the opposite happened. Everything moved quickly, like a film on fast-forward. They were racing towards me, gabbling as if the sound had sped-up too, their arms outstretched, holding something I could not make out. My fear turned to anger and I started shouting and swearing at them to leave me alone. I’d done too much of this lately, too much shouting and swearing. I was sick and tired of it all, sick and tired of being alone and exposed, intimidated and stared at, and these guys were going to feel the full force of my anger and fear. I yelled at them again to back off. Then I saw them shaking their heads, their faces breaking into great dazzling smiles, their eyes eager, sparkling with excitement. And then I saw what they were holding in their hands. And I cringed.
The younger man stopped in front of me. He was skinny and ragged, visibly poor. He spoke a few words of English.
‘We see you. We like to speak with you. We have food for you.’
He thrust two bags of fruit into my hands. The older man had bottles of water for me.
‘Welcome … to … Iran,’ said the older man carefully, as if he had been practising the phrase for the last two miles.
The seesaw of emotions was too much. Now I wanted to laugh and cry and hug them. I settled on the first option. Then we were all laughing and making jumbled introductions as we attempted to find places to secrete ten pomegranates, eight peaches and two bottles of water in my overstuffed luggage. I ended up barely able to move, with fruit bulging out of every one of my jacket’s pockets.
‘Please, we take photo?’ said the young man.
They took it in turns to stand next to me, almost hysterical with amusement and excitement as they snapped away on an ancient Nokia phone. When the older man dared to rest an illicit arm on my shoulder, they both broke into uncontrollable schoolboy giggles. I was giggling too, thankful to them, not just for their generosity and kindness but for the timely reality check.
‘What do you think of Iran?’ asked the younger guy from the cab before they drove away, wide earnest brown eyes meeting mine.
‘I love it,’ I said. ‘I really love it.’
He touched his hand to his heart and bowed his head before careering back on to the blacktop, driving like a maniac. I gunned the bike out of the ditch and up the bank, and watched them disappear into the distance, making a mental note to self: When other road users in Iran appear to be trying to kill you, rob you or kidnap you, normally they just want to feed you. Now for heaven’s sake, stop worrying about everything.
The road took a majestic turn as it approached Yazd, emerging on to a scene reminiscent of the American West. Flat scrub transformed into high desert, with mountains on the horizon and great towers of rock in stripes of red, yellow and golden brown lining the route. The highway now twisted around these formations, providing some much needed motorcycling thrills. My mood soared as I swept through the curves of this startling multicoloured landscape, flicking the bike from side to side. The similarity to Utah or New Mexico was uncanny, but it wasn’t the only aspect of Iran that reminded me of America. The two countries had far more similarities than either would care to admit; both maligned and misunderstood, tarnished in the eyes of the world by a minority of religious fundamentalists and obstreperous politicians, but in truth, populated by generous, hospitable people, endlessly innovative and industrious with a truly astounding capacity for vast portions of food. The meth-cooking drug labs of their respective deserts were another more recent and unfortunate similarity. Shishe had come late to Iran, in the last decade, but was ripping through the country, overtaking heroin as the drug of choice among disaffected youth and even upper-class women looking for a quick weight-loss plan.
In keeping with his revolutionary rhetoric, Khomeini had blamed the Great Satan for Iran’s drug problems, claiming that global heroin distribution was part of a US-inspired conspiracy, and made possession of even a few grams a capital offence. Unfortunately for him, and every Iranian leader since, being positioned between poppy-growing Afghanistan and the lucrative drug markets of Europe made for big problems, with Iran at the heart of two major smuggling routes. Over the last few decades Iran has stepped up its own war on drugs and the border with Afghanistan has become a battleground, with tribal groups and the Taliban cashing in on the smuggling action. Fighting off the Revolutionary Guards with RPGs and machine guns, the traffickers transport hundreds of tons of opium and heroin across the frontier, even resorting to using camel trains on ancient back-country routes to avoid the Iranian authorities. The Revolutionary Guards give as good as they get, treating it as a jihad, a holy war on the traffickers, and operate on an officially sanctioned shoot-to-kill policy. Iran claims to have the highest rate of heroin seizures in the world, but it comes at a cost; it is not unusual for officers’ bullet-riddled corpses to be found lying burned or beheaded in the lawless border country.
As Nahid had attested, Iran’s heroin problem has become one of the most severe in the world, partly because of the easy access from Afghanistan, but she also blamed the inevitable fallout of a large, disillusioned youth population with high unemployment and a bleak future of seemingly endless repression, where the creating of music or art, or even dancing, is under the control of the authorities. Khomeini’s zero-tolerance approach to drugs during the 1980s had little effect, and since reformist president Khatami took power in the 1990s, Iran’s official approach to its addicts has been to offer help rather than punishment. Nahid had taken much pride in stating that Iran is now considered to have one of the most progressive treatment programmes in the world. It even has an English-language website devoted to its efforts – the Iran Drug Control Headquarters – with the baffling subtitle Resistance Economy; Action & Proceeding, and with therapy programmes based around contrived Persian-themed acronyms such as PERSEPOLIS – Participatory ExpeRienceS for EmPOwering Local InitiativeS. This strange bureaucratic waffle is about as close to bleeding-heart liberalism as the Islamic Republic gets, with references on the website to ‘outreach teams’ and ‘therapeutic communities’. But while it may not be making much of a dent in the number of addicts, it has at least reduced the stigma of being one, as was clear from Nahid’s openness about her brother’s situation.
Yazd came as a blessed relief. The city was about as far from the rubbish-strewn drug highway as I could have imagined. Despite being cursed with the usual Iranian traffic on its outskirts, its centre oozed antique charm and the timeless tranquillity of an ancient desert citadel. I was immediately at ease as I walked around the mud-walled old town with its winding alleys and adobe-type houses with their domed roofs and ornate wooden doors. Marco Polo had come to Yazd in the thirteenth century, describing it as a ‘good and noble city’, and something of that atmosphere remained even now. There was a gentler, more subdued atmosphere here, compared to Isfahan, and certainly to Tehran, although some of the residents I spoke to, mainly young women, bemoaned the lack of action. But I was glad of the respite. In Yazd there was a tangible feeling of being in one of the oldest cities in the world. Iranian ingenuity was visible at every turn, from the qanats, the underground water channels invented by the Persians in the first millennium BC, to the bâdgirs, the square brick wind-catchers that make up Yazd’s unique skyline. These are the most striking feature of the city and a source of great pride to the Yazdis, who love to explain their inventive form of air conditioning. When I admitted my ignorance on the subject, a taxi driver insisted on taking me
free of charge to the Dowlat Abad Garden, where an eighteenth-century pavilion boasts Iran’s tallest bâdgir.
My self-styled host was, I guessed, in his late fifties, a thin, slightly bowed figure who walked with a limp and took a formal approach to our relationship, giving his name only as Mr Yazdani and making his introduction with a respectful bow. When not driving a taxi, he worked as a librarian, where he had taught himself English and, like many Iranians, was keen to test it out on a real person. Thankfully for me, he wasn’t at the stage of seeking answers to complicated grammatical conundrums.
‘You can feel it, yes?’ said Mr Yazdani, as we stood in the centre of the pavilion underneath the bâdgir. I gazed up inside the hundred-foot tower to the chink of daylight above, aware of the gentle movement of wind being channelled down through the tower’s vents and then up again, cooling the air around us. At our feet was a small tiled pool, its still turquoise waters evaporating and further lowering the temperature of the air as it made its way up and out.
‘Yes, I can. But what happens when there is no wind?’
‘Today there is only a little wind but as you can feel, even a small breeze from any direction will be caught by the bâdgir,’ he explained. ‘And if there is no wind, the heat from the room rises up the tower so inside the building stays cool at all times, and the water here, this also helps to make the room cool. It is a great Persian invention, used in desert countries all across the world,’ he added with a serious nod.