by Jill Worrall
‘You’ve seen the lighthouses, you know,’ he says.
I’m being put to the test.
‘Do you mean the minarets?’
‘Yes, exactly,’ he says approvingly. ‘People think of minarets as being simply the place for the muezzin to call the faithful to prayer, but one of their most important roles when the silk routes were in extensive use was to guide the caravans. At night a fire could be lit at the top of a minaret, which the caravan navigator would see and thus be assured he was going in the correct direction.’
We return to Mashhad as night falls. The shrine is bathed in light and the crowds are still pouring through the entrance gates. I knew we’d be joining them – the illuminated courtyards and minarets will draw us in like unresisting moths.
Mashhad has been the beginning and end of thousands of travellers’ journeys over many centuries. For me it is and always will be a spiritual springboard from which to launch into the soul of Iran and its people. But in the case of this particular journey, our travels actually begin in the more prosaic surroundings of an apartment building in central Tehran.
2
POTATO SALAD IN THE DESERT
Tehran to Shahrood
Think, in this battered Caravanserai
Whose Doorways are alternate Night and Day
How Sultan after Sultan with his Pomp
Abode his Hour or two, and went his way.
Omar Khayyam, 11th-12th century Persian poet
When the caravan leaders of old awoke, ready to set forth along the silk route, they had the assurance of knowing that their camels were almost certainly in the caravanserai’s stable, loaded and ready to go.
We, on the other hand, have just received a telephone call to say our transport is stuck in traffic. But given the starting point of our journey towards Mashhad is Tehran, being caught in the city’s clogged arteries is almost inevitable.
‘People often ask me what is rush hour in Tehran,’ Reza says, as we pile up our luggage for our journey beside his apartment door.
‘I tell them it starts at 7 am and finishes about midnight.’
He has just been talking to our driver, who is somewhere out there on the streets, marooned in the daily gridlock caused by its 12 million inhabitants and their two million vehicles.
While we don’t have the luxury of a train of camels to accommodate our luggage, we do have a van, so there is no need to pack particularly lightly. It’s just as well because the mound of gear is growing rapidly.
Reza’s family, like that of most Iranians, is close-knit and everyone is helping. Sedighe, his widowed mother, is pouring walnuts from the family’s summer house at Damavand into a plastic bag; Nastaran, his sister, brings us glasses of tea and brother Mojtaba is searching through the household’s vast library looking for a book from Reza’s collection, a battered but valuable guide to Iran’s caravanserai.
Recently retired from teaching, Sedighe now devotes much of her time to steering her household of adult children through the complexities of modern Iranian life. Each morning she gets up long before everyone else to tidy the kitchen and prepare breakfast. As her husband died some years ago, Reza, as the eldest son, is head of the household, but as in most Iranian families, wives and mothers wield much influence.
His sister, Nastaran, usually abbreviated to Nasik, has long, wavy chestnut hair that frames her delicate face with its pale, perfect skin. In her early twenties, she combines working in a travel agency with studying for a degree in psychology. Around the house she wears jeans and T-shirts, talks on the phone, texts her friends, argues sometimes with her mother and her brothers like any other young woman her age and is doted on by everyone.
Younger brother Motjaba or Mojik is studying to be a tour guide, having just finished his compulsory military service. He is unfailingly kind, gentlemanly and is always unobtrusively there when the rest of the family needs him. Which is why he’s now systematically sorting through a cupboard trying to find that book. Reza knows it’s here somewhere, but it’s proving elusive. I’m not really surprised – there are shelves of books everywhere and the overflow of Reza’s collection is stored in a metal filing cabinet on the verandah.
We are travelling with our own ‘library’ gleaned from this collection – all the essentials for travel in Iran – guide books in English and Farsi, my Persian language books and dictionary, academic papers on everything from Sufism to archaeology. Perhaps the most important, though, are the books of poetry: Hafez, Omar, Sadi, Jala-u-Din (Rumi) and Attar. Iranians from all walks of life love their poets; bus drivers to academics, shopkeepers to farmers – all appear to be capable of quoting favourite lines of verse at the drop of a hat.
I’m intrigued that although there are three large bedrooms in the apartment everyone seems to store things in different rooms. The wardrobes in the room shared by Reza and Mojik contain not only clothes and more books, but sets of glasses and plates and bags of nuts and dried fruits. I sleep in Nasik’s room, which is also home to the freezer and the ironing board. I like this arrangement because of the warm feeling of communal living involved – people drift into each other’s room to find things and to talk. In the faint light of a Tehran dawn I sense rather than see a figure tiptoeing past my bed to grab the iron or lean into the freezer to find bread – I feel absorbed into the routine and into the family.
Reza is confidant and advisor to all and, of course, the apple of his mother’s eye. Frequent travel, sometimes involving only a few hours’ turnaround, means his life is sometimes less than well organised. Everyone in the household recognises this, especially now, and pitches in to help him pack, find clothes from the washing pile or search for his missing mobile phone while he sits at his desk, suddenly lost in thought.
‘What are you doing?’ I ask him. ‘The driver will be here soon.’
‘I am thinking,’ says Reza unperturbed, ‘about our journey and where we will stop today.’
I suspect the thought of having to pack for the umpteenth time in a few months is more the problem. I put a jumble of shirts on the desk and tell him to sort out what’s coming and what’s to be bundled back into the wardrobe.
The Mirkhalaf household is a comfortable fusion of Persian, Islamic and the international. Unlike some families who eat all their meals while seated on the floor, Reza’s family has a dining table that is used for most meals. When everyone comes in from wherever it is they’ve spent their day, they tend to flop into armchairs or couches rather than directly onto the floor.
Appropriately, the apartment’s floors are a patchwork of Persian carpets: the swirling intricate blues and creams of the urban rugs, nomadic rugs in shades of red, ochre, orange and browns. The dining and living room actually features an elegant parquet floor, but like most Iranians Sedighe likes to have every centimetre covered with rugs.
Footwear worn outside the house never comes into contact with these beautiful works of art, which involves a complex – at least to my eyes – shoe ritual. On coming home, everyone takes off their shoes outside the front door and then mostly pads around the house in their socks. But just inside the door to the bathroom are several sets of plastic slip-on shoes that must only be worn in this room. More sets of bright yellow sandals are located by the kitchen door and similarly must only be used in the kitchen. It takes a few hours for me to get into the routine – take shoes off outside the apartment door (someone regularly goes into the stairwell, gathers up the shoes and carefully places them on a shoe rack just inside the door, the overflow on neatly folded newspaper on the floor), go to the bathroom (slip feet into plastic shoes), leave bathroom (remembering to leave shoes behind), go into living room, put sandals on to go into kitchen to watch dinner being prepared, return to living room (take off kitchen shoes), avoiding tripping over the spare sandals on the way.
The fluidity of Iranian family life means that while Western-style pop music (via satellite) is singing to itself in the living room, someone could well be saying their prayers in their bedr
oom, a small prayer rug spread on the floor, a set of prayer beads in hand and the mohr (a small tablet containing clay from the sacred city of Kerbala) placed on the rug where their forehead will touch it. The contact with this symbolic piece of earth is a sign of humility and also brings the person praying blessings from the sacred site). There is nothing either overt or covert about prayer. It is simply a part of life.
The doorbell rings – our driver has arrived. Before we open the front door though, we three women have to find our manteau and scarves and then there is a mass scramble for the right shoes as we hop around in our socks and drag the bags into the hall.
Sedighe brings a large copy of the Koran to the door and holds it above our heads. Reza and I pass underneath it – following in the footsteps of pilgrims and travellers who for centuries have carried out the same ritual to ensure a safe journey. I shake hands with Mojik and am then enveloped in an embrace by his mother who kisses me on both cheeks. ‘Look after my son, it is a long journey,’ she tells me, and then tells Reza to look after me, too. Nasik kisses me. ‘I will miss you,’ she says. I only met her for the first time two days ago, but I know she means it. She wraps my hand around a small gift – an early Valentine’s Day present of a pink bear-shaped candle with an ‘I love you’ message on its tummy.
Down in the street, having miraculously found a car park, the driver (also called Reza and whom from now on I’ll call Reza B to avoid confusion) is waiting outside the van. In his mid-forties, he’s smartly turned out in a grey check sports jacket and dark trousers, but it’s his moustache that commands the greatest attention. Gleaming black and luxurious, it caresses both his cheeks in gentle curves.
We say a somewhat formal sob bekheihr (good morning) in Farsi, after which Reza B indicates the van and asks me if I am happy with it. I admire the shiny green paintwork of what is to be our transport for the best part of the next four weeks, then he slides the back door open with a flourish so that I can admire the interior – and his wife, Ferengis, who immediately gets out to kiss me. Reza B had asked if Ferengis could accompany us as far as Mashhad so she could go on pilgrimage to the shrine. Not knowing any better I’d anticipated travelling in the company of a black-clad, religious woman who’d spend the entire two-day trip with her head buried in the Koran. I’d already decided, somewhat pessimistically, that she’d probably disapprove of me.
However, the woman who has just kissed me on the cheek is wearing an elegant black jacquard manteau and smart black pumps. Dyed blonde hair peeps out from under her lacy headscarf and, like many Iranian women, she is wearing a lot of make-up. I guess her to be about ten years older than her husband. She immediately lights up a cigarette, coughs, and laughs heartily and somewhat throatily, as Reza B twirls his moustache for me. Reza and I look somewhat scruffy beside them.
We load the van (with Reza B groaning theatrically as he hauls the ‘library’ onto the back seat) and for one blissful minute drive down a street devoid of traffic before being engulfed in a tide of cars, from gleaming 4WDs and glossy Mercedes to bruised and battered Paikans (the Iranian version of a Hillman Hunter).
It takes at least an hour to thread our way out of central Tehran and onto the highway that leads east to Mashhad. Eight lanes of traffic fight to escape the city where once single files of camels plied the trail that led to the steppes of Central Asia and on to China.
As we clear the featureless concrete-box jungle on the outskirts of Tehran, the Alborz mountains emerge on our left from the brown haze that often envelops one of the most polluted cities in the world. It is February, so snow coats even the lower flanks of the range that rises to its highest point in the form of 5671-metre Mt Damavand, an inactive volcano and Iran’s highest mountain.
Ferengis and I are conversing in a mix of my scant Farsi and her even more limited English. This will be her seventh trip to the holy city of Mashhad. Iranians all want to go the shrine of Imam Reza at least once, but if they can go again and again, so much the better.
‘I go because Imam Reza was a great man,’ she says. ‘I always feel relaxed there. It has a special atmosphere.’
The traffic thins out a little as the road begins to wind through deeply incised hills striped in layers of pink and violet. There is not a vestige of plant life on them, but the first few tufts of spring grass are emerging by the roadside where we have just come to a stop.
I assume we’ve developed some kind of mechanical fault, but it turns out to be the first of our journey’s many tea breaks. Iranians fuel their travels by partaking of frequent cups of tea and an almost constant array of snacks, with a midday break for an enormous lunch.
In the back of the van are capacious flasks of hot water and a mobile café. Along with the drinks are fresh dates, pistachios and Reza’s mum’s walnuts. We drink our tea as juggernauts thunder past, making the van shake and threatening to send our headscarves blowing into the hills.
It’s cloudless and cool as the van begins to climb through the low Abovan Pass. The sun gleams on the snow that covers the undulating hills and lies in piles beside the road. It’s a sign that winter is not quite ready to give way to spring here in northern Iran.
Beyond the pass and across an uneven stretch of boulder-strewn ground studded with scraggly shrubs are two square buildings with watchtowers at each corner. Reza directs our driver to go off road and we bump our way across to our first caravanserai of the journey.
To our right is a fourth-century AD Sassanian caravanserai made of layers of rough stone, and to the right one of Shah Abbas’s Safavid 17th-century versions built of small bricks.
Why, I wonder aloud, did they build a second caravanserai when there was an earlier one still standing and presumably still habitable? It was probably a simple matter of demand outpacing supply for room, Reza explains.
‘Necessity is the mother of rebuilding,’ he says, as we shake the 400year-old double wooden doors that loom over us. They are padlocked shut. Not a good start. But I am determined not to be thwarted and we begin to work our way around the building’s perimeter.
Most caravanserai outer walls consist of a series of shallow alcoves with pointed archways. These are not merely decorative or structural (the hollow spaces reduce the weight of the outer walls), but acted as refuges for late arrivals. If the inner rooms of the caravanserai were full, the alcoves at least offered some shelter from the elements (if not from bandits).
At the back of one alcove someone has hacked a hole through the brickwork. We clamber over the broken bricks and drop into the central courtyard. Snow lies thickly in the shadows, its surface pitted with the footprints of small animals and birds. The only sound is the crunch of our feet through the snow.
Alcoves also line the inner walls of the rectangular courtyard. Halfway along each side is a much taller, deeper alcove called an ivan. In the courtyard’s four corners are arched entranceways into the inner corridors, on each side of which are more alcoves. These would probably have been the first to be snapped up by travellers as they would have been much warmer in winter than those exposed to the elements and completely protected from the sun in summer.
Reza leads the way into one of the corridors, with me following behind hoping somewhat unchivalrously that he’d scare away any snakes before I got there. It is extremely dark until my eyes adjust from the bright clear desert light outside. But once I become accustomed I discover it is not nearly as gloomy as I’d expected.
Caravanserai architects had found a simple solution to the problem of providing natural light to these inner corridors without sacrificing the security of the solid outer walls, winter warmth and shade in summer. The roof above the corridors consists of a series of small domes and every second or third dome has a square aperture at the top. From here light floods down, illuminating the nearby alcoves. There is only a small pyramid of snow under some of them. I notice the domes are black with soot, 400-year-old soot.
At the back of each alcove is a fireplace with a chimney built into the wall.
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br /> ‘In most caravanserais people cooked for themselves, although occasionally there might have been someone available to cater for them. That’s why there are so many fireplaces.’
Reza’s voice is slightly muffled as he peers up one of the chimneys.
We gaze down the corridor. In the snow-blanketed silence it is not difficult to picture the flicker of cooking fires dancing on the alcove walls, to hear the sound of meat sizzling, the smell of bread baking, the bellow of a camel being unloaded in the courtyard and the murmur of voices speaking a babble of languages.
Although caravanserai designs have a number of common elements, such as the central courtyard, having only one entrance/exit gate and the provision of individual sleeping and living spaces for guests, each one is also as distinctive as a fingerprint. It was almost as if the architects had responded to the lonely expanses around them and, freed of conventions and constrictions, had unfettered their imaginations.
‘As you can see, symmetry is very important in Islamic architecture, including caravanserais,’ Reza says as we emerge from the corridor to explore the other side of the padlocked main door.
‘If you stand here in the centre near the well you can see that if you run a line through the middle of the caravanserai from the main door, the two sides are identical.’
The deep main entrance was covered with a dome of herringbone brickwork under which a number of archways led to small rooms and to the roof. This was the domain of the caravan leader who was always assigned the best room above the gate. Frustratingly, the stairs to the roof had been padlocked.
If I’d been a caravan leader I’d have opted for an extra night at the next caravanserai along the route to Mashhad. Qusheh, another 17th-century building, has formidable guard towers in each corner and fortuitously the staircases to the gallery and caravan leader’s quarters are unblocked.