Two Stories From Tehran
I’m 4 days into my time in Iran and onto my second city and I still don’t know what to make of the place. Certainly Tehran and Khorramabad are two unlikely bedfellows. Telling the Tehranians that I’m going to Lorestan gets the same reaction as if I’d told someone from Perth that I’m going to Narrogin or someone from New York that I’m going to St Joe, Missouri.
Please note that, to be on the safe side, from now on I might not be using people’s real names.
For my first two full days in Tehran, I was taken around by the family I was staying with. Each day seemed to open pages and pages on the city and Iranian society in general. Where we went and what we saw was almost insignificant beside what was said and what I learned. I met Abed through friends in Australia who had lived in Tehran before. He lives with his wife and son and has seven sisters and a large extended family. He introduced me to his nephew Hamid, who basically offered to take me around with his mates to do what they normally do. It’s the kind of offer I never turn down, because I get to see something new, I have no idea what it’s going to be, and I don’t have to make any decisions. What he said we’d do was pick up two of his mates in his short-wheel-base Nissan Patrol 4WD and head up into the mountains north of Tehran to do a bit of off-road driving, have a smoke, get some fresh air and see the city from above.
We collected his friends Reza and Sam from Reza’s well-appointed top-floor North Tehran flat. The flat could have been one in any fashionable suburb anywhere in the world and the two guys occupying it could be spotted at any arts school anywhere in the world. Reza, half American, looked like one of the Ramones, wearing skinny jeans and a brown hoody, and Sam resembled a scruffier David Baddiel. Sam is a film student and Reza plays in a band, all Iranian but now based in Istanbul. We packed into the little 4WD and headed north and, while Hamid’s initial frankness had dragged me out of my shell, it was Reza’s fluent English that was the catalyst for some fascinating conversation between the three of us, with Sam quietly listening in.
As the opening notes of “The XX” came on the stereo, I apologised for being paranoid and asked if the public buses really had the women at the back and the men at the front. Reza burst out laughing saying, yes, of course they do, you’re not paranoid. They even thought they’d try to separate the sidewalks once but realised it would never work.
So what about the internet and web filtering? Everything’s filtered, says Hamid. Radiohead’s website is out of reach simply because of the word “Radio”. Reza can’t look at his own band’s MySpace, officially. But VPN software costs about $2 a month and then everything is available. People find a way.
What about the BBC? I thought it was banned, how come Abed’s got it at his house? There are satellite services that you can buy and it’s all affordable. There are plenty of Persian-language stations broadcasting from outside Iran. People just put the satellite dishes behind fences and out of view because, officially, no one’s allowed to watch anything other than the government-owned channels.
You guys all have USB drives in your car stereos, that’s a good idea. Yeah, Reza says, we need them, at least you’ve got good radio stations. I felt grateful for RTR fm.
We hit the dirt roads in the foothills, Hamid whacked the vehicle in Low-Range 4WD mode and then started cutting corners, churning up the moutainside. So what about booze, can you get it? Of course, said Hamid, there’s no problem getting booze and there are plenty of places to drink it, not just behind closed doors. You won’t believe what it’s like coming down these tracks, in the dark, drunk AND stoned!
Stoned? Right, so when Hamid told his aunt he was going up into the hills for a smoke he didn’t mean a cigarette? She probably knew what he meant and I probably should have twigged too.
We parked up at about 2300m (Tehran’s about 1600m) with views over the western side of the city out our front window and up the brown, craggy river valleys out the back. Hamid was in his element. Tehran obviously gets to him – 10 million people and that traffic would get to anybody – and the fresh air and a joint, overlooking the place, is what he needs to stay sane. The authorities can’t easily go where his vehicle can.
The packets of crisps were opened and we started talking about everything else – films, music, travelling. At one point The Herd came on Hamid’s car stereo. I recognised the vocals and told them we were listening to Australian hip hop, but neither Reza nor Hamid recognised it and nor could they work out where they got it from. There’s a lot of music on there, they said. We talked about Australian music for a bit. They gave me a listen to “the Iranian Nick Cave” as Reza described him. But the music was pre-1979, of course. One line in a song said “I pray to see you every day” but since the revolution it had to be censored to “I need to see you every day” – the Islamic Republic believes praying should be reserved for God. Reza recounted a story about a Turkish band who supported them once, who wrote a shitty comment to them after the show because they expected an “Iranian Band” to be Islamic and to represent the music of the Islamic Republic. What the fuck, we’re just a band who all happen to be from Iran. Who expects us to be “Islamic”, he wondered.
I quizzed them on whether they’d ever been caught. Of course I didn’t really know the full extent of what you can get “caught” for in this country, but Hamid said yes, he had been busted with some weed. He managed it, reasoning with the officer saying that everyone does something wrong and it wasn’t much weed and, basically, he’s a good dude. The guy let him go. See, the way they run this place is they make it impossible for people NOT to break the law, Hamid said. So everyone’s guilty of something. And everyone, even the Basij, understands that. So you can manage these situations. Yeah, but if I was in the same position, because of the way I look, I’d be fucked, said Reza. You see, Hamid might not behave like the stereotypical Iranian, but he looks like one. Brown face, short black hair, and big old moustache – he’s the traditional picture of masculinity in Iran. (he understands full well he looks more like a gay porn star in the West). That’s his way of making life easier for himself.
The rain came in and we headed down the mountain, got stuck in some of that nasty traffic on Vali-Asr Street, and eventually headed for a coffee and some dinner in a cafe-bar at the Tehran Cinema Museum. The grounds were lovely, and the museum in a historic country house. The cafe-bar was modern and could have been anywhere in Perth except for 3 things: The girls were prettier, they wore headscarves far back on their heads, and the bar had no alcohol behind it. The three friends joked that they should have brought some of their own booze and put it in the alcohol-free mojitos.
From the first day I arrived, there was a rough plan for Abed’s sister Aram and niece Shirin to join me at a couple of Tehran’s museums. Aram has been based in the US for many years and is now living in Abu Dhabi, so she was a visitor too. And Shirin lives in Shiraz but studies IT Engineering in Tehran and was keen to see the Museum of Contemporary Art and the Carpet Museum. After the day out with the lads, I’d been quietly looking forward to spending some time with these two women, who had both been wonderful conversation in the evenings at home and whom I’d want to ask a whole different bunch of questions.
When the morning came, Aram was unwell and decided to stay home but Shirin, shortly after returning from uni, approached me with sunglasses and black headscarf, looking a little like Jackie Onassis and said “Let’s go!”.
It was like an amusement ride, a strange kind of thrill – head out in Tehran with a woman who is not your wife, and see what happens. The first and most obvious thing that I noticed was, in the back of the cab, her manner hadn’t changed. If anything she’d become less shy, free of the intimidation of a house full of English-speakers. Her second language is French and she tended to think in French first, before converting to English. It was on my mind, but I resisted the temptation to ask about the legality and acceptability of a foreigner accompanying an Iranian who isn’t his wife. For one, it could have shown me up as the ignorant foreigner who, despite all evidence, sees Iran as a backward society. But also, it could make Shirin self-conscious and cause her to behave unnaturally, which, so far, she clearly wasn’t. There’d been a loud bang that morning and I asked her if she’d also heard it and she said she hadn’t, but it makes sense because “we’re all terrorists!”. Then we joked about how it was probably just bomb practice.
The Museum of Contemporary Art (Honar-i-Moaiser) had a New Year photo exhibition on for a limited time, since the Iranian New Year (Nowrouz) had only finished about a month before. The photos showed the symbols of the festival and Shirin explained each of them to me and what the new year customs were. Nowrouz pre-dates Islam in this country so it’s a genuinely Iranian (rather than Muslim) festival, which might be why, when we reached a photo of a black-clad woman at the grave of a martyr (or shahid), Shirin recoiled and moved on, as if she felt such a religious image had no place in the exhibition. At one point, looking at the paintings in the permanent collection she pointed to one and said “There’s always a mosque in these paintings! Always, even when there’s no reason for it!”.
The permanent collection had some interesting stuff; some obviously Islamic but most not. There was not the absence of sculpture that I’d been expecting (three-dimensional art is meant to be un-Islamic) but I did notice that the vast majority of the works were pre-1979. The museum wasn’t busy but we were rarely alone. I usually attract curious looks in this country by myself but walking through the museum I kept trying to see if there were judging looks at Shirin and for her reaction to them. She didn’t seem to be looking for them, or if she was being judged, she was enjoying it. I noticed nothing.
We walked around the corner to the Carpet Museum, where we were the only visitors. There are signs in English around the place saying “Please Do Not Touch the Carpets” and Shirin soon said they just made her want to actually touch the exhibits. About halfway through, out of nowhere she said “Alright, I’ll watch out for the guards, you touch it. All clear, touch it!” So I touched a 300 year old carpet, and she thought it was hilarious. Intermittently through the rest of the museum we jokingly plotted how we were going to steal one of the exhibits without the guards noticing.
From the museum we set off into the Tehran traffic to get a cab to a restaurant that she likes north of where we were staying on Vali-Asr. Tehran traffic is like one big game of chicken – buses, cars, motorbikes and people all venture onto the roads and drive at each other to see who blinks first. To cross the road you need to watch the traffic, which is unbroken and moving at random speeds and simply select which car is least likely to run you over and step out in front of it. Once you’ve succeeded there, you approach the second lane of traffic exactly the same. You repeat this for the 4-8 lanes you need to cross depending on where you are. Even at the stop lights I saw no order but Shirin obviously did, so she led me like a mother does a school child, through the cars to find a cab.
During the long journey to the restaurant we talked about life in Tehran and the one thing she kept saying, with joy in her voice was “We have fun!”. Some people go bungee jumping or sky-diving for their excitement, but in Tehran you get the adrenaline from just going outside and being yourself, she said. The parties are crazy because it’s not just booze and a little weed, everything else is there, too. Which can make them scary at times. She’d been busted twice being drunk at a party. Once they paid the guys off. The second time there was more than one group who caught them so they couldn’t offer bribes. The men and women were split up and they spent the night in something like a lockup. The girls enjoyed themselves in the lockup and denied they had been drinking because they had hidden all the evidence. They just kept on partying. All day her headscarf would fall back and she’d continuously replace it. Each time in a different way, sometimes tucking it with her hair behind her ears, sometimes placing it halfway up and simply waiting for it to fall back again.
During our filling meal of traditional Iranian food I asked if there’s a bus back to Abed’s house and her eyes lit up. “I’ve never been on a Tehran bus before. Let’s do it!”. Ummm, don’t we have to sit in separate sections? No, we don’t have to if we don’t want to, she replied. So we jumped on an air-conditioned bendy bus, where she was one of only 2 women in the front section, and rode the slow Vali-Asr traffic home. She told me everyone suspects the dedicated bus lanes were put in just so the Basij can break up protests quicker, and that 2 years ago the protests were on Abed’s doorstep and she had the Basij bashing down the gate to get at some protestors who she’d let inside.
The next morning I did ask about the laws. Officially, an unmarried couple can’t be hanging out together in public. It’s worse if it’s a foreigner. Throughout the day she’d been talking to Aram and her mum back in Shiraz, and they’d come up with a story in case we got caught. She was breaking laws and taking a risk just by being herself and helping out an Aussie tourist. And it probably made things more fun for her. I guess it’s all part of the fun of living in Tehran.
