by Ramita Navai
For all Tehranis, wherever you may be.
For my husband Gabriel, honorary Tehrani and the love of my life.
Most of all, for my parents: my mother Laya, for inspiring me, and my father Kourosh, who is all that is good and great about Tehran.
CITY OF LIES
Love, Sex, Death and the Search for Truth in Tehran
RAMITA NAVAI
Weidenfeld & Nicolson
London
CONTENTS
Cover
Dedication
Title Page
Map of Tehran
Epigraph
Preface
Prologue
One: Dariush
Two: Somayeh
Three: Amir
Four: Bijan
Five: Leyla
Six: Morteza
Seven: Asghar
Eight: Farideh
Epilogue
Author’s Note
Key Dates in Iran’s Recent History
Glossary
Sources
Acknowledgements
Copyright
Better the lie that keeps the peace than the truth that disrupts
Sa’adi Shirazi, The Rose Garden of Saadi
PREFACE
Let’s get one thing straight: in order to live in Tehran you have to lie. Morals don’t come into it: lying in Tehran is about survival. This need to dissimulate is surprisingly egalitarian – there are no class boundaries and there is no religious discrimination when it comes to the world of deceit. Some of the most pious, righteous Tehranis are the most gifted and cunning in the art of deception. We Tehranis are masters at manipulating the truth. Tiny children are instructed to deny that daddy has any booze at home; teenagers passionately vow their virginity; shopkeepers allow customers to surreptitiously eat, drink and smoke in their back rooms during the fasting months and young men self-flagellate at the religious festival of Ashura, purporting that each lash is for Imam Hossein, when really it is a macho show to entice pretty girls, who in turn claim they are there only for God. All these lies breed new lies, mushrooming in every crack in society.
The truth has become a secret, a rare and dangerous commodity, highly prized and to be handled with great care. When the truth is shared in Tehran, it is an act of extreme trust or absolute desperation. Lying for survival in Iranian culture goes back a long way; in the early years of the Islamic conquest, Shias were encouraged to lie about their faith to avoid persecution, a practice known as taqiya. The Koran also states that, in some cases, lying for the greater good is permitted. While this pathology of subterfuge has leaked out of the city and flowed into the towns and villages across the country, Tehran remains at its source.
But here is the rub: Iranians are obsessed with being true to themselves; it is part of our culture. The Persian poet Hafez begs us to seek the truth to discover the meaning of life:
This love you now have of the Truth
Will never forsake you
Your joys and sufferings on this arduous path
Are lifting your worn veil like a rising stage curtain
And will surely reveal your Magnificent Self
The characters in Iranian soap operas are nearly always on a quest to find their real selves and many a fatwa deals with the dichotomy between the burden of religious obligations and honest human desires. So most Tehranis are in constant conflict, for how do you stay true to yourself in a system in which you are forced to lie to ensure survival?
Let me be clear about one last thing. I am not saying that we Iranians are congenital liars. The lies are, above all, a consequence of surviving in an oppressive regime, of being ruled by a government that believes it should be able to interfere in even the most intimate affairs of its citizens.
While living (and lying) in Tehran I heard the stories of the Tehranis you are about to meet. Not all of them are ordinary Tehranis; some exist at the very margins of Iranian society. But I hope that even the most extreme stories in this book will help an outsider understand everyday life in this city of over twelve million people. In my experience, the defining trait of Tehranis is their kindness, for no matter how hard life gets, no matter how tight the regime turns the screw, there is an irrepressible warmth; I have felt it from diehard regime supporters to ardent dissidents and everyone in between.
I have changed all names and some details, time frames and locations to protect people, but everything here has happened or is still happening. These are all true stories from the city of lies.
PROLOGUE
Vali Asr Street
From above, Tehran has an ethereal glow. An orange mist hangs over the city, refracting sunrays: a thick, noxious haze that stubbornly clings to every corner, burning the nose and stinging the eyes. Every street is clogged with cars coughing out the black clouds that gently rise and sit, unmoving, overhead. The fumes even creep up the caramel Alborz mountains in the north. Here, clusters of high-rise buildings look down across the city, like imams standing over a prostrating congregation. A mass of humanity fills the valley below them. Every inch is covered, with no discernible style, logic or reason. Old neighbourhoods are crudely carved open by spaghetti junctions, and ugly post-modern buildings rear up over manor houses.
In the middle of the city, cutting straight through the chaos and slicing Tehran in half, is one long, wide road lined on either side by thousands of tall sycamore trees. Vali Asr Street runs from the north of Tehran to the south, pumping life through it and spitting it out into the deepest corners of the city. Vali Asr is the single road that sums up Tehran for all Tehranis. For decades Iranians have come here to celebrate, to protest, to march, to commemorate, to mourn. One of my clearest childhood memories from Tehran is journeying along the street by car; I can still remember the feeling of being cocooned by the trees, tenderly bowing towards each other, protecting us below with their green canopy.
Alongside the trees’ aged, overgrown roots, twisting and protruding from the cracked concrete, deep gutters known as joobs carry icy water that gushes out of the mountains in the north. The farther south the water flows, the murkier and darker it becomes. Just past the middle of Vali Asr is downtown, a bubbling, densely packed concentration of the city, where thousands of motorbikes and cars and people roar along and across it. Squeezed between the apartment blocks, the dying remains of a few grand old houses can still be found, clinging on to life. Farther south, the buildings become smaller and more decrepit: houses of raw cement and crumbling brick with broken windows and corrugated iron shacks set up on rooftops. Rusting gas flues and air conditioning units hang from walls, like metal guts pushed outside. Here the colour is sucked from the streets, into the shadows of conservatism and poverty. Black shrouds of women’s chadors weave silently among the dark suits and headscarves: the shades of mourning that all bear the Islamic stamp of approval, broken only by lurid murals of war heroes, religious martyrs and political propaganda. At the very southern end, Vali Asr opens its mouth onto Rah Ahan Square, Tehran’s main railway station, where travellers arrive from all over the country: the Lors, the Kurds, the Azeris, the Turkmens, the Tajiks, the Arabs, the Baluchis, the Bakhtiyaris, the Qashqa’is and Afghans.
Vali Asr Street and the hundreds of roads that run off it is a microcosm of the city. Just over eleven miles from top to bottom, it connects the rich and the poor, the religious and the secular, tradition and modernity. Yet the lives of the people at either end seem centuries apart.
The road was built by Reza Shah, although when work first began on it in 1921, he was not yet King. After a military coup that ousted Ahmad S
hah, the last Qajar monarch, the road really began to take shape. Orchards and exquisite landscaped gardens belonging to aristocrats, statesmen and royal Qajar princes were destroyed to make way for it, with Reza Shah saving the best plots of land for himself and his family. It took another eight years for the road to be completed as it was stretched further north, through the countryside, connecting the Shah’s palaces; the winter residences in the warmer south of the city and the summer residences nestled in the cooler mountains in the north. The road was part of Reza Shah’s programme of massive expansion, as he attempted to drag Iran into the modern world. It was to be the envy of the Middle East; magnificent and awe-inducing, with the refinement and beauty of French tree-lined boulevards and the majesty of a great, big Roman road. Reza Shah personally oversaw the planting of about 18,000 sycamore trees. He named the road after himself: Pahlavi.
When the Islamic Revolution toppled Reza Shah’s son, Mohammad Reza Shah, in 1979, anti-Shah nationalists renamed the road Mossadegh Street, in honour of the former Iranian Prime Minister, Dr Mohammad Mossadegh, an eccentric, European-educated lawyer who was ousted in a CIA-backed coup when he attempted to nationalize the country’s oil, propelling him to hero status. The name lasted almost as long as his incumbency – just over a year. The godfather of the revolution, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, was never going to allow the country’s most famous road to remain named after a man who stood for Persian nationalism rather than Islam, and whose popularity he envied. Khomeini commanded the road be called Vali Asr, after the revered Imam Mahdi, also known as Imam Zaman, the last of the twelve Shia imams and the man who many Shias believe will be the Last Saviour of the world. The messiah’s reappearance will herald a new era of peace and Islamic perfection, but until then the Last Saviour will be in hiding. A fitting name for a road that symbolizes a city whose real life force is so suppressed under Islamic rule.
It happens in the middle of the night. No one knows exactly what time, nor how many men are involved. But the next morning, everybody is talking about it. The evidence is dotted along stretches of Vali Asr Street: dozens of tree stumps protrude from the concrete. Municipal workers with chainsaws have cut down over forty of the road’s sycamore trees. Tehranis complain. They write letters, call the mayor’s office, take photos. They tweet and start a Facebook page. The story makes headlines. A well-known human rights group claims many more trees have been cut. A cultural heritage group calls the slaying of the ‘innocent’ trees a ‘devastating’ act. Radio Farhang, a national radio station, is inundated with calls on its live discussion show. ‘Every tree is a memory for me. If the trees are cut, my memories will die. It’s as though they’re cutting my very soul,’ says one tearful woman, with typical Iranian passion and drama. Tehranis are angry.
A war veteran with no legs takes up his usual spot on the pavement near Park-e Mellat on the north of Vali Asr. He places his dirty crutches next to him and spreads out his goods on the ground: batteries of different sizes and colours. A giant rat scampers across the gutter behind him. A music student, with his violin slung over his shoulders, has heard about the cutting of the trees and has come to see for himself.
‘At least I went to war, what did that poor tree do to deserve the same fate as me?’ jokes the veteran. The young man smiles and walks north to Bagh Ferdows, a public garden in front of an elegant Qajar palace. This is where he comes to think and watch the world on Vali Asr. He sits on a bench and opens his laptop; on it he plays a live performance of Mozart’s Requiem. An old man in a three-piece suit joins him, sitting at the other end of the bench so he can hear the sublime music above the sounds of the city.
Where Vali Asr careers towards downtown, near Jomhouri Street, a bearded man in green trainers and a red shirt is busking on his accordion, playing mournful Persian classics for commuters stuck in their cars. When someone hands him a note, he fishes out a strip of paper from his bumbag directing people to his Internet page, a blog about the evils of the world: the devil, materialism and our obsession with sex.
Near the southernmost tip of Vali Asr, the road has come to a standstill. But this is not rush-hour traffic. Thousands are gathered in the cold, on the pavement and on the street outside a mosque; there is no room inside. It is a funeral. Men carry seven-foot-high displays of white gladioli tied with black ribbon. Inside the mosque, a ghaari, religious reader, is reciting from the Koran. Afterwards he leads the eulogy about the dead woman: ‘She was from a generation who knew the true meaning of honour. She turned to God and never looked back,’ he says. ‘She was an honest woman.’
one
DARIUSH
Mehrabad Airport, Tehran, March 2001
‘You’ve been away a while.’ The young officer did not look up as he flicked through the passport. ‘And now you’ve decided to come back.’ Still flicking. ‘After all these years.’ He picked the plastic corner of the first page.
Dariush could not remember being this scared since he was a little boy. He slid his tongue along the hard plastic side of the cyanide pill lodged between his gum and cheek. They had told him the regime had a list of all their names, a blacklist of dissidents wanted by the state. They had said that prison would mean torture and a slow death.
The officer was staring at him. ‘Why did you leave?’
‘My parents left because of the war, I wish I’d stayed but they took me.’ He had answered too quickly.
‘Why are you back?’ The man scanned his passport. It had cost 20,000 US dollars from a Shia militant in Baghdad who had supplied passports for some big names. It was a work of art; you could not buy a better fake.
‘I’ve come to see some relatives. I – I miss my country,’ his voice was trembling. The officer leant over his desk and pressed his hand on Dariush’s chest.
‘Your heart’s beating like a little sparrow,’ he said. Then he burst out laughing and tossed Dariush’s passport across the counter.
‘You new ones, you’re always so scared. Don’t believe what you read mate, we won’t eat you. You’ll see life is better for people like you here. You’ll never leave.’
It was as easy as that, returning to the country that had haunted his every day since he had fled the revolution with his mother over twenty years ago. It seemed almost too easy. He should be cautious, as they might still be onto him. Dariush knew Iranians were masters of double-bluffing.
As the Group had forewarned him, his bags had to be X-rayed before he was allowed out. The tightened security wasn’t just regime paranoia or fear of separatist movements. It was also fear of people like him, it was fear of the MEK, the Mojahedin-e-Khalq, the Warriors of the People.
It had been just over a year since Dariush had officially joined the MEK. His mother, a primary school teacher, had reacted angrily when he had first started to talk about them. The MEK had played a crucial role in the 1979 Islamic Revolution that brought down the Shah and Dariush’s mother blamed them as much as the Islamists for having ruined her life. She had hoped he was going through a phase; the MEK were Iran’s first modern Islamic Revolutionaries and she remembered how, as a student, some of her own friends had been impressed by their talk of socialist values and equality. But she began to start to notice more serious changes in Dariush; he began praying, and even though she practised her faith, her son’s new-found religiosity unsettled her. He had started lecturing everyone around him about the sazman, the organization – the Group – showing photographs of MEK prisoners of conscience. She argued back, reeling off anecdotes about family friends who had become involved and been brainwashed and separated from their loved ones. His mother had been proud of his American education and of their new life in a small town near Washington, DC. She could not abide watching him pouring all his savings and earnings into the Group’s bank account. Dariush did not accept a word of what she said. He started spending less and less time visiting home until he stopped calling her. She begged him to leave the MEK. Instead, he cut her out of his life.
Dariush stepped out into the e
arly-morning spring sky, breathing in the dusty smell of Tehran. It was the smell of his childhood: mothballs, dried herbs, earth and petrol. He was home.
Walking to the taxi queue he savoured every small step, his head jolting around like a pigeon scanning for food. The famil-iarity was almost overbearing; everywhere he looked it was as if he were surrounded by relatives. He had never felt such a strong sense of belonging, not even with the Group.
‘Listen, we haven’t got all day, get in the car or out the queue.’ A man in a bib and a clipboard was staring at him.
‘Sorry, deep in thought. Vali Asr Street, Parkway, please.’
Dariush had been surprised when the instructions came to meet in north Tehran, but the Group had learnt from bitter experience that there are few places in the city where they could blend in. People are less interested in your business on the streets of north Tehran; too involved in their own conversations and recoiling at anything that may prick the bubble in which they live. In the early days, first meetings between an operative and his handler used to happen in secluded downtown parks, but now those were full of drug addicts, dealers and cops. Even when there appears to be no one around, in every alley and corner in downtown Tehran there are hidden eyes and ears. Once, a meeting of comrades near the bazaar had gone disastrously wrong. Whispers of a hushed conversation spread through the area. Two group members saw the police coming and ran for their lives. They lived in hiding for three months before they were smuggled out on donkeys over freezing mountains by outlaw Kurds, having persuaded them that they were student protesters, for the Kurds would never have taken them if they had known they were MEK members. They still remember how the MEK helped the Iraqi President Saddam Hussein battle Kurdish uprisings. Under the Shah, most political prisoners and those executed on political grounds were members of the MEK and that had helped swell their support. Just two years after the revolution, the MEK had half a million active followers. Feeling threatened by its burgeoning power, the real men behind the Islamic Revolution – the clerics and the fundamentalists – did what they would repeatedly do when faced with a threat from within: they turned against their own. Calling MEK members monafeqin, hypocrites colluding with imperialist Western powers to wage an unholy war, the revolutionaries hanged or shot thousands as part of a systematic cleansing. Survivors escaped to Iraq, where Saddam gave them protection and installed them in Camp Ashraf, a stretch of land north of Baghdad where he armed and trained them. The MEK had even joined the Iraqi army to fight against Iranian soldiers during the Iran–Iraq war, killing many of their own countrymen. That is when attitudes towards them shifted.
