City of Lies: Love, Sex, Death and the Search for Truth in Tehran

by Ramita Navai

  As Bijan drove farther south, the city’s buildings slowly receded into rubbish-strewn arable land; thousands of plastic bags bobbed along the dirt into the horizon. It was as though the city had vomited out its guts and they had landed here; car factories, gas tanks, water tanks, wasteland bordered by barbed-wire fences and Portakabins flashed past. On a small patch of scrubland beside the motorway, a family had laid out a sofreh, picnic blanket, and were eating abgoosht, a hearty peasant dish of meat, beans and potatoes; nothing could get in the way of an Iranian and a picnic, not even six lanes of roaring traffic.

  There were a few miles of respite when nature reclaimed the land, where wheat fields, walnut and fir trees stretched out ahead; orchards of apples, cherries and pears and carpets of mint, coriander and basil; until the squalor of urban life rose up again from the ground as Bijan entered Chahar Dongeh. Dilapidated buildings, pitted roads and mounds of rocky earth surrounded him. In the centre of town a huge billboard loomed overhead with a message from the government: IF YOU SUPPORT THE SUPREME LEADER YOUR COUNTRY WILL NOT COME TO HARM.

  He drove down a lonely, shabby road where a few old men in rags were carting rubbish in wheelbarrows and giant trolleys, to be sifted and sold. Some carefully displayed their detritus on the ground. A group of Afghan workers with bandannas tied round their heads mooched past. Bijan got out of his car to buy some pomegranates from a man in a seventies flying jacket who was selling them out of the back of his pick-up truck. Six tired, worn sofas bundled on vans wobbled past them. Bijan always tried to do some shopping when he came to Chahar Dongeh; everything was cheaper here, including the drugs and women. The grocery shops still sold opium as if it were milk.

  As Bijan opened his car door to get back in, he saw them walking towards him, two basijis. He whacked the door shut so hard the car rocked. It was a while since he had played the tough guy; he had missed it. There was nobody he hated more than small-town basijis. He stared straight at them

  ‘That T-shirt is illegal!’ one of them screamed. Bijan was wearing his favourite T-shirt; white with the letters ‘USA’ emblazoned on the front and back. Bijan’s dream was one day to live in America.

  ‘It’s apostasy!’ screamed the other.

  This is going to be fun, thought Bijan.

  ‘You have to burn your T-shirt right now, in front of us!’

  ‘Listen closely you pair of illiterate faggots.’ Bijan took a step towards the boys. ‘If you want to burn my T-shirt, first I suggest you go to the store at the end of this road and burn every single packet of USA-made Winston cigarettes in there. Then, when you’re done, I suggest you go to Karaj dam, which provides us all with electricity. And guess what? You’ll find Morrison of the USA made it, so you’ll have to burn that down too. Next, may I suggest a visit to the airport where you can burn the Boeings, the F-4s, the F-5s and the F-14s. Guess why? Oh yes, they’re from the US of A. Once you’ve burnt all of them, then you can come and pour gasoline right over my body and burn the T-shirt from off my FUCKING BACK!’ The boys were edging away. They knew a real thug when they saw one.

  ‘You’re crazy, he’s fucking crazy.’

  ‘Yeh, I’m fucking crazy. Next time I see you, I’ll rip your fucking testicles off,’ Bijan laughed as they turned on their heels.

  He drove for another ten minutes through the wretched streets. He spotted his first lookout, who nodded. He could see the warehouse ahead, in the corner of a derelict plot of land the size of two football pitches. They had an excellent safety record and produced high-purity, good-quality meth. He only used a handful of people he knew and paid them well. He was proud of his operation. As he parked the car, another lookout walked towards him.

  ‘Sir, everything’s already been cleared. We got word this afternoon.’ The warehouse was spotless. The Kurd was always one step ahead. Bijan tipped the lookout and smiled as he got back into his car.

  Tehran’s yellow lights were glimmering in the distance. He put in a CD of his favourite underground music, turned up the stereo and rapped along to a song by Hichkas:

  This is Tehran

  A city that tempts you till it saps your soul

  And makes you see you were always meant to be

  Nothing more than dirt

  As he entered the city, Kambiz rang and told him to drive to a road off Pirouzi Street, in the east of town. When Bijan arrived, Kambiz’s boys were waiting on a motorbike. One of them was an ex-soldier who also moonlighted doing night shifts as armed security for a crime syndicate that sold drugs under a motorway flyover in north Tehran. They would act as lookouts and protection as the dealers traded on a lay-by. It was a busy spot where two motorways converged, so there was a constant stream of customers; two o’clock in the morning was peak time.

  When Kambiz’s boys saw Bijan, they walked up to a small, two-storey house and knocked on the front door. The dentist opened it. They dragged him onto the street and started beating him. They broke both the dentist’s arms and knocked out four of his teeth. Bijan watched from his car, all his nervous tension melting away. On his drive home, he called his wife and told her to stop cooking and leave the kids with his mother; tonight he was taking her for supper to Café Azeri on Vali Asr.

  five

  LEYLA

  Imam Khomeini Street, south Tehran, Motahari Street (Takht-e Tavous), midtown and Sa’adat Abad, north Tehran

  Leyla was on her knees. Her hands gripped the edge of the brown velvet sofa. She flicked her hair over her back and arched her round bottom upwards. Taymour dropped his iPhone slightly as he started to pound faster. The small tea glasses on the side table chinked as the sofa rocked against it. On cue, Leyla started to moan loudly. Taymour grabbed her hair, pulling back her head. Then it was over. A few seconds of silence before the electricity meter on the wall clicked it away. Taymour threw her a towel and Leyla wiped herself down and put on her clothes. And so began Leyla’s career as a porn actress.

  In truth, she was a prostitute who made home sex movies, but in her mind she was a porn actress. That is because making home-made porn changed Leyla’s life. She no longer felt like a prostitute; she was an actress, she told herself. And, more importantly, she was earning three times the money she could get from turning tricks. The grainy film she made with Taymour was an underground hit. Which meant she was a step nearer to fulfilling her dreams – of giving up hooking and setting up a happy home with a rich husband.

  Leyla grew up a lower-middle-class kid in a middle-class neighbourhood in north-west Tehran. Her childhood was like thousands of others. Her mother was a secretary. Her father was an administrator in a bank who worked as a chauffeur to supplement the family income. If there was extra money, holidays were spent in a cheap chalet in Babolsar, a resort town on the Caspian coast. At the weekend, on Fridays, they picnicked in Park-e Mellat on Vali Asr.

  Leyla was still a little child when her parents began to despise each other. It had dawned on Leyla’s mother that her husband would never amount to much, and that life would always consist of juggling their debts to stay afloat. It had dawned on Leyla’s father that his sex life would never recover after Leyla’s birth. He also realized there was a direct relation between the passage of time and nagging; the older his wife got, the more she nagged and belittled him. The few happy moments gave way to arguments and bitterness. They both took lovers. Leyla’s older sister escaped by marrying a doctor and moving out of the city, to the wealthy manicured suburbs of Lavasan. The doctor’s parents had tried to talk their son out of marrying beneath him, the daughter of a driver, but he had stood firm. To everyone’s relief, Leyla’s parents finally divorced when she was sixteen. Her parents soon both remarried, her father to a jealous young wife who forbade him from keeping in touch with his family.

  By that time Leyla had fallen in love with a wild boy rebel. Babak was a year older and a teenage girl’s dream. He had a rap group, a nose job and wore his Versace sunglasses even when it was dark. He had once deejayed at an underground rave in a car park, and s
till rode the wave of the fame that episode had brought him. Leyla and Babak had met at the food court in the Jaam-e Jam shopping centre on the north of Vali Asr, where gangs of teenage boys and girls flirted, swapped numbers and drank milkshakes after school. Their pairing was inevitable; Leyla was the prettiest girl of her year. She looked like she had been dipped in caramel: honey-highlighted hair, toffee-dyed eyebrows and a gold tan. She spent most summers sunbathing at her local public swimming pool, slathering baby oil that she spiked with coffee granules, tea and chillies (a secret recipe that ensured maximum tanning) over her body. As soon as the autumn months began to suck the bronzed colour from her skin, she slathered herself with fake tan instead.

  The first time they had sex was in Babak’s father’s car. The second time was in her bedroom when her mother had gone to check out the Hyperstar supermarket Carrefour that had opened in the west of the city. They fell in love the way teenagers do, with a dramatic intensity that masked any lack of substance. They had enough in common that mattered to teenagers in their circle: a love of parties, irrepressible vanity and an unquenchable need for conspicuous consumption. Clothes were from Sisley and Diesel on Africa Boulevard (which they all still called by its pre-revolution name of Jordan Street), Debenhams on Vali Asr, or bought from the upmarket shopping malls in Shahrak-e Gharb. The girls spent a fortune on make-up, the boys on cars, souping up their Peugeots. They would meet at Niayesh Highway to race them at four in the morning when the roads were empty; every once in a while there would be a fatal accident, but a few weeks later they would be back. All of them spent money on cosmetic surgery; a nose job was de rigueur.

  A year after they met, Leyla and Babak got married. Neither of them had wanted marriage at such a young age, but it was the only way they could live together and act as a normal couple without being judged or arrested. It was also a way for Leyla to build a new life away from the miserable home she had grown up in. Leyla’s parents had never been interested in their children, and although her mother tried to talk her out of marrying young, Leyla was stubborn and in love. Babak’s parents had always spoilt him and told him he could have anything he wanted; this now included a wife.

  Babak’s father made enough money from a pizza delivery business to be able to look after his family. He paid Babak and Leyla’s rent for a small apartment in Vanak, north Tehran. Babak wanted to become a pop star, but he did not have the right connections or the talent. When the allowance from his father vanished, Babak borrowed money to start an auto-glass business. It failed, as did every other business he touched. He was better at partying than making money, so they danced at the weekends and smoked sheesheh. By now Leyla was working as a secretary and was paying off Babak’s debts. Resentment quickly found its way into their lives. They started to fight. Once Babak whacked Leyla so hard he gave her a black eye. She ran to the police. They sent her home; they had enough on their plates without a moaning housewife dragging her dirty laundry through the station.

  Less than a year later it was all over. Leyla had come home to find Babak having sex with his cousin in their bed. She could have put up with the occasional fist fight and verbal abuse. But she had been a friend of Babak’s cousin and the betrayal was too much to bear.

  Babak refused to give Leyla a divorce. Her mehrieh prenuptial agreement had been set at 1,500 gold coins, an ostentatious show of wealth rather than a real indicator of what Babak’s family were prepared to pay. Babak made it clear that if Leyla wanted a divorce, she would have to forgo her mehrieh. They threatened each other with court action and accusations that could get both of them thrown in prison, until Leyla could take no more. She left with nothing. By now she was no longer speaking to her mother. Rent had nearly tripled in one year alone. Leyla could not afford north Tehran, or the northern suburbs where she had grown up. Her best friend, Parisa, suggested looking farther south; it was where she had first rented a place after her own marriage ended. Leyla sold her jewellery and used the money for a deposit on a small studio flat near Imam Khomeini Street, which cost her 600,000 tomans a month. She heard the whispers immediately after she moved in. That she was a whore and a husband-stealer. Within a month, two married men had already asked her for sex. The words had been branded on her like an indelible stain.

  In Tehran complaining is a way of life. And Tehranis make excellent complainers. The rich complain about Western policies affecting their businesses, the poor complain about the rising price of food, drug addicts complain of the wildly fluctuating purity of smack that could end their lives with a single hit. And everyone complains about the traffic, pollution, parking spaces, queue-jumping, inflation and politics. Every year there is more to complain about, more to be miserable about. Complaining ambushes conversations – a constant reminder of all that is rotten.

  The day after Leyla’s boss complained about sanctions, he slashed her pay by over a third. Overnight her salary went from 800,000 tomans a month to just 500,000. Overnight she could no longer afford her shoebox of an apartment. Leyla was forced to call her mother, who told her to call her father. Leyla’s father felt guilty for having neglected his children and he gave her half the cash he had in his account, but that was only one million tomans, barely enough to get by for a couple of months. Leyla could move farther south where the rents were cheaper, but the thought of living near Shoosh, the road at the end of Vali Asr, scared her. People were too different there. If her neighbours in Imam Khomeini questioned her morals for being a single divorcee in fashionable clothes, she could not bear to think what would happen to her in Shoosh. She called Parisa, one of the only women she knew who lived on her own, and asked if she could stay with her while she decided what to do.

  Parisa was a palang, a panther, the nickname given to women who dressed like her. A suitable moniker, for palangs looked as though they could pounce at any moment and claw at you with their acrylic talons. They were a step up from the Beesto-Panj-e Shahrivar girls, more petulant and more overtly sexual. The look was nineties porn star: blonde hair, skin pumped with Botox, biscuit-coloured tans and engorged lips that had either borne the brunt of a syringe full of collagen or whose outside rim had been stabbed by lip liner. They wore Perspex stripper-style shoes in the summer and thigh-length boots in winter, always visible under their short, belted manteaus that flapped open. They shared the same love of cosmetic surgery as other Tehranis, but they favoured implants and liposuction along with the requisite nose job. Ten years ago palangs were confined to north Tehran, but now they were everywhere, blow-up dolls teetering around town, prowling among the poor and wealthy alike. They could even be spotted grinding their six-inch stilettos into the streets of south Tehran.

  Parisa had grown up in Tehran Pars, a working-class suburb in the east of the city, and had progressed to a small flat in Sa’adat Abad, a middle-class, north-western neighbourhood encircled by motorways, west of Vali Asr. Because of the Allameh Tabatabai University, locals were used to students and to renting khuneh mojaradi, homes for single people. It was an up-and-coming area, filled with upwardly mobile Tehranis, many of whom had climbed their way out of working-class suburbs. The recent surge in dolati, government workers, and self-made businessmen rich from the construction boom had pushed up the price of rents; even a few Porsches had made their way onto Sa’adat Abad’s streets, the poorer show-offs resorting to leasing Dodges in Dubai and driving them over. Neighbours held different ideologies and politics, but they shared the same ambitions.

  Parisa spent her days tattooing eyebrows and administering ‘Hollywood’ and ‘Brazilian’ bikini waxes in a beauty salon that had, for a while, offered sheesheh as a slimming aid. She earned more than Leyla, but still not enough to cover her rent and expenses. She had told Leyla that her parents helped her, but that was a lie. Her parents had no money to give. After a week of late-night conversations in which the girls updated each other about men and swapped stories of their miserable childhoods, Parisa revealed her secret. She had been working as a private lap dancer to pay the bills a
nd cover her cosmetic procedures, her most recent being cheek and chin implants. She offered Leyla a gig. It would be dancing at a party at the weekend. They would make 50,000 tomans each, not including tips.

  ‘Oh my God. Do I have to take off my clothes?’

  ‘If you flash your tits you’ll get a bigger tip, and if you make it look like the films and wear sexy underwear, they’ll pay us at least double. They’re good guys, we’ll be safe. It’s like going to a party.’

  The party was for a group of middle-aged bazaari men in suits who were celebrating a birthday. They knocked back vodka shots and drank neat Ballantine’s whisky at the kitchen bar. What the men lacked in charm, they made up for in humour. They were bawdy and fun, bantering with the girls and throwing around innuendos and jokes about sex and mullahs: ‘After a mullah finishes a long sermon on the merits of the hejab, a woman approaches him and says: “I’m so pious, I wear my headscarf even inside my own house – how will I be rewarded?” The mullah replies: “God will give you the keys to paradise.” A second woman approaches him and says: “I want you to know I wear my chador inside my house.” The mullah tells her: “You too will be given the keys to paradise.” A third woman comes forward and says: “I don’t bother with any of it in my home.” The mullah says to her: “Here are the keys to my house!”’

  When everyone was drunk, they moved into the living room. Chairs lined the walls and flashing disco lights had been set up. The girls started to dance to Iranian pop songs interspersed with Euro-hits and Beyoncé. The men cheered when the girls took off their tops. The rest happened naturally. Parisa was right, it felt like just another party, only speeded up. Parisa disappeared into a room with one of the men – another secret she had not told Leyla. The girls left just before dawn, Leyla clutching an envelope stuffed with money.