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

by Ramita Navai

  Hung-over and drinking coffee the next afternoon, Parisa and Leyla dissected the details of the night, laughing at the men’s crude jokes. Leyla finally asked what she had wanted to know since they had left the party.

  ‘How did you get into that?’

  ‘Can’t you guess?’

  ‘Not the street?’

  ‘Of course. That’s the only way to build up your own client list. It doesn’t take long.’ Leyla silently stirred sugar into her latte, watching the milky-brown swirl. She looked up at Parisa.

  ‘Where?’

  ‘Takht-e Tavous Street. You’ll be fine, I promise. You’ll meet some nice girls down there.’

  Leyla was not surprised by the location. Nor was she partic-ularly surprised to learn that Parisa had been paying her rent by streetwalking.

  It is impossible to escape sex in Tehran. Everybody knows that the streets are full of working girls. Prostitutes are part of the landscape, blending in with everything else. Pornographic photos are blue-toothed across the city, strangers send obscene images to strangers sitting opposite them on the underground, or in a café, or passing in the streets. Internet chat rooms and social sites are full of hook-ups and file shares for sex. Triple X porn channels are beamed in by satellite, the channels unlocked for a premium price by black-market television technicians. The regime valiantly goes into battle against sex. It is obsessed by how its people are having it and whom they are having it with. Lawmakers and scholars devote hours to discussing sex, philosophizing sex, condemning sex, sentencing sex. Mullahs issue countless fatwas on it; some have become the stuff of legend. One of the nation’s favourites astounded with its specificity. Issued shortly after the revolution, it was a hypothetical scenario raised on television by a cleric called Ayatollah Gilani: If you are a young man sleeping in your bedroom and your aunt is sleeping in the bedroom directly below, and there’s an earthquake and the floor collapses, causing you to fall directly on top of her, and if you should both be naked, and you happen to have an erection, and you happen to land on her so that you unintentionally penetrate her, would the child of such an encounter be legitimate or a bastard?

  Prostitution is so ubiquitous on the streets – with the average age of girls starting out only sixteen – that the authorities are wringing their hands at what to do. The Interior Ministry has suggested rounding the women up and taking them to a specially designated camp where they can be ‘reformed’.

  *

  Leyla took a bus to just over halfway down Vali Asr. Here, splintering east, is a criss-cross of main roads that eventually feeds into downtown Tehran, leading south to the bazaar. This is where the city’s heart starts to really beat. Older residents remember how, sixty years ago, before the masses began their northbound migration up the social ladder, it used to be the refined north – suburban and underpopulated. Now the city rages on its streets and in its alleys. Takht-e Tavous, ‘Peacock Throne’ Street, had been renamed Motahari Street after the revolution, in memory of the cleric Morteza Motahari, a disciple of Khomeini who was assassinated by a member of the fundamentalist Islamic Forqan group in 1979. The street still clings on to its old identity, and many call it by its old name.

  For once, Leyla was thankful for the traffic, even though the summer sun singed metal and made the bus feel like a furnace. The stink of foul body odour mixed with the reek of choking exhausts and burnt tyres that wafted through the open windows. Yet Leyla wished the journey would never end. It was not the act itself that terrified her, but everything that went with it. Where to stand; what to say; how to look inconspicuous yet obvious enough to actually make money. Her biggest fear was getting caught. The humiliation would be far worse than any physical punishment.

  When she stepped onto Vali Asr, she almost turned back to the bus stop. But as she looked across the road, towards Takht-e Tavous, she saw them: girls staggered along the street in the spot Parisa had told her. Leyla crossed the corner of Vali Asr and Takht-e Tavous, past Bank Melli, and positioned herself near a huge billboard poster. This month’s message was not from a fashion retailer, but from the government. It was an attempt to tackle the interminable bitching and grumbling of its people. Big white letters were stamped out as friendly advice underneath a picture of a white house: LET’S NOT SPEND SO MUCH TIME DISCUSSING SOCIETY’S PROBLEMS IN OUR HOMES.

  There were about a dozen other girls standing there. They were attractive and dressed in trendy manteaus, some with rolled-up jeans and trainers looking like students, some with sparkly eyeshadow looking like they were about to go clubbing. After her lap-dancing experience, Leyla had glimpsed hope for the first time since she had moved out of her parents’ home; this new optimism eased her nerves. Parisa had told her that she would not have to work the streets for long; after a few months prettier girls would get enough repeat customers to be able to work from home, which is what had happened to Parisa.

  Leyla had worried that someone she knew might spot her, but she realized that Parisa was right – they just looked like thousands of other girls standing on the streets of the city hailing a cab. In many ways, they were no different. There were a handful of students funding university degrees, three women whose blue-collar jobs were not enough to pay the rent and feed the children, a few girls who had fled abuse and broken homes and two girls who wanted to buy iPhones and designer clothes. Leyla was amazed some of the girls looked so respectable. One of them even had a fake Louis Vuitton handbag.

  Cars slowed down as they reached the women; taxi drivers tried to figure out if they were girls wanting a ride and customers tried to figure out if they were girls looking for business. The girls did the same, working out if the cars were taxis or punters. With the country plunged in an economic crisis, there were as many rogue taxis operating these days as legal ones – desperate men, and even women, who had lost jobs and were supplementing paltry incomes by driving around the city looking to give somebody a ride for a few hundred tomans. Everyone looked the same. It was impossible to tell who was a punter and who was a prostitute. Transactions were brisk; a glance to see if the goods were worth it; a few stabs of conversation shot out through an open window. The price of flesh had also risen, in line with inflation, and the girls were charging more than six months ago. It was different on the streets here from south Tehran, where drug addicts still charged just a few thousand tomans for sex, their world dictated by opiate production in Afghanistan, a world largely untouched by the realities of sanctions and internal economics.

  A man in his thirties in a white 4x4 Nissan Murano was Leyla’s first customer. They had sex in his flat in the Saman building in Vanak. Afterwards he took her number and told her he had never seen such a pretty prostitute. She did not feel dirty or degraded. Just scared of God – a feeling that would sour nearly every encounter she would have.

  Leyla quickly learnt the rules of the street: go with your instinct. Do not get in a car with more than two men. And, she had been told, if you get raped, too bad. The girls sometimes chatted to each other, about boyfriends and music, and they shared warnings, either about clients or the police. The police knew most of the girls on their beat. Some of the officers knew them as intimately as the punters. In 2008, Tehran’s police chief, Reza Zarei, had been caught in a brothel, reportedly with six naked women. Zarei had been in charge of a programme to fight indecent behaviour.

  A blow job was usually all it took to buy freedom. If the police were feeling randy they would swoop for an arrest, sometimes demanding full sex, but the Takht-e Tavous girls almost always refused.

  ‘I’d rather be stoned to death than have to fuck you, your wife must be a blind cripple!’ one of them had screamed as she was handcuffed and dragged to the police station. She was imprisoned for three months and got ninety-two lashes. The officers thought these uptown girls pugnacious. They were feisty, unlike the fear-addled heroin and sheesheh addicts in south Tehran who accepted the whippings and rapes with the particular resignation found among the abused and dispossessed. In south Tehr
an, sex with a cop usually happened there and then, in alleyways and under motorway bridges. Blackmail would be enforced in twos; one officer would be on the lookout while the other had his turn. On Takht-e Tavous, the girls moved faster and talked faster, their wits undiminished by malnutrition and cheap drugs. Unlike their counterparts in the south of the city, these girls had an inkling of the ever-changing face of the law and, more importantly, of its flexibility. It was almost impossible for the police to prove the girls were conducting any business other than agreeing on a price for a taxi ride. But they would still arrest the girls and threaten them with the legal punishment for sex outside marriage, which was up to 100 lashes and, in the case of adultery, execution. The green-uniformed cops lavishly dispensed shame, hauling parents into the police station for sessions of humiliation.

  The girls were armed with their own means of protection. When bribery did not work, some would produce folded sigheh papers from their handbags. Sigheh is a temporary marriage approved by both God and the state, between a man (who can already be married) and a woman (who cannot), and can be as short as a few minutes or as long as ninety-nine years. It is Shia pragmatism at its vital best, ensuring that even a quickie can be given an Islamic seal of approval and sanctified in the eyes of the Lord. A crooked mullah in Haft-e Tir had been peddling fake ecclesiastical documents; he would issue sigheh contracts for 600,000 tomans a pop (about 200 US dollars), complete with an official stamp. In an emergency, the girls simply had to fill in the man’s name. The sigheh papers were valid for six months, renewable at a discounted rate of fifty dollars. By law, in most cases a sigheh did not require official registration, but the girls did not want to take any chances. Every few years a debate would rage about sigheh. There was the obvious charge against it: that it was the ultimate in clerical hypocrisy. Women’s rights groups would also complain, for like so much in the Islamic Republic the benefits were weighted towards the men who, unlike the women, could already be married; could have as many temporary wives as they wanted and could end the sigheh at any time. The former President and powerful politician Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani had once led the way in advocating it during a sermon but with the caveat that it should not encourage Iranians to be ‘promiscuous like the Westerners’. Thousands came to parliament to protest. Another cleric had even proposed licensed brothels, with a mullah on hand to perform temporary marriage rites, so that transgressing Tehranis would be able to act out their lust in a religiously appropriate way. The plan never got off the ground.

  Leyla had been working Takht-e Tavous for less than a month when the raids began. The first time, they approached from behind, hurtling the wrong way down the one-way street. There were four of them, fluff-stubbled teenagers revving up their motorbikes, crazed by their virginity and obsessed with love for the Prophet. Everyone knew the Basij Islamic vigilantes were the ones to watch out for. They took girls straight to the station, and not before a beating. On occasion even some of them could be bought; mostly for aggressive, angry sex that left the girls bruised and depressed. But this group of basijis had discovered the police were ignoring the whores on Takht-e Tavous and they were incensed, determined to mete out justice themselves. They rounded the girls into a tight, frightened swarm. When they got close, one the girls offered a blow job and was rewarded with a shower of stinging slaps in her face. A skinny, pale-faced boy drew a truncheon from an inside pocket of a Russian combat jacket a size too small for him. They ordered the girls into the back of a van and Leyla felt the thudding soles of their boots kicking their backs as they got in. Leyla and the girls were locked in a police cell with a group of uptown north Tehrani revellers who had been caught with alcohol, and a thirty-two-year-old woman who had been seen kissing a man. It transpired the man was her husband, but they would not let her go until her parents turned up with her marriage certificate. Meanwhile her husband had also been thrown into a cell. They were all kept overnight. Leyla’s mother had refused to come down and be humiliated; she thought it must be the usual charge of bad hejab. Leyla was ordered to appear in court.

  Leyla was scared. She had never been in front of a judge before. The courts were in a grey concrete slab of a building that could have been any municipal building in any developing country of the world. In the rows of offices that lined its long corridors, bored secretaries and bureaucrats shuffled paper and played solitaire on old computers, oblivious to the chaos around them. The crowds spun in and out of their offices, grasping their parvandehs, case files – little more than a few pieces of A4 paper with illegible notes, dates and names scribbled on them. They bustled from office to office. They waited on plastic chairs. They crouched on the floor and leant against walls. Mostly they queue-jumped.

  It was early morning, peak hour for the disgruntled and the accused. The usual fracas of sobbing and swearing and begging echoed up and down the packed stone staircase. Prostitutes, adulterers, fraudsters and drug addicts screamed insults at whoever would listen; their language was filthier than anything Leyla had heard on the streets.

  A map of Tehran hung on the wall in the judge’s room next to the obligatory framed photograph of the black-turbaned Supreme Leader, with his white beard and glasses, the black background giving the image an iconic edge. On the judge’s desk was a framed three-dimensional piece of gold calligraphy of the word Allah. The judge was short and well groomed. Despite his age and height, he had a debonair manner about him. He did not bother looking up when Leyla was escorted to her seat opposite him. To the judge, all the girls looked the same. Shameful. It was impossible to tell who was a real fornicator and who was not, and he did not really care. So he just booked them all, lest he got caught out missing any real culprits by accident, which would be worse than condemning an innocent girl. The judge had lost his appetite for dispensing justice. There was no point in even opening Leyla’s file. He delivered the sentence with a sigh: ninety-two lashes.

  ‘Have you ever been lashed, sir, for doing something you shouldn’t have done?’ The judge looked up for the first time. Girls usually shouted back at him and caused a scene. He was not used to having his authority questioned in such a personal way. He studied Leyla. This bronzed, dyed-blonde beauty. And watched as she was marched away.

  An office with a brown plywood desk and net curtains doubled as a whipping chamber. Leyla was told to sit on her knees, propped up against a wall.

  The guidelines for flogging had been set by Ayatollah Mahmoud Hashemi Shahroudi, a politician and former head of the judiciary. Ayatollah Bayat Zanjani also issued a fatwa on flogging. Between them, they had the punishment well covered. Sexual contact without penetration called for more vigorous flogging than that for alcohol consumption. Pimping and giving false testimony got off more lightly, quite literally, with the severity of the lashes to be less than for boozing and heavy petting. The face, head and genitals are out of bounds. Men must be standing, women sitting down. The whipping must be done with a leather-bound whip, one metre long and no thicker than one and a half centimetres. Hands and feet can only be tied if they are going to get in the way and result in the genitals, head or face being accidentally whipped. The flogging must be done in moderate temperature – not too hot or too cold. Lashes must be evenly distributed.

  The flogger had been ordered to whip Leyla with the Koran wedged under his armpit, to ensure he would not be able to raise his arm above his head and lash down with his full might. But he had a particular dislike for loose women, the scourge and ruin of the Islamic Republic. He had heard, often enough, clerics on the radio and the television blaming immoral women for the deterioration of society, for spreading adultery and even for earthquakes and the state of the economy. These women needed a good thrashing and, like many civil servants, he liked to bend the rules. He had devised a contraption to deal with situations like this: a sling. He had attached a small copy of the Koran to a sling that he strapped across his shoulder, satisfying his legal obligation while giving his arm full manoeuvring power. A weedy, sinewy man, he did not lo
ok like he would have much power in his skinny arms, but he did. As he thrashed the leather whip down on Leyla’s back, she could see from the corner of her eyes the Koran flailing around under his armpit, its pages flapping open.

  Leyla had thought her two layers of clothing would provide protection, but the leather strap sliced open her skin like a razor blade. She could not lie supine for a week afterwards. The red, raw welts turned into black, crusty bruises that covered every inch of her back. It was bad for business.

  It was not long before Leyla was back in the same building, in the same room before the same judge. This time she had refused to have sex with a policeman. When the cop had booked her she had threatened to lodge a complaint with the judge. The cop had laughed scathingly, making a show of putting on his Ray-Ban Aviator sunglasses. By now it was impossible to know what Leyla was thinking. She had learnt to disguise signs of laughter, hurt and fear on her face that would only expose her to abuse. Her stony countenance and her beauty worked against her as much as they protected her. The police would see her expressionless face as arrogance that should be knocked down. They needed to feel pity in order to show mercy. And if her looks did not soften them, they saw it as something to be used.

  Leyla was not as scared as before. One of the working girls she knew had paid someone to take her lashes. Leyla had already struck a deal with an addict she found loitering outside the courtroom charging 2,000 tomans per lash; the addict was splitting the money fifty-fifty with the duty flogger.

  ‘Repeat offender. Ninety-nine lashes and a month in prison,’ said the judge.

  ‘I’ll tell you the real reason I’m here. I refused to have sex with a policeman. He wants to blackmail me and I won’t do it. How does that fit in with your laws?’