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

by Ramita Navai

  The judge gestured to his secretary, who then whispered to a group sitting on chairs at the back of the room to leave. The secretary closed the door behind them.

  ‘You know you can be punished for what you’re telling me.’ The judge’s tone was more relaxed now his audience was gone.

  ‘For telling you the truth? Yes, I know, funny isn’t it?’ Leyla shrugged her shoulders. The judge was silent for a while. Watching her. Leyla leant back in her chair.

  ‘I couldn’t lie on my back for weeks after I was flogged.’ She narrowed her eyes and cocked her head sideways. The judge raised an eyebrow.

  ‘I appreciate that you’ve been honest with me. You know I can help you,’ he said.

  ‘I’m assuming you don’t mean by bringing the policeman to justice?’ Leyla smiled. The judge flicked his head upwards, the Iranian nod for ‘no’.

  ‘I will have your file destroyed, so you don’t exist.’

  That is how Leyla’s affair with the judge began.

  Leyla was not working when Takht-e Tavous was raided again. This time it was the police, embarrassed that the basijis’ raid had exposed their indifference. They were determined to make a show of it, to prove they were doing their job. A few of the girls were imprisoned. One turned out to be only fourteen years old, forced onto the streets by her drug-addict parents. Her case was taken up by a human rights lawyer who managed to place her in the care of a charity that helped ‘runaway girls’. It was a never-ending cycle, a cat-and-mouse game between the authorities and prostitutes. The net would close in on the girls; a round of arrests and convictions would begin; all would go quiet. Then they would appear again, proliferating in the city as though nothing had happened. Most of the girls never returned to Takht-e Tavous after the police raid. They decamped four roads farther north, to a shopping mall on Gandhi Street. The girls were diversifying, and the police struggled to keep up.

  The cyberpolice, launched in 2011 to fight Internet crimes and protect ‘national and religious identity’, are cottoning on to what many have known for years: Facebook is teeming with Iranian prostitutes. There are hundreds, maybe thousands of girls working through social network sites. They are easy enough to find; the user just has to pick a random Iranian girl’s name and add the word ‘whore’ after it. Maryam jendeh, Azadeh jendeh, Roxanna jendeh…they are all there. Pictures of the goods on sale beside lists of services offered in the ‘About me’ section: threesomes, anal and lez sex for women. There are step-by-step instructions on how to buy, which usually involve topping up pay-as-you-go phone credit before arranging a rendezvous.

  Some of the girls in Leyla’s group were on Facebook, but were terrified after the head of the cyberpolice announced a crackdown on the Internet and Facebook pages that promoted pornography and prostitution. The girls had heard that undercover agents were posing as customers, and the customers had been scared off by rumours that some of the profiles were honey traps planted by the government. After news of the last raid, Leyla, like the other girls, stopped working on Takht-e Tavous and moved to the shopping mall. It was an ugly marble and stone building with boutique-lined arcades. The girls drank freshly squeezed melon juice in the basement next to the food stands where teenagers hung out. If they spotted men on the prowl, all it usually took was a look. Sometimes they picked out leather handbags and expensive clothes with their punters shuffling behind them, looking more like browbeaten boyfriends than seedy clients.

  *

  A middle-aged man with a paunch and spectacles opened the door; a heavy waft of frankincense floated out. At first Leyla thought he must be an assistant, as he looked more like a tired office worker than a sorcerer. She had booked an appointment to see a witch doctor who was a favourite of the ladies who frequented Parisa’s beauty salon. He was known for his potent spells and warding off the evil eye, working out of his apartment in a scruffy block in downtown Vali Asr. Leyla was not an observant Muslim, but she believed in God, the Prophet and the imams. That is why she feared holy retribution for what she was doing.

  The man led Leyla to a living room decorated with multicoloured remnants of material draped over the windows, evil eyes hanging from the walls, a gigantic silver hand of Fatima next to the television, and joss sticks burning on every available surface. Past a dirty kitchen, Leyla could see a satellite dish propped up on a balcony blackened by pollution. The sorcerer sat at a small Indian hand-carved table, to his right a burning candle and a copy of the Koran, to his left a pestle and mortar and dozens of jars filled with coloured powders and herbs.

  ‘I’ve heard you cast spells for protection. I need protection because I’m a sinner.’

  ‘We are all sinners. You must tell me exactly who you need protecting against.’

  ‘God. I’m afraid of judgement day.’

  ‘God will forgive you. You need protection from people around you who wish you harm. Many people wish you harm, I can see it.’ He lit the candle and began grinding a potion together while uttering a prayer. He mixed in some water and told Leyla to drink. It tasted of turmeric and dust. He charged her 100,000 tomans.

  ‘I can only guarantee protection for six months,’ he said as he ushered her out of the door.

  Leyla also enrolled in erfan, spirituality, classes in an office building one block north of the witch doctor. The teacher was a handsome, long-bearded Sufi scholar in a white kurta. His speciality was Gnosticism. Most of the students were uptowners and Leyla felt a little out of place, even though the teacher treated her no differently. They tackled metaphysical issues and read poetry. But Leyla could find no answers to her own questions and felt no nearer to being pardoned by God.

  Word of her looks had spread and she was in demand. It was rare for a girl as pretty as Leyla to work in public for very long. She had amassed a dedicated following, enough never to work the streets or the shopping malls again. During her short time on Takht-e Tavous, Leyla had earned a year’s salary as a secretary, as well as a new wardrobe. She had moved out of Parisa’s flat and rented her own place a few roads away in Sa’adat Abad.

  One of her first regular customers after the judge was the rich owner of an upmarket jewellery shop on Vali Asr. He had been referred to Leyla by a friend who had picked her up on Takht-e Tavous. He could not believe his luck. He kept Leyla to himself for as long as he could, without submitting to his impulse to show her off and share her. They would meet every Tuesday at three o’clock for half an hour at an empty office he owned on Fatemi Street. It was after one of these sessions that he told Leyla he had a new client for her, a very special man who required absolute discretion.

  Leyla walked past a long row of Mercedes Benz cars and past two armed bodyguards as she entered the spectacular domed lobby of a high-rise apartment block in Kamranieh. This was prime north Tehran property, and at 15,000 US dollars a square metre it was bricks and mortar designed for businessmen, politicians and the moneyed upper classes. The latter preferred not to live here because of the proliferation of regime stooges and industrialists, whose chador-clad wives and whose habit of leaving their shoes outside the thick wood doors screamed nouveau riche. The building was a study in the kind of vulgarity only the rich can afford: an excess of marble and sparkling gold, faux Renaissance murals and columns topped with ornate Grecian flourishes. Residents included a foreign diplomat, the spoilt child of a famous politician and two members of parliament. But the bodyguards were not for them. They provided round-the-clock protection for a well-known cleric who also happened to be Leyla’s newest customer.

  Leyla had not been given a name, only instructions to tell the liveried porter that the resident of the twenty-third floor was expecting her. The porter was an old, tiny, white-skinned Rashti northerner who was paid handsomely by at least half the residents of the block to keep his mouth shut.

  ‘Salaam Khanoum, you are as beautiful as I heard,’ said the cleric as he opened the door, bowing his head deferentially to Leyla. Everything about him was elegant; even now, dressed in the white gaba
a undergarments worn beneath the robes, he looked refined (in his religious regalia he looked almost dapper). He was tall, with a lean body, and wore expensive spectacles. His beard was perfectly trimmed.

  The cleric took Leyla’s manteau and headscarf and led her through an enormous reception room stuffed with imitation rococo furniture and intricately carved dark wooden chairs covered in gold brocade. In a bedroom with drawn curtains, they sat on the edge of the bed.

  ‘My dear, do you say your prayers?’

  ‘No sir, my family isn’t religious.’

  ‘Are you a believer?’

  ‘I love God and the Prophet, God rest his soul, with all my heart. I think the imams are amazing. I’m a very spiritual person, sir.’

  ‘Good, very good. But doing this kind of work you must take extra care to remain untainted in God’s eyes.’ Leyla nodded. This was not the first time she had been lectured by a customer, but instead of getting angry, she was listening intently.

  ‘Have you ever been temporarily married – done a sigheh?’

  ‘No, sir.’ Leyla was too ashamed to tell the cleric that in her handbag she always carried the fake sigheh paper she had bought from the bent mullah.

  ‘My girl, as long as relations between a man and a woman are sanctified in God’s eyes, they are not immoral. It is imperative that you learn the sigheh prayer. God is forgiving. It is not too late to save yourself.’

  The cleric read out the words in Arabic and then translated them into Persian for her to understand: I marry you for a specific amount of time and for a specific mehrieh.

  Leyla and the cleric repeated the words in Arabic together, and then she uttered them one more time on her own.

  ‘Now we are not sinning.’ The cleric patted Leyla’s leg and smiled. He took off his glasses and his rings and turned off the side light before undressing in the dark. They sank into the memory-foam mattress. Afterwards, for the first time, Leyla did not fear a reprisal from God.

  The cleric became a regular and they would meet every week. He was polite and attentive. He bought her gifts, nearly always cheap, ugly underwear – bright red crotchless knickers, scratchy lace teddies, hold-ups and see-through baby-doll nighties. Leyla would give them to Parisa, who would sell them at the beauty salon. After sex, they would drink tea on the balcony with the entire city splayed out in front of them, thousands of concrete tower blocks receding into the smog, to the west the tall spire of Milad Tower, Tehran’s tallest building, which from a distance looked like a seventies alien spaceship atop a gigantic spike. On days when the pollution was not so dense, they could see all the way to the mountains that cradled the south of the city.

  As he grew to trust Leyla, the cleric would confide in her about his troubles: ungrateful children and a bitter wife who refused to have sex. He serenaded Leyla with his favourite verses from the Koran, about paradise and beautiful gardens that await the righteous:

  Rivers of milk

  Of which the taste

  Never changes; rivers

  Of wine, a joy

  To those who drink;

  And rivers of honey

  Pure and clear.

  Leyla would learn them off by heart, which pleased the cleric; she showed far more diligence than any of the spotty teenagers that he taught. She became fond of him, this sage father figure. He had awakened her spiritual senses in a way her erfan classes had not, and taught her how to keep her work on the right side of the Lord. There were no endless discussions on morals, no philosophical questions where there were no real answers. Instead there were ethereal words of righteousness and divinity straight from the Prophet’s mouth. And Leyla never again had sex without whispering the sigheh prayer under her breath.

  *

  The first time the judge heard her say it, he had laughed out loud.

  ‘Oh I’m so glad you said the sigheh dear girl, because I had been worried what we were doing was wrong. Now I can rest in peace!’

  ‘But if clerics say it makes it OK in the eyes of God, how can you argue with that?’

  ‘Quite right, who are we to argue with the justice of the clerics?’

  Over thirty years as a vassal of the Islamic Republic had rewarded the judge with a droll sense of humour, as well as disillusionment at how the revolution had turned out. He had seen many men he trusted and loved, who had fought shoulder to shoulder with him on the streets of Tehran and then in its courts, chewed up and spat out by the system. Good men, some of them the very architects of the Islamic Republic, were now either imprisoned or under house arrest for daring to criticize the regime and the Supreme Leader. The judge had made a decision early on: the regime was like a child he had created and it was almost impossible to turn your back on your own blood. He also knew that being an enemy of the state would be his ruin.

  The judge did not pay Leyla to begin with, according to their arrangement. He liked it the way nearly all her clients did: doggy-style. After that, Leyla became the judge’s concubine; he had never had sex with such an exquisite woman. He paid her rent and had her on twenty-four-hour standby. Whenever he could make excuses to his wife, he hurried to her apartment. He bought her gifts, including an expensive carpet she picked out herself from Solomon Carpet on Vali Asr. She feared he was falling in love with her.

  *

  Leyla was beginning to feel a sense of accomplishment. She had a roster of respectable clients and the money was rolling in. She was no longer just surviving; she was living. She figured that within a few years she could open her own beauty salon, a good earner in a city where, no matter how severe the economic downturn, women always found the money to beautify themselves.

  She soon revised her calculation down to a year. When Taymour first saw Leyla, he wanted to film sex with her. Leyla refused. She had a strict policy: she would allow anonymous photographs for extra money, but she would never be filmed. Taymour would not give up. He was a thirty-year-old software designer who lived in a small apartment with his parents in the east of the city and he was addicted to porn. Taymour was desperate to make his own; he wanted it to look good and Leyla was the prettiest girl he had ever met. He offered her so much money that Leyla finally agreed, on condition that he would not show her face and that she would approve the final result.

  Taymour liked the look of amateur porn. It turned him on. The seedier, the more real, the better. The Internet had sucked most of the money out of the under-the-counter porn market in Tehran in recent years. But uploading and downloading videos that could be traced was a risky business. Taymour preferred DVDs. In any case, during elections or protests the authorities would grind Internet connections down to an excruciatingly slow speed to dissuade use altogether. In these times, it was back to the good old days of underground porn bought and sold on the streets. Taymour had been told that there were a handful of kiosks and computer shops near downtown Toopkhaneh Square that sold porn. Hawkers stood on the square and whispered super, the Persian word for a porn film, out of the side of their mouths at potential customers. It was pot luck; as many people got ripped off buying blank DVDs as those who got the real grainy, blurred thing. Through trial and error, Taymour had found a reliable dealer. He was an old hand, a suave, middle-aged man with a mountain of jet-black hair in dark jeans, loafers and a smart jumper.

  ‘Listen mate, don’t fuck around, it’s like being caught with a truckload of heroin. Death sentence,’ he had said to Taymour as he sucked hard on a cigarette and made a hanging noose gesture with his left hand.

  ‘Home-grown stuff is hard to find. I got a shitload of foreign, but home-grown is going to cost you more.’ Every time the Internet was slowed down, the dealer was inundated with requests for local porn. Not the blonde, foreign girls, but beautiful, dusky Iranians. Some wanted to see them in their headscarves and chadors, others wanted to see the young and beautiful having fun. Taymour bought everything the dealer had; clips that had been sent to international porn sites and had been filed under the ‘amateur’ section; girls who had been filmed
without their knowledge, girls who were seen shouting instructions not to film their faces. But there were also girls who did show their faces, who smiled at the camera. A few even waved. There were girls flashing their breasts in the backs of taxis driving through packed traffic. One couple was having sex in a park. Another was in the back of a car. These were young people taking deadly risks.

  Sex is an act of rebellion in Tehran. A form of protest. Only in sex do many of the younger generation feel truly free. They have ultimate control over their bodies, if nothing else in their lives, and they have made them weapons of revolt. It is a backlash against years of sexual repression; in the process of having to continually lie and hide natural desires, the sense of ordinary sexual behaviour and its values is being lost.

  Taymour played his porn collection for Leyla. She had watched foreign porn with clients before, and it looked much slicker than the fumbling on the screen in front of her. She knew she could do it better. They filmed it in Leyla’s apartment, because Taymour lived with his parents. Leyla charged double for home visits; she would make men wait outside until she sent a text, then they would come in through the basement car park to ensure they would not be spotted by neighbours; she paid the Afghan caretaker to act as lookout.

  Leyla made Taymour listen to her sigheh prayer before they started filming. Taymour was thrilled with the results: every glistening crevice and prickle of shaving rash was sharp and clear, even Leyla thought it looked good. He called it Tehran Nights and made a load of copies. He handed them out to his friends and even sold one to his DVD seller. A week later, Leyla’s porn film was everywhere. The touts standing in downtown Tehran and on Vali Asr Square, outside Ghods Cinema, were flogging unmarked CD copies of it for six US dollars a pop – twice the amount as for a classic series of Benny Hill and even more than Desperate Housewives and Lost. It was also the underground bestseller at the various electrical shops scattered through the city that ran lucrative side businesses in stolen mobiles and black-market goods. Even the marble-floored, air-conditioned stationery boutique on the northern reaches of Vali Asr, renowned for its under-the-counter Hollywood blockbusters, had already sold fifty copies of Tehran Nights. The DVD would be fished out from behind a drawer that was concealed, not in a back room but under a glass cabinet where a handful of top-of-the-range fake Mont Blanc pens were carefully displayed.