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

by Ramita Navai

  By the time he got to Ana’s house it was one o’clock in the morning; the party was pumping, Hot Chip was booming and everyone was dancing. Ana was single and in her late twenties, living on her own in a small apartment stuffed with retro shabby-chic furniture. She was one of the few Iranians who had kept the imperfect nose they had been born with, a handsome, strong, aquiline nose that had become her glory, a proud mark of her strength and individuality. Her nose would not be considered big in the West, but in Iran she had endured a lifetime of concerned relatives and family friends, even kindly strangers, cajoling her to have her nose carved into a more desirable shape, a more marriage-friendly shape – a narrow, pre-pubescent button nose, to be precise. She had refused. Ana was not one to conform. Growing up in the Islamic Republic had not impeded her dream of being a dancer. She trained in a studio in the city, where moves deemed too sexual by the Islamic Republic had to be scrapped. They could not even call what they did dance, but rather movement. Her troupe ended up touring Europe, working with celebrated choreographers in Madrid, Berlin and Paris. Now she designed jewellery.

  Tonight Ana was dressed as a forties pin-up girl, hair in a quiff, shocking red lipstick on her pouty mouth. Beside her, a girl in a pair of brogues, pastel chequered trousers and a bow tie was smoking a skunk joint with a rock chick with a shaved undercut in a black jumpsuit. This was the trendy crowd, and they were the kind of girls who wore baggy, vintage-looking manteaus. They were surrounded by a gaggle of adoring gay boys. Ana was holding the party in honour of her friend Jamshid’s ‘coming out’ to his parents. During the protests in 2009, Jamshid had been arrested out on the streets. He had been taken to Evin where he was held for three weeks and interrogated while blindfolded every day. His interrogators had forced him to give them his email and Facebook passwords; at that moment he had been petrified, thinking his life must be over. His inboxes were full of messages from ex-boyfriends and graphic photographs of himself that he had sent to lovers. But the interrogators never mentioned them. Finally, on the last day, one of them had whispered in his ear: ‘We know all about you and we know exactly how you like it. But we don’t give a shit about that. That’s your fucking problem. We just wanted to know you hadn’t been acting against the regime.’

  In the bedroom, a group of boys were gossiping and drinking from a bottle of Mr Chavez Blended Special Whisky – Extra Special, an Iraqi brew. Jamshid’s new eighteen-year-old boyfriend had just got an exemption from military service by claiming he was a transsexual, a condition the regime viewed as an illness.

  ‘You know, he could have just told them he was gay, they think we’re mentally sick too. What could they do? It’s not illegal to be gay, only to have gay sex.’

  ‘Well that’s a good thing, cos then half the fucking city would be arrested.’

  ‘All of south Tehran would, that’s for sure.’

  ‘Oh God, I got to try me some south Tehran man, I love those strapping rough-and-ready barrow boys.’

  ‘You’ve seriously got to go south. If the middle classes are homosexuals, all the working-class boys are G-A-Y. Gay, gay, gay.’

  ‘Listen, it’s the same in any Muslim country, you can just clean up. It’s cos these poor bastards can’t get anywhere near pussy, that’s why we’re in business!’

  The boys mostly met dates on the Internet. The Internet is the lifeblood of the gay scene in Tehran, specifically a gay social networking website called Manjam. Men all take risks – from webcam sex to picking up boys in Park-e Daneshjoo, cruising south Tehran and screwing in cars and alleys and public baths. The law on same-sex sodomy, which had just been amended, reflected the state’s twisted attitude towards homosexuality: if the sex is consensual and the man playing the active role is not married and a Muslim, he will be flogged 100 times, whereas the man who plays the passive role will be put to death (unless he is a kafir having sex with a Muslim, in which case they will both be killed). It is better to bugger than to be buggered.

  In the kitchen a guy in high-top trainers was rapping Rumi poetry to a group of women who liked to joke that they were members of the militant underground group Lezbollah. Among them was one of Tehran’s most notorious lesbians, a hefty, butch woman who was startlingly successful at seducing straight marrieds. She had recently got married herself in San Francisco, to a blonde beauty who had left her husband – one of Tehran’s most desired catches – for her. Another two women were kissing in the hallway, evidently also affiliated to Lezbollah. The punishment for lesbianism, mosahegheh, is 100 lashes, but if lesbian acts are repeated four times, the death penality can be applied – although none of these women or any of their friends had ever been caught.

  Alidad moved between the groups, downing tequila shots and getting stoned. He had grown up with this quixotic, eclectic group of friends; they were privileged but good people, non-judgemental and accepting. Even the ones who could afford a life abroad chose to stay. But they all knew the dancing and the partying were vital to their well-being, so they made sure they did it well.

  A European diplomat friend helped push Farideh’s visa application through. A month later she was on a plane to London. The plan was to spend three months with Marjaneh while she looked for a small apartment to buy. She would then divide her time between Tehran and London, for as long as she was legally permitted to stay.

  Alidad could not understand why Farideh thought she would be happier in the West. He had visited friends in London, LA, New York, Paris, Rome – all the usual places – and always looked forward to getting back home. He liked to dip his toe in, to party and pull exotic foreign girls, but his life was in Tehran. He embraced it all, the good and the bad.

  Farideh’s first week in London was heavenly; Marjaneh took her to galleries, museums and restaurants, showing her everything she had been missing. Farideh was overcome with guilt that she had made her husband and her child endure Tehran when they could have had this: real freedom and all that came with it. But as the weeks wore on, she began to feel strangely disconnected from this new society around her. Life was more disparate and impersonal here. The gatherings and dinner parties were cold affairs, lacking in intensity. The bonds between Marjaneh and her friends were looser too; people had their own families and jobs to care about. Everyone watched the pennies. Cabs were extortionate. People were aggressive; they shouted and swore at each other in the streets, even in Marjaneh’s high-class area, something that rarely happened in north Tehran. When Farideh began to house-hunt, she realized how little her rials and tomans would buy her. Even if she sold everything and used up all her savings, she would only be able to buy a minuscule, dingy, one-bedroom apartment in Marjaneh’s neighbourhood. Otherwise she would have to live in suburban hell, rows and rows of identical houses with crude gas boilers and tiny, sorry splodges of grass as gardens. And the weather never changed; one cold, grey, wet, drizzly day morphed into another.

  After just two months, Farideh was surprised to discover that all she really wanted was to go back home. To Tehran.

  ‘We had the first rain of the year last week. It was wonderful. Cleared up the pollution. You been away long?’

  ‘A few months. What have I missed?’

  ‘The same old – pardon my language madame – shit.’

  Farideh laughed.

  ‘Bet you wished you stayed away, eh?’

  ‘Actually, I missed it here. Funny really.’

  ‘I know, sometimes I think I want to take the whole family away from all of this, but I don’t know if I’d be able to live anywhere else.’ The taxi driver looked at her in the rear-view mirror. ‘At least we’re all in it together.’

  Farideh smiled at him. ‘Yes, you and I. Who would have thought.’

  Now it was his turn to laugh.

  The cab turned into Vali Asr. Two men were stripping a sheep’s carcass in front of the Mercedes Benz showroom. Farideh wound the window right down and leant her head out. She never thought she would be so relieved to be back; wrapped in Tehran’s mountains,
protected under her startling blue sky and warmed by her sun, enveloped by her trees, licked by her breeze, bursts of umber, russet and ochre now bleeding out of the leaves. They drove past the fruit stalls filled with the autumnal yellows and oranges of lemons, quinces and persimmons, the jumble and the chaos and the clamour, the smoky smell of lamb on hot coals which rubbed against her cheeks, the mulberry trees and the jasmine, the layers of dust, the splutter of vans, the man selling puppies at the side of the road, the swarms of motorbikes criss-crossing between beautiful girls in defiant clothes, the juice stands, the gold shops, the ancient bazaars and tunnelled walkways, the chipped blue tiles on magnificent, crumbling manor houses and the hidden gardens.

  Farideh closed her eyes to savour the moment.

  EPILOGUE

  Vali Asr

  The first snow of winter falls on a queue outside the barbari bread bakery on the north of Vali Asr – the price of a few pieces of bread is now the same as a hit of meth. The road is splashed with bursts of ruby red from the season’s pomegranates and beetroots. Two teenage boys with quiffs and ripped jeans dart between the cars, selling rap CDs and gum. On the pavement, an elegantly dressed woman with glasses sells cashmere headscarves; next to her an old man sits cross-legged, a pair of cracked scales in front of him. An eight-year-old girl on a piece of cardboard leans against a metal telephone exchange box, carefully writing in an exercise book as she takes a break from selling packets of tissues to do her homework.

  Near Rah Ahan railway station, where Vali Asr begins its northbound ascent towards the mountains, thousands of mourners dressed in black stand in the cold outside a mosque. The crowd keeps swelling; part of Vali Asr has been closed off to traffic. An ambulance expels clouds of gritty black fumes as it waits beside the mourners. The mosque has opened its hosseinieh to cope with the numbers. Trays of dates, halva and herbed rice with lamb shanks are laid out on a table. After recitals from the Koran and the eulogy, the crowd outside parts as the body, covered in a sheet, is carried out on a stretcher and put in the back of the ambulance, which will make its way to Beheshteh Zahra cemetery where the body will be washed, wrapped in the white kafan shroud and placed in the earth.

  ‘That’s the end of the city as we know it. He won’t survive without her,’ says an old man in fingerless gloves as the doors of the van slam shut. He has taken a break from selling polyester socks on the corner of Vali Asr and Rah Ahan so he can pay his respects to the wife of Asghar the Brave, the toughest and most chivalrous jahel to have walked the streets of Tehran.

  Two elderly women in chadors leave the crowd; one of them used to be a dancing girl with Pari. She limps from a bad hip. The women come across the stump of a sycamore tree. ‘It was in the news. They said they’re sick and they had to cut them down,’ says her companion. The old dancer shakes her head.

  The government did not immediately respond to the controversial felling of Vali Asr’s sycamore trees. Now it says that the trees are diseased, that they are a danger to pedestrians. The women staring at the stump do not believe this. They have heard that the trees are obscuring police cameras, and that they are in the way of development plans.

  But it is true. The sycamore trees are sick. They are slowly dying – mainly of thirst. A plan to pour concrete into the joobs went wrong; it prevented the water that ran down them from seeping through to the trees’ roots. Some say pollution is making matters worse, that like Tehran’s own residents the trees farther south of the city are choking. But everyone agrees on one thing: the trees were chopped down in the dead of night because the authorities knew there would be an outcry.

  The women continue up Vali Asr, the gush of the water rushing down the joobs rising above the sound of car engines and horns. They walk under the dying trees, now grey, shimmering skeletons cloaked in a thin sheet of ice, stripped of their leaves by winter’s cold hand. Soon they will be clogged in snow, the water in the joobs hard as crystal before it will thaw with the first warm breeze that will breathe life into the green shoots and roots, encouraging them to sprout again. Buildings will be built and torn down, people will demonstrate and celebrate, cars will crash, citizens will be executed, lovers abandoned, police corrupted, political dissidents imprisoned and freed, presidents will come and go; but Vali Asr will remain, a constant, unchanged by wars, dictators and revolutions. With or without its sycamore trees.

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  It was Black Friday 1978 when my mother, brother and I landed in Mehrabad airport in Tehran to join my father for a new life. Martial law had been announced and the military had opened fire on an anti-Shah protest, killing and injuring dozens of demonstrators. It was the first time the authorities had reacted to a protest with such force. It was the start of the revolution; it was the beginning of the end of Iran as we knew it. It was an inauspicious day to be returning to the country of my birth.

  My memories of this time are vivid: the dancing and the street parties when the Shah finally left; the jubilant mood that filled the city; men and even children carrying guns stolen from the national armoury, now adorned with flowers poking from the barrels. Yet the streets felt safe, and the majority of Tehranis were united in a way they never had been before. It was a time of hope.

  I was only a child, but I soon sensed a change in the atmosphere: the streets became quiet, adults started whispering. Standing on our balcony, we would watch the night sky streaked red by tracer rounds. I remember evenings when we sat in silence and darkness in our flat as armed groups roamed outside our front door, firing their guns.

  Nine months later we were on a plane back to London. My father stayed behind for another four months, awaiting the acceptance of his resignation from the navy. He had not wanted to flee his country and sever ties with the land he loved.

  My mother and father had met ten years earlier at a party in Earls Court. He was being trained by the British Navy at the time. The minute he saw her, he fell in love. Like me, my mother was born in Tehran but grew up in London. Her father moved his family there in 1960 in self-imposed exile. My grandfather was a military man and during Mossadegh’s term as Prime Minister, one of his jobs was to be head of army radio. He had been ordered by the Ministry of War to broadcast propaganda about Mohammad Reza Shah, who was in exile in Italy. My grand-father refused; he believed that the army was there to serve the people and should not interfere in politics. Mohammad Reza Shah soon returned when Mossadegh was ousted in a CIA- and British-backed coup. Word reached the Shah of my grandfather’s defiance and he was repeatedly passed over for promotion. A brilliant polymath renowned for his honesty, he worked his way up the ranks through his abilities rather than bribery, connections and loyalty to the regime, as was so often the way. When he was finally made a general, it was too late for him. He was tired of the sycophants and the corruption – it was said that no one dared to lie to the former king, Reza Shah, and no one dared to tell the truth to his son and successor, Mohammad Reza Shah. He was also keen to give his children a British education. He left Iran and vowed never to return.

  My grandfather’s cousin, Hassan Ali Mansour, tried many times to persuade him to come back, but he would not be swayed. Mansour was appointed Prime Minister in 1964 and during the White Revolution he implemented the controversial and much-loathed ‘capitulation’ law. The law gave US citizens accused of crimes immunity from prosecution in Iran. Mansour told my grandfather that he himself had been forced to capitulate to the US’s demands; he had accepted the US’s terms in return for a loan of 200 million US dollars, money which the country desperately needed. But in the eyes of most Iranians, he had sold his country and the interests of his people to interfering imperialist powers. The capitulation law turned out to be a seminal moment in the country’s modern history. It was condemned by a little-known cleric called Ayatollah Khomeini, who also denounced the Shah and the United States. Khomeini was promptly sent into exile where he used the capitulation law as one of the rallying cries against the Shah. And so the rumblings of a revolution began. J
ust over two months after Khomeini was exiled, Mansour was assassinated. His killer was a seventeen-year-old who worked with two accomplices, members of the fundamentalist Fadayeen-e Islam group. All three were executed.

  Twenty-six years after leaving Tehran, I went back to live there. Although I knew little of my family history, I had an overwhelming need to reconnect with my roots. It also seemed to be the perfect place to launch my career as a journalist.

  It was the summer of 2004, when I was the Tehran corres-pondent for The Times, that the idea of this book first came about. My press card had been revoked by Ershad, the Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance. This would occasionally happen to journalists living in Tehran. You would never be told what you had done to piss them off, but this time a particularly friendly official told me straight. ‘Miss Navai, you covered a notorious human rights case and you wrote about people laughing at mullahs. You know they don’t like attention on human rights. And as for jokes about mullahs…’ At this point the official started to laugh. He told me to sit tight and give it a few months, while they ‘taught me a lesson’. At least I would have some respite from the periodic secret interrogation sessions with intelligence officers that I had come to dread, and which the Ministry claimed were not carried out by their people.

  I knew immediately what I would do. I had written a feature about a school run by a charity for street kids in Shoosh, south Tehran. I was so moved by the children’s stories I wanted to help in some way.