Stranger to History

by Aatish Taseer

  ‘As far as I know.’

  ‘You have known him four or five years, Mr Aatish, he’s letting you stay in his flat and you don’t know what he does?’

  ‘It’s hard to say,’ I mumbled aimlessly. ‘I’m not sure he does anything.’

  They looked at each other. The little one’s beady eyes flashed and the big one leant back in his chair with a shrug, as if to say ‘How can we help someone who won’t help himself ?’

  ‘Then how can he live?’ the little one asked, of his own accord.

  ‘Perhaps he’s well-off.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Perhaps his family is well-off.’

  They both looked away in disgust.

  ‘You say Mr Bahador is not in the country so how did you get into his flat?’

  ‘He sent me his keys with his driver to Isfahan.’

  ‘Who was this driver?’

  ‘Mr Sadeghi,’ I answered, sad to drag his name into this.

  ‘What’s his number?’

  ‘I’m sorry, I don’t know it by heart. I have it at home.’

  ‘He’s based in Isfahan?’

  ‘No, Tehran.’

  ‘You said he picked you up in Isfahan.’

  ‘Yes. He came from Tehran to Isfahan in order to pick me up.’

  ‘Mr Aatish, you have a mobile phone in Iran.’ This was not a question.

  ‘Yes, I’m borrowing one.’

  ‘What’s the number?’

  ‘I can’t be sure, but I think it’s . . .’ As soon as I said it, I knew I’d made a mistake. I had given them a variation of my passport number, which began in a similar way, but I couldn’t bring myself to correct it.

  He wrote down the number and examined it closely. ‘Where did you get this phone?’

  ‘It’s also Bahador’s.’

  ‘He gave you his phone?’ the little man asked, always with his tone of incredulity.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘How did he give you his phone?’

  ‘Mr Sadeghi brought it to Isfahan.’

  ‘Mr Sadeghi had his phone?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘What is Mr Sadeghi’s phone number?’

  ‘I told you, I don’t know it by heart. I have it at home.’

  ‘How much did you pay him?’

  ‘I don’t know – maybe sixty dollars?’ I had spoken in a tone of exasperation and they eyed me as if to say, ‘Watch it.’

  ‘Mr Aatish, what is your purpose in Iran?’

  ‘I’m writing a travel book. I’ve been travelling from Istanbul by land and hope to finish in India.’

  ‘What is the book about?’

  ‘It’s a travel book based on my impressions,’ I answered, hoping to find a middle route between Hosseini’s suggestion and my actual purpose. ‘I’m interested in religion and culture.’ Religion had been an innocuous way of approaching more sensitive subjects in other countries and I hoped it would be the same in Iran.

  ‘Did you have an interpreter in Iran?’

  ‘No, I didn’t,’ I answered, thinking of all the interpreters I nearly had.

  ‘You didn’t need an interpreter?’

  ‘No, I didn’t.’

  ‘Why? Do you speak Farsi?’ The little man’s face gleamed.

  ‘No, but I’m just travelling through, recording my impressions, talking to people where I can. I haven’t been doing interviews.’

  ‘Mr Aatish,’ the little man began, with an assertiveness that suggested someone who took pleasure in language and the sound of his own voice, ‘we hear that you have been asking about religion, the changes in religion, and politics somehow.’ I nearly smiled: it was a glorious, subtle formulation, encapsulating perfectly the closeness of religion and politics in Islam and the Islamic Republic, just in case I was confused.

  ‘I’ve been asking only about religion, not politics,’ I answered, with failing conviction.

  ‘You were seen attending the Friday sermon given by Mr Rafsanjani.’ This was not true, but it was nearly true. I had asked Payam’s friend to take me to the Friday sermon at Tehran University. If the interrogators knew this, they would have overheard it on the telephone, and if they had been tapping my phone, they knew a great deal more.

  At this stage, I made a mental shift from thinking of this as a short interrogation to just the first stage of a much longer detention.

  ‘No, I did not attend the Friday prayers.’

  ‘You were seen there.’

  ‘That’s impossible,’ I said, with as much conviction as I could muster. ‘I wasn’t there.’

  ‘Have you been visiting any seminaries in cities like Mashhad and Qom?’ Now, a further wave of doubt came over me. Had they spoken to Reza?

  ‘No.’

  ‘But wouldn’t you like to?’ the little man asked patronisingly. ‘They’re very interesting for your work.’

  ‘Yes, I would,’ I answered, seeing no point in lying. ‘I was hoping to go to Mashhad tomorrow night. But I’ve been to other places too.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘I’ve been to Shiraz, Yazd, Isfahan . . .’

  ‘From Tehran?’

  ‘No, I flew to Shiraz and worked my way up.’

  The big man got up and walked out of the room for a moment. The little interrogator’s tone became suddenly friendly. ‘Which city did you like the most?’

  ‘Yazd,’ I smiled.

  ‘Why Yazd?’ he asked, now sly again.

  ‘I liked the desert nearby, the colour of the buildings, the Friday mosque.’

  The other man walked back into the room. He spoke to the little one, who nodded. ‘Mr Aatish, don’t you need someone to arrange your travel for you, buy your tickets?’

  Now I was sure they knew something about Reza. ‘No, I do it myself.’

  ‘All of it?’

  ‘Yes – why not? For instance, I bought my ticket in Dubai for Shiraz. The hotel in Shiraz organised the car to Yazd.’

  ‘How much did you pay him?’ he asked, always relying on the relentlessness of his questions to wear down his subject.

  ‘Oh, I don’t know! Same as the other one – forty or fifty dollars?’

  They looked between themselves, mean and dissatisfied.

  ‘Mr Aatish,’ the little man said, with his special sarcastic voice, making me feel as though I was in a Dickensian orphanage, ‘you do know that you must always tell us the truth?’

  ‘I am telling the truth,’ I cried.

  ‘I hope so,’ said the little man, putting down his pen and rifling through some papers. Then, looking up, he added, ‘For your sake.’

  I became subdued and a new cycle of questioning began.

  ‘Mr Aatish, how long have you been travelling for?’

  ‘Since November, so six, seven months.’

  ‘How did you have the money to travel?’

  ‘It was my own money.’

  ‘Yes, but who gave it you? A newspaper, an organisation or are you also “well-off ”?’

  ‘Yes, my family gave it to me,’ I lied.

  ‘Your father?’

  ‘My mother, actually.’

  ‘Where are your parents from?’

  ‘My mother’s Indian and my father’s Pakistani.’

  ‘What does he do?’

  ‘He’s a businessman.’

  ‘What kind of business?’

  ‘Telecommunications.’

  ‘And your mother?’

  ‘She’s a writer.’

  ‘In India?’

  ‘Yes.’

  A kind of fatigue set in. The interrogators looked thoroughly unhappy.

  ‘Mr Aatish, why are you doing this trip in Iran?’

  ‘I’m exploring the lands of my father’s religion,’ I said, surprising myself with how pompous I sounded.

  ‘You are Muslim?’

  ‘Yes!’ I answered hopefully.

  ‘Sunni or Shia?’

  ‘Sunni,’ I replied, realising too late that this wouldn’t help me in the least.


  ‘Mr Aatish, you know you have a tourist visa. You’re not meant to be writing a book and asking questions. When you’re a tourist, you just see the sights and then go home. Do you know what you’ve been doing in Iran is illegal?’

  ‘No, I didn’t. I was just talking to the people I met on the way.’

  They looked at me sadly. I had no idea how much more they had up their sleeve. They told me to go out for a while and Hosseini was called back.

  Hosseini was in for a few minutes, then came out, shaken. Poor man, I thought, he was too old to go through this. He made out that nothing was wrong. ‘They’re letting me go,’ he said quietly. ‘They want to ask you a few more questions. It’s nothing. Should I wait downstairs?’

  ‘Yes, please,’ I said, hoping that it really would be ‘nothing’.

  They called me back into the room with the frosted-glass windows. Sitting behind the desk, from which the women in black had shuffled off like birds, now nearly two hours ago, they watched me as I sat down on the straight-backed chair against the wall.

  ‘Mr Aatish,’ the little man sighed, ‘we hope you have thought about your answers and are now willing to tell us the truth. Do you have something new for us?’

  ‘No,’ I said, with fresh conviction. ‘I’m doing a travel book. I’ve been travelling from Istanbul to India and I spoke to people on the way. That’s all.’

  ‘Mr Aatish, do you know Ms Violet?’

  Of course! That was what this was about. Violet, the agency journalist who had introduced me to Jasib.

  ‘Yes,’ I said, slightly broken.

  ‘How do you know her?’

  ‘She was introduced to me by the Rahimis.’

  ‘By whom?’

  ‘My Iranian family friends.’

  ‘They introduced you to her?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘What is your relationship with her?’

  ‘I’ve only met her a few times.’

  ‘When?’

  ‘For dinner and for lunch.’

  ‘When was the last time you saw her?’

  ‘A few days ago.’

  ‘When?’

  ‘Two or three days ago.’

  ‘What was the exact time?’

  ‘I’m not sure, about noon.’

  ‘It was only a few days ago. Try to remember.’

  ‘Noon on Friday?’

  ‘And what was the occasion?’

  ‘We met some friends of hers.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Humeyra and her husband.’

  ‘Their full names?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘What do they do?’

  ‘They’re artists.’

  It had been a very strange lunch full of expat Iranians who had recently moved back to Iran. Everyone spoke French and English and the lunch had become very drunken. Madonna played. A homosexual in a printed shirt danced close to a small, voluptuous woman. There was something childishly defiant about Madonna in Tehran, especially late in the afternoon. The gay man said, ‘I hate this fucking revolution. Why us? It’s not fair. Why not Turkey? We just picked the wrong number.’ He enjoyed provoking me. ‘We’re waiting for the Americans,’ he hissed, ‘waiting for bombs!’

  ‘And the time before that?’ the interrogator asked.

  ‘I met her for lunch.’

  ‘Did you meet anyone with her?’

  Now I could see what all this had built up to.

  ‘Yes. We met a friend of hers who she thought could be a guide for me in Tehran.’

  ‘Jasib!’ the big man exclaimed, as he had done with Bahador at the start of the interrogation.

  ‘Yes,’ I replied.

  He emitted a satisfied grunt. ‘Mr Aatish, you’ve had no problem in the other cities, why did you need a guide here?’

  ‘No, I’ve had no problem,’ I answered, pretending to misunderstand him.

  ‘Yes, so why did you need a guide here?’

  ‘The other places were small cities, more manageable. Tehran is vast. I thought I’d need some help.’

  They seemed content with this explanation.

  ‘So he was your guide?’

  ‘No, his English wasn’t good enough. I met him once and that was that.’

  ‘Mr Aatish, when did you arrive in Tehran?’

  ‘On the fifteenth.’

  ‘So, two weeks ago?’

  ‘Yes, about.’

  ‘Two weeks in Tehran! What did you do for so long?’

  ‘I met my family friend, saw the city, saw how people lived here.’

  ‘For two weeks! What did you see?’

  ‘I saw your palaces, the Gulestan, Sadabad,’ I said, reaching in my mind for other tourist destinations. ‘Your crown jewels, the national museum, the museum of contemporary arts.’

  ‘And what else?’

  ‘The museum of ceramics?’ I managed. ‘Which used to be the Egyptian embassy.’

  I could see from their bored expressions that they already had what they were looking for.

  ‘Can we see your mobile phone?’

  I handed it to them. It was the worst moment in the interrogation because I knew, now that they were through with me, they wanted to go after all the people who had helped me in Iran. I recalled Desiré not giving names under duress. ‘I don’t know all the numbers in it,’ I said, trying to make up for the cowardice of handing them the phone. ‘It had some from before.’ Fortunately, none of the names had surnames and I could pretend I didn’t know them.

  ‘You have a number in here that says Bahador’s flat,’ the interrogator asked, ‘but it’s a mobile-phone number.’

  I asked to look at it and saw that it was the number of my mobile phone. ‘This is the number of my mobile phone.’

  The bigger man examined his sheet and shook his head.

  The little interrogator said, ‘But this is different from the number you gave us.’ He read the number back to me.

  ‘No, that was a mistake,’ I stammered. ‘I told you I might make one. This is the number of the phone. You can try it if you like.’ For a moment, everything seemed to hang in the balance. Then they returned to the phone list, writing down all the names and numbers.

  When they came to the end, they looked up at me and a neutral silence fell over the room.

  ‘You would like an extension?’ the man said at last.

  ‘Yes, I would have liked an extension. I would have liked to travel more.’

  ‘Why is your visa issued in Damascus?’

  ‘I was there when I needed it. I’ve been getting them as I go along.’

  ‘Did you get your Pakistani visa here?’

  ‘I had that from before. My father’s Pakistani.’

  ‘What will you say about Iran?’

  ‘Very positive things. I liked it very much.’ I wanted to add, ‘Until now!’ ‘I hope you’ll let me come back.’

  ‘Did you take notes?’ he asked, ignoring the question

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘On paper or the computer?’

  ‘On the computer,’ I answered, with relief at having got rid of my notebook.

  ‘How many pages on Iran?’

  ‘I’m not sure, eight to ten.’

  ‘What will you write about Iran?’

  ‘Very good things, I’ve really enjoyed my time here and wish I could stay on.’

  ‘And you have Mr Sadeghi’s number at home?’ they asked again, making me think they would come for both that and the notes.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And where do you go next?’

  ‘Pakistan.’

  ‘When?’

  ‘Well, in the next day or so, I only have two days.’

  ‘And then you finish travelling in India?’

  ‘Yes.’

  They handed me back the phone and said, ‘Have a good trip.’

  ‘I’ll try.’ I smiled, walking out of the room, half expecting to be cut down before I reached the door.

  That night as I drove to the airport I felt a
childish excitement at leaving Iran. My last hours in the Islamic Republic, and the nature of my departure, gave me a sense of escape. It made me feel the country’s impoverishments more acutely. I would never have believed I could look forward so much to the freedom of the Dubai Duty Free.

  Earlier I had gone to the flat for the last time. It was quiet, as always, and the windows showed another spring storm building over the hills. I packed all my things and went to Payam’s house. The storm broke later that afternoon. Reza called and I agreed to meet him for coffee. The sky was black when I crossed the busy main road in front of Payam’s house and the wind made the new leaves on the trees cling to their branches.

  The coffee shop was in an open-air arcade. Reza arrived, looking sombre. He said he would have our tickets refunded and was sad I was leaving. He asked me what flight I was on. I didn’t tell him I was booked on the Emirates night flight to Dubai. I didn’t want to trust anyone: I was still worried they would come after my notes.

  The three-hour interrogation covered every aspect of my shortened trip to Iran. When I looked back on the transcript of my interrogation, drawn from memory as soon as I left the country, I was amazed by its thoroughness. The questions that seemed incessant, and cut with fear in the interrogation room, were now a helpful way to retain everything about my time in Iran. Every car I hired, every kilometre I covered, every person I encountered made its way on to the interrogators’ notepad. They took my phone, wrote down every name and number in it, making me fear for those who had helped me and now could end up in more trouble than me for the generosity they had shown to a visitor. I had vowed to tell the truth, but seven months of travel from Turkey to Iran can sound incredible. In the closed-off world of Iran, these strange, doubtful threads seemed to excite the interrogators’ worst suspicions. At times, even as the interrogation was going on, I was grateful for it, grateful that I did not leave Iran disarmed, unaware of the regime’s constant presence in the lives of the people I liked so much.

  Then came that formulation I could hardly believe: ‘Mr Aatish, we hear that you have been asking about religion, the changes in religion, and politics somehow.’ Politics somehow! All the faith’s inability to deliver in the modern sense was contained in that ‘somehow’. What I had discovered in Iran, and had sensed in Syria, was how violent and self-wounding the faith could become when it was converted from being a negative idea, a political and historical grievance against the modern world, into a positive one.