Tehran
Arrival
I was the only Westerner on the flight to Tehran. I helped a middle-aged Muslim woman next to me plug in her earphones so she could watch David Guetta’s, Dirty Sexy Money.
Let me start by sharing what I knew about Iran when I took that flight: nothing. Or as close to nothing as is significant when arriving in a new country. I knew how much money I would need and how to carry it. I had read a book about the 1979 revolution but had seen very few pictures of modern Iran, and I had not searched for them either. I did not know how the internet worked in Iran. Or the transport. Or the phones, or retail, or anything commercial at all. I knew Iran was a mix of modernity and tradition, but I did not know where each showed itself or in what form.
I knew that women covered their heads and not their faces, but I did not know why. I wasn’t sure what I was allowed to do or not allowed to do or when or where. I didn’t know what people ate or how well-fed they were.
David Guetta leaked through the woman’s headphones. A seven-year-old girl sat across the aisle from me. Her eyes widened when the air hostess handed her a colouring book with crayons. She turned to her parents, confused that she had received gifts and they had not.
After disembarking, the young girl bounded ahead through the airport tunnel alone. Her freedom and explosive enthusiasm comforted me. Perhaps I was more nervous about safety in Iran than my stubbornness cared to admit; young girls do not bound ahead in dangerous places.
The City
I stood between the airport and the train station. The subway map showed eight different lines connecting 153 stations. A young lady approached me.
‘Good morning, can I help you?’ she asked. Her fine features were hidden by makeup, but a friendly smile broke through. I explained where I needed to go.
‘Come with me,’ she said, leading me to a train that had just arrived. Her name was Massi, and she played for the Iranian national women’s rugby team.
Men weren’t allowed in the first and last carriages of the train, but women could sit wherever they chose. Massi and I joined the men in the middle.
‘The men’s team are not so good, but the women are very good!’ she said. She also played sevens, but she preferred fifteen-player rugby.
‘I like it more…’ Her words trailed off as her arms made pushing and swaying gestures. She pulled up a few videos on her phone, and we watched her score tries.
‘You are fast,’ I said.
‘Not so much, but I am good at handoffs,’ she replied.
Her frame didn’t suggest she could push much weight around, but as she talked rugby, her eyes widened, her pulse quickened, and her English improved. Her team was called ‘The Dirties’, and her favourite player was Portia Woodman.
‘Can I watch you play?’ I asked.
‘No, it is not possible. Women are not allowed to play sports in front of men.’
We got off, and Massi helped me change trains before heading back to the one we had just come from. Signs on pillars encouraged women to keep their headscarves on.
I left the subway station and passed trendy coffee shops. They were interlaced with high-end stationery stores displaying expensive pens and custom-made notebooks. Old beggars sat alone on steps and quantified pedestrian empathy. Whey protein lined shop windows in huge plastic buckets and cell phone racks pushed Samsung, Huawei, LG, and Nokia against the glass. I walked with buildings on my left and newspaper stands on my right. Lines of anxious taxis edged forward with engines off and gears in neutral, while flower sellers watched them with mild interest.
Public buses, motorcycles, and private cars paid scant attention to traffic lights. Pedestrian crossings were decorative, and I scurried to catch up with a father as he pushed a pram into the oncoming flow of traffic. He was confident the cars would swarm past him, and I was confident in his confidence.
The marginalised too impatient to beg scavenged for cans and cardboard. Sculptures rose from the pavement, and illegal street art spread across the walls. I crossed a small plaza where a mother taught her son how to ride an oversized bicycle, and a father steered his daughter in a remote-controlled car.
The entire street-facing wall of a nine-storey building was painted with short statements like, ‘We will crush American Hegemony. America is the embodiment of evil and satin incarcerated.’ ‘Down with the USA.’ Skulls replaced stars on the American flag, and bombs dropped from each of its red stripes.
‘It annoys me that every foreigner who travels here posts pictures of those paintings,’ Mohadese shared with me a few days later. ‘A small, extremist group owns the building but nobody takes time to ask about that.’
The entrance to the restaurant was a nursery, and people dined in a conservatory. Men’s moustaches were neater than those in the subway, and the women had more experience with makeup. They ate eggplant with curd, fried mint, onion, olives, and garlic and drank rosewater with cardamom and cinnamon. A street musician wandered in with a deep voice and a Suroz, an instrument resembling an African mask with strings. He played for me alone and asked for a donation.
‘Do you have Wi-Fi here?’ I asked the waiter.
‘I am afraid not, sir, but if it is an emergency, I can hotspot you from my phone,’ he replied.
Mohadese was a friend of a friend. She reached back to pass me a handwritten itinerary and told her boyfriend to drive. I’d written to her for advice, and she’d chosen to be my translator, taxi, and cultural liaison.
At the Shah Abdol Azim Shrine, I followed Amir through five large passageways and halls. We were separated from the women and walked through a kaleidoscope of reflected light. Tiny mirror pieces, no wider than two centimeters and each angled differently, covered every surface of the shrine except the carpet. Hundreds of men moved, or did not move, through the passages, halls, and alcoves. Their individual prayers hummed like a swarm. They kissed and caressed every wall, pillar, and post. An elderly man sat in a corner and stretched his legs out before him. His eyes were closed, his prayer was deep, and a Quran lay open upon his head.
We entered the courtyard in time for the midday prayer. One hundred carpets were laid out in the open air, and men and women seeped from the shrine’s halls. A group of young boys lined up and imitated their fathers. Mohadese laughed.
‘They do not need to do that. They are too young to pray.’
‘At what age are they required to?’
‘Boys pray after they turn fifteen.’
‘And the girls?’
‘When they are nine.’
‘Why such a difference?’
‘Because in Islam, girls are thought to be women when they are nine years old. They can even marry then,’ Mohadese said with half humour, half disdain. Her faith was strong, but she heavily criticised the antiquated laws of Islam.
The Imam gave a short talk over the loudspeakers before and after the prayer. His sage advice was meant to guide listeners along the spiritual journey of their lives. His first sermon was on social media and how dangerous it can be. The Imam advised the crowd to use it wisely and practise restraint. After the prayer, he chose to talk about the evils of the USA and Israel. Mohadese and Amir translated for me and laughed at what they considered an old relic abusing his platform to spew outdated nonsense to the crowd.
We moved to the Taghol Tower, where the guide had more energy than Kazakhstan. He could breathe in and speak at the same time. The right side of his face was smudged by the war with Iraq, and a quarter of his moustache was missing. His raised hands pleaded with us to connect with the tower, itself far less interesting than he was, and his arms seemed to move the sun when he explained how the shadows on the pillars were used to measure time.
I walked through a bookshop, up a flight of stairs, and into a coffee shop. The final stair was made of old cassettes. A remix of ‘Hotel California’ played to Latino rhythms. Two men wore bowler hats. Both smoked. Both sat alone.
The waiter wore jeans rolled up just enough to show his white leather boots. He smoked between serving tables, and the smoke drifted up through his wavy black hair and curled around the rim of his black suede hat. His hair was cut above his ear on one side and below his ear on the other. His arms were as thin as the rims of his glasses, and a bright red heart hung from his neck on a silver chain.
I asked him for coffee, and he asked me about my country. I said South Africa, and he said,
‘Would you like brewed or filtered? Would you like 100% Arabica or 70/30 Robusta?’
In the bathroom, the toilet lid had a sticker that said, ‘Welcome to Wonderland.’ There was no mirror above the sink, but in its place, red neon lights spelled out in English, ‘This is a mirror. You are a written sentence.’
There were no other foreigners there.
The next morning, I crossed the city to the lower slopes of the still snow-capped Alborz Mountains. The mood of the northern suburbs of Tehran was condensed in a small coffee shop on Fereshteh Street called ‘Sam Café’. Bedside lamps lit the tables, casting a warm light over their wooden surfaces. The ceiling was made from unpolished industrial iron beams and cement bricks.
iPhones must be registered at great cost in Iran, but almost everyone in Sam Café had one. Many worked on MacBooks, shielded from the din by small white earphones. I was handed an English menu and ordered what was called ‘Aloe Vera and London Rocket’. I could choose Siphon, V60, Clever, Kalita, Chemex, Aero Press, or French Press if I ordered coffee. I was tempted by a Quinoa, Cranberry or Caesar salad. Signs encouraged me to take a picture of whatever I ordered and tag the café on Instagram.
When I stepped back onto the street, I watched a man driving a Hummer H3 hold up traffic to let a young woman in a BMW 4 Series pull out in front of him. He was a muscular canvas for tattoos. She started to pull out, and he edged forward, making it more difficult for her while getting a better view for himself.
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Roots
I hadn't booked accommodation in Iran before arriving, but finding a hostel for the first night was easy from the airport. After that, my goal was to ‘couch surf’ Iran as much as possible.
Couchsurfing is a platform where travellers stay for free with their hosts. Depending on the person, it is the best way to immerse yourself in the day-to-day lives of a culture you don’t know.
Bahram and Behnam lived near the Azadi Tower. As I crossed Al-Mahdi Park to get to their apartment, the quality and diversity of the sculptures caught my attention. Animals, cultural scenes, or abstract shapes were carved from stone, steel, wood, and plastic. I had expected politicians, warriors, or military men. Later in my trip, I saw a few poets and inventors, but only once, in Kerman, did I see a statue concerning war or battle. Public art in Iran celebrated creativity rather than conquest.
Bahram and Behnam were twins. But for a mole on Bahram’s neck and a scar on Behnam’s forehead, they were identical. They were Danny from Grease. They were the cool kids, the cute kids, the boyband lead singers. They had V-shaped bodies and wore tight shirts. They dressed the same every single day. They were dancers, actors, movie directors, parkour artists, and models. They were each other’s stunt double.
They lived with their two uncles. Their mother took pity on her sedentary, middle-aged brothers, who were still single and moved her whole family to cook and clean for them.
Fifteen of us sat on cushions in a large, carpeted room. A two-door Samsung fridge stood near the windows and the front door. A couch was tucked in the corner near the kitchen, with a flat-screen TV against the longer wall. A few pot plants and the cat completed the room.
The twins’ mother laid a plastic tablecloth on the carpet and filled it with food. With a visiting family, we ate baguettes, mashed potatoes, tomatoes, and gherkins with our hands or spoons. Only the twins spoke English but were soon drawn to a family brawl.
Dinner ended, and the family gathered around a popular television series aired during the Nowruz holidays.
‘This year, there are more episodes than normal,’ said Bahram.
Dark green army Jeeps swerved through dunes. The cat turned at an explosion and laid its head back down to the rattling of machine guns.
‘The government wants us to believe that it is necessary to send our army to Syria to fight against ISIS. They say that if we don’t, ISIS will come here, but everybody knows that is a lie. They are wasting our money. There are more important things to fix here at home. These extra episodes are just another way to scare us.’
Once the visiting family left and the cat was kicked out, we laid thin blankets on the carpet and slept with the same cushions we used at dinner.
The twins swept me up in their celebrity life. I joined a large group of their friends at Kourosh Cineplex, a six-storey building with fourteen cinemas and a food court. All the screens showed a movie that night, none of which was from the West.
When our film started, Behnam translated everything for me. I was touched, grateful, and not prepared for him to talk for two hours throughout the movie.
It was a comedy: a tale of greed and deception. A dark, moustached character worked for an intelligence agency under the Shah before the Iranian revolution. He had bought some land, but he was arrested after the revolution, and while others were executed without trial by the new regime, he managed to escape. He fled to El Paso with a Mexican bar singer and soon became embroiled in anti-regime protests in Los Angeles. There, he met an old friend from Iran who told him that the government had confiscated his land and that he was never allowed to go back. A dramatic scene showed him crying around a bonfire while burning his Iranian passport. It was all a scam; his friend was the crook who had stolen the land and made up the stories about being unable to return. He was convicted, the land returned, and the movie ended with the moustached man returning to Iran to find himself the owner of a tall apartment block built upon his land.
The group left the cinema, complaining about the story’s tackiness and the poor production quality. In its defence, Bahram told me that a movie like that would not have been allowed five years earlier due to its disapproval of the post-revolution government. Even then, Bahram said it only got away with it because of its humour. We left the cinema and blasted down the highway listening to Iranian rap and Survivor’s ‘Eye of the Tiger’.
The twins’ uncle wrote novels, poetry, and screenplays. Their grandfather was a Jen-gir, an exorcist specialising in expelling jinn. Their father spent most of the day on the couch, resting his cell phone on his stomach. The twins and their friends joked that he was watching porn. Screen addiction ran in the family. iPhones and Apple watches beeped simultaneously. If the twins weren’t messaging on Telegram or WhatsApp, they were playing games or comparing Tinder swipes. All social media was banned in Iran, but the prohibition was easily and ubiquitously bypassed with a VPN app.
‘Why are the social apps banned but not the VPNs?’ I asked.
‘Iran is a free country. You can do anything, but you must do it behind the walls. The government doesn’t give a damn. As long as you don’t do anything against government,’ replied Bahram.
AS Roma has a huge fan base in Iran and during the Champions League, people noticed that the nipples of the Capitoline Wolf suckling Romulus and Remus were blurred out on national television. Meme culture in Iran, a tinderbox for creativity and sarcasm, set alight.
One image showed a cartoon of a she-wolf standing upright. Her legs were provocatively crossed, her fringe played across her left eye, and a long ponytail rested on her hips. A tiny bikini constrained her bulging breasts. The tagline read, ‘How the minister sees the wolf.’ Another meme showed a photo of a local celebrity known for his exaggerated pear-shaped chin, which, when cropped, resembled bum cheeks. The tagline demanded that his face be blurred while presenting on television.
The stage moved in three directions. The theatre was a perfect circle, and all the seats and balconies had great views. Bahram apologised profusely for taking me to what he said resembled a high school arts project. He assured me that theatre in Tehran was usually a lot better.
Backstage, I greeted everyone with an awkward, ‘Salaam’, while men and women of all ages embraced Bahram and Behnam. It was the first time I had seen unmarried men and women hug each other. While men hugged and kissed on the cheek freely, the normal greeting from a man to a woman was a soft handshake and even then, only is she offered her hand. In more conservative settings, no contact was made at all.
A dancer approached me.
‘He is gay,’ he said pointing to a companion. ‘He is very gay,’ he said pointing to another.
The accused defended themselves with mock punches. Being gay in Iran was illegal and could result in the death penalty.
As we left the theatre, the twins’ good looks drew unwanted attention from a transgender group mulling about on the sidewalk.
‘If it’s illegal to be gay, why are transgender individuals so open about their sexuality on the street?’ I asked.
‘If you are transgender and feel that you were born in the wrong body, government considers it part of God’s will and will help you pay for surgery,’ said Bahram. ‘But these guys take advantage and just hang out around here to hit on men.’
‘What’s up, dude! Where you from, man?’
‘South Africa.’
‘Nice man! I just came back from Canada.’
‘You lived there?’
‘Yeah. Twenty years. Now I’m back. I sell beauty products. I also own a beauty salon,’ he said.
I was back at Sam Café. David was thickset with a square jaw. His hair was immaculate. His jacket was a perfect fit, small enough to draw attention to his chest but not tight. Adam, his friend, nodded at me across the shared table.
‘I work with young ladies, and Adam does old people,’ laughed David.
‘I work in marketing,’ said Adam.
‘What story sells? What do Iranians aspire to?’ I asked him.
‘Iranians are so difficult to understand because they never say what they mean,’ he said. ‘I prefer people from the West. They are direct and transparent.’
‘So, have you fucked any Iranian girls yet?’ asked David.
I was taken aback, but I hid it well.
‘Is that something tourists typically do?’ I asked sarcastically.
‘Not really, man. But it’s so easy. Look, I’ll show you pictures of the girls I’m sleeping with.’
Two striking women entered the café and sat at the same table. They glanced our way occasionally while we talked. After brief jeering between the two men, Adam leaned forward, moved the lamp aside, and spoke to them. He brought David into the conversation and introduced the women by name. David said a few words and then asked each of them for their numbers, which they gladly shared. He sat back next to me and laughed.
‘You see, man, I get Adam to do all the work, and then I invite them to the beauty salon. Maybe I’ll fuck them, maybe I won’t,’ he said with a shrug.
Azadeh was arrested by the moral police for wearing tight jeans. After spending half a day at the police station, she was forced to sign an official apology and a commitment to Islamic values. When I met her a few days after the arrest, she wore the same pair of jeans.
She invited me to stay with her the next day. It was rare for unmarried women to live alone in Iran, but it was a rising trend.
‘Is that economics or a culture change?’ I asked.
‘You can’t distinguish between them; one leads to the other,’ replied Azadeh. ‘The internet and access to Western movies have much to do with it. We see it as something normal in the West and like it. Some people will say we had our brains washed, but it works for me.’
The next morning, I woke up craving the outdoors. I took public transport as far north as I could, hoping to eventually walk along the Golab Darreh River for as long as the day would allow. However, I got lost, and on the fringe between the tidy neighbourhood of Tajrish and the Alborz Mountains, I stumbled upon hundreds of people doing yoga. Their bodies moved in unison, blending with the pallid hues of Tehran that stretched out below them to the far horizon.
Later, deep in that same urban sprawl, I walked through a poorer sector of Tehran on my way to Azadeh’s apartment. Some shops had pulled thick steel shutters over their windows, but most were still open. A young boy was picking cardboard from street bins while a grocer swept cabbage leaves into the gutter.
A tall, poorly dressed man kept his eyes on me from the other side of the street. He was nervous and didn’t try to hide how he changed pace when I did. It was the first and only time I thought I would be robbed in Iran. After twenty minutes, he crossed behind a fruit truck, cut me off on the sidewalk, and offered me an uncomfortably firm handshake. He told me he was Azerbaijani-Russian. He asked me where I was from and left.
Before leaving Tehran, I was introduced to a well-known political journalist. We sat in a dark room adjacent to his office. He spoke before I could ask questions.
‘In writing, you must pick your words. In all other jobs, people are judged by their work. When you go to the repair man to fix your car, the repair man is judged by his work. When your car is fine, you judge that he is a good repairman. But we are judged with words. One word may put you in jail.’
‘Do you still enjoy it? Do you still feel it’s important?’
‘It is the price we pay for our country, for our society, for our people. I think there are three visions about Iran and Iranians. The first vision is from the people who live in Iran, like me, like the others. The second vision is the vision of Iranians who live abroad. The third vision is the foreigner’s vision about Iran: Arabs, Turks, Europeans, South Africans, and so on.
People in Iran think they deserve better lives. They think it is their right to have someone make them live better. People in Iran think that they are miserable, that all the officials are corrupt, that we are very poor, and that we are falling because of corruption. The people of Iran have a very negative vision of their country.
The Iranians that live in other countries, they are so-so. They criticise their country and wish for better conditions. They think that their country has problems but not more problems than other countries. They compare their country with other countries, their people with other peoples. In education, health, housing, transportation, environmental preservation, life quality, and so on. They judge that people in Iran and Iran are better than some countries and worse than other countries. But the people in Iran always think that they are the worst. They think that they live in the worst conditions in the world.
Now the foreigners, the foreigners think that Iran is something fantastic, like Godzilla. They see Iran as powerful. They think that when Iran has economic sanctions, the people are sitting and enriching atoms. They fear us in every aspect that you can imagine. This is especially true of our neighbours. We are a rich country among the poor people around us: Turkmenistan, Tajikistan, Afghanistan, Pakistan and the little Arab countries on the Persian Gulf shore.
Do you know that Iran does not have a day of independence? We have always been independent. Every Iranian who is born in the hospital, or where the ships dock, there is no difference. Every Iranian is proud,’ he said, beating his chest with a fist.
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