Authors: Ramita Navai
Some of the girls decided to go back to Mansoureh’s house after school as her family had a big living room. There were few public places to hang out in this part of town. The nearby parks were mostly full of drug addicts and there were no cool coffee shops. The traditional tea houses were men-only dens, full of hookah-pipe smoke and banter.
Somayeh left the other girls; she had to help her mother prepare for a party. Tonight was a big night, they were celebrating Haj Agha’s latest pilgrimage trip and all the neighbours were invited. As she turned the corner into her street she saw them. Tahereh Azimi and her elderly parents were standing by a small van laden with their possessions, fleeing in shame, back to the village they came from.
Tahereh Azimi had never fitted in. Her parents seemed normal: poor and working-class. They prayed and her mother only ever wore a chador in public. Tahereh’s mother was nearly fifty when she had given birth to her, after thirty barren years. Tahereh’s father, Sadegh, had endured decades of pressure from his family to leave his sterile wife for younger, more fecund ground. Sadegh had refused. He was a good man who could not stand to cause pain. Tahereh was their miracle baby, even if Hazrat Abol Fazl had responded to their
nazr
prayers with perverse delay.
They were sturdy country people, but the city had sucked the vitality out of them. Tahereh’s parents had moved to Tehran in their youth when their village had crumbled to mounds of rubble after an earthquake had rumbled its way up from the earth’s crusty layers. Half their house had smashed in on the ground in less than six seconds. Whole lives were reduced to particles of brick and dust. A few scores were killed, including Tahereh’s extended family. Their bodies were buried in the cemetery under the orange trees. A village that had once been so vital, on a fertile plain, encircled by mountains that gushed water and fed orchards near where wild horses roamed, became a sad, forgotten place.
The transition to the city had been less painful than they had expected. Although Tehran’s brash, ugly urbanity, its motorways, concrete high-rises and festering underbelly suggest an impersonal metropolis, it can still feel like a village. In Tehran, urban privileges like privacy and anonymity are still Western concepts. Hidden in its seams is the stitching that holds the city together: the bloodlines, the clans, the kindness, the prying and the meddling.
Tahereh’s family soon stumbled on distant relatives and friends. But their new community did not last long. Many around them were felled by heart disease, cancer and medical incompetence. As their lives contracted, they became more solitary, leaning in towards each other, with Tahereh at their centre. The net began closing in on them too. Tahereh’s mother suffered a stroke. They had no medical insurance and Sadegh juggled three jobs. Tahereh began working as a seamstress in the tiny back room of a dressmaker’s shop in a shopping mall on Vali Asr, a job that was kept a secret. There would have been whispers if the neighbours found out that Tahereh was a working girl at sixteen, even if her time was spent with a Singer sewing machine sitting opposite an Afghan tailor in his seventies. Vali Asr opened a new world for Tahereh, where teenagers hung out in coffee shops and fast-food joints. Super Star and Super Star Fried Chicken were always brimming with teenage boys and girls flirting with each other, exchanging numbers and setting up dates.
Tahereh spent all her free time walking up and down Vali Asr, marvelling at its beauty, which seemed to intensify the farther north she ventured. She started walking up as far as Bagh Ferdows near the furthest reaches of Vali Asr. She would sit on a bench and watch the city; people here seemed to come from a different race. It was on one of these trips that she bumped into Hassan, the son of a neighbour. He had come to look at football kits in the sports shops on downtown Vali Asr, near Monirieh Square. Away from family and neighbourhood spies, they spoke differently to each other, at once understanding the other’s need to discover a world outside the Meydan. The chance meeting became a treasured weekly tryst. Tahereh started reading
Zanan
, a daring women’s magazine that covered everything from literature to sex and argued for gender equality. Tahereh visited exhibitions and plays. She was a gifted artist; but her teachers were not interested in drawing and painting. Only her parents understood the remarkable talent of their girl, but they had neither the money nor the education or foresight to encourage her.
Tahereh’s parents were religious and traditional, but they came from a liberal village where men and women celebrated weddings together, where chadors were white and where it did not matter if your
hejab
slipped off your head. Sadegh thought the revolution had been a big mistake and he still lamented the fall of the Shah. He believed that the
hejab
should not be compulsory; it was a matter of personal choice and one’s relationship with God was private. He never drank, but was not against alcohol. He thought modernity was not at odds with Islam. Sadegh also believed that people should be virgins until marriage, but he thought that relations between men and women were nobody’s business but their own. Sadegh soon realized his views did not belong in Meydan-e Khorasan, so he kept them to himself, truths only shared with his wife and child.
When Sadegh found out about Hassan, he believed Tahereh when she said her honour was intact, but he was devastated that her reputation had been shredded to worthless pieces.
When Hassan’s mother returned home she was so enraged that she called the police, telling them there was a prostitute in her house. The police took Tahereh to the station and summoned her father. He told the officers his daughter was pure and begged them to release her. They mocked his village accent, and spoke down to him as though he were a simple peasant.
‘Your daughter behaves like a whore and you defend her! Where’s your honour? Is that what they do in the villages? They’d have stoned her from where you come from!’ They all laughed, not knowing that life in his northern village had not changed much since the revolution – in some ways it was more liberal than the laws enforced by the police in Tehran. As for Hassan, he got a few hearty slaps on the back from his friends. Only his best friend knew the truth: that he and Tahereh had fallen in love, that they spent their time visiting art galleries and listening to Pink Floyd. They had only ever dared to kiss.
Tahereh did not notice Somayeh loitering at the corner of the road, waiting for her and her parents to leave. It would not have surprised her; since the episode everyone had cut her off.
The smell of saffron and buttery steamed rice filled the flat and vats of rich stews bubbled on the stove. Somayeh’s mother, Fatemeh, had been cooking for the last two days. Any morsel of food that passed through her soft, plump hands was transformed into succulent dishes. Fatemeh’s mother had told her that if you kept your husband well fed, he would never leave you to taste forbidden fruit. Fatemeh had learnt her skills from a young age. She was famed for her cooking and their parties were always packed. Fatemeh stirred and fried and washed while Somayeh set out bowls of fruit, cucumbers, walnuts and pistachios. She cleaned the dust off the plastic maroon flowers that were displayed around the room. Even with windows closed, the dust somehow worked its way into apartments and houses across the city, sheeting everything in a fine grey powder.
Mohammad-Reza sat at the kitchen table playing the
Quest of Persia
video game on the family PC. Haj Agha was watching television. A turbaned mullah was wagging his fingers, doing what mullahs do so well: lecturing. Iran’s mullahs are not only authorities on Islamic theology, but are also experts at finding moral decay in the most unlikely of places. Today it was to be found in a new
3
G mobile Internet service: ‘It endangers public chastity…it will destroy family life!’ moaned the mullah, disgusted by the idea of video-calling. Four grand ayatollahs, no less, had issued a fatwa condemning the new service. The Internet operator had ignored them.
Haj Agha always looked like he was in contemplation. His permanently furrowed brows and small, squinting eyes gave the aura of a serious, reserved man. He was shy with strangers and mostly kept his thoughts to himself. He had been remarkably handsome in his youth, but an unfulfilled marriage and dull, poorly paid government jobs had prematurely ground his looks down. Haj Agha had spent most of his life toiling to make ends meet. When he married Fatemeh, she moved in with him and his parents. The four of them lived between three rooms, even when the children came along. For years he barely seemed to sleep, working two jobs, just enough to keep everyone fed. Two events changed his fortunes: the deaths of his parents and the arrival of a new President in the summer of
2005
, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, whom he had voted for on the Supreme Leader’s advice. With one of Ahmadinejad’s new easily accessible, low-interest government loans, Haj Agha joined Tehran’s construction boom. He knocked down the small brick house his parents had bequeathed him and he built four floors upwards. He sold one apartment and was now renting the two below him. Never again would he live in a ramshackle brick house struggling to make ends meet. He could now afford to send his children to university. Haj Agha’s boosted income also meant that even though Fatemeh did not have time to spend on religious pursuits, she had the money to buy spiritual peace of mind. When Fatemeh’s father died, she paid a mullah one million tomans – just over
300
US dollars – for a year’s worth of daily
namaaz
prayers for him, in case he had missed any during his lifetime. Ahmadinejad had served them well.
Haj Agha’s social status had risen exponentially in line with his growing income. His rank in the neighbourhood had also been nudged up several places thanks to his religious devotion. The party tonight was to celebrate his second trip to Mecca. In the last few years he had been immersed in demonstrating his love to God and the imams: two trips to Karbala in southern Iraq to visit the tomb of Hossein, the most important Shia martyr and the Prophet Mohammad’s grandson. From there on to Najaf to pay his respects at Hossein’s father’s tomb, Imam Ali, the first Shia imam and, as Shias believe, the rightful successor to Mohammad. Not forgetting two visits to Syria to the resting place of Imam Ali’s daughter, Zeinab, granddaughter of the prophet.
Piety struck Haj Agha late in life. Fatemeh blamed herself for his affliction: soon after their marriage she had asked him to take her to Imam Reza’s shrine in Mashhad, Iran’s holiest city, for their honeymoon. Imam Reza was the only Shia imam buried in Iran, rumoured to have been murdered with poisoned grapes. But Haj Agha refused to take Fatemeh. He could not afford the trip and thought pilgrimages unnecessary. He was a stubborn man and could not be persuaded. Fatemeh was devastated but also fearful of angering her new husband. Instead she had cried to her mother, who had told her father, who had a quiet word with Haj Agha. There was no way of refusing his new father-in-law. Fatemeh was overcome with joy, not because he had agreed to the trip, but because, in changing his mind, he had shown his love for her. She was never told he had been forced to take her.
Mashhad and the world’s busiest Islamic shrine were not what Haj Agha had in mind for his honeymoon, although the city was packed with honeymooners. Afghan migrants, pilgrims, hawkers, tourists, beggars and noxious fumes swirled around them on the crowded streets. The colossal shrine was open for business twenty-four hours a day and twinkled at night like an Islamic Disneyland.
Haj Agha and Fatemeh walked into this beguiling world of gilded domes, glittering mirror mosaics and exquisite alcoves tiled luminous blue and green. Somewhere between a vast courtyard shadowed by minarets and a dazzling six-tiered chandelier dripping light from a vaulted ceiling, their emotions took over. Fatemeh felt a rush of love for God and all He had given her. She felt a rush of love for this quiet, reserved man she barely knew, whom she had met only once before her wedding and had not wanted to marry. Haj Agha was stricken with regret for his academic failures and his laziness. But most of all for agreeing to marry Fatemeh, and being bound to a life of sexual frustration. Fatemeh and Haj Agha edged towards the inner chamber where the imam’s body is entombed.
Shia shrines are not usually peaceful havens of reflection and meditation. Each shrine marks the spot on the trail of Arab caliphs, sheiks and horse-backed fighters as they journeyed towards war and death; they are monuments to murder, betrayal and sacrifice. Tragedies to be mourned. Lucky, then, that Iranians make excellent mourners. We embrace sorrow like no one else, wailing on demand, tapping into the vats of love and loss that simmer in the cauldrons of our hearts. We were always doomed, lied to and betrayed from the very beginning
.
Shrines are usually a tumult of sobbing and chest-beating and Imam Reza’s shrine is no exception. From the female entrance Fatemeh stepped into what looked like a battleground. Howling women barrelled against her as they charged their way towards the tomb. Stewards holding neon feather dusters tried to beat them back. Even the scrums that broke out at Fatemeh’s local bank were not this vicious. She was annoyed that she was unable to conjure even a few tears. So she pushed her way into the throng until the crush of wailing bodies sent her into a trance. She did not even notice when the tears trickled out of her eyes.
Fatemeh was spat out the other end, exhilarated. She edged towards the Perspex partition that separated the sexes, to look for Haj Agha. That is when she saw him. Crouching near a corner in the distance. He was wailing uncontrollably, an unstoppable flood of tears gushing from his eyes. She was dumbfounded. He had outdone all the other mourners, some of whom kept a competitive eye on him, forcing them to up the ante just to be heard over the din Haj Agha was making. Haj Agha seemed unaware of his surroundings. He had been overwhelmed by sorrow for a life half lived and half lost. Fatemeh had no idea he was such a sensitive, religious soul.