City of Lies (26 page)

But real aficionados head to Tehran’s illegal gambling dens. In the north of the city, the joints are accordingly classier and more sophisticated: private casinos set up in high-rise apartments where customers turn up in sharp suits and ties, where the croupiers are glamorous, the security personnel burly and where fortunes are lost.

Asghar found an abandoned building just off Nasser Khosrow that would be perfect for his new operation. Nasser Khosrow was not too different from when he was younger. There were more illegal pharmaceuticals being peddled than before, but the road still throbbed with the loud hum of hundreds of motorbikes weaving their way up and down the street, ignoring traffic lights, stop signals and one-way signs; like an endless stream of worker ants they zigzagged past pedestrians and barrow boys and shopkeepers and old men playing backgammon outside shop fronts.

He strode down the street in his army Puffa jacket, with his diamond ring (which he had sworn he would be buried with) on his little finger, a gold chain with a pendant that spelt out his name hung round his neck. He was in good shape for a man his age; the heroin had not ruined his looks yet. He was missing a few teeth, knocked out in fights, but he still had a full head of hair, thick and grey. The street was buzzing. Asghar felt at home right there, in the middle of it all, even if he no longer ruled it. A good-looking barrow boy lifted a toothless man in the air and joked to some pretty girls: ‘Take a look at my stock ladies, I got the best stock in town.’ Between the electric shops and the pharmacies, there were still remnants of the Tehran that Asghar had been born into, flashes of elegance in decaying buildings. An old man in a woolly hat was sitting on a concrete bollard, scores of scissors of all different sizes and shapes spread out in front of him on a makeshift table propped up by cans of industrial adhesive; he was in exactly the same spot as when he had first arrived in Tehran, when he had left his hometown of Hamedan nearly fifty years ago to make his fortune.

‘Alright boss!’ he shouted out to Asghar, just like the old days. Asghar threw him a
2
,
000
-toman note. A man selling screwdrivers was eating his lunch; beside him a middle-aged woman was yelling, ‘Cunts are made of gold!’ Asghar smiled to himself. Nobody ever paid her any attention, but she had been shouting the same thing for as long as anyone could remember.

Asghar walked past the Shams-ol Emareh Palace, where it was said that
100
years ago slaves were brought over from Ethiopia and Zanzibar; the men were castrated and forced to guard the harem and the women were trained as informers and spies. He walked past the passageways that led to bazaars that snaked behind the streets and sloped underground; he walked past the open doorways where bowls of hot broth appeared; past the sweet stands and the rubber boots and knife displays. A man wearing a black and white chequered turban carrying boxes on his back stopped outside a shop that was advertising lottery tickets to win an all-expenses-paid trip to Mecca. As he turned into an alley, a young man shouted out to a passing woman, ‘Hey gorgeous, let me suck some sweet milk from those tits of yours.’ For the first time in years, Asghar felt alive.

With money borrowed from the owner of an electrical store on Nasser Khosrow, who remembered him from back in the day, Asghar set up shop. He hung his black and white photos of wrestlers on the wall, dead heroes who used to treat him like a god. He bought old tables and chairs. He served tea and
aragh
. After only a few months he had attracted a raft of regulars. Slowly, Asghar started making money.

Pari was furious when she discovered what he was doing. She had put up with it all, even the heroin, but gambling was
haram
, a sin. The baptism had changed Pari. She had taken it seriously; she prayed every day and read the Koran. Asghar was moved by her devotion and was proud of her. A few weeks after the revolution happened, she started wearing a chador and never took it off again. Asghar paid for her to go on a tour to Karbala. It was there that she had a dream so vivid that for a few days afterwards she thought it had really happened; she had been standing by Imam Hossein’s tomb when God spoke to her. He told her that he accepted she had atoned for her sins, but unless Asghar stopped his immoral ways, they would never be reunited in paradise. She returned from Karbala on a mission to save Asghar from hell.

She pleaded and begged him to close the gambling den. Asghar was religious, but he had always thought God would appreciate the importance of his survival. When Pari found out where he had set up shop (by pressurizing one of his friends) she started storming into the club on a weekly basis, shouting at him in front of the customers; they got used to it. When he would try to reason with her, she would tell him she did not want to be without him in the afterlife; he was all she had in this world and all she wanted for the next.

*

After Pari ran out of the club the boys cracked even more jokes about Asghar the Henpecked, or Asghar the Brave – unless his wife was near, in which case he became Asghar the Coward. Asghar smiled and went along with it, but he could not help feeling guilty for having let Pari down yet again. In between shots and toasts, he tried to call her on the home line, but she was not answering. He would talk to her in the morning; he would promise her that within four months they would have enough money to shut down the gambling den and move out of Shoosh. And this time he meant it.

As it was their pre-Ramadan celebration, Asghar drank more than usual. He was so drunk by the time he stumbled home he could hardly walk. Trying to be as quiet as he could, he climbed under the covers, relieved that Pari was fast asleep. He kissed her goodnight. But he was too drunk to notice that her body was stiff and cold. Pari had died of a heart attack as she had got into bed.

In the morning, as Asghar rubbed his eyes and felt the hangover throb in his head, he turned round to cuddle Pari, as he always did. That is when he realized. He did not leave the bed for a long time, crying into her neck.

Asghar organized a grand funeral for Pari, spending nearly all of the money he had saved; with Pari gone, he no longer needed extra cash.

After her death, his life changed in a way it never had before. He made it his mission to fulfil all the promises he had made to Pari that had remained broken. It was less to soothe his guilt than to make sure they would be together in the afterlife. Asghar never gambled again. He shut down the business and cut off ties with that part of his life. He stopped drinking. He even started to pray. More than ever, he wanted to show Pari that he could be a good person, an honest person; that he could be the man she had always wanted him to be. His only real vice was the daily hit of heroin that oozed into his veins, warming his soul. And that was the beauty of Pari; even when he did wrong, he knew that she would understand.

No matter how hard she tried, she could not get it right – gyrating her hips while undulating her stomach. Farideh looked like she was frantically trying to keep an invisible hula hoop aloft. All the women were laughing at their own clumsiness.

Belly dancing at the health club had proved even more popular than the Bikram yoga classes. The dance studio had magnificent views of the mountains, but thick lace curtains had been drawn to shield the dancing ladies from view. The owner took every precaution to abide by the law.

It was then, mid hip-swivel, that four chador-clad women from the morality police entered the gym. They walked into reception and calmly told the duty manager to shut the whole place down. They then went upstairs into the dance class and one of them turned the Arabic pop music off. None of them shouted. They just issued a list of commands:
stop dancing; everybody get dressed; everybody get outside.
The teacher, a blonde dancer in bra top and hot pants, was terrified.

‘I don’t understand what we’ve done wrong?’ She was pleading with one of the
chadoris
, who was shoving all her music CDs into a bag.

‘These dancing classes are lewd, provocative, immoral and contrary to Islam,’ the
chadori
replied in a clipped monotone. Most of the women had already grabbed their
manteaus
and headscarves and raced outside, scared of being arrested.

Farideh was enraged; her weekly moment of joy had been invaded by
them
. She refused to be hurried.

‘How dare you! You should be ashamed! When did dancing become illegal in your filthy minds? Even if there were men here, they would hardly be interested in us when there are so many young girls on the loose that
your
lot can’t control.’

‘But look, no men!
Mard neest!
’ A beautiful French business consultant was trying to reason with the
chadoris
in her faltering Persian. The
chadoris
paid no attention to the foreigner. They had recognized the supercilious tone of Farideh’s voice; it irked them that the Islamic Revolution had not managed to curb the superiority complexes of these rich old women. Farideh recognized it too, and she was always struck by her condescending manner towards
regimeys
. She could not help but look down on them, her anger at what the country had become manifesting itself as class hate.

‘You—’ Another
chadori
was pointing at Farideh now. ‘Watch your tongue or I’ll have you arrested. Unfortunately, old women like you still have libidos, and we know what happens when
your sort
can’t get attention. This type of dancing clearly promotes lesbianism. It’s disgusting the way you
all behave,’ she said.

Farideh must have looked shocked, for when she walked outside the other women grouped around her.

‘We heard you shouting at them! What did they say?’

‘They’re afraid we’ll turn into lesbians.’ Some of the women began to laugh at the absurdity of it; Farideh just stood in silence. She was angry at herself for letting something so trivial upset her; it was not as though she would never dance again, but the dance classes were one of the few things she actually looked forward to leaving her house for.

Farideh dreaded her brushes with the city. Despite all the years, it was impossible not to feel stabs of longing when she drove through the streets for the Tehran she had loved, full of miniskirts, discos and pool halls; juice bars and vodka bars, donkey carts and new cars; the triumph of colours and music on the streets; the thrill and buzz of a new epoch; milkshakes and cigarettes and wine and song. She remembered one of her boyfriends coming back from a trip to London and announcing how the English were so
uptight
. How London was so
backward.
He told her British border police had never seen a watermelon, and insisted on slicing it open in case he was smuggling something inside it.
He told her the food was terrible, you could not even buy garlic! And he had been threatened with arrest for indecent exposure because he had taken his top off on a scorching day. How they had laughed at swinging London.

There were plenty of her friends who were now happy to live in the bubble of north Tehran, acting as though the rest of the city did not exist. Farideh did not have that luxury. Ever since her husband Kaveh had died she had taken over his fight to claw back some of the family land that had been confiscated after the revolution. Kaveh had come from old money – lots of it – but a large portion was tied up in property and land, and most of that had been seized by the state.

For nearly twenty years Farideh had endured endless days in government offices, ministries and courts, forced to beg and flatter and fawn to various officials and judges who spoke to her as though she barely existed. Sometimes the first question they would ask was: ‘And where’s your husband?’ Even when she explained that he had died, that she was now in charge, they did not take her seriously. She saw how differently they would treat the men. The process was torturously slow; the machinery of the Islamic Republic was encumbered by bribery, corruption, poorly educated officials, internal politics and crippling ineptitude. It took her five years to prove that the deeds to a building her father had owned had been forged by a civil servant who had claimed it as his own. And then, after spending over
50
,
000
US dollars on bribes, it took another two years to fight the (rich) civil servant’s appeals, which were effectively greased by his even larger bribes to the judges. She spent six years trying to reclaim a plot of land north of the city where Kaveh’s family once had a holiday home. After the revolution, it had been declared the property of the state. She had received five separate verdicts from five different courts, all in her favour. Yet still the verdicts continued to be contested, which meant another court case; another appeal; another few years.

Farideh often wondered if she should have left after the revolution. Her life had only just started to come together when it happened. She had finished her degree in art history and had been accepted for a job as curator of a small gallery. Kaveh had got his first promotion in the Oil Ministry and they were attending decadent parties at weekends. She had watched as so many of her friends fled, draining their prodigious bank accounts and siphoning the money into Switzerland; politicians and cohorts of the Shah plundered the treasury and the Ministries for every last shekel, frantically bankrupting the country in a whirl of greed, fear and violence, sucking the bone of its marrow. Whole packs of aristocrats and monarchists escaped in private planes and first-class seats, bound for their villas in the south of France, their pieds-à-terre in Paris, London and New York. And of course they flocked to the blue-skied glitz of Los Angeles, where Italian mottled marble, crystal chandeliers and gilded furniture would be soothing reminders of home. In time they monopolized block after block of Brentwood and Westwood, until Los Angeles became their
Tehrangeles
.

There were those who refused to be cowed, who refused to leave their glorious land, even in the face of death. Most of them were executed. Like General Rahimi, who was killed by firing squad on the rooftop of a school a few minutes before midnight on
14
February
1979
. The General was the military commander and police chief of Tehran; he had also been a family friend of Farideh. She had watched his interrogation by the Islamists on television. They had beaten and tortured him, yet he refused to denounce the Shah. His last words, reportedly, were ‘
Javid Shah
’, long live the Shah. But the Shah had already scarpered; the only battle he was now fighting was against the cancer that would soon kill him. Farideh still ached when she thought of those times and the friends she had lost.

She had chosen to stay. Kaveh had tried to persuade her to flee, but she could not bear the thought of leaving her parents behind, who were too set in their ways to start over. That was only one of the reasons. They had not been as canny as their friends; there were no secret offshore accounts. No homes abroad. No foreign passports. Farideh was afraid that if they left, their house would be taken. When the new state began to auction off thousands of people’s homes, she thought she had made the right decision. They still had enough to afford a handsome life, better than anything abroad. Then there was the war. A new round of friends leaving, of parents packing their sons off to international boarding schools instead of the front line. The ones who stayed behind, like Farideh, retreated to the countryside when the bombings in Tehran started. During the darkest days, they had partied the hardest despite the dangers, drinking and dancing and loving like they never had before. These moments, in between the terrors, were a perversely magical time.

Farideh had also stayed partly through loyalty and devotion to this cursed, wretched, beautiful land. These were her people, fanatical or not. She was a patriotic woman and talk of Cyrus the Great could still reduce her to tears; as for so many Iranians, it was not just the romanticism of him as a great, beneficent king, it was the fact that at the time of his rule Persia had been the envy of the world. She would suffer with her fellow countrymen. Although so many of them appeared happier now the Shah was gone. The extent of discontent had taken them all by surprise. She felt guilty for not having noticed. It was easy enough to call these others a bunch of
dahati
, illiterate peasants, but deep down it upset her that there was such a giant gulf between her and so many of her people, and she sensed they would edge no nearer to each other in her lifetime.

Some days she was sure she had made the right decision. She remembered her friends who had suffered far more, like Mr Karimi, an eminent chemical engineer reduced to being a London cab driver, and Mr and Mrs Ahmadian – he had been a high-ranking member of government under the Shah and spent his final years in a small two-up, two-down terraced house in Willesden, robbed of all his wealth, all his land taken. They were the honest ones. The ones who did not loot the country, but left with nothing, taking their naive, law-abiding ways with them, to stand in queues and beg for acceptance that would be issued on pieces of paper; to become refugees and immigrants; exiles.

*

The night after the gym was raided, Farideh was meant to be going to a wedding, but she was no longer in the mood. Besides, these big, showy weddings bored her.

The son of the head of a multinational company with a government contract was marrying an English model and the party was happening a few roads away from where Farideh lived. The father of the groom had pulled all the right strings and sweetened all the right mouths. The local police had been paid off. The party was going to be spectacular. They had hired top DJs, a band and a film crew to cover the event. The cost was rumoured to be a million US dollars. Hundreds of guests in expensive clothes were screened by security and were ordered to hand in their mobile phones before entering the gigantic luxury home. The north Tehranis were out in force, the spoilt layabouts, party lovers and hangers-on. The groom’s mother was a
chadori
, and some of the partying would be carefully hidden from her. This was new Tehran, where tradition and class are blended together and trumped by money. Some of the upper-crust families kept away from these events, wanting to distance themselves from distasteful displays of wealth.

It was a huge operation. But by nine o’clock it was all over. The party had barely started when it was raided by the security forces. Terrified revellers scattered like rabbits, hiding anywhere they could.
Basijis
on motorbikes circled, looking for victims. A few truckloads were carted off and the father of the groom was led away in handcuffs. Everyone had their theory: somebody important had a grudge; his competition wanted his contract and this was the way to get it; he was a pawn in a political game.

When Farideh heard about the wedding raid, she did not leave the house for twelve days straight. She painted, tended to the garden and had friends round. But being at home was as lonely as being on the streets. And she was aware that she had to face her fears, get out there and carry on. She broke her enforced incarceration by agreeing to join her friend Lilly at an art class. Lilly had discovered a remarkable young artist, Golnar, who gave life-drawing lessons.

Farideh and the other women were drinking tea and smoking when Golnar arrived. She was alone, without her life model. It was obvious something was wrong.

‘They raided a friend’s lesson, I don’t know how they found out. Dena was modelling.’ Golnar started crying. ‘They arrested everyone. They accused them of making porn, and when they didn’t find any footage, they said it must have been an orgy. I didn’t want to say what had happened on the phone.’ Golnar explained that they had been on the thirteenth floor of an apartment block, a solitary building away from prying eyes, with wondrous light streaming in from huge windows. They had not seen a faraway neighbour spying with binoculars. It did not matter that everyone, apart from the model, had been fully clothed. The drawings, of course, made matters worse. They were propagating porn – an executionable offence.

‘Where’s Dena now?’ Lilly asked.

‘She’s at her mother’s, but they’re trying to get her out.’

‘How much will it cost?’

‘About
10
,
000
US dollars across the Turkish border. Her parents have given her
4
,
000
, all they’ve got.’

‘Tell her it’s OK, I’ll pay the rest,’ said Lilly.

Farideh stepped in. ‘I’ll help you Lilly, I’ll give you half.’

Farideh had helped a few journalists and activists in the past, paying for their lawyers. It made her feel less useless. There were plenty of privileged women who could not care less, as long as they were safe and free and nothing threatened their splendid lives; and there were those who were too frightened to get involved.