Winter of Iranian Secrets

But as Buddha said, “Embrace nothing. If you meet the Buddha, kill the Buddha.”

January 2007

I can feel my face turn white as I crunch through ice on the Zagros mountains, somewhere between the abandoned vineyards of Shiraz, the desert tombs of Yazd and the Isfahan Uranium Conversion Facility. It was a mistake leaving the car: my fingers are numb, my head hurts and the cameras are stone cold. Nothing in Iran is as you’d imagine from the outside.

One dead and the other dying, the watchful eyes of Khomeini and Khameini are everywhere, so we rolled up the windows and talked of the old days of the Shah in hushed tones. No one, it seems, likes the Ayatollah, and no one can say anything aloud. Among the ruins of Persepolis, grand even after Alexander burnt down the city in an alleged drunken haze, a young Iranian came up to me and made the sign of a turban over his head, said the words ‘Islam’ and ‘Iran,’ grabbed them in the air with his hands, and threw them into the garbage can. The Islamic Revolution was led by Ayatollah Khomeini, and overthrew the Shah in 1979, taking the world by surprise, and Iran down a path it has never gotten out of ever since. Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi had been close to the United States, against the Shi’a clergy, didn’t mind women voting and was, of course, hopelessly rich, all factors that earmarked him for doom. I would walk through his wife’s pleasure house in Shiraz, with its rooms of French furniture, Persian rugs and soft green cloth-covered walls, the most enviably elegant residence I have been in, now owned by a military that insists on a tank parked outside, and a gun museum beneath.

The Shi’a clergy would turn on the Shah, a show of strength that is mirrored today in the power struggle for the Middle East that is being played out in neighbouring Iraq now. Such exhibition was on the streets as I walked through evenings in Shiraz and Isfahan, young men beating themselves with chains and mourning the slaughter of Imam Hussein at Karbala, in what is now Iraq. Ashura or Muharram processions are not violent in Iran, but in India and Iraq streets are awash in blood, because they whip themselves with knives at the end of chains.

Blank space on the map for the United States has been filled in by Europe, Japan and China, going by the shipping containers being hauled across the highways. Germany's trade with Iran is in excess of US$4 billion a year, while Italy – Iran's largest European trading partner – does some US$8 billion worth of trade a year. This is a sore point for Israel, which views Iran as the largest threat in the region. ‘It is 1938, and Iran is Germany,’ is the favourite line of Binyamin Netanyahu. And a poll in Maariv, an Israeli newspaper, found that two-thirds of Israeli Jews think Iran would use a nuclear bomb to destroy Israel. This is far fetched, and a little expected from the Israelis who will typically insist that they’ve moved from one existential crisis to the other from the Holocaust onwards. Iran has much more immediate concerns on its hands: a free-for-all Iraq to its west and a lawless Afghanistan to its east – with Americans galloping across both neighbours. This is the mashed up semi-fluid situation that will determine the new Middle East. Or perhaps it is the new Middle East.

A virtual pariah of the West, Iran has turned into itself, and, in its own way, is booming. The high street of Shiraz, the Zand, is clogged with young men and women in the evenings, in blue jeans, high heeled boots and leather jackets, shopping for clothes and electronics, snacking on hamburgers and pizzas. In Isfahan, the cultural jewel in the Iranian crown, you could stroll along the banks of the river and think, for a moment, you were on the Seine. Iran is more European than Arab: the people are pinkish-white, they drive Peugeots, winters consist of ice on the ground and the ever-present backdrop of white mountains. And the Farsi word for ‘thank you’ is merci.

The little home-grown Saipa is so underpowered it shudders to a crawl against the onslaught of a raging desert wind, and we involuntarily lean towards the windshield and shift down into third. An acronym of the Societe Annonyme Iranienne de Production Automobile, Saipa is one of only a handful of vehicles you will find in the Islamic Republic, along with Peugeot Pars, Iran Khodro and an ancient cockroach of a Citroen that the French called deux chevaux (or two horses!) way back in the 1930s.

This battered insect crawling along Chaar Bagh Boulevard will elicit hoots from a tourist, but the joke is really on us. The Citroen 2CV is a legend that will grind the flatulent Land Rover Defender into the dust. The brief for the design of this car was for a low-priced, rugged ‘umbrella on four wheels’ that would enable two peasants to drive 100kg of farm goods to market at 60km/h, in clogs and across muddy unpaved roads if necessary. France at that time had a very large rural population, who had not yet adopted the automobile due to cost. The car would use no more than three litres of petrol to travel 100km. Most famously, it would be able to drive across a ploughed field without breaking the eggs it was carrying. Its designer later also had the roof raised to allow him to drive while wearing a hat.

Today’s city streets are packed two, sometimes three to a lane. I mean, there really isn’t any lane, and traffic lights are merely suggestions to slow down rather than instructions to stop or not. All Westerners invariably return from the Third World with horrific stories of traffic rushing into them, astounded at the seeming chaos. From travel books to dinner table conversation, such reports have become so clichéd they have begun to point more to the spinelessness of the observer than the rashness of the native. But Iran is the real deal. It would put a rickshaw driver with a nervous twitch outside a north Bombay railway station at 6pm to shame. The only reason there are no accidents here is that everybody is driving too slowly to bump into another, and, since there are no stops, you’re always making your way around people, not going down a predetermined trajectory. It’s as easy as crossing a street: walk into incoming traffic and a pattern will emerge as they dodge around you and you dodge around them.

Such petite packaging of the 2CV was sure to be a hit with the Iranians. This might be a poor, developing country, but look to the details: the little piece of paper you get to hold your sticky baumiya, while you crunch on one end and sip on your freshly squeezed orange juice. Look at the little straw that they insist on giving you with the giant plastic glass, the slab of soft cake you can have with it, the mini plastic fork you can eat your French Fries with. If God is in the details, he’s here in Iran. Here in the tiny mirrors, tens of thousands of them that cover entire palace rooms, each reflecting the other, in the countless tiles that stitch together to form a countless number of mosques that rise out of Iran. Look under your feet at the ceramic work on the stairs of the Ali Qapu Palace that you will not want to walk over and above you at the stunning frescoes of the Armenian church in Jolfa. The details will force you into submission, from the Safavid paintings on the walls of the Palace of the Eight Paradises to the arches of the Khaju Bridge – this is the weight of thousands of years of culture at a point in the world that could well have been called its centre.

This was the birthplace of Zoroastrianism and many things, and even though Iran has come to embody a particular hue of Islam, you will see the winged figure at the heart of the ancient religion everywhere, from the pleasure house of the Shah's wife to the ruins of Persepolis to the fire temples of Yazd. There are still around 30,000 Zoroastrians in this city, stuck between Iran's two massive deserts, the Dosht-e Kavir and the Dosht-e Lut. Yazd is where you will walk up the Towers of Silence, set on two barren lonely hills outside the city. Zoroastrians believe in the purity of the Earth, so will not bury their dead, nor will they cremate them for they worship fire. Instead, so as not to dirty the elements, dead bodies were left (and still are in places like Bombay) in the towers so that vultures could pick their bones clean.

The centre of the world has drawn everyone into its fold. Genghis Khan had stormed in, and Alexander burnt down Persepolis. I walked through its ruins, up the staircases for kings, the steps shallow to allow them to climb with long, flowing robes. Outside, between the palace ruins and an entire mountainside carved with the graves of kings – Darius I, Ataxerxes I, Xerxes I and Darius II – was Hassan, a stocky, young man with perfect English in a grubby shirt who would pay for his M.A. with the rides he offered on his white horse. He asked me what I thought of Iranian women, and this is when I raised my eyes up to the sky and wept.

Iranian women are gorgeous, of course, but to be fair every living thing in Iran is. The dogs are huge and regally haired, roaming across the scrub plains on either side of the highway, the cats purring through the gardens are beautiful and the crows are so big they’ll scare you. The women are better, of course, and when you bump into a Shahrazad in the Palace of Eight Paradises, surrounded by gardens of orange trees, its walls of soft pink covered every inch over with the leftovers of centuries-old Safavid art, your head will spin, and implode.

It comes with the climate, and the geography. This is the land of saffron flavoured rice, saffron even on the cashew nuts, of sweet and sour pomegranate seeds over the chello, of food that is rich but delicately flavoured, and piled so high you can eat two to a plate. It is the land of an outpouring of poetry, of Omar Khayyam, of Hafiz, of Sa'di, now practically worshipped as gods, their sickly sweet verses like a cube of sugar Iranians will hold between the lower lip and teeth while sipping on chai, their graves now surrounded by gardens, where lovers hold hands and old women kiss tombs. Far away from the fatwas of Khomeini and the stompings of the Revolutionary Guards, their books are ripe with the ever present sexuality of women twirling to the strains of their poems, their heads uncovered, necklines plunging, verses dripping with the wine that was named after Shiraz, even while its parent city ran dry, now offering nothing more heady than cans of 'Non Alcoholic Tuborg Beer.'

How fate turns. The old saying stated, Isfahan-e nasf-e jahan: Isfahan is half the world. Now, its parent country is the leper in the world community, a central pillar in Bush’s Axis of Evil, as sinister as Khomeini’s raised eyebrow, staring at you dolefully from the chipped paint of walls, posters in the near freezing night and a million places you didn’t know were there. Khameini, the present, is always paired with Khomeini, the previous, and if this show of succession wasn’t subtle enough, one side of a building on the banks of Isfahan’s river said it all: ‘Obedience to Khameini is obedience to Khomeini.’

Promises of obedience were topmost on my mind as the old man on the riverbank sat down with me on a bench in the sunshine – it was eight in the morning and cold as hell – and tapped me between the legs. Behind me was a group of energetic young men revelling in Shi’a past martyrdom, while scattered around were young couples enjoying the morning.

He had been doddering around, and invited me to the bench, which I gratefully accepted. Iranians aren’t as open as Omanis, so I was glad at an opening for conversation, and perhaps photographs. He asked where I was from, and then, if I was Muslim, which I said I was not. “Mushkil?” I asked, at this, was it a problem? Ah no, he signalled, turning his eyes up to what I supposed was heaven, mumbling that in the eyes of God, Khoda, everyone was the same. And that’s about when – in the midst of this moment of pure thought and fellow love – he reached over, tapped me on the groin, said something in Farsi, and chortled in winter delight. I could do nothing else but chortle back. I presume what he meant was that if we both had possession of the family jewels, we’d be equally recognised by a universal power above, bless us both. The sun was low, the fountain in the middle of the river in full spewing glory. I swallowed my laugh and looked nervously around.



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