Authors: Ramita Navai
The fight against porn was a losing battle. The clerics were worried. The government was worried. Porn had even been discussed in parliament. A new bill was introduced that updated the law, enforcing stricter punishments, which included being found a corrupter of the earth, an executionable offence. Sex tapes were leaking out, and the cyberpolice needed to act. When the private sex tape of a soap star, Zahra Amir Ebrahimi, had exploded across the whole country, more than
100
,
000
DVD copies were sold on the black market. The regime was caught in a tricky situation; the actress was adored and it would not look good to come down too hard. She had also made her name by playing the pious lead character in a soap opera called
Narges
; she was the face of virtue and purity on state television. A celebrity sex tape was not the image the Islamic Republic of Iran Broadcasting (IRIB) had hoped for. Ebrahimi left the country and never returned.
Even the threat of execution had done little to deter the fornicators. The courts had sentenced two people to death for running porn sites; one of them, an Iranian-born Canadian computer programmer called Saeed Malekpour, had his death sentence reduced to life imprisonment for ‘designing and moderating adult-content websites’ which went hand in hand with insulting the sanctity of Islam.
The cyberpolice pored over hours and hours of porn films. They needed a conviction, but finding the culprits was almost impossible. The officers watched
Tehran Nights
several times; it looked like another amateur porn video but classier.
*
A girl in a catsuit with blonde pixie-cropped hair was gyrating with an Amazonian beauty wearing a sheaf of a dress slashed to her navel. Around them a group were popping ecstasy pills in each other’s mouths as they danced in front of a DJ spinning house tunes from his booth. Two famous actors were on the sofa with a group who were chopping out lines of cocaine on a glass table. The house belonged to a returned exile, notorious for her wild parties. She was an interior designer and her home was a homage to gothic style: pointed arches, black and red walls, heavy velvet curtains and six-foot wrought-iron candelabra.
Leyla was about to take off her
manteau
when the hostess sprang on Kayvan.
‘Get that fucking
jendeh
out of my house. How many times have I told you before about bringing those girls here?’ She dragged Kayvan to the kitchen. Leyla stood on her own, her headscarf round her shoulders. She was unmoved by the attack, but was surprised that the hostess could tell she was a
jendeh
. Leyla had thought she was now assimilated well into the north Tehran set, but the hostess had trained eyes. Kayvan returned.
‘Sorry babe, I’ll get you a cab home.’
This was the first time he had abandoned her.
‘You said we were going to a party tonight – together?’
‘I know, but you heard her. House rules, what can I say. I’ll call you next week.’
‘You fucking arsehole.’
That night Leyla decided to leave Iran, to start a life where no one knew her.
Leyla had always thought that marrying above her station was the only way that she could better herself, just as her sister had done. The sex films had given her an independence she never thought she would have, but it was not enough. She wanted a husband; she wanted love and a family like everyone else. Partying with Kayvan had been fun, but she had been wrong about him and her own naivety surprised her. It was obvious really: they were all happy to fuck her and even to be seen with her, but no rich kid with high-society friends would marry a whore. Even the most outwardly urbane guys who seemed so sophisticated and, well, Western, wanted to marry virgins – or at least upper-class girls who knew how to play virtuous.
Parisa had reached the same conclusion and was now working as a prostitute in Dubai, where Iranian flesh was some of the most expensive on the market (Chinese and then African the cheapest). Parisa was now earning nearly
1
,
000
US dollars a night, and she was not half as striking as Leyla.
Recently Leyla had been listening obsessively to Dr Farhang Holakouee, a Los Angeles-based celebrity agony uncle with a daily radio call-in show; his popularity had peaked a few years ago, but Leyla still tuned in. His callers were mostly Iranians living in the United States. No subject was off-limits and he tackled them all with a no-nonsense manner, doling out sensible counsel with stern impatience. Housewives and professionals from all parts of the city downloaded his show and bought his DVDs on the black market. He was anti-regime, secular and modern, and he understood the damaged Iranian psyche. He spoke of cycles of behaviour, of taking control, of cause and effect, of responsibility for your actions. A caller had phoned in to ask if changing your life was really possible:
of course it is possible, first you have to face reality and then you must know that your future is in your own hands.
Leyla knew what to do. She would save up in Dubai and then start anew in the USA. She lay awake all night, overwhelmed with this sudden urge to leave Tehran.
*
They came for her at six o’clock in the morning, her head still full of the plans she was making to join Parisa. She shook with fear when they put her in the back of the police car. This time she knew it was more serious.
The officers in the cyberpolice unit had whooped with excitement when they noticed a box in the corner of the screen with a serial number on it. It was Leyla’s electricity meter. It had taken a matter of hours for them to track her down.
She was taken straight to Evin. There was no police station, no courtroom, no lawyer. On the way, she had frantically called the judge’s number. No answer. The line was dead. She managed to send two texts before they confiscated her phone, one to Kayvan and one to the judge.
I NEED HELP. POLICE HAVE GOT ME
.
Neither of them replied. Kayvan had got scared and deleted all signs of her existence from his life. The judge had died.
Most of her cellmates were either working girls or women who had been found guilty of other moral crimes, such as adultery. The sex workers were from the streets, and at first Leyla found it hard to identify with them. She had worked hard to eliminate the memories of her Takht-e Tavous streetwalking days from her mind. Many of the girls took drugs and often fights broke out between them. Leyla won them over with gossip about her film star clients and details of lavish parties. She sold herself as the glamorous porn star headed for Dubai – what they could all be. She even comforted the women by teaching them the beautiful passages from the Koran that the cleric had taught her. The women shared with her their own stories of bouncing in and out of prison and reassured her she would be freed in no more than a few months.
Leyla was told she would be assigned a lawyer, and that she could call her family. Her mother sobbed down the phone and said she could not bear to visit her in prison through shame. She told Leyla to call her when she was released.
But she was not in prison long.
It was a beautiful spring dawn when Leyla was hanged.
There was blood everywhere. It was smeared over faces and streaking down necks. A sticky film of it glistened viscous pink on chests; in places it had clotted deep red in tufts of hair. From each lash more droplets spurting outwards in a ruby mist.
Morteza was standing at the back of the room, clutching a chain in his hand.
‘Ya Hossein!’ He was chanting the imam’s name as he watched his comrades. Forty of them were thrashing chains down on their bare backs in perfect synchronization to a hypnotic electro-techno beat.
‘Ya Hossein!’
They were in a
hosseinieh
, the hall next to the mosque, in the south-west suburbs where Morteza had grown up. The doors were locked and the curtains were pulled. The room had been turned into a dark, dank box, lit by a few bare yellow lightbulbs on the dirty tangled wires hanging from the low ceiling. The room was fetid with sweat, blood and rose water. To his right Morteza could see Abdul slashing his head with a
ghameh
, a big dagger. Blood was seeping out in waves; his eyes were half shut, ecstatic with pain.
‘Ya Hossein!’
One voice led them all, rising above their cries, hovering somewhere between a groan and a sublime soprano. Morteza stared at the singer on the small stage, head tilted back as if singing to God himself. It was the first time in all these years that he had really studied him. He was a bearded man in his thirties with steel-rimmed glasses and a green scarf tied round his head, Bruce Springsteen-style. A special-effect reverb on the microphone produced an ecclesiastical echo that looped over the rhythmic throb.
‘Ya!
Ya … Ya … Ya…
’
‘Hossein!
Hossein…Hossein…Hossein…
’
‘Ya Hossein.’ Morteza repeated the words in a flat whisper.
It was Ashura, the ten-day festival in the Islamic holy month of Muharram
that commemorates the martyrdom of the Prophet’s grandson, Imam Hossein, who was killed with seventy-two others at the battle of Karbala in
680
. But this was a secret Ashura, hidden from view ever since the state banned bloodletting during the ceremonies, deeming it barbarous and fanatical. A hardcore minority ignored the edict, believing that some things are strictly between a man and his God and none of the state’s business. Violent self-flagellation where blood is a sign of love for Hossein was part of their culture, a tradition that their fathers’ fathers’ fathers had practised. These rituals simply disappeared underground, in guarded
hosseiniehs
and back rooms across the country. Illegality stamped the gatherings with added importance, binding the men closer together, brothers in arms. Morteza had been a part of this ritual for years, hearing the same songs in the same rooms.
‘
Hossein went to Karbala…
’ The singer broke into a sob that the microphone regurgitated and spat back out, sending the sound spinning across the room:
wah wah wah wah
.
In the next breath he was deliriously upbeat, as though a different man had taken over.
‘Come on everybody, let’s hear it louder! Let’s put a little more into it!’ The singer now sounded like a holiday camp leader whipping up the crowd. A reminder of the forgotten sob was still reverberating as he spoke:
wah wah wah…
The men responded, jumping up now as they whipped their backs, bellowing the words as an incantation until they were all gripped in a trance.
‘Hossein! Hossein! Hossein! Hossein! Hossein!’
For the first time in his life, Morteza did not join in. He just stood there, surveying the spectacle as though he had never seen it before. His comrades looked strangely like the north Tehran ravers they abhorred, lost to the rhythm of a drum, in a haze of adrenalin and cortisone instead of ecstasy and alcohol. For the first time, he found the singer’s mock sobs ridiculous. Morteza realized that even the real tears he conjured up every year were not really for God or Imam Hossein, but for himself.
Morteza dropped his chain and fetched his coat. His friends tried to stop him leaving.
‘What’s happened? What’s got into you?’ They barred his exit. Morteza said nothing as he pushed through them and walked upstairs and out into the late afternoon light. On the street an official, more sedate public Ashura was on show: rows of men in black shirts softly tapping themselves with blunt chains, eyes on the women, who were more interested in the quality of the self-flagellators than the self-flagellation. A sanitized version of the real thing. Morteza weaved through the crowds, and when he had nearly overtaken the parade, he turned round and took a last look. He shook his head and walked away, knowing what had to be done.
*
Morteza was born a disappointment. When the midwife had pulled him out of his mother she had slapped his wrinkled face and all that had come out of his tiny pink lips was a feeble whimper. ‘You’ve got yourself a weakling. This boy’s not built for this world,’ she had said as she placed him on his mother’s breast. Morteza groped around for her teat, and even when it was shoved into his mouth he lacked the strength to suck out enough milk.
The men in his family were built short, wide and strong. Stocky, fat babies that became strapping boys whose robust bodies rarely allowed illness to invade. Morteza’s pretty, delicate features never filled out and his slight frame only got leaner and longer. The women in the family cooed over him, drawn by his beauty – deliciously long eyelashes and a perfect, heart-shaped face. Morteza spent most of his childhood clinging to his mother’s chador.
The revolution was the making of the Kazemis. The family had been plagued by poverty, a hereditary curse passed down from generation to generation. Imam Khomeini changed their fate. They had always been deeply religious and not just because they were
seyeds
, the honorific title used to identify direct descendants of the Prophet. They attended the mosque a few times a week and they never missed Friday prayers. When a newcomer to the neighbourhood erected a satellite dish on the roof, Morteza’s mother Khadijeh went straight to the head of the Basij unit in the local mosque and reported it. The dish was destroyed a few hours later by a policeman and two young
basijis
, who warned the owner that next time they would destroy him too.
The family home was a small brick house, in a row of identical brick houses in Imam Zadeh Hassan, run-down, ugly suburbs in the south-west of the city where the only well-kept buildings were mosques, and where cars were either white Prides or dented and rusted pick-up trucks, the backs of which were as often filled with families as with produce. Five of them – Morteza, his parents Khadijeh and Kazem, and Kazem’s parents – lived and slept in two rooms, one of the bedrooms doubling up as the main living room during the day. It had small, high windows with dirty lace curtains that were rarely parted. The walls were bare, greying and flaky. Persian floor cushions lined the room and in the corner was a dark plywood desk. It was crammed with most of their possessions: a television, a computer, a bottle of perfume, a magnifying mirror, a pair of tweezers, toothpaste and a big blue tub of Nivea cream. Underneath the desk, bed sheets and blankets were neatly rolled. A makeshift kitchen had been erected in the hallway, where Khadijeh cooked on a camping stove next to a fridge with a lopsided door that rattled loudly into the night.
Many of Morteza’s uncles were original
Hezbollahis
who had formed little battalions during the revolution and fought against the unbelievers, leftists and the monarchists. People like the Kazemis were remunerated with jobs and respect. It allowed them to be proud once more of the strict religious control they exerted over their lives and their women. The revolution also unwittingly brought about more equality between the classes – for the first time in the history of the Kazemis, female members were allowed to be educated beyond primary school, safe in the knowledge that they would not be corrupted under an Islamic education system. A stream of distant relatives from a farming village in central Iran, from where the Kazemis hailed, poured into Tehran. The family found strength in numbers. An uncle who had excelled at spying for the Islamic Revolutionaries, liberally denouncing neighbours and inculpating dissenters, was swiftly rewarded with a position in a newly established Ministry. Nepotism was another bonus, and before long several more Kazemis were installed as clerical assistants, cleaners and even office managers. Despite the new-found power and income, unlike Somayeh’s clan, the Kazemis were not friends with people who did not share their political and religious beliefs – especially not those who were making the climb to higher class and looser morals. They isolated themselves against outsiders who brandished invasive influences, and that was a crucial tactic in their survival.
War also served the Kazemis well. Morteza was just a baby when his two teenage brothers, Ali and Hadi, were sent to fight against Iraq. They had joined the Basij as volunteer militiamen. It was near the end of the internecine war when Khadijeh had paid a forger in downtown Toopkhaneh Square to falsify Ali’s birth certificate. With the stroke of a pen Ali was bestowed another three years, going from an underage fifteen years old to a fit and fighting man of eighteen. Sending her son as a child soldier to war was Khadijeh’s way of showing her gratitude and love to Saint Khomeini and God. Ali and Hadi were immediately drafted to the front line, where they survived for nearly a year, watching their friends die around them, some during notorious ‘human wave’ attacks. The tactics were suicidal: charging into incoming artillery and wading into minefields in order to clear them, encouraged by the promise of the glory of martyrdom and virgins in paradise.
Ali was finally hit by a rocket; miraculously he survived long enough to pick up his debris-encrusted entrails from the ground, push them back in his ripped stomach and whisper the death rites before his blood went cold. Less than a week later Hadi was killed; his body was never found. Stories of the brothers’ bravery emerged after their deaths and grew ever more impressive with time: both boys had relentlessly and fearlessly charged towards the enemy, dodging bullets and bombs, dragging comrades to safety, killing dozens of the enemy with no more than an AK-
47
in their hands,
Allah Akbar
on their tongues and Khomeini in their hearts. They were war heroes. With two of those in the family, the position of the Kazemis in the new Islamic order was instantly bumped up a few more notches. Photographs of Ali and Hadi were displayed around the house and on the walls of local businesses in the neighbourhood.
The fringe benefits of martyrdom were also reaped by those left behind. Morteza’s father gave up his job as an office cleaner and, with the help of a foundation set up for families of martyrs, he opened a cab company, licences for which were favoured to families of martyrs and disabled war veterans.
The pride of their martyrdom did not lessen the pain of Hadi’s and Ali’s deaths for the family, nor did the passage of time. And the more time passed, the more obvious it became that Morteza was the opposite of his brave brothers. As a little boy he liked to play on his own, or with his aunties. His favourite game was when they would dress him up as a Persian prince and paint his nails red; when his father Kazem found out, he slapped him across the face even though he was only five years old.
Morteza had recognized his father’s disdain for him early on, which soon morphed into revulsion. By the time he was ten, Kazem had begun regularly whipping his son with his belt. At nights Morteza would hear his father sobbing and shouting at Khadijeh, ‘I had two sons in this life and because of you, I now have none.’
More than anything, Morteza wished he was more like his brothers. Khadijeh spoke of them incessantly; she hoped that igniting jealousy in her son with stories of their bravery would goad him into behaving more like them – local bully boys who were scared of nothing. Morteza tried hard to emulate them, playing football in the alley outside the house as they had. He persevered, despite being mocked for his irrational fear of the ball. He hung out with the neighbourhood boys after school. He began to wear Hadi’s and Ali’s old clothes, musty and two sizes too big for him, desperate that their essence would be transferred into him through the fraying cotton. Even if his parents could not see it, Morteza was the most determined, tenacious child ever to have been born to a Kazemi.
A group of boys had gathered in the lobby of the mosque; Morteza stood alone beside them, his pointed leather shoes shining from the slick of vegetable oil he had used to polish them. His new white shirt was so stiff it looked as if it was made of cardboard. Khadijeh was near the entrance, shouting out to him and waving her hands, urging him to queue-jump as all the other boys were doing. But Morteza was getting pushed farther back.
The mosque was at the centre of the community; it was as much a social club as it was a spiritual retreat. Worshippers arrived well before prayers to catch up with friends and gossip. The mosque fed and clothed the poor in the holy months and at
norooz
, New Year. It lent money to struggling families and helped with the cost of marriages. Morteza’s local mosque was also a Basij headquarters.
Khadijeh had tried to dissuade him from joining the
Basij-e Mostazafin
, the ‘Mobilization of the Oppressed’ voluntary militia. Even though it was her deepest wish that he should be a member, she did not think he was up to it – this meek and frail twelve-year-old with a languid walk, all long limbs and skinny buttocks, who would cry at the slightest provocation. Morteza had insisted. Being a
basiji
would make him a respected man equal to his heroic brothers. Khadijeh had finally relented, not least because the family was struggling to survive. With Morteza a member, it would mean he would be fed and taken care of at least once a week.
Morteza’s father Kazem had always enjoyed an occasional toke of opium, but after the death of his sons he began smoking more. Soon his state pension, Khadijeh’s jewellery and the money they received from the
Bonyad-e Shahid
martyrs’ fund foundation was being used to feed his addiction. When that ran out, he sold his barely functioning cab business. Most of his day was spent pipe in hand, bent over a small
manghal
or brazier, sifting white-hot coals with iron tongs. When he was not smoking, he was shouting, either at Khadijeh or Morteza.