Authors: Ramita Navai
She had tried everything to fight the increasing isolation. Yoga had helped, the breathing exercises calmed her and made her feel a little more whole, even if it was only for a matter of minutes. She had tried the Vipassana meditation retreat outside Tehran, where she took a vow of silence. It was full of lapsed drug addicts who had nowhere else to turn. She had emerged after ten days more accepting of herself and the world, exhilarated with new concepts like
mindfulness
, able to will the bad thoughts away. That did not last. A stay in an ashram in Goa had left her more empty than before, depressed that a country such as India had progressed so much while her own slipped backwards. Depressed that she had resorted to searching the globe for what she should be finding at home. By the time she decided to sign up for the Landmark Forum courses in personal development, another underground hit in Tehran, it had closed down.
She had even dared to try Christianity, more out of curiosity than a need to find God. A friend, a recent Christian convert, had convinced her to give Jesus a go. They went to a weekly night service, walking round the block three times, checking over their shoulders before entering an alley. They used a password to get in:
omeed
, hope. They walked through a large garden to a soundproofed room at the back of a house. The music was deafening: frantic, joyous singing; manic clapping and whooping to the clatter of a tuneless piano and rattle of tambourines. There were crosses hanging from the walls and teenagers jumping around like kangaroos. Nearly everyone here was a convert, risking death to pray to the same God, but a new prophet. Farideh was grief-stricken; she could not articulate exactly why she was so sad watching the fearless happiness and love around her; she had not seen people look this happy for a long time. She had later found out that the underground church was funded by a Christian union affiliated to a North American university, its money spent on proselytizing in Muslim nations. She was furious, suddenly so protective of the faith that she felt imprisoned by.
And yet Farideh had never felt so far from her religion. She believed in God. She loved the drama and humanity of Shia sacrifice, of battling for your beliefs. She did not hate all mullahs; in fact there were some she adored, with their wise words and modest behaviour. She had continued to seek spiritual guidance through her
estekhareh
sessions with a mullah who lived nearby. He had a good heart and he always got everything right, which was more than a coincidence. She was surprised by the strength of her superstition.
Over lunch with a Zoroastrian community leader, a charismatic charmer and intellectual with a ribald sense of humour who delighted women wherever he went, Farideh confided in him of her evangelical foray. He told her every month he turned away dozens of young kids wanting to convert to Zoroastrianism. The kids would plead with him, saying it was their true faith, part of Iran’s glory years before the Arabs invaded and burned their books and gave them Allah.
‘But why do you turn them away?’ Farideh looked almost bereft.
‘Apart from the fact I don’t want to get anyone killed, it’s all the bloody same isn’t it? And they’ve got this romantic notion about Zoroastrianism. They think it’ll fix all their problems, but it won’t.’ The Zoroastrian was murdered in an apartment in Paris a year later, his throat slashed by his ex-wife’s lover. Some said the killer was an Iranian undercover agent. The authorities had been monitoring him for years. He had even been kidnapped in London, on his way to give a lecture at the School of Oriental and African Studies. Iranian intelligence agents from
ettela’at
had driven him around
for three hours and threatened him, he had said. They should have known he was not the type of man to be intimidated. He had returned to Tehran with the same vitality as before, even more determined to help his Zoroastrian community.
A month after the arrests of the life drawing class, again Farideh felt unable to leave the house. Some of her friends thought her weak for letting
them
get the better of her, that it was just bad luck she had been caught in a freak wave of crackdowns that happened from time to time. Lilly persuaded her to go to a friend’s dinner party.
Farideh flitted between a few different social groups. The handful of upper-crust, old-money families mostly stuck together. They were descendants of the Qajars, a Turkic dynasty who ruled Persia from the late
1700
s to the
1920
s. Being a Qajar was to be bandied about and made known, for it was a thing of stature and prestige; never mind that the Qajar rulers were oppressive, whoring gamblers who clung onto power and gobbled up the country’s wealth while their subjects were devastated by famine. Blue blood was blue blood. A step down from them were the landowners, to which Farideh belonged. They had enjoyed being on the winning side of feudalism until land redistribution in the early
1960
s, but even that did not seem to dent their wealth. There were the families of established merchants who had been trading across the Caucasus and along the silk routes for generations, selling to the royals and upper classes and spending money on education until they were, at last, assimilated into them. There were the academics and intellectuals, but they were rare, Iran being the victim of one of the world’s most spectacular brain drains. Money was not strictly an indicator of class; there were enough struggling aristos to attest to that. In Farideh’s generation, the new wave of industrialists was seen as uncouth, no matter how much money they made. Too
nouveau
. Artists, film-makers, actors, foreign visitors and diplomats dipped in and out of these circles, along with avant-garde bohemians and (educated) free spirits. Their homes were mostly clustered together in a few choice north Tehran neighbourhoods that curled around the foothills of the mountains: Niavaran, Farmanieh, Fereshteh; the Chelseas, Knightsbridges and Mayfairs of Tehran. A few of the edgier, younger generation had moved downtown, to be nearer to the soul of the city, among the hoi polloi where Tehran still had heart and vigour.
Farideh lived in Fereshteh, the first right turn off Vali Asr above Parkway, the final northern stretch of the big road. A quarter of the way down Fereshteh Street, opposite Bosni Herzogovin Street, is the luxury Sam Center, stuffed with shops like Chopard and TAG Heuer.
Farideh’s home was a grand mansion with inner and outer courtyards, one of the few old houses still stubbornly standing in the area, squashed in on all sides by hideous high-rises. The house was exquisite; Farideh had an eye for design and style, cleverly mixing the old and the new. There were gigantic turquoise urns and ancient clay bowls on stone floors, priceless Persian carpets and antique tiles. On the walls hung paintings by the latest up-and-coming artists and in the garden there was a swimming pool surrounded by walnut and fig trees. She had lived here since her marriage, for over thirty years. It was where Kaveh had died, in their bed, after cancer dealt him three cruel years of pain. She had married Kaveh for love and for his goodness. He had been her best friend, a true, loyal companion in life.
Tonight’s party was at a theatre producer’s house in Niavaran, north-east of where she lived. The parties and gatherings kept them all going. It was part of their defence; it was what lent verisimilitude to their carefully crafted lives, as well as being the only possible means they could socialize, laugh and dance like the rest. But the community was small, even if the houses were big.
They were served canapés and wine in the garden in the last glinting shafts of the day’s sunlight, enjoying the dewy smell of the cool air and the sensation of a new season lurking nearby. A few nightingales tentatively tested their voices; Farideh could smell a joint being passed around.
It was a mixed lot tonight. There were a few single girls in their thirties; one was an architect, another a poet and the rest worked in publishing. An international painter was chatting to a respected movie director. An eligible doctor in his forties was encircled by another group of single women. A gastroenterologist by profession, he was a secret stitcher of hymens on the side, restoring dignity and marriage prospects with a needle and a few inches of thread. His few friends who knew his secret had nicknamed him Dr Sew-up. He gave back virginity to the daughters of rich
bazaaris
and industrialists; to girls from religious families and
sonati
families rich and poor, even ordinary working-class girls. Having your hymen sewn up could cost from
200
,
000
tomans (about sixty US dollars) to seven million tomans (about
2
,
300
dollars) depending on who and where in the city your doctor was, but Dr Sew-up charged lower fees to his poorer clients as he had a strong sense of justice; it was not fair that these fearful women were being judged simply because they had been born into the wrong class. His own class had different rules. Western rules. He knew there were plenty of rich kids who wanted virgins, but they were never the true upper classes. He and his friends wanted the opposite: experienced women who would not simply lie back and give out in the hope of getting a ring on their finger. Dr Sew-up was regaling the women with stories of virginity kits that he had seen in the bazaar, consisting of a capsule filled with red liquid that was to be inserted into the vagina and would burst under pressure. Dr Sew-up was lying; he had not seen them in the bazaar, but had heard about them from one of his clients who had decided the fake blood was an unconvincingly bright hue.
At the dinner table, talk shifted from scandal to art, to politics and to work, the familiar rhythm of the subjects ticking along with the regularity of a metronome. A European businessman had left his wife and four children for a woman they all knew, a forty-something desperate high-class wannabe with a series of failed relationships scattered behind her. Copious injections of Botox had failed to dissolve her haughty look, a mouth perman-ently turned in disgust that she had learnt from her mother and practised since her teenage years in the hope it would elevate her status if her face suggested everything around her was beneath her. She taught French to rich kids and diplomats’ children, and even spoke Persian with a faint, affected
Parisienne
accent. She had slept her way through a slew of married men, aiming for the ones with foreign passports, for that translated into
cachet
. She had finally struck gold.
There were a few new faces, part-time exiles dropping in from Milan and New York to buy art, socialize, speak their mother tongue and eat good food. There had been a flood of returnees in recent years, mostly the children of the Diaspora coming back with their sweet foreign accents and malapropisms that would endear them to the rest. They came to find themselves; to find husbands and wives, to party, to be sharks in a very small pool, which they were; for everyone was hungry to be touched by the West with all its exotic chic and refined urbanity. Once these visiting exiles had tasted the upper echelons of society, a tier they did not inhabit in their host countries, many did not want to return to the West. They simply cocooned themselves from the real Islamic Republic. Just as Farideh and her friends had done.
‘So what’s the latest from New York?’
‘Dull! New York is just about visual arts at the moment. So boring. It
so
doesn’t excite me. It’s just not happening there,’ replied a striking woman who dabbled in interior design, as did most of these females, spending their friends’ money on exorbitant furniture and overrated paintings. ‘Everything’s becoming the same. I blame the bourgeois!’ continued the dabbler. ‘In fact I
loathe
the bourgeois. Give me a working-class Englishman over a middle-class anything,
any day
.’
‘What about a working-class Iranian?’ Farideh could not help herself. ‘Not a romantic gangster-with-a-heart type, but a real south Tehrani, with a
chadori
wife and a picture of the Supreme Leader on his wall?’ Was it jealousy, she wondered, that provoked her to cut them down, jealousy at the ones who liked to flash their international credentials? Or just anger at the casual snobbery, the objectification of the poor, seeing them as simply things of interest?
‘Absolutely – give me him over the interminable middle class!’ Everyone laughed. Except Farideh.
‘Maybe there is something exciting about
them
thinking of
us
as immoral sluts.’ The room laughed even louder, not noticing Farideh’s sarcasm. She forced a smile in time for her not to be discovered. Recently at these gatherings she had had a habit of sabotaging merriment. She could not understand why she was being so defensive of a class she did not understand, of a class she was capable of loathing, an entire stratum of society that she could write off with disdain at their backwardness.
Farideh left early. She got stuck in the Thursday night traffic on Vali Asr, an endless line of cars crammed together, inching forward; the chug of engines, horns hooting, music thudding. A queue had formed outside the glass-fronted
aash
and
haleem
shop, where cooks in white overalls were scooping up ladles of thick bean and noodle soup and wheat porridge from massive steel vats. A woman in a chador and pointed silver spiked-heeled boots was eating her
aash
on a blue plastic chair on the pavement. Above them all, strings of fairy lights flashing different colours hung between the lamp-posts and the sycamore trees were lit by red, blue and green flower-shaped lights set in the pavement below.
At home, Farideh fixed herself a whisky. Her son Alidad was picking at leftovers in the kitchen. He had spent the afternoon playing polo and was now getting ready to party.
‘Mum, did you hear about Delara?’
Delara was the young niece of one of her friends. For months, nobody had spoken of anything but Delara. She claimed to have been raped by three rich kids after they spiked her drink; Farideh had believed her story but many thought she had simply regretted a wild night out. Delara had a reputation. She liked to dance on tables in her bra drinking vodka and cherry juice; she liked one-night stands and she liked to hoover up lines of coke and pop pills into everyone’s mouths.