Sex & The Islamic City: part 5

It was not long after my separation from my lover that we first had phone sex. I had been back in Tehran staying with my aunts in the Sad Flat for a few days when everyone went out to a wedding and I volunteered to stay home and look after my grandmother for the evening. She being happily off in la-la land, my lover took the opportunity to ring. The night before, in a studiously casual tone (in case my aunts were within hearing range, which they almost always are), I had told him of their plans to go out, saying, ‘Oh and guess who is getting married…’ He immediately understood and I knew he would ring me. And so he did. And we luxuriated in an uninhibited conversation for the first time in days, relieved at least to be able to be ourselves, even if we couldn’t be together.

Our lack of inhibitions led, quite naturally, onto the thing still on our minds: our mind-blowing sex. It was a small step from discussing our amazement at our athletic and mutual pleasure to partaking of the pleasure itself. Years ago I was in love with a man who lived in the most south-westerly corner of Europe and we endured frequent long separations. So I was necessarily used to the occasional bonding moment over the phone and though this was on my mind as I chatted to my lover, I still wasn’t sure of what was considered acceptable in Iranian sexual relationships. Yet again my lover shocked me by launching first into some frankly blue talk, describing in graphic detail what he would like to do to me were we together. Things escalated from there and afterwards I felt like the naughtiest girl in school: phone sex in the Islamic Republic, imagine that.

A few days later I decamped to a friend’s house in the country and there, for the next two weeks, my lover and I enjoyed nightly intimate bedtime chats that left us both exhausted and elated. With the uncertainty of when we would next meet always threatening to overwhelm us, this particular preoccupation not only helped us feel closer but also kept uncomfortable questions about our next meeting – and indeed our future – at bay.

It wasn’t until an innocent conversation with a friend turned my mind to darker things that we paused in our nocturnal activities. My friend M has been in Iran 5 months longer than me, and one day over lunch, she told me how, a few months into her trip she had received the call we all dread: from the Intelligence Service of the Islamic Republic of Iran. They had called her mobile and said, in an elaborately polite manner guaranteed to strike terror into our Western hearts: ‘Please, Miss M, do grace us with the honour of your presence at such and such a time.’

M is a feisty girl by nature. What’s more, she has been brought up in the West and is not used to accepting things without question. After a few months of being in Iran as a lone woman, she has also acquired an aggressive manner designed to deflect the unwelcome attentions women here face daily, from suggestive comments on the streets, to being felt up by strangers on crowded savaris (shared taxis) to being stopped on mountain trails by moral police dying to know how a woman thought she could do anything alone (‘Ladies, where is your man?’ we had been asked several times on a recent hike together). So instead of simply writing down the address which she had to grace with the honour of her presence, she instead challenged the speaker: ‘How did you get this number?’

She told me she could hear the speaker smiling. ‘Well, Miss M,’ it had declared in honeyed tones, suppressing a laugh, ‘We are the intelligence service, after all.’

She told me the interview had been painless, that their intentions were quite innocent, even that she could understand why she had been hauled in, bearing in mind her family history and the work she was engaged in. She skated over what must have been the terror of leaving her companion outside as she stepped into the building to present herself, not mentioning the thumping of her heart as she walked down the corridor adjusting ever tighter her headscarf; she didn’t have to tell me. As children who lived through the Revolution and familiar with the early days of terror of the Islamic regime, we both were fully aware of how easily she could have been swallowed up by that building, her companion left outside waiting fruitlessly for her re-emergence, of how she could have that day joined the ranks of the ‘disappeared’. But no, we agreed that of course they had a right to find out what she was up to, that it was understandable, and we supported each other in the lies you tell to try and normalise your situation in this strange society that we are living in.

Lying sprawled on my bed that night, I answered the phone to my lover. ‘Salaam English,’ he purred in his bedroom voice.

I tried to head him off. ‘Salaam to you,’ I said curtly, using the formal ‘you’ to try to put him off. It had the opposite effect.

‘Janam,’ he exclaimed with relish, ‘my life, my darling heart, what are you doing?’

Me: ‘Oh no. Listen, no more of that.’

Him: ‘Of what, darling of my heart? May I die for you…’

Me: ‘Stop the Iranian stuff. I am serious.’ We had long since decided that the elaborate and flowery terms of affection that colour the Farsi language – mostly all about sacrificing yourself for the beloved in some form or other – were perfect for love and we used them liberally.

Him: ‘OK, English, what’s up?’

I recounted M’s tale and how it had awakened in me the awareness that probably I was being watched, that our conversations were recorded, that we had used all sorts of people’s phones to have sex including my mobile which in reality belonged to a friend of mine currently in the States and how she was sure to be arrested and flogged for my lewd behaviour on her return. ‘I mean, what we are doing is illegal and apart from anything else can you imagine being found out and our families having to know…’ I finished with a flourish.

He chuckled softly. ‘Listen my darling,’ he said, ‘if the regime was going to go round arresting every single person who has phone sex, they would have no time left for anything else and you can bet the streets would be empty.’

I was stunned into silence. It had never occurred to me that what we were doing was anything less than totally unique. I had been secretly proud of my own daring and liberated sexuality, imagining I had taught my lover a whole new way of enjoying sex.

Me: ‘Do you mean you have done this before?’

Him: ‘My love, my life, darling of my heart… Of course I have.’

Me: ‘Oh… often?’

Him: ‘English, do you think you people invented sex? You know, it’s not always so easy to get together with someone here. And mobiles, well, they are at least more private. Most people live with their parents but at least now you can shut yourself in your room with your mobile.’

Me: ‘Oh…’ I am crestfallen.

Him: ‘Actually, lots of girls prefer it. It gives them a way to get sexual kicks without having to lose their virginity, risk being found out or feel they have done anything too wrong. In fact, recently it has become very fashionable…’

So I lie on my bed in the Islamic Republic of Iran while my lover whispers extravagant words of love and I imagine all those words on the ether, the sighs and moans, this removed intimacy being beamed over the country, the air thick with sex, and I am grateful at least that the trained ears of Iranian Intelligence won’t find anything in my pleasure too worthy of note. So I turn over in bed and sigh into the phone:

‘Darling of my heart… May I die for you…’

Sex and the Islamic City: part 4

My lover and I have taken to talking in bed. Since I live in Iran in the Sad Flat with a hundred relatives and share a room with one of my aunts, I go to bed earlier than everyone else (luckily they stay up preternaturally late) and dive under the covers with my mobile phone. Luckily for me mobiles are plentiful enough that even I have managed to get one for the duration of my visit, and again luckily for me, the reception under the covers is quite good, unlike in the rest of Tehran. If I didn’t have the mobile, our conversations would have to be limited to times I could call him from a phone box or the rare nights when my aunts all go out. Since he is a family friend, and since it has already been noted – and brought to my attention – that his visits to see me in Tehran over the last few years are regarded as somewhat inappropriate, there is no way I could speak to him from the landline every night, nor could he ring me openly.

Iranian families being what they are, should he call on the landline, I would only get handed the phone once he had made the ritualistic round of enquiries after everyone’s health and even then, someone could easily hang up the phone before it got to me, and of course I could never openly protest, nor could he ever openly ask to speak to me. And if we did manage to speak, our conversation would have to be light and appropriate: I would have to restrict myself to asking after the health of every member of his family, telling him what I have done only in terms of how much fun it was and how much he was missed, and this sort of ritualistic communication has never been satisfying to us.

Thanks to the wonders of technology, though, we can speak almost as often as we like. I say almost because after all I live with family, and even under the covers, I am aware that they are aware that I am on the phone to someone. Every minute that I am not in the communal spaces of the flat, my absence is quietly noted. While he is in his own house in the border town where he works during the week, my lover is free to speak as he will and he enjoys being deliberately salacious knowing I have to be conservative in my response. Come the weekends (here that means a half day on Thursday and all of Friday off), he goes back to his family home where the concept of private space is so alien that he doesn’t even have a room. His family’s living quarters are arranged around a huge sitting/dining room with open plan kitchen, opening to a long balcony at the end, with the four bedrooms opening off this main room. On the nights he is home, my lover sleeps here, making up a bed on the floor. His parents, sister and brother occupy three of the bedrooms and all doors remain open so every excursion to the bathroom or into the kitchen for water is likely to awaken his parents who are the lightest of sleepers.

For the few weeks I was recently the guest of his family, I preferred to sleep outside on the balcony, to enjoy the fresh mountain air of the balmy summer nights. I would wake every morning at 5 with the bright sunlight and sneak quietly into the sitting room to find him waiting for me. I would walk the length of the room to the door leading to the bathroom, checking to see if his parents were asleep, all the time followed by his questioning eyes. And then, pretending I was on my way back from the bathroom, I would stop by his bedding, stoop down and give him a lightening quick kiss on the lips, before retiring back out onto the balcony to sleep a few more hours. His little brother decided to join me there after a couple of nights, adding another obstacle to the already dangerous course I negotiated every morning.

We couldn’t take too many chances. I love his family and would have been mortified at the disrespect to them my actions would imply had we been caught, and he seemed to possess a sixth sense about people’s movements and the possibilities of being seen in ways I would never have considered. For example, sitting in his sister’s room side by side by the computer, as we often did, I would begin to run my foot up and down his leg, safe in the knowledge that the desk obscured our legs from the rest of the house. He, however, knew that the mirror that was behind us on his sister’s dressing table would probably, at some angle, reflect what we were doing and beam it into the sitting room, and would therefore stop me. Something I would never have thought of.

On my last morning in their house, I woke up to have breakfast with him at 6 as he prepared to leave for work, before the rest of the house was awake. We snuck into a corner of the kitchen where I was sure there was no way anyone who suddenly appeared could see us, but before taking me in his arms, he walked out to the sitting room from where the tiles of the wall opposite us were visible, to check how much they reflected. They were glazed black tiles and indeed were busy reflecting our liaison to the exact spot where his parents would emerge from their bedroom. We found another spot for a quick embrace, but neither of us was relaxed by now and I was too amazed by his foresight to concentrate.

It was our last morning and we knew we would not get another chance to be alone all day, that later in the full glare of the family we would have to part with a handshake and would have to contain our sadness. So we found our corner and we kissed and hugged each other tight, attempting to put into those short, wordless actions all that was meaningful between us.

Here in the Islamic Republic of Iran, in this culture that is fed by feeling, run by a regime that has ritualised religious fervour and passion to fever pitch, I have had to learn to quell floods of desire with mere drops of satisfaction and to find my love answered with the subtlest of glances. And I have learnt to have it be enough, the vastness of our love expressed in a quick kiss, a longing look, a whisper under the covers – in the absence of freedom, I have finally had to learn to be content with my lot.

Sex & The Islamic City: part 3

It’s been a week since I parted from my lover. He is back in the little border town in Iran where he works and I am back in the thick of things in Tehran. I am staying with family, a typical Iranian set up that means I share a three-bedroom flat with a gaggle of aunts, two teenage cousins and my ailing 90-year old grandmother in a flat dripping with sadness. He is back in his own house which has been issued with his job, although two months ago they asked him to vacate it – as a single man it is a terrible waste to give him a whole house. Iran is the only country I know where one’s marital status is the business of one’s boss. They ask him: ‘well, when are you going to get married then? It’s not natural for a man to be alone at your age.’

He is 35 and he has been in his job for nearly four years. Since they asked him to leave his house he has done nothing and no one has said anything. He is hoping it has been forgotten; such is the way with Iranian bureaucracy. He explains to me: ‘Supposing someone one day remembers the order, there will be another lot in charge and it will all be meaningless. Or you never know. I may have taken a wife by then…’

Every once in a while the topic of his single status arises at work, and with the survival instinct of a man dodging sniper bullets, he responds in jokes and promises that satisfy them for a while. He uses a similar tactic with his family, for whom my lover’s failure to submit to marriage is a topic of daily interest, even though the status is unchanging from year to year. Sitting around the lunch table with his whole family while he is still at work, I attempt to put on a convincing show of interest in his marital status too. I have learnt to adopt a manner of teasing spliced with sincere curiosity: ‘No but really, why does he not get married?’ I say, knitting my brows.

What I really want to answer, to shout out loud from every flat rooftop in their small town is: ‘Because if he had a wife, he would not be available for me when I visit. Even though it’s only once a year at most and we only see each other for a week in that time, it is so precious that it is worth adjusting the rest of his life for.’

In truth, although this is how I feel and how I wish it to be, I don’t know if this is how it actually is. We have never discussed the wider implications of our relationship, and we have certainly never talked about the future. Our eight-year affair has only just become a physical relationship. Although we first said the words ‘I love you’ years ago, we used a form in Farsi that is indistinct, a word for love that you can use for your friend, for your mother, for your favourite food. Like so many things in Iran, we keep the tenor of our feelings for each other vague. In a country where the difference between what is lawful and what actually happens is so vast, where everything is possible as long as you keep it hidden, where openness is seen as simplicity bordering on foolishness, it is better to keep things vague.

My lover, like most other Iranians here, is expert at being non-committal. Life under an authoritarian regime means keeping your options open; when nothing is in your control, then you learnt to duck and dive so that at least when things change – as they are apt to do suddenly and randomly – you don’t get caught in a corner. You never ever commit, not to a thought, an ideology, or even a lunch date. And so it strikes me that this could be the real reason my lover isn’t married, he is too expert at the duck and dive, and perhaps his ability to turn that into a game to be enjoyed has destroyed in him the need for security. Perhaps in learning to live with something approaching ease under an authoritarian regime, he has become too enamoured of uncertainty.

In a few weeks there is a public holiday, which I am hoping he will be able to come and spend with me. In the way I last did when I was 17 and living with my parents in London, I have ferreted around for a place where we can be alone, knowing there was no way we would have any space to ourselves in the Sad Flat. And I have scored a wonderful apartment in the north of Tehran with a wide balcony opening onto the mountains, a place full of light and breezes perched above the pollution of town where we can be just us for four whole days. If he manages to take the time off (of course it is uncertain because his boss won’t commit and, to my lover’s questions, only replies ‘inshallah’ – if God wills), then he has to lie to his family who will be expecting him to be home in that time. I too will have to lie to my aunts, and these lies are not something we relish. He, used to these obstacles to pleasure, can live with the lies. I, who have not lied to my family since those breathless first love days at 17, find my heart rebelling at having to deceive people I care about in order to do something I consider perfectly acceptable. I tell him what I think.

Me: ‘Look, for goodness sake, why don’t you just tell your parents you are coming to see me because you love me and we want to have sex?’

Him: ‘Well, in that case, English, why don’t I just forget the first bit and say I am coming cos we want to have sex?’

His meaning is, ‘since I am going to give both my parents heart attacks if I tell them the truth, why don’t I make sure I finish them off by making it as shocking as possible?’ And I know he means this because the idea of telling the truth, in this world of dissembling and opacity that is the Islamic Republic of Iran, is the most preposterous suggestion of all.

Sex & The Islamic City: part 2

Imagine my surprise… everyone here goes naked. I mean, not with their clothes as obviously this is the Islamic Republic of Iran but underneath all those layers and veils, underneath knickers and tights, vests and chadors, Iranian women – and men – have no pubic hair. And so, although Iranian women sport the most splendid eyebrows in the world, the luxuriousness that is trained into perfect black arches above is not welcome down below. Down below is meant, apparently, to be naked. Clean, as I was told.

I always thought that compared to my Islamic brethren, hailing as I do from the individualistic, tolerant shores of Great Britain, I was the liberated one. The one who had long ago shed inhibitions and had lost the ability to be shocked. But now, in bed finally with the man I have spent the last few years chastely and platonically in love with, I am shocked. He has no pubic hair. And what’s more, he asks me, with total ease, why I have hair when he touches me for the first time. ‘Er…’ I stumble. Well whisper actually, because this is the Islamic Republic and we are in a hotel room in a small town somewhere in the mountains in the west of Iran and the fact that the hotelier agreed to give me a room at all – a single woman travelling alone with a man not my husband, father, brother – is quite a coup. And against the law.

By law, I should have arrived with signed and stamped permission from the local morality police, but I have done no such thing. And the hotelier, because it is late and because he is from the same town as my (then still platonic) lover and because he is also quite obviously, illegally drunk, agrees to waive the legalities and give me a room. So the fact that I even have a room is already defying the law of the land, but add to that the fact that I am in this room in the middle of the night, unchaperoned with a man not my husband, father, brother, and we are naked, would give the morality police enough to keep them busy for weeks. What would happen were we caught? We would be jailed, we would probably be flogged and we may be forced to wed on the spot.

But in truth I didn’t think of any of this. After eight years of longing looks from under eyelashes and increasingly confident ‘accidental’ brushes against each other, finally my lover and I were alone together in a room. The morality police was the last thing on our minds. First our conversation was perfectly conventional, one that takes place in bedrooms the world over.

Me: ‘Do you have a condom?’

Him: ‘No, I don’t.’

Me: ‘Oh that’s a shame. I guess we won’t have sex then.’

Him: ‘Oh look I have found some.’

Me: ‘Really? Huh.’

Then, some delirious moments later, we have the other conversation.

Him: ‘So why do you have hair here?’

Me: ‘Er… because it’s natural?’

Him: ‘So why don’t you have hair under your arms? Or on your legs?’

Me: ‘Er…’

I can’t really fault his logic, but we don’t argue the point. There are other things on our minds. Until of course I see him naked.

Me: ‘Oh, wow, do you shave your hair?’

Him: ‘Yes. Everyone does. Men and women. Do you mind?’

Me: ‘Er, no. It’s just unusual.’

We move on. Hours later, as dawn is breaking and he is preparing to duck back to his own room, we broach the subject again.

Me: ‘So does everyone really have no hair there?’

Him: ‘Yes, really. It’s, you know, better. For sensation. And cleaner.’

Me: ‘Cleaner!! What tosh, there is nothing unclean about my lovely bush…’

Him: ‘It’s just what they say…’

Me: ‘So did you not like it?’

Him: ‘No no, I didn’t not like it. It’s just unusual.’

Me: ‘But look, I am a woman and I don’t want to look like a pre-pubescent girl…’

He kisses me gently, deeply.

Him: ‘You ARE a woman, English, an amazing beautiful woman and I love you with or without hair. It matters not to me.’

Still, as we went about our travels, staying with his family and pretending to be friends – back to sidelong looks and ‘accidental’ brushes – I pondered the merits of having hair opposed to being, well, bald. I looked at the women we passed on the streets and wondered if they too, under their hejab, were clean-shaven. As we went on family picnics and visited historic sights, I made a decision; prior to the next night we would spend together I would go native: I planned to shave my pubic hair.

A little ideological tussle preceded this decision. After all, I had poured scorn on friends in London who had opted for Brazilians, saying I would never want to be with a man who preferred his woman to look like a young girl. Now though, this ‘feminist’ (as I had thought of it) angle no longer held sway as instead I became fascinated with the idea of heightened sensation and the realisation that my lover would be more enthusiastic in pleasuring me should he have a clear path. So one day as we took a drive alone under the pretext of buying some groceries, I consulted him.

Me: ‘Listen, I was thinking of shaving, you know…’

Him: ‘No no, don’t do that! You mustn’t.’

Me: ‘Why not? Wouldn’t you prefer it?’

Him: ‘I love you as you are, English. And I don’t want you to do something you don’t believe in for me. I know your views.’

Oh dear, I was in danger of being held to my convictions – a sorry fate for a girl who, after all, just wants to have fun.

Me: ‘No it’s not just for you. It’s for us. I mean me. I am intrigued, I want to know how it feels.’

Him: ‘But it will be really hard to shave and then it will itch and you will get spots and in-growing hairs… we could buy you some of that cream, but you say it gives you a reaction. Why don’t you just wait till you go back to London and get a Brazilian wax?’

I continue to be amazed by what an expert he is in different forms of depilation. This is a man who lives in a small town in the remote mountains of Iran, not a Primrose Hill metrosexual.

Me: ‘My darling, what’s the point of a Brazilian if you aren’t there? Look I will just shave and be very careful.’

Him: ‘Well, if you are determined then I will give you a fresh blade, make sure you use plenty of shaving cream, don’t shave against the hair and only go over each area once, ok?’

Me: ‘Wow, ok.’

Him: ‘In fact, I better give you the hair trimmer first cos you won’t be able to shave it at that length…’

Me, still amazed: ‘OK. So, think it will be interesting?’

Him: ‘I think I will be able to do things I couldn’t before with all the hair getting in the way. You know, it makes it hard to breathe…’

Me: ‘Yes I noticed…’

So the next day I was shown how to trim and shave and while he was at work I spent a full hour in the shower at his house carefully removing all the hair I could see. Afterwards, bald and, I must say, beautiful, I wandered around his house alone wearing nothing but a t-shirt, feeling the breeze on parts of me that had never felt the air before. It was quite a new sensation, a fluttering awareness of myself that even made wearing knickers a pleasure. I had discovered a whole range of new nerve endings and I waited eagerly for my lover’s return.

Reader, it would be obscene to go on. But suffice to say I am a convert to the joys of the naked bush and no amount of itching can now dissuade me from keeping myself trim and defuzzed. It is, quite literally, sensational.

Sex and the Islamic City: part 1

I have been living back in Iran for six months now. I was supposed to be back in my homeland just for a few weeks but I was soon infected with the Iranian curse of ‘bi khial’ and, without ever really making a decision to stay, simply failed to make a very clear decision to leave, despite the return date on my ticket.

Translated literally, ‘bi khial’ means ‘without intention.’ In reality it means not ever committing to anything or worrying about consequences, a sort of existential limbo that may have delighted Sartres or the Buddha, but is designed to drive to distraction a Brit used to turning up on time and subscribing to a work ethic (OK I am a writer so work ethic maybe is pushing it but I have been known to occasionally meet a deadline).

It first manifested itself to me as a national inability to make a date and stick to it. Even my friend M, who has been brought up in the US and has been living here for just 5 months, displayed advanced signs when I first arrived. Keen to meet up with her and catch up on the gossip, I tried calling her. Her mobile didn’t answer but the next day she called me back. I could hear traffic and the sound of her footsteps in the background. ‘I am dying to see you,’ she exclaimed. ‘What are you doing later? I am just off to a meeting, why don’t I call you when I am done at around 5?’

So I made my first mistake. Turning down other plans, I waited for her call. The hours passed and finally at 8 I sent her a text. The next day she called me. ‘Oh I am so sorry about last night,’ she said, her footsteps clattering. ‘My meeting ran late and then stuff happened and then I was in the mountains for dinner and I didn’t get your text cos I had no reception’ and etc.

This became typical of our interactions over the next few days and, I noticed, characterised at varying degrees all my social interactions. First I became frustrated: how was I ever supposed to see anyone when it was impossible to make plans? And how did anyone ever get anything done here? I put this question to my then still-platonic lover, who laughed. ‘Listen English,’ he said in Farsi lilting with a soft Kurdish accent. ‘This is Iran. Don’t take life so seriously. Everything will come right in the end, inshallah. You know darling, bi khial.’

So I learnt to let go and take things as they came, the kind of living in the moment espoused by the sages of yoga and countless America self-help gurus. And it was surprisingly easy to let go of schedules and expectations when it meant that I too was absolved of any responsibility to anyone except myself and to anything other than the next day’s plans. I started to float through the days, calmly reassuring family and friends that I couldn’t wait to see them, and then simply failing to call back for a couple of weeks. I had finally found the perfect way to deflect the unbearable pressure of family relations; having always taken seriously the implied duty of visiting all the family elders and accepting invites from all the family’s youngsters, my previous trips home to Iran had always been filled to bursting with family parties at which people would sit around commenting on my weight, the shape of my eyebrows and my defiant disregard of the importance of finding a husband ‘before it’s too late’ (ie: before you lose your looks). I would lessen the boredom by eating all the delicious food on offer and thus go back to London after three weeks in Iran fatter and paler, having never managed to escape the endless round of parties to take to the mountains that towered so enticingly outside the window.

Now, I do as they do. When my cousin, a notoriously fickle character, says ‘hey, shall we go to Dubai?’ I say, ‘Sure’, safe in the knowledge that it will never happen. I promise my legion of aunts that I will come and visit them in Shiraz ‘any day now’ and then I fail to show up from week to week, distracted by the lure of a party, a hiking trip in the mountains or an illicit visit to my lover in the west of Iran. I make apologetic calls, citing the pressure of work as an excuse (‘Sorry auntie, but suddenly I have so many articles to write. You know Iran is such a hot topic now…’) and I put off getting on the plane for another week. When a cousin’s husband asks me to research a new teaching method for him when I am back in London, I readily agree, knowing I will never remind him to give me his email address. Work that would have taken me a day now stretches to a week and I can no longer be bothered to check my emails every day, let alone hourly as I do in London. Life has taken on a loose and fluid form that I drift along on, failing to make a decision about anything.

For me of course this is the pleasure of pure laziness and the seduction of the lack of responsibility. For those who live here and who don’t have the escape clause of a flat in London and the reassurance of a British passport and bank account, it is a visceral reaction to living under an authoritarian regime, in a world where nothing is certain and everything depends on the grace of the person above you on the ladder of life, be it parent, husband, boss, mullah or president. I have begun to see how the lack of personal definition that characterises life in Iran is the reason why fabled eastern fatalism still hold true. I understand that 'bi khial' is sometimes the only way to survive.

The only sticky moment came when I was planning a research trip that I wanted my lover to accompany me on, a good opportunity for us since he lives on the opposite side of the country. I rang him several times with the dates, insisting he gives me an answer so I could reserve tickets. ‘Oh well, inshallah I will be able to come,’ was his reply.

I finally lost my cool. ‘Look my darling, inshallah won’t do. If you want to see me then you come on this trip and if you want to come on this trip you will let me know tomorrow. It’s up to you. No more "bi khial".’

He rang me the next night. ‘Good news,’ he said. ‘I went to my boss again to ask for the time off. He said, as usual, inshallah, as God wills, we will see. So I decided to be like you, English, and I got aggressive and said that I needed the time cos I had a guest coming from abroad and he had to give me an answer immediately. So he had to say yes.’

I was delighted he had learnt assertiveness from me, and, a couple of weeks later, seeing my lover waiting for me on the tarmac to start our trip, I felt that this was finally a meeting of the east and west I could claim some credit for.