Sex & The Islamic City: part 6

A few days ago I ran away from my family’s Sad Flat with the daily round of teenage tantrums and old lady smells to take up residence in one of Tehran’s most distinguished tower blocks. With its doorman, 24-hour security, tinkling fountains in the front garden and clocks announcing the time in Tehran, London and New York in the lobby, it is clear this skyscraper’s spiritual home is Manhattan. However, unlike the Park Towers of Manhattan our Tehrani towers are not just known by their street numbers. Oh no, the delicacy of the Iranian sensibility is evident even in the midst of these most modern of edifices: our towers are called things like ‘Tower of Light’, ‘Tower of Shadow’, ‘The White Tower’, ‘Tower of Rain’ and most common of all are names of flowers. All over the north of Tehran bloom skyscrapers such as Lily Tower, Tower of Poppies, Tulip Towers, and my current favourite, The Fragrance of Roses Tower. Most famous of all is the Kooh-i-Noor Tower, ‘The Mountain of Light Tower’, named after the famous Iranian diamond the Kooh-i-Noor which now resides in the Tower of London (maybe it’s time for a rethink? Tower of Crows or Jewel Tower might do) as part of the British Crown Jewels.

Life in my tower is easy and comfortable. In the few days I have been here I have been seduced by life as lived by those northern Tehrani ladies who have plenty of money and nothing much to do. In London I may be a poverty-stricken writer, but here I am quite well off, at least for the purposes of daily life. I think nothing of spending the equivalent of £10 on a pretty silk headscarf and blowing £40 on treating a bunch of friends to dinner in a fashionable restaurant when a little further south, people struggle to live on £60 a month.

But regardless, I ask my doorman to call me a cab wherever I want to go, thinking nothing of spending up to £2 a trip on private taxis when I could instead line up at the end of the street shouting out my destination to passing savaris who load up to full capacity with people going the same way, and who cost on average 10 pence per trip. Now that I am here alone, and it is hot, savaris have lost the appeal they used to have when my then-platonic lover visited me in Tehran on previous trips.

A few years ago, we were able to hit the town alone for the first time in all the eight years we have known each other, a testament to the loosening of the tight social controls imposed by the Islamic Republic. Going back to the Sad Flat late at night after a movie or a meal, we would squeeze into full-to-bursting savaris, and there, in the back of the spluttering cab, I would find myself pinned tight against my lover and feel his heart beating as fast as mine. In those days, though we had declared our love for each other, neither of us had the courage to cross the huge cultural divide that yawned between us when it came to sexual relationships, he not knowing how he was supposed to make a move on an English girl and I simply lost in the sea of cultural misinformation that my old-fashioned family and the regime had fed me.

But in the back of those savaris we at last got close enough to allow our bodies to communicate directly. Pinned against him I felt the heat coming from his body and I rested my head on his shoulder. Or, with both of us squashed into the front seat, my lover trying not to sit on the gear stick, he had no choice but to put an arm around my shoulders, as much to stop me falling out of the car every time we took a corner at top speed as anything else. (These savaris are invariably old Paykans, an Iranian car now sadly discontinued but which are famous for their tenacity. It is said you can repair a Paykan with anything; one of my uncles once completed an eight-hour long journey in a Paykan held together by the skin of some persimmon fruit.) With his arm around me I would melt into my lover and carefully link my fingers through his and we would caress each other surreptitiously without saying anything or looking at each other directly, still leaving things superficially ambiguous.

It was more than two years before we finally kissed but it was the late-night journeys in the savaris that lit those particular fires.

Now, on my own in Tehran and suffering from the heat of the summer, I have no desire to become the object of some stranger’s fumbling attentions in a crowded savari. So I spend my money on private cabs with air conditioning on the increasingly rare occasions when I go out. Sitting up in my tower I have been overwhelmed by a desire not to break out of my bubble. With the trees and the fountain below me and the mountains right in front, I can happily spend my whole day watching the light change on the mountains, spotting the different butterflies swooping outside my tenth floor window, waiting for that time at the end of the day when Tehran’s strange flock of green parrots go rampaging through the skies, after which I switch to another room with its panoramic views west to watch the sun put on its nightly show of colour as it sets behind the mountains, all the time drinking endless cups of strong black tea which I have taken to sucking through a sugar cube held in my teeth. When I get hungry I pick up the phone and order some food to be delivered from the best restaurants in town; if I need groceries I ring the grocer who sends a man round; if I decide to travel out of town for the weekend, I ring the travel agent who books my plane ticket and sends it round in a cab. With the heat outside feeling unbearable, the thought of donning coat and headscarf to run a few chores is too bothersome, not to mention negotiating the legion of cars that end up following me down the street as I stride around, a single woman. The men in the cars – and even the ones who pass comment as they walk by – have so far proved themselves to be harmless, but it all conspires to make a girl stay locked up in her tower.

And, like a fairytale princess, I await my lover, who wakes me every day from my afternoon slumbers with, well, a phone call rather than a kiss. After all, this is modern life in the Islamic Republic of Iran, he lives many miles away from the bright lights of Tehran and the whole culture conspires to keep us apart. And so, like all good fairytales, we know we will have to overcome many obstacles before we reach our happy ending. It’s just that with all the internal and international uncertainties that govern life here, we also know that, like in all good fairytales, hundreds of years may pass before the evil forces that keep us apart can be defeated for good.