Sex & the Islamic City

The diary of a love affair in Iran.

Sunday, August 03, 2008

Sex and the Islamic City: part 11


Finally I am sitting on a bus heading west. After mounting a united offensive of untruths, my lover and I have managed to convince both our families that my visit to Kurdistan is purely for work and that, for the two days we have decided it is safe for me to visit, I will in fact be in another town on the other side of the mountains that he lives by. For reasons that took me a while to understand, my lover has persuaded me that to stay for more than two days will be too suspicious so I have agreed to arrive on Tuesday morning so that we have until Thursday alone, at which point, when he finishes work at lunchtime for the weekend, I can return with him to his home town and family.

I am so excited by the prospect of having time alone with him that I happily ignore its brevity. I know that he will have to go to work every day and that in truth we will only have the afternoons and evenings but after three weeks of separation and having only ever spent one whole night together, we are intoxicated by the idea of two days in a row alone, with no one else to disturb us. I know that I will have to stay indoors for the duration, never leaving his house in case I am seen (‘You ok with being a prisoner, English?’ he asks me, and I sigh happily, ‘Prisoner of love, how romantic…’) but I can’t imagine anything I want more right now than to spend my days waiting for him to come home and make love to me. Who needs fresh air when you have earth-moving sex?

So here I am on a bus that will spend the next 12 hours winding across Iran to arrive early tomorrow morning in the main square of his town. I have solicited the help of K, one of my male cousins, to take me to the bus station, a place so vast and filled with smoke and noise that it feels impossible for a girl to negotiate alone. K is a body builder and likes to wear shirts that show off his muscles (much to the delight of my senile grandmother who has lost her inhibitions – and indeed mind – to the point that she openly fondles his chest when he comes to visit, wreathed in kittenish smiles all the while) so I feel safe with him in such places. He also showers himself in very spicy aftershave so provides protection from the smoke that way too. Tehran’s four bus stations, each located in a different corner of town for easy access to the four corners of the country, are extraordinary places, filled with men shouting out various destinations in a voice and manner reminiscent of race track bookies. All is, seemingly, chaos, but K weaves his way through to buy me two tickets (‘to make sure you get to sit alone and are comfortable,’ he tells me) and delivers me – moving in the fog of All Spice – to a bus that bears no sign or indication of its destination, bar the fact that the driver and his helpers are all Kurdish.

Finally we set off. Minutes pass like hours, I look at my watch every few seconds, it seems. I have never known time to pass so slowly. I ring my lover to tell him we have set off. ‘Ring me when you have stopped for supper,’ he instructs, ‘Then I will be able to work out when you will get here.’ He is at his parents’ house so we cannot talk but the excitement that bubbles in his voice is enough to make me smile for the duration of the journey. Which is just as well for I am too restless to sleep and in the one moment I drop off, the bus driver decides to tune into the soap opera that has gripped the whole nation and I have to surrender to the noise and watch too. When it is over I can no longer sleep so I stuff my iPod headphones into my ears and watch several episodes of Lost, so drawn in that when we draw up at a service station in the middle of nowhere and I am obliged to leave the bus, I blink to find myself back in Iran.

And it soon becomes clear that I really am in Iran. My life in Tehran has protected me from the realities of the Islamic Republic recently. But here, in the middle of the night, in the middle of the wilderness, I start to realise why my lover was so anxious that I shouldn’t make this journey in secret. I am a young woman alone and as such am like some rare exotic species. The place, a vast restaurant lit with neon lights and filled with bustle, has men pouring in and out, and the only women I see are enveloped in black chadors (the voluminous fabric that covers women from head to toe) and are attached firmly to their men. On a previous bus journey an older lone woman had befriended me so that, during our nocturnal stop, we had not been alone. But tonight no such companion offered herself and I was left to gingerly pick my way through the crowds on my own to find the washrooms.

Reader let me tell you that next to these crow-like women wrapped in yards of black fabric, I look like a tropical flower, with my navy silk headscarf splashed with flowers of fuchsia, turquoise and cream, navy manteau falling in folds to my knees (my one concession to my journey was to swap the skin-tight manteau I wear in Tehran which skims my bum with this looser, longer version for ease of travel) and white linen Armani palazzo pants over towering wedge sandals through which peek out tanned toes with their fuchsia nail varnish so bright it is almost fluorescent. I am even wearing eyeliner and mascara, so keen am I to step off the bus looking glamorous for my lover, who has most recently seen me only in ‘on the road’ mode, in trainers and covered in dust.

But standing here at this service station in the middle of the night in the middle of nowhere, I am attracting a lot of attention and my Nars Schiap nail varnish, which made so much sense when I purchased it in Selfridges, suddenly doesn’t seem like the best idea. I want to get back on the bus but it is locked and the driver and his team lost somewhere in the neon, so I find a seat outside at the end of the row and sit down gingerly, training my eyes to the ground. Even I have learnt by now that were I to return any of the looks the passing men throw me, I could be in real danger of being seriously propositioned. These are not sophisticated people and for them a lone woman looking back at a man can only mean one thing: acquiescing to sex.

It is with relief that an uneventful 30 minutes later I get back on the bus. The remaining five hours pass in a mix of restless sleep and restless waking until finally I recognise the orange and green neon palm trees that grace the main square of his hometown, just as light is beginning to streak the dark sky. I begin to thrill, I know he is here, just now waking up to sneak out quietly from the family home to meet me in the town an hour away where he works. I wash out my mouth, check my make up in the mirror and put on some lip gloss. I see the driver watching me in the mirror and I shrug: he definitely thinks I am a whore now. After this, every time I look up I catch his eye in the mirror so I am forced to keep my gaze fixed out of the window on the mountains and the valleys we are winding through. My heart sings to be back in my lover’s golden country and at the thought that any minute I may see his car overtaking us. Then my phone rings, it is him and it turns out he has only just set out, meaning he is at least 20 minutes behind us. He tells me where to alight from the bus and says, ‘I will get there as quickly as I can English, don’t worry, I won’t let you stand there alone too long.’

But how long is too long? Suddenly I am in a panic. When we were last in his town, he often wouldn’t let me get out of the car alone, so dangerously forward are the men there. Now I was going to be standing in the main square at 6 in the morning, all florid in fuchsia and turquoise in high heels with kohl-rimmed eyes, all alone. I was convinced that even 15 minutes was long enough for me to be kidnapped and raped and equally convinced that if he speeded up his journey, he would fall off the mountain and kill himself. The anxiety gets more acute as the bus stops and I get off and take myself to the side of the road, reaching into my bag to find my phone. As I stand up, phone in hand, my lover pulls up beside me, and I am sure the beam of my smile eclipses the new-born sun in that moment. I jump in. ‘But how did you get here so quickly?’ I ask. He looks tired, there are still pillow marks on his face. He beams back at me. ‘I told you I wouldn’t let you stand here alone.’

Oh yes he did. And as our smiles meet and we both laugh out loud in delight, I feel he couldn’t be more of a hero than if he had arrived on a white charger.