Sex and the Islamic City: part 7

Living in Tehran is not exactly like living in London, where I have a variety of ways to entertain myself any given minute of the day (nearly). It may be that a simple desire to go for a swim here is attended by the hassle of finding a pool which allows women to swim on the day and time I wish to go (of course swimming pools are strictly segregated); and going out to the latest hot restaurant, movie or concert may mean having to stay dressed in my manteau and headscarf throughout the evening, but at least there are some options. At least, of an evening when my date comes to pick me up to escort me to a party, I feel safe in the knowledge that the doorman of my very posh tower block is not going to ring the religious police to report me for being alone with a man, and as for his opinion of me – this foreign Iranian who only ever has gentlemen callers – I care not a jot.

The cultural life of Tehran is surprisingly rich, with private views of art, secret screenings of controversial documentaries and movies, underground rock concerts, officially sanctioned classical concerts, and even illegal fashion shows on offer almost every night, as long as you know the right people. Alternatively you can get on the party circuit with Tehran’s rich and beautiful, those expensively-suited men and their glossy, whippet thin wives who live in penthouse suites of marble towers or behind the walls of sprawling villas in the north of Tehran in the lap of the mountains. If this isn’t your scene then you can penetrate the circle of foreign journalists, diplomats and NGO workers with their unkempt hair who observe life in the city with a wry detachment always amusing to a girl missing the dry British sense of humour and longing to party in jeans with a face bare of the thick make up that is de rigueur in society here.

When I get bored during the day, I slick on some lipstick and ring my most glamorous cousin who screeches up at the gates in her huge white SUV, a pair of outsize Chanel sunglasses perched atop expensively blonde hair and the season’s latest silk headscarf knotted loosely at her throat. She takes me off to a number of very shiny shopping malls in the north of Tehran where we browse designer boutiques and drink coffee in wannabee coffee shops called things like Starcups. We swap gossip about the family, discuss the best shape for me to train my eyebrows into and laugh at the fashionistas who have taken the summer’s tanned look a little too far and are glowing bright orange. She drops me off when she has to pick up her son from his round of classes, always leaving me with a party invite. I love my cousin and I enjoy dipping into her Yummy Mummy routine once in a while, but after attending several of her parties, I feel life is too short for the vapid conversation and explicit competition that characterises the interaction of these Yummies when they are gathered together with their husbands.

Life in my lover’s town couldn’t be more different. With a population of 100,000 people, the quickest walk through town is delayed by hundreds of stops to ask after the health of my lover’s legion of acquaintances. With no recreation on offer, not even a cinema in town, come the early evening when the summer weather has cooled, everyone pours into the streets. Gangs of girls congregate and gangs of boys dawdle and they throng the bazaar and coffee shops and parks. It is a nightly passeggiata of which the Italians would be proud, and, despite the paucity of the entertainment on offer, everyone is determined to enjoy themselves.

While I was staying with my lover’s family, the Friday night passeggiata was the most extravagant of the week. Friday being the Sabbath here, and my lover’s home town being set in beautiful mountain country, it is traditional for families to spend Friday out of town, enjoying the multi-generational, elaborate picnics I remember so fondly from my childhood. Just after dawn we would start packing the car with essentials: a samovar and tea pot, a few pans full of saffron lemon chicken to kebab, rice and herbs, quantities of flat bread, flasks of water, the yoghurt drink so good at sending you off on an afternoon nap, and a few Persian carpets and cushions to sit on. The whole family would pack into several cars and by the time the sun was up in the sky, we would be breakfasting under a tree in golden fields. An excursion would follow, perhaps to an ancient fortress so neglected we would be the only people there (it’s hard to imagine a 2,500-year old fortress in Europe begin thus ignored) after which we – the young people – would maybe climb a mountain, my lover and I racing to get away from his brother in law and younger brother to steal a kiss. Panoramic views and cool breezes would greet us at the top, and we would spot where his parents and the other women of the family had gathered to start cooking lunch before racing back down, avoiding the locusts and the geckos, to join them.

Lounging on the carpets in the embrace of a venerable walnut tree, we would be fed steaming hot rice stained with saffron and chicken kebabed on an open fire. Afterwards, we would all lie back and doze, my lover lying on one carpet between his brother, father and brother-in-laws while I shared my carpet with his sisters and mother and little nephews and although I would be careful not to look at him too much, lying there under the walnut tree in acres of gold with folds of mountains stretching away, watching butterflies swoop and my lover sleep on a beautiful carpet in the middle of his tribe, was enough to make me feel content with my lot.

Back from our old fashioned day, my lover would then bundle me into the car and insist we go on passeggiata. Usually these days were long and I wanted nothing other than to sit in front of the television with more tea chuckling at inanities with his mother, but he would insist and we would arrive where a handful of cars were parked overlooking a main square and a park. It was crowded, the streets full of cars for once driving very slowly instead of the usual breakneck speed and the pavements thick with people. The first time he took me to this spot he explained that this patch belonged to just a handful of families who came here every Friday, since it was a prime spot for seeing and being seen.

Me: ‘But look, why are we here? Aren’t you tired? I really need to be at home having a shower…’

Him: ‘Patience, English, I’ll tell you why I insisted later…’

I acquiesced and, joined by his sisters and their husbands, we stood about by the car, greeting friends who drove up and crunching sunflower seeds. I noticed that he was not keeping his distance from me as he usually did, standing so close to me as we talked that I could feel his breath on my face. After having to fight all my instincts to be close to him all day, this sudden public intimacy was intoxicating. It was also puzzling, until I noticed how all the other girls gathered around were looking at us.

When no one was within earshot, I leaned into him and asked what was going on.

Him: ‘See how everyone is looking? Now they are all going to think I have found a fiancée and not told anyone. It’ll be the week’s headline news for all the gossips. It’s just too irresistible.’

Me: ‘So you are using me to get everyone off your back?’

Him: ‘You know how the big topic in town is why I don’t take a wife? Let’s give them something to talk about.’

Me: ‘What about your reputation?’

Him: ‘Well English, you are our honoured foreign guest, and all the gossips will be frustrated once word reaches my parents and they laugh and say that you are like a sister to me.’

Me: ‘Am I like a sister to you?’

Him: ‘Darling of my heart… Shall I kiss you right here right now? Would that answer your question?’

Me: ‘Oh yes please…’

And as we leaned into each other, locked into each other’s eyes, the cars and the lights and the jealous girls melted away and for one delirious moment we nearly broke every rule and convention and law and kissed right there and then. Of course our lips never actually met but the fire between us was burning so bright it must have dazzled anyone paying attention. And we looked at each other and laughed. After all, what could they say when I was his honoured guest and like a sister to him…

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.

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…’