Magic Bus (10 page)

‘My generation must either change Iran or leave Iran,' Laleh said, meeting my eyes.

I spent the day with Babak, knowing that I should move on, but the prospect of seeing Laleh kept me in Tabriz. To fill my time, I hired a car and driver and headed to Kandovan, a nearby town touted as another Garden of Eden by the local tourist office. Along the riverbank lounged families of picnickers, the doors of their cars open like birds' wings. In a tea house I treated Babak to a bowl of
abgusht
mutton stew. On the drive back to the city, I tried to draw him about the Iran–Iraq war, which had lasted eight years and left a million dead, but he was preoccupied. He said
only, ‘Khomeini promised us all a place in paradise. Today, most Iranians would rather check their email than die for Islam.'

I waited at the house again that evening.

In Iran, life is largely a grind relieved by parties. Hence the country's greatest treasures are said to be found indoors, usually on a Friday evening. On the street, alcohol, Madonna and the mingling of the sexes are banned, but in their homes people are for the most part left to enjoy themselves.

I was as surprised as Laleh when Babak suggested holding a party. At first she refused to co-operate, distrusting his motives, but when he insisted the occasion was for my benefit, she could not refuse. He seemed determined to draw together all their friends. All
her
friends. As Laleh prepared the food and we rearranged the furniture, she kept looking at him, saying hardly a word all afternoon.

Around eight, the women arrived, slipped off cloaks and veils, emerged in skimpy skirts and teetering high heels. Laleh wore a dress only slightly more modest than her friends'. She set vases of fresh flowers on the table, laid out grilled fish, herbed rice and sweets. Couples paired off, revived old conversations, made new acquaintances. Babak showed me off like a trophy, introducing me as ‘his' travel writer.

Over glasses of fruity, home-made wine, I enjoyed the easy banter. One student asked me what I thought of Iranians.

‘Hospitable,' I assured her.

‘But are we beautiful?'

‘Tabrizi women are said by Iranians to be the country's most beautiful,' her boyfriend pointed out.

‘I've seen nothing to prove otherwise,' I told them.

‘You'll find the road becomes less civilized as you head east,' said Laleh's teacher, a tall and elegant academic wearing a heady perfume.

‘Afghans consider us to be as soft as girls,' the boyfriend told me, shaking his long, gelled mane. ‘Do you know they call us “sandwich-eaters”?'

Guests started to dance as casually as if in Forest Hill or Windsor.
The academic said, ‘Before 1979, we used to drink in public and pray in private. Now we pray in public and drink in private.'

Babak seemed to be his usual troubled self. He lit cigarette after cigarette, took a single drag, puffed his cheeks, then stubbed out the butt. He danced once, an unbalanced, graceless stumble across the living-room floor. No one laughed, good manners preserving his dignity, for he was respected – as a hero if not as a man.

Around ten o'clock, word spread that he had an announcement to make. When Laleh heard this her mood darkened. She found a chair in the corner, smoothed back her hair, then sat on her hands in a hopeless, childish gesture.

In front of the closed door, Babak said, ‘This is a historic evening in our lives.' At first, his voice wavered but, as he spoke, he gained confidence. ‘Tonight, a new life begins.'

Babak announced he had resigned his bus-driving job that morning. He had decided to emigrate to France and, because money was needed for fares and to arrange the visas, he had arranged for the house to be sold. Although she would miss her many dear friends, he went on, Laleh would be coming with him. As a single woman, she could not remain alone in Tabriz, nor could she choose a fate apart from him.

‘Now, friends, eat and laugh,' he said. ‘Enjoy the music and be happy for us.'

Few guests were surprised by the news. To escape the confiscated revolution, about 200,000 Iranians emigrate every year. The men shook Babak's hand. The women embraced Laleh. Only her teacher hesitated at the back of the room. All assumed Laleh had known of the plan.

‘You must visit us in Paris,' Babak said to me.

For her part, Laleh said nothing. Babak could act alone. I looked at her and imagined the strip of masking tape over her mouth. When he cranked up the music, the guests wheeled back on to the dance floor. Laleh stared in the mirror, reeling in shock, full of inward rage. ‘I hate my feelings,' she said.

I followed her into the garden.

*

She's by the pond, her body turned away from me, sheltered in darkness.

‘You said that you would never leave Iran,' I say to her back.

‘This is where I was born, where I grew up. How can I leave my father's garden?'

‘Can you stay?'

‘Without parents or relatives?' Her laughter mocks my naivety. ‘You, as a foreigner, will never understand.' Her voice cracks in frustration at the contradictions. ‘I chose not to have a boyfriend. I didn't want to be trapped. Now, my own brother…'

Laleh – whose name means tulip, the symbol of martyrdom – turns to face me. Her blanched face seems to shimmer in the shadows of the trees. She is angry, desperate, bitter: at her bondage, at my freedom, at her brother.

‘Who do you – in the West – turn to for moral authority?' she demands, no longer speaking in polite half-truths. ‘To answer your questions and to know yourself?'

I turn the question over in my mind. I realize that she has touched on my dilemma. ‘Mostly to ourselves,' I say, choosing my words with care.

‘Hence your dislocation and fragmentation,' she hisses at me, her mouth so close that I feel her breath on my ear. ‘You lost your way, forgot your God and now belong nowhere. You wander alone in a spiritual desert. You are a cancer.'

Iran has struggled for security throughout its history. The Persians built an empire stretching from the Mediterranean to India only to surrender it to Alexander the Great, the Parthians and then the Sassanians. In
AD
637, five years after Mohammed's death, the country was conquered by the Arabs. Persian society flourished under the caliphs and the Seljuks, until destroyed again by the Mongols.

In modern times, Iran has continued to be a battleground for foreign and internal rivalries. The CIA helped to topple a democratically elected, nationalist prime minister in 1953. Both Washington and London had disapproved of the nationalization of the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company, forerunner of BP. But the new Shah's brutality and impatient reforms inspired anti-American Islamic fundamentalists to hijack the 1979 revolution which overthrew him.

That February, 3 million Iranians took to the streets to celebrate the Ayatollah Khomeini's return to Tehran. Many considered him to be God's envoy. All knew he was a ruthless leader. He seized real power for the clergy. He permitted the execution of the Shah's generals, praying on the spot where they were shot. He ordered the killing of ‘anti-Islamic' modernizers, adulterers and homosexuals. His Revolutionary Guards – an elite parallel army – stormed the American Embassy to prevent the CIA from plotting another coup, holding US diplomats hostage for 444 days. His regime exploited the Iran–Iraq war, initiated by Saddam Hussein, and the Shia ideology of martyrdom to consolidate its grip on power. Khomeini changed the balance of power in the Middle East and introduced a new ideological force into world politics. His pursuit of security even led him to incite murder beyond Iran's borders, innovating a death sentence against a foreigner – British
author Salman Rushdie – for expressing contrary opinions, spreading seeds of fear into the century ahead. Today his successors build nuclear weapons to protect clerical rule.

I put down my pen, turn off the Byrds, gaze out of the window of my Partisan Black Super Saloon. ‘GOD'S TRUCK' flashes past me on the electric name-board above a driver's cab. ‘
Allah Akbar
' is painted in green lettering along the flank of a government oil-tanker. ‘Victory is Ours' proclaims a Shiraz Turbo bus, lying on its side among scattered suitcases, limping passengers and thick black skid marks.

Babak and Laleh are on my mind. Her unhappy, angry words ring in my ears. She's right, despite all her insecurities. Western society is dislocated and fragmented. We're dismantling the social order of civil society. Our God is all but forgotten. But it wasn't always so. The counterculture tried to reform the West in the sixties. A generation rebelled against institutional authority, espousing communality without ideology, confronting spiritual emptiness by pursuing a collective dream for self-knowledge. Youth wanted to change the world.

Which was why one of the first actions of Khomeini's Revolutionary Council in 1979 was to close the trail. The Intrepids – liberal, curious and often stoned – weren't welcomed in the Islamic Republic. Not that any of them set out to influence Iranian self-determination. The overlanders were, after all, the first movement of people in history travelling to be colonized rather than to colonize. But travel opens minds. As I had witnessed in Turkey, visitors' values and comparative wealth did – and do – change places. The irony is that the very people Khomeini locked out may have helped to kindle his revolution.

The first European tourist bus to cross Iran was probably Société Dubreuil's
La route des Indes
. In the spring of 1956, its Chausson coach left Porte d'Italie in Paris under police escort with two well-known actresses – Danielle Delorme and Micheline Presle – and fourteen passengers on board. Two engineers and a complete set of spare parts accompanied them on a second coach. The
2-month, 8,733-mile journey to Bombay, which apparently went as per timetable and without a single mechanical incident, also took in Italy, Yugoslavia, Bulgaria, Turkey, Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, Iraq and Pakistan. After its return Dubreuil never attempted to run another trip, even though 22,000 people watched the film of the journey at the Gaumont cinema in Place Clichy.

The next year a British travelling salesman, Paddy Garrow-Fisher, established the first regular coach service to the subcontinent. For almost a decade, ‘The Indiaman' operated the world's longest bus route from London King's Cross and across the Middle East to Bombay and Calcutta.

‘Whoever had this brilliant idea deserves some sort of memorial,' wrote the editor of
Meccano
magazine in 1959, ‘and I believe he finds it in the minds of those who travel with him. Anything may happen on such a long land voyage, and those who venture on it accept cheerfully any discomfort that may arise, whether caused by a dust storm in a desert or by such a misfortune as sticking in the mud of some primitive road.'

‘The Indiaman' and its twenty-six tourists shuddered over stony tracks and sank in loose sand. Its tyres had to be deflated to cross the Iranian deserts. In the absence of road signs – and sometimes roads themselves – navigation through Iran was often by the Safavid towers which once guided camel caravans. After forty-eight days or so, its AEC Regent rolled into Pakistan.

Dozens of cheap tour operators followed in Garrow-Fisher's rutted trail. In 1960, the first backpacker hostel – the Overseas Visitors Club – opened in London. Young Australians, the real Barry McKenzies, sailed to England on one-way tickets, served in pubs, slept with New Zealanders, then headed for home. Auto-tours, Exodus, Intertrek and the Beesley brothers showed them the way with inclusive camping trips via the bulls in Pamplona, the beer halls of Munich and the Asia overland trail. Ford Transit vans loaded and unloaded punters at all hours of the day and night along Earls Court Road. Penn Overland ran two new coaches to India. Swagman used dilapidated bangers acquired from nationalized companies. A young Australian vet bought a lumbering
green Bristol double-decker to drive to Morocco with his mates and within a few years built up a hundred-strong fleet of converted ‘deckers'. Top Deck and Hughes Overland then pushed the trail beyond India, across the Bay of Bengal and south-east Asia all the way to Sydney. The
caravanserais
and doss-houses of the old Silk Road echoed to the strains of ‘Waltzing Matilda' and ‘Kumbaya'.

At the same time, British freaks were reading Hugo Williams, grooving on
Siddhartha
, following the Beatles' procession to Rishikesh. They hitched to Istanbul to link up with the other tribes of independent travellers. Americans tended to start in Paris. In the late fifties, in the Latin Quarter, the Beats had sketched out the road map for the hip generation: eastwards towards mysticism, inwards to creative expression, out of this world with the recreational use of drugs. At the fractured, transatlantica bookshop Shakespeare and Company, Ginsberg had slept among the stacks and Burroughs researched
Naked Lunch
. John Lennon had dropped by the shop in October 1961. Now boys from Queens and girls from Sarah Lawrence began their journey sitting in Henry Miller's chair, stroking the press on which the first edition of
Ulysses
was printed, scoring a dime bag of Paris's cheapest marijuana in dingy Chez Popoff's before heading to the teeming bus depot at Porte d'Italie.

‘Where's you guys going?' shouted hopeful travellers into the open passenger doors of idling vehicles.

‘Nirvana,' came the reply.

The original Magic Bus operated from a cockroach-infested office on Amsterdam's Dam Square, carrying students, lone voyagers and brigades of hippies to India. Its buses were diverse and decrepit, especially after financial troubles forced the company to subcontract. Not that hard seats and broken springs lessened the pleasure of the journey. The secret for a successful trip was to get the passengers smoking chillum dope pipes before breakfast. In the early days, the buses almost levitated across border posts. On their return, so much Afghan hash was stashed in their tanks that regular smokers in Europe became accustomed to the aftertaste of diesel.