Stranger to History (26 page)

‘And what was the occasion?’

‘We met some friends of hers.’

‘Who?’

‘Humeyra and her husband.’

‘Their full names?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘What do they do?’

‘They’re artists.’

It had been a very strange lunch full of expat Iranians who had recently moved back to Iran. Everyone spoke French and English and the lunch had become very drunken. Madonna played. A homosexual in a printed shirt danced close to a small, voluptuous woman. There was something childishly defiant about Madonna in Tehran, especially late in the afternoon. The gay man said, ‘I hate this fucking revolution. Why us? It’s not fair. Why not Turkey? We just picked the wrong number.’ He enjoyed provoking me. ‘We’re waiting for the Americans,’ he hissed, ‘waiting for bombs!’

‘And the time before that?’ the interrogator asked.

‘I met her for lunch.’

‘Did you meet anyone with her?’

Now I could see what all this had built up to.

‘Yes. We met a friend of hers who she thought could be a guide for me in Tehran.’

‘Jasib!’ the big man exclaimed, as he had done with Bahador at the start of the interrogation.

‘Yes,’ I replied.

He emitted a satisfied grunt. ‘Mr Aatish, you’ve had no problem in the other cities, why did you need a guide here?’

‘No, I’ve had no problem,’ I answered, pretending to misunderstand him.

‘Yes, so why did you need a guide here?’

‘The other places were small cities, more manageable. Tehran is vast. I thought I’d need some help.’

They seemed content with this explanation.

‘So he was your guide?’

‘No, his English wasn’t good enough. I met him once and that was that.’

‘Mr Aatish, when did you arrive in Tehran?’

‘On the fifteenth.’

‘So, two weeks ago?’

‘Yes, about.’

‘Two weeks in Tehran! What did you do for so long?’

‘I met my family friend, saw the city, saw how people lived here.’

‘For two weeks! What did you see?’

‘I saw your palaces, the Gulestan, Sadabad,’ I said, reaching in my mind for other tourist destinations. ‘Your crown jewels, the national museum, the museum of contemporary arts.’

‘And what else?’

‘The museum of ceramics?’ I managed. ‘Which used to be the Egyptian embassy.’

I could see from their bored expressions that they already had what they were looking for.

‘Can we see your mobile phone?’

I handed it to them. It was the worst moment in the interrogation because I knew, now that they were through with me, they wanted to go after all the people who had helped me in Iran. I recalled Desiré not giving names under duress. ‘I don’t know all the numbers in it,’ I said, trying to make up for the cowardice of handing them the phone. ‘It had some from before.’ Fortunately, none of the names had surnames and I could pretend I didn’t know them.

‘You have a number in here that says Bahador’s flat,’ the interrogator asked, ‘but it’s a mobile-phone number.’

I asked to look at it and saw that it was the number of my mobile phone. ‘This is the number of my mobile phone.’

The bigger man examined his sheet and shook his head.

The little interrogator said, ‘But this is different from the number you gave us.’ He read the number back to me.

‘No, that was a mistake,’ I stammered. ‘I told you I might make one. This is the number of the phone. You can try it if you like.’ For a moment, everything seemed to hang in the balance. Then they returned to the phone list, writing down all the names and numbers.

When they came to the end, they looked up at me and a neutral silence fell over the room.

‘You would like an extension?’ the man said at last.

‘Yes, I would have liked an extension. I would have liked to travel more.’

‘Why is your visa issued in Damascus?’

‘I was there when I needed it. I’ve been getting them as I go along.’

‘Did you get your Pakistani visa here?’

‘I had that from before. My father’s Pakistani.’

‘What will you say about Iran?’

‘Very positive things. I liked it very much.’ I wanted to add, ‘Until now!’ ‘I hope you’ll let me come back.’

‘Did you take notes?’ he asked, ignoring the question

‘Yes.’

‘On paper or the computer?’

‘On the computer,’ I answered, with relief at having got rid of my notebook.

‘How many pages on Iran?’

‘I’m not sure, eight to ten.’

‘What will you write about Iran?’

‘Very good things, I’ve really enjoyed my time here and wish I could stay on.’

‘And you have Mr Sadeghi’s number at home?’ they asked again, making me think they would come for both that and the notes.

‘Yes.’

‘And where do you go next?’

‘Pakistan.’

‘When?’

‘Well, in the next day or so, I only have two days.’

‘And then you finish travelling in India?’

‘Yes.’

They handed me back the phone and said, ‘Have a good trip.’

‘I’ll try.’ I smiled, walking out of the room, half expecting to be cut down before I reached the door.

That night as I drove to the airport I felt a childish excitement at leaving Iran. My last hours in the Islamic Republic, and the nature of my departure, gave me a sense of escape. It made me feel the country’s impoverishments more acutely. I would never have believed I could look forward so much to the freedom of the Dubai Duty Free.

Earlier I had gone to the flat for the last time. It was quiet, as always, and the windows showed another spring storm building over the hills. I packed all my things and went to Payam’s house. The storm broke later that afternoon. Reza called and I agreed to meet him for coffee. The sky was black when I crossed the busy main road in front of Payam’s house and the wind made the new leaves on the trees cling to their branches.

The coffee shop was in an open-air arcade. Reza arrived, looking sombre. He said he would have our tickets refunded and was sad I was leaving. He asked me what flight I was on. I didn’t tell him I was booked on the Emirates night flight to Dubai. I didn’t want to trust anyone: I was still worried they would come after my notes.

The three-hour interrogation covered every aspect of my shortened trip to Iran. When I looked back on the transcript of my interrogation, drawn from memory as soon as I left the country, I was amazed by its thoroughness. The questions that seemed incessant, and cut with fear in the interrogation room, were now a helpful way to retain everything about my time in Iran. Every car I hired, every kilometre I covered, every person I encountered made its way on to the interrogators’ notepad. They took my phone, wrote down every name and number in it, making me fear for those who had helped me and now could end up in more trouble than me for the generosity they had shown to a visitor. I had vowed to tell the truth, but seven months of travel from Turkey to Iran can sound incredible. In the closed-off world of Iran, these strange, doubtful threads seemed to excite the interrogators’ worst suspicions. At times, even as the interrogation was going on, I was grateful for it, grateful that I did not leave Iran disarmed, unaware of the regime’s constant presence in the lives of the people I liked so much.

Then came that formulation I could hardly believe: ‘Mr Aatish, we hear that you have been asking about religion, the changes in religion, and politics somehow.’ Politics somehow! All the faith’s inability to deliver in the modern sense was contained in that ‘somehow’. What I had discovered in Iran, and had sensed in Syria, was how violent and self-wounding the faith could become when it was converted from being a negative idea, a political and historical grievance against the modern world, into a positive one.

I had wanted to see what Butt and Abdullah’s vision of Islamic completeness looked like when it was implemented in a modern society. In Iran it had been, and its small, irrelevant rules were turned on the people to serve the faith’s political vision. For the faith to remain in power in a complex society, it had to beat down the bright and rebellious members of that society with its simplicities. In the end the big unpurified world won anyway, but terrible hypocrisies took shape: short marriages were condoned to allow prostitution; lashes were bought from the municipality as if they were no more than gas bills; and little girls were sexually taunted because Islam forbade West Highland terriers.

We drove through a velvety, smoke-filled night and passed a great white arch that looked as if its base was caught in a wind, causing it to fan out on all sides like a frock. The driver said it was the Azadi Monument. ‘
Azadi
’ – ‘freedom’; one of the many words that Farsi had in common with Urdu.

Imam Khomeini airport at that hour was deserted. The imam would have liked it the way I saw it: its sparseness, white lights and purple seats, its porters in red waistcoats gliding across the sparkling floors, or dozing against a trolley, gave it a heavenly aspect. To me, it was menacing. It stood for all that I had learnt about the Islamic Republic in the last twelve hours: brutality wrapped in godliness.

The airport was not real; it was a showpiece. The real airport was down the road and handled most of the air traffic in and out of Tehran. It was there that the noise, grime, long queues and commotion of other airports collected. None of that was permitted in the tube-lit serenity of the imam’s airport. It was a symbol, more shrine than airport. It was big and modern, ablaze with fluorescent light; every surface spoke of newness. It didn’t matter that the world had to be kept out for it to look as it did. The ideal was achieved – the simplicity, the quiet, the decorum – and that was all. It didn’t matter that the ideal served, the Islamic perfection, had played no part in its construction. It was like the Islamic Republic in miniature: a violent imposition of religious perfection on the modern world, driven to illogic.

I bristled when I presented my passport and visa to Immigration, with its rude notation in red, stating that I had two days to leave the country. But the young woman inspecting it was unfazed and put a red-domed exit stamp over the blue one that had allowed me entry into Shiraz twenty-five days before. As the announcement for the Emirates flight came, and a small group of passengers walked on to the jet-way, I noticed some young female Tehran–Dubai regulars. The scarves were already slipping.

Continuities

I
t was July in Delhi, 2002, when I made up my mind to visit Pakistan for the first time. The rains had broken, and for a short spell the air was hot and gassy; earthworms were flooded out of their holes and the fruit from
neem
trees, the same fat berries of my childhood, lay mashed in the wet earth. I was twenty-one.

All summer Indian and Pakistani troops had brooded on the border in huge numbers, and though foreign diplomats had been evacuated, and news bulletins flashed with talk of nuclear conflict, the joy and lethargy of the rainy season felt too deep that year to be interrupted by the sound of war. I’d wanted to go many times since the abortive phone conversation with my father, but was prevented by being at college in America and by worsening relations between India and Pakistan. This time, seeing a lull in hostilities, I decided I’d catch the cycle at its trough in case the next one was deeper still.

Getting to Pakistan from India in those months posed so many practical problems that meeting my father for the first time became more of a logistical challenge than an emotional one. There were no flights, trains or buses between the two countries, and it looked as though I would have to fly to Dubai, and from there to Lahore. This seemed complicated and expensive so I went to see the acting Pakistani high commissioner in Delhi to ask his advice. The High Commission, a blue-domed mausoleum of a building, enveloped in afternoon gloom, was deserted, like some embassy of a former ally after a revolution. I found the acting high commissioner surprisingly receptive to my problem. ‘Why don’t you drive?’ he suggested.

‘Isn’t the border closed?’

‘Only to Indian and Pakistani nationals. You have a British passport. I can give you a visa and you can cross by land at Wagah.’

By land! I thought. That moody frontier! It seemed impossible. I grew up thinking of the physical border as a land fault, a crevasse in the earth spitting fire. I would cross that border in a car?

‘No, not in a car,’ the acting high commissioner said. ‘On foot.’ Apparently, I could drive up to the border, but then would have to walk across it and someone else would have to meet me on the other side. With that, the high commissioner had a little blue and purple rectangle stuck in my passport that read: ‘Islamic Republic of Pakistan, 28 days, Multiple Entry’.

‘Do say hello to your abbu for me. I know him,’ he said slyly, handing back my passport. ‘They have a very nice farm near Lahore.’

My mother was not in Delhi at the time, but offered her full support for the trip. She called a friend of hers in Pakistan, also a friend of my father, to ask if I could stay with her. The friend said she would be happy to have me and would send her son to the border to pick me up.