Mashhad, Iran, 2013: six days until visa expires
When I finally drag myself out of the shower, it’s 5 am. I get dressed and go downstairs.
The concierge kindly reminds me that I am to check out this morning (and since the
hotel’s booked to the rafters, I really do have to). Dad and I were meant to head
back to Qom today. I have a plane to catch. What with the Imam Reza commemoration
and all, how will I get another flight? I have to take the police chief the envelope.
I assure the receptionist I’ll be back.
I cab it to Kalantari 27, where activity has quadrupled since last night. The guards
at the door frisk me. I head up to see the chief.
The chief is out on patrol. Instead, I get a sergeant. I explain my situation—the
hotel, the flight, the body. He dunks a sugar cube in his tea and shuts his eyelids
for two whole seconds. He reopens them, nodding his head slightly. He takes a sip
of his tea and goes on with his business.
At eight-thirty the chief shows up and heads to his office. He closes the door before
I can get a word in. He’s a short man—that’s all I have time to absorb.
Just after ten o’clock, the chief opens his door. He twitches his index finger to
call me into the room.
‘So you had nothing to do with the man’s death?’ He asks.
‘The man,’ I say. ‘My dad.’
‘Hmm,’ he says. ‘Son, do you know how many family homicide cases I’ve done?’ He
says this so dramatically I have to stifle a laugh. He squints his eyes and studies
me. I’m too worn out to protest. I just have to wait until he’s done X-raying my
mind.
He asks me to go through the events again. I walk him through them. As I speak, he
cross-checks my story against the statement taken yesterday by the burglary detective
who was so ‘out of his depth’.
‘So you didn’t hit your father?’ the chief says.
I’m stunned. ‘What?’
‘Says here you were hitting your father.’
‘Oh, no, no,’ I say. ‘That was a reaction. I wanted to wake him up, you see.’
‘Have you had physical altercations with your father before?’
‘No!’ I say. ‘I hit him because he was dead and I didn’t want him to be dead.’
He opens his drawer, takes out a stamp and stamps the statement. He scribbles a
note on the paper.
‘Take this to the coroner’s,’ he says. ‘This is not your release yet. Since you’re
a foreigner and your father was an important man abroad, I’m taking extra caution.
I need an official cause of death. If the cause of death is consistent with your
statement, I will sign the release to the morgue so they can give you a burial permit.
Then you can take it from there.’
I thank him and rush out. I hail a cab outside the Kalantari. It stops for me. Good
news: I just have to shout ‘coroner’ and the driver flings open the door.
There’s a long line at the coroner’s. I line up behind everyone else. Forty minutes
later, a man behind the counter takes the paper the chief gave me and goes out to
search for my file. He comes back with the death certificate and tells me to take
it back to the Kalantari.
I run out and find a taxi. It’s way past my checkout time. I call information, get
the hotel’s number and talk to the receptionist. He tells me the people who have
booked the room are on their way.
Could he take my belongings out? I ask him.
He consults with a supervisor, then confirms: this, they can do.
I hang up and read the cause of death. Cardiac arrest. The last paragraph catches
my eye: ‘The tall male was of excellent hygiene.’ Why would they include that? It’s
tattooed on my mind.
Back at the Kalantari, it only takes the chief another thirty-eight minutes to open
his office door. He stamps the paper and wishes me well. ‘I could tell you are not
the kind who would kill his father, but my instinct has been off since my divorce.’
He hopes there are no hard feelings.
Back to the coroner’s again.
Official closing time is 4 pm. It’s after three by now. My flight’s at seven-fifty.
I can’t focus on that right now.
At the coroner’s, the guard tells me to come back in the morning. I explain my situation
as rapidly as I can. He goes inside and talks to the man who found the death certificate.
The man recognises me, and nods his head. I sit down in the hall. A lot of people
are waiting. I hear causes of death called. Every one is drug-related, no matter
how old people are.
Finally, I hear my name. I head to the counter.
‘Where are the court papers?’ the man says, clapping once and showing me his palms.
‘What court papers?’ I ask.
‘These are the police papers. Isn’t your father a foreign national?’
‘Yes, but no one told me—’
‘Didn’t I tell you to take the death certificate to the courts? I think I told you.’
‘No, sir, you did not.’
‘Well. You have to take the chief’s paper and get it released through the court.’
‘I have a visa expiring on Saturday.’
‘Don’t get rowdy, just do as I say.’
‘They’ll be shut today.’
‘So do it tomorrow. Don’t complicate things.’
‘I have to fly back to Qom tonight, I haven’t got a place to stay—’
‘You think you’re the only one with problems?’
I can’t think. I just take the chief’s stamped statement and take a taxi back to
the hotel. More than a day has passed and I still haven’t told Mum. I want to be
sure what’s happening first, but the pressure’s mounting.
The hotel manager apologises for being unable to accommodate me tonight; the religious
festival means the whole city’s booked out. I take Dad’s suitcase and walking stick,
and head out in search of a room for the night.
It’s just after 7 pm and my body’s shutting down. I’ve barely slept in days, and
haven’t had anything to eat in all this time; nothing to drink either, except the
glass of water at the hospital last night. I stop at a felafel stand and grab two
sandwiches. I remember the last felafel stand—not so long ago, Dad was
giving a man
who was down on his luck some money. I wonder where he is right now. What he and
his children are doing. I check the time and swallow the sandwiches. I don’t even
feel them go down, so I order another two. I down those with little chewing.
Five sandwiches later, I go hotel hunting again. I try more than thirty hotels, motels,
hotels, serviced apartments—nothing. I look at my watch again. It’s midnight already.
Snow falls, stiffening the tips of my fingers. I must’ve walked over twenty kilometres,
wearing a backpack, dragging luggage. I have to take a gamble. I cab it back to our
old hotel.
I casually enter the lobby and collapse on the couch. It’s
incredibly
comfortable.
I sink right in, feeling the enervation drain out. The staff here know me; they know
I have no reservation for the night. I look nervously at the receptionist. He catches
my glance for half a second. He gives me a slight nod, gets back to his business,
and lets me close my eyes.
Qom, Iran, 1995
For Shiites, Qom was one of the holiest cities in Iran. It was home to the prestigious
hawza ’ilmiyya
, the largest Shiite seminary in the world, and the shrine to Hazrat
Ma’sooma—the eighth imam’s sister, and also the granddaughter of the Prophet.
In other words, it was turban festival. It’s also where my family moved after the
eight-year war. You don’t have to be a geography enthusiast to see how bizarre this
would be to a seven-year-old kid. During the war, we lived in Abadan, on the Iraqi
border, always feeling the mortar shells caress our ears. And now, here we were,
in central Iran, about 200 kilometres from Tehran—probably the safest place we could’ve
been during the war, which now happened to be over.
But I wasn’t a seven-year-old kid anymore. I was officially a teen. I’d been the
man of the house since age four, I’d smoked my first cigarette at seven, and I knew
how to assemble and dismantle a Kalashnikov by eleven.
Dad was doing pretty well; he was now a qualified cleric. He taught at the
hawza
’ilmiyya
for 800 tomans a day, and lectured in Arabic Literature at the University
of Tehran. But 800 tomans is only about forty cents Australian, so the more things
changed, the more they’d stayed the same. We’d moved houses six times in Qom since
the war had ended. Nowadays, Mum and Dad, my two brothers and little sister and I
were renting someone’s basement.
Growing up in a family dominated by Arab speech, my Farsi wasn’t anywhere near as
good as the other kids’, and Dad had an uphill battle finding me a school. At meeting
after meeting, schools routinely rejected me, despite my eager recital of a Hafiz
poem I knew by heart (not that I had any idea of its meaning).
Eventually, a teacher by the name of Mr Rashidi intervened and took pity on me. He
loved Dad’s love of the arts and theatre; he loved that Dad was a
different
man of
the cloth. Once enrolled, I picked up Farsi in no time.
What’s more, I performed in every school play Mr Rashidi had written, and he even
had me over for dinner a bunch of times. One night, when his wife had cooked
qormeh
sabzi
—a traditional Persian herb stew, absolutely mouth-watering—Mr Rashidi offered
me a drag on one of his Marlboros. Mr Rashidi had lost his one and only son during
the war, a thirteen-year-old who’d enlisted as a minefield-clearer. He cleared one
mine. Perhaps because of this, Mr Rashidi treated me as an adult; he was always happy
to discuss complicated politics, and even fantasised openly about what it would be
like to stage an uncensored showcase of
Romeo and Juliet
in Iran.
The night he offered me the Marlboro, he must have felt particularly close to me.
He started talking about his fondness for liquor.
Before the Ayatollah Khomeini revolution, during the Shah era, he’d tasted what he
called the Mister John Walker.
‘The Mister Walker is one that plonks you out with happy dreams,’ he said, dreamily.
‘Dreams of freedom and the smell of air without blood…’ There was a glitter in his
gaze. ‘It’s also good for your eyes,’ he confided. ‘You start seeing your wife in
ways you never had before. You’ll see the super goggles I’m talking about when you
grow up.’
‘Does Mister Walker make your wife less older?’ I asked. Mr Rashidi’s wife was noticeably
his senior.
‘Yes, Osamah,’ he said wistfully. ‘It takes a decade off her. And that’s only one
benefit.’
I sat there, amazed and astonished and feeling important, having been worthy of my
teacher’s sharing a punishable secret with me. If anyone else had heard such a confession
in Iran, he’d have been sacked and imprisoned and, naturally, tortured. I felt an
admiration for this rebel of a man, more than any religious authority I’d been brought
up to worship. I felt cool, in other words. He puffed cigarette smoke out his nose,
and gestured to his pack of Marlboros.
‘Osamah, my boy, don’t think this stuff’s what’s gonna kill you. There’s a stronger
killer, something that suffocates you stronger than the gas. When you grow up, you’ll
know what I mean,’ he said, again, mysteriously.
‘Why do I have to learn everything when I grow up?’ I asked him. ‘Why can’t I just
know now?’
Mr Rashidi just patted my shaved head, got up and walked into the kitchen, still
beaming his signature smile. He kissed his wife on the shoulder and made his way
to the fridge. He retrieved a bottle of Mister John Walker, an illegal import, no
doubt, walked to the front door, opened it, and stepped out onto the street.
I watched him look over the street, impassively, pour the bottle on himself, shout,
‘God is Great!’ and then self-immolate. He was flapping as the flames engulfed him,
but his wife flapped even harder, helpless and screaming. There was nothing she could
do. I just watched Mr Rashidi until he dropped onto the concrete. I read the Koran,
silently, to brighten his burned soul.
Mr Rashidi was still fresh in his grave when the surviving teachers began to routinely
belt the socks off me. Other kids got beaten too, but I was an Arab, and so I had
to cop a lot of discipline.
The necessity for discipline made the teachers work hard. The ever-growing need for
new and interesting torture techniques opened their imaginations, fuelled their creativities.
Instruments ranged from the wooden ruler to the garden hose to the electric cable,
applied as needed to the knuckles or the bare soles of the feet. This was not as
fun as I am making it out to be. The fun part was walking home if it was snowing;
with your feet fresh from the lashings, it was a blessing to be numb. It still stung,
but it dulled your pain receptors.
If your hair was long enough that a teacher could grip it in their fingers, it was
deemed too long, inspiring them to perform what they dubbed an ‘intersection’.
I detested shaved, short hair.
Not from vanity. I’d seen too many dead soldiers on the street, and shaved heads
were the one thing they had in common. I always pushed it, growing my hair to three
centimetres’ length. But you had to be careful: nothing delighted the teachers more
than hair long enough to grip and twist between their fingers. Or, almost nothing.
They also took special pleasure in the intersections. This involved shaving in a
cross-shape, leaving four
patches of longer hair, causing strangers by the side of
the road to call cruel and droll remarks on your walk home, mainly about watching
your step when you crossed the intersection. ‘Nice grass patches! Can sheep herd
on them?’
The thing about kids is that they’re prone to forget things. This is just how kids
are built. It’s the reason you have to punish them, the reason you have rules, but
it’s also the reason they’ll keep breaking them, over and over, and the reason your
punishments can’t be uniformly brutal. Like the day I went to school in a short-sleeved
shirt.
The day was warmer than usual—beautiful, but hot. I forgot short sleeves were banned,
I really just did.
The schoolmaster yelled like a dragon. I saw the fire come out his nose. He called
me into his office, saying I needed to be taught to behave. He said I was a no-good,
trouble-making Arab. His frog-like lips always made me giggle inside.
He opened up his filing cabinet and pushed me inside. My shoulders touched the edges;
my head crammed against the roof.
At recess and lunch I was so hungry, I wanted to ask for my lunchbox, but I didn’t
dare. He didn’t let me out until long after the last bell rang, and everybody else
had long ago gone home. I was so scared in that dark box I peed my pants.
Dad thought I was destined to become a cleric to lead the people, so he’d take me
with him to the
hawza
to complete my schooling. It sounds grand, but in practice
this meant sitting under the pulpit for endless hours, listening to lectures delivered
by the white-bearded imams.
One such lecture, imaginatively titled ‘Masturbation Is a Sin’, prompted me to join
the circle of young men who always gathered afterwards to ask the imam questions.
‘What if I have this friend who masturbates but does not reach climax. Is that still
a sin?’ asked a horny teenager with pimples on his nose.
‘Yes, son,’ preached the imam. ‘Any form of self-pleasure is a sin.’
‘What if this person, like my friend, is in bed and he doesn’t really know if he’s
dreaming or awake? Can he keep rubbing against the bed?’
‘No, son,’ the imam firmly said. ‘Unless it is entirely and solely a wet dream, then
it is a sin to continue to rub oneself against the mattress or any part of the bed
thereof.’
Another boy raised his hand. ‘What if a guy I knew inadvertently bumped into a girl
at the mall, by
complete
accident, got an erection, and then tried to do the gentlemanly
thing by pushing the erection into his pants, using his hand, and in doing so, reached
climax?’
You had to hand it to the imams. They always answered questions like these systematically
and resourcefully. And although their faces were as wrinkly as old paper bags, it’s
one of life’s great mysteries how they kept straight faces at times like these.
While the boys kept up their best attempts to find some religious loophole that would
allow them, definitively, to masturbate without guilt, Dad came in and excused me
from the imam question time.
‘You’re too young to sit in these lectures,’ he said. To make up for it, he promised
to take me to my favourite juice bar, and then to the bookstore, where I’d be allowed
to pick any three books of my choice. He also told me he’d enrolled me at the Kanoon
Parvaresh Fekri—Iran’s leading arts institute—for the fourth year running.
All of this news was uniformly excellent. At the Kanoon, I learned literature and
was able to write poetry; I went there to express my rage, and was encouraged to
do so. It was more exciting than the illegally imported poster of Pamela Anderson
my cousin had shown me under cover of darkness one night, and it definitely gave
me a higher high than the imam’s masturbation seminars.
We walked towards the rusty gates of the
hawza
to collect Dad’s motorbike. Dusk was
sneaking down on Qom; the moon had just crept into the sky, getting ready to take
over for full-blown night shift. In its low light, we spotted two policemen ordering
a tow truck to take away Dad’s motorbike. Dad ran towards them, which wasn’t easy
in full religious garb.
‘Lieutenant! Please! I’m here!’
‘Cleric, Your Reverence, is this your bike?’ an officer asked. You could hear the
effort it took to put respect into his voice.
‘Yes,’ Dad confirmed, shaking both the officers’ hands and offering them a tired
smile. ‘Please don’t tow it away.’
‘You are Arab?’ quizzed the officer. He’d picked up Dad’s broken accent.
Dad and I had witnessed this scene many times before. ‘I am a citizen of this earth
and your fellow brother in humanity,’ Dad replied.
‘So you are Arab,’ said the officer. ‘This is a disabled veterans parking zone,
cleric
.
You are a man of the cloth and should know it is a sin to take someone else’s spot
illegally…’
‘I
am
a veteran,’ Dad responded, taking out an ID card.
‘A disabled veteran?’ asked the officer. ‘You don’t seem all that wounded. Unless
you’re wearing a prosthetic leg under that garb.’
Dad was trying to keep his cool; he was better at it than I was. But he knew how
to push his case, when to take a stronger
tone. ‘Are you suggesting that a person
who served eight weeks, got wounded and then never served again is more entitled
to this spot than a person who watched thirty-two changes of season on the front
line?’
‘Of course! He lost a limb!’
‘And we lost our minds, lieutenant.’
‘How do I even know you were not like those traitor Arabs who played both sides?’
the officer muttered. ‘Might explain why you left the war unscathed…’
Dad’s eye twitched. His lip quivered. For a minute, I thought my stoic, ice-cool
father was about to take the policeman’s rifle and knock him out with it.
Then he smiled at the officer, and wished him a good day instead. Our plans for juice
bars and bookstores were not brought up again; we needed the money to free the motorbike
from the police yard.
Today, the snow had coloured the whole city perfect white, and everyone was walking
cautiously across the spongy carpet, in mutual agreement to keep all of Qom virgin-white.
My cousin Musty and I were walking to the holy shrine, tiptoeing across the thick
snow. We were discussing alcohol, naturally.
‘When you grow up, do you think you’ll try it?’ Musty asked.
I considered the question thoroughly. ‘Only if I was alone and stranded on an island.’
‘That’s so stupid,’ Musty said. ‘Where would you get the alcohol?’
‘
You’re
stupid! In any other situation Mum and Dad would be nearby.’
Alcohol in Qom was sold in seedy underground markets, usually someone’s old war bunker.
I was the son of a cleric, my
cousin was the son of a cleric and another set of cousins
had been born into another family of clerics. In other words, access to these merchants
was out of the question.
We had heard about a Mr X, which was bizarre, seeing as the letter X does not exist
in the Persian alphabet. He ran a legitimate business near the shrine selling pictures
of the Ayatollah, which was as profitable in a place like Qom as fish and chips in
London. But he also had a storage space behind the religious photos, where he plied
another trade that was more interesting to teenagers.
My cousins and I tried hard to look like ordinary citizens, ones without religious
parents. We wore huge silver chains around our necks, thinking these gave us a reckless
look. When Musty and I got up the courage to walk into Mr X’s shop, we amplified
our thuggishness by undoing the top buttons of our shirts, straw hanging out the
sides of our mouths like regular John Waynes.