remaining foodstuffs in the
Ricardo and I thought it was fantastic, and it sure made a welcome change from all the kebabs and rice. To accompany the
The music was great and there were lots of people clapping hands and clicking their fingers in time with the music. There are several ways Iranians click their fingers all of which I found very difficult. The most popular method is to put your hands together as if praying, then slightly raise your two forefingers and push one against the other in opposite directions to cause the one pushing down to “click” onto your fingers below. It wasn’t easy, and after much perseverance, I only managed to get a very insignificant click. Leyla and her mother had it down to a tee and could produce the loudest of snaps this way. They showed Ricardo and me several other finger clicking methods, but those were even harder to do.
Leyla’s mother explained that the music’s lyrics, like most traditional Iranian songs, were very melancholy. It was a song of regret for a person loved but lost, and this, she said, was a recurring theme in many Iranian songs. On the more modern music front, Leyla said that she’d looked into a governmentsanctioned rap or rock concert to take us both to, but Ricardo was flying out tomorrow for the historic city of Esfahan, so it was not possible. It made a hell of a lot of sense to fly considering the distances involved, and as Ricardo said it was fairly cheap, I decided to look into it myself.
After the meal, Ricardo and I gave the water pipe a go. The tobacco in the pipe had a fruity flavor, and predictably, Ricardo was far better at smoking the stuff than I was. I couldn’t get the water to bubble and as a result breathed very little smoke, maybe a good thing.
We stayed in the restaurant until closing time and no prizes for guessing who insisted on paying. When we finally left, all the staff wished us good night and insisted on shaking hands with Ricardo and me.
In the cab heading to Ricardo’s hotel in the south of the city, I had an interesting conversation with Leyla’s mother. I asked her if there were many other traditional Iranian restaurants in Tehran like the one we’d been to tonight. She said there were only a few that were comparable, but one in particular she would never visit because of its location. It was called, I think, the Persian equivalent of Seventh Heaven. Very few people knew, she explained, that it was actually located beneath a prison used for torturing political prisoners. Quite understandably, she said that the thought of having a celebratory meal whilst people were being tortured upstairs was sick. She went on to tell me that on the rare occasions the prisoners were allowed a family visit, these were conducted nearby in what she described as a “Lunar Park,” which I took to mean a fairground or theme park, purely to make it more traumatic for all involved.
Just around the corner from Ricardo’s hotel was a huge square called… you guessed it, Imam Khomeini Square. In the center of the square along with lots of cheerfully colored lights was a large replica of the black cloth-covered cube-shaped shrine in Mecca, known as the Ka’ba. Rather at odds with this was a display around the edge of the square that contained a number of massive missiles complete with mobile truck launchers. They looked just like the Scuds I’d seen on television during the first Gulf War. Next to a couple of the missiles was a vast banner of Iran’s current supreme religious leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who is the true holder of Iran’s executive power, with the president ranking number two in the country’s political hierarchy. The Iranian president’s status is very different to that of a U.S. president. He is not the commander-in-chief of the country’s armed forces, and does not have the authority to set policies which fall outside the parameters approved by the true rulers of the country, the ayatollahs.
Before dropping Ricardo off, Leyla and I arranged to come pick him up in the morning in a taxi and to go around the city’s sprawling bazaar together.
It was well past midnight by the time we arrived at Pedram’s place, so I ended up phoning him on Leyla’s cell so as not to wake his parents. Predictably, the poor bugger sounded like I’d woken him up. Apologies flowed from me for being so late, but he didn’t seem to mind and he showed me to his room where a spare bed was waiting for me. Before we hit the sack, I invited him to come along with us to the bazaar tomorrow. He gave me a slightly perplexed look and said that there was no need for us to get a cab because he’d drive us all there but that he thought the bazaar a very strange location for us to visit. He probably thought a lovely computer shop would be more appropriate for foreign visitors.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
“Jamie, we’re gonna have to get a taxi instead,” Leyla turned to me and said from the back of Pedram’s car as we careened through the streets of northern Tehran.
Soon after setting off together for the bazaar, it had become apparent that there was something of a personality clash between Leyla and Pedram. This had boiled over into a heated discussion in Farsi culminating in Leyla’s comment to me. I had no idea what was going on and felt somewhat caught in the middle. I was staying at Pedram’s house and therefore felt obliged to spend time with him, but on the other hand had also promised to go out with Leyla and Ricardo, whose last day it was in Tehran.
Pedram pulled over, and as Leyla and I got out, he asked me to call him later in the day. As his car wheels spun off, disappearing into the torrent of traffic racing along the road, Leyla gave me her take on the situation. Pedram, she said, had wanted to go and pick up a CD at his friend’s house in the north of the city and didn’t really want to go to the bazaar with us but wouldn’t admit it. She said that by the time we’d gone all the way to his friend’s place it would be too late to see Ricardo. She added that she thought Pedram was an idiot.
Without further ado, we headed to a little taxicab office, which Leyla had a special prepaid taxi card for. When the driver asked our location, she said “Imam Khomeini Square.” The driver turned around and said something in Farsi. She translated, saying that he’d told her not to call it Imam Khomeini Square as Khomeini was no Imam and had no right to use the title. He clearly didn’t like Khomeini but told her this in a friendly enough way. We got down to the square, driving past the missiles and other displays we’d seen the night before.
After going around in circles for a bit, we managed to locate Ricardo’s hotel, where he was waiting outside. With Ricardo on board, we headed for the bazaar. On the way there, our taxi approached a mullah, standing by the side of a the road. On approaching the mullah, the taxi driver slowed down and yelled something at him through the open window. Leyla began laughing herself silly and took a minute to compose herself before she managed to translate: “I hope all the shit in the world falls down on you and washes you away.”
Ricardo and I were hugely surprised at the driver’s audacity and apparent fearlessness in abusing the establishment. He then went on to say, Leyla translated for us, that his dream was to see all the mullahs hanging from the trees, and to one day see them walk naked through the streets. He continued and told us that mullahs find it very difficult to get a taxi in Tehran as none of the drivers will pick them up. He was a real character and told Leyla to tell Ricardo and me to inform everybody about this when we got back to our own countries. He shook our hands warmly with a huge beaming smile as we left the car for the sprawling bazaar.
Although our taxi driver was fervently against the government, there was, apparently, a lot of support for the establishment amongst the men running the Tehran Bazaar, which we were about to enter. These men are, on the whole, extremely wealthy, well-connected individuals who wield a massive collective political power, with the vast majority of them being ultraconservative in both religion and politics. Traditionally, the Tehran Bazaar is the Iranian equivalent of Wall Street, where staple commodity prices are fixed. Some estimates put Tehran’s Bazaar in control of up to a third of the country’s total trade and retail output. And many bazaar merchants, the
