Street Scenes

In the mid-1950s, before I left Iran for school in England, my family lived in an apartment next door to a movie theater. In the summers, we slept on the balconies on the third floor of the building; it was too hot to sleep indoors.  Tehran could predictably reach above 100 degrees Fahrenheit every day, and with no air conditioning, sleep inside was nearly unattainable. 

The theater next door had an outdoor roof terrace where the owners aired films in the summer, and since they had to wait till it was dark, the shows ran quite late. The last show in the summer would end at about midnight, and the crowd from the theater would disperse quickly.  The street would grow quiet with only an occasional car driving by and the street vendors and street dwellers would lay out their bedding on the sidewalk and go to sleep.  During the day, Shah Reza Avenue was a main thoroughfare with considerable road and foot traffic. Before the show, the delicatessen and bakery teemed with people buying sandwiches and pastries to take to the movies with them.  Street vendors lined the sidewalk selling fresh walnuts, chewing gum, and hard candy. The contrast between the bustle of the daytime street and the late-night street was magical; everything shut down, cooled down, and become quiet at midnight.

During the day, there were always aimless young men loitering along the sidewalk. I don’t know what they did to earn a living. The young men who hung about would often start brawling with each other, either over some dispute or out of boredom.  Each would side with his friends against the opponent and they’d shout at each other.  They would make like they were going to hit each other, and their buddies would hold them back.  The two opponents would yell, “Let me go. I’m going to kill him” and make weak attempts to unhand themselves, but clearly they had no intention of really breaking free and fighting. 

But late at night few people lingered. One night, there was a commotion in the street, and oddly, it wasn’t a brawl between men.  This time it was a woman yelling at a man who was getting into a taxi, saying that he had to pay her.  A small crowd materialized from among the street dwellers whose sleep was disturbed, and started to take sides, some against the man, some against the woman. It was unusual for a woman to be out late at night by herself.  This one was wearing a chador, the long veil that covered her from head to foot, but the front was open, and I could see that her clothing was fairly fashionable, not the shapeless dresses a lot of women who wore chadors would have worn.  She didn’t seem concerned about keeping her face covered, and she looked like she had lipstick on. The shouting and shoving went on for a while, and finally the woman’s team managed to settle with the man, and all went their way.  I made no sense of this incident at the time.  It stuck in my memory because it was remarkable for a woman to brawl with a man and because she was out alone late at night.

In Iran in the 1950s, sex was never overtly discussed, and most people knew very little about the biology that drove them.  Gender roles were prescribed based on tradition rather than science.  Men were supposed to do certain things and women certain other things.  For some, I suspect, the connection between copulation and childbearing was a mystery. My parents didn’t tell me the “facts of life” before I left home at the age of twelve.  My father had mentioned something to my older sister, who had imparted the very vague information to me, but when I got my period, I had no idea what was happening. It was not until I was in biology class in the second year of school in England, that anything to do with sexuality started to make sense. It was through this ignorance that I interpreted the world around me.

At the entry to our apartment building, a vendor had set up a kiosk to sell soda, nuts, and candy. After the theater closed at night, the owner of the kiosk and his assistant would shut down, close the door to the building and sleep on the floor in the corridor leading to the stairs.  Often the kiosk owner’s family slept there also. When we came home from a late outing, we would pick our way over sleeping bodies to access the stairs to our apartment. They would wake up and apologize and we would apologize for waking them. It was a very public way of life and nobody thought much about privacy.  In fact, privacy was seldom sought nor was it particularly desired. 

The long hot days of summer were tedious.  Sometimes I would go downstairs and hang about the kiosk in the entryway.  The owner was a congenial man and never seemed to mind us being in his space.  Once when I went downstairs, his assistant was there alone. 

After chatting for a while, he said, “I’ll show you mine if you’ll show me yours.”

I had no clue what he was talking about, but I was curious, so I agreed.  He led me into the back of the corridor, away from the street and proceeded to whip out his penis.

“Your turn,” he said.

I still had no idea what he was after, but a man with his genitals cradled in his palm was not what I had anticipated. I fled upstairs. 

When my mother came home, I told her what had happened.  She stormed downstairs and had the assistant fired. I was surprised by the vehemence of my mother’s reaction, because to me, this wasn’t much different than being groped in the street.  Girls and women lived with perpetual harassment every time they stepped into a public place, getting pinched on the buttocks or having their breasts groped.  I felt responsible for the assistant losing his job—I had never felt I was in danger and was too ignorant to realize the implications.  That said, I think that the young man was also ignorant.  It was probably more a case of curiosity than potential rape.

My parents almost always had clients to entertain. There was a night club and cabaret in the south of Tehran, and that was where clients were taken. It was a large outdoor space with a stage and rows of tables.  Somehow this club, in a seedy neighborhood, managed to bring in dancers and musicians from Europe to perform.  When I returned to Tehran on summer holidays, I was old enough to go with my parents on these dinners. I had been in school in England and had an inkling about prostitution by this time.  It was assumed that the women who performed were also available for sex.  I wondered how desperate they had to be to come all the way to Iran to do their dispirited dances and sell their bodies.  The fact that these women looked like they belonged in the prosperous and enlightened West made it more disconcerting to think about their fates.  As I became more aware, the performances struck me as bleak and hopeless rather than entertaining.

There was a cultural divide between “westernized” and traditional Iranians.  My family, as refugees from an Anglicized Iraq, were not nearly as conservative as traditional Iranians.  It was not always clear which camp people fell in, especially men.  Men could dress and socialize like they were more progressive than they actually were.  Usually, the telling detail was how they treated the women in their families.  If the women were expected to wear chadors and not socialize with men outside their immediate circle, it was a strong indication that the head of the family, father or husband, was traditionally conservative.  There was always tension between the conservative elements and the more progressive factions, and the more spiteful harassment was leveled against women and girls who were deemed immodest or too westernized, although all females were subject to molestation at the hands of these guardians of tradition.

Once when I was back on vacation from boarding school, a client of my father’s invited us to his pool to swim.  The pool was built on vast acreage, and it was the only structure there.  His family did not come, just the client himself.  It was common for the lines of commerce and friendship to overlap, and Iranians are among the most hospitable people in the world.  My mother and the three of us girls, my father and brother were there in bathing suits, as was the host.  We had been under the impression that the client’s family would be there, which was why my father had taken the whole family.  I’m not sure what the client expected, but these half-naked females must have either offended his sense of modesty or really turned him on. I spent the day trying to avoid his pawing.  He was discreet enough to grope me in the pool so my parents wouldn’t notice, but it was a constant game of chase and avoidance.  I suppose he felt I was fair game, even as his colleague’s daughter, since I had the temerity to wear a bathing suit.

 

As I say, sex was never openly discussed when I was growing up in Iran.  However, the subtext of just about every aspect of life was about sex, about keeping women submissive, and about men not having to rein in their urges.  The harassment in the streets was about power. I understand that even now, when all Iranian women are required by government edict to cover up, the harassment hasn’t stopped.  I have often wondered if one of the main areas of contention between the West and Middle Eastern cultures is men’s fear of losing their power. If Middle Eastern women are given the liberties that women in the West have, Middle Eastern men would have to cede some of their dominance.  I’m not naïve enough to believe that sexual harassment doesn’t exist all over the world, but in the Middle East, it was (and is) an entrenched and accepted view of the world order. It has always bewildered me that men seem to distrust their own urges, but their remedy is to squelch women’s freedoms.  It is unimaginable to me that these urges are so overwhelming that they are completely unmanageable, and that women are the ones who have to sacrifice for them.