Or Life in the Fast Lane
It’s always very humbling to visit my in-laws – they are all doctors, dentists and architects, when they aren’t researchers, engineers and university professors. They of course all speak several languages and have travelled to more countries than I’ll ever visit, but nonetheless seem content to be temporarily saddled with their foreign visitor.
Being a guest in Iran is a twenty-four hour job.
I am hastily herded into the tiniest scraps of shade, continually plied with drinks to prevent me wilting, as if I am in constant peril of keeling over in the heat, dying of thirst or getting clipped by a speeding car – or all three at once. Regularly admonished for looking like I want to cross the street on my own, if I so much look like I am entertaining that ridiculous notion, half a dozen in-laws will immediately thread their way through and impenetrable moving wall of vehicles and, gripping my elbows in a manner that shows their concern isn’t to be taken lightly, will escort me across.
Tehran is about twice the population of Switzerland, and with gasoline at 10 cents a litre, that puts just about everything that runs on the road, usually coming in your direction.
The city is so huge that entire villages have been swallowed whole – one-story adobe houses, with sheep in orchards, will suddenly appear alongside a freeway, besieged by phalanxes of apartment blocks. Any shopping or sightseeing expedition means hours in transit, usually at a great speed and mere inches away from other vehicles.
Drivers in Tehran are likely the best in the world, which of course makes taxi drivers the best of those (though there are several serious contestants in my wife’s family). Driving in Tehran is like a stock car race with scooters and pedestrians added. (Imagine Paris at its bumper-to-bumper best then triple that and speed up the film.) Taxi fares are negotiated in advance (with me some distance away, feigning indifference, since prices double as soon as I appear). The instant the doors shut, the trip is a kaliedoscope of fleeting flashes of pedestrians and other vehicles, all missed by a hair’s-breadth. It’s quite… exhilarating to say the least.
After a week or so, my wife is fed up with her role as bodyguard and I am able to escape occasionally and stroll about by myself, but Tehran is worse than L.A. for the pedestrian, sorry, the automotively challenged, so I end up on long walks between 8-lane freeways and abandoned lots, rocks in my pockets if the odd stray dog comes too close. Every now and then a car pulls over and somemone leans out with a scrap of paper seeking an address (even Tehranis get lost in Tehran, it’s so huge) and I shrug and mumble something and they drive off, doubtless to regale the family that evening with the story of this curious foreigner out all by himself, and without a car to boot.
Of course my wife always generously bestows upon me a handful of banknotes, at which point I think “Yes! Temporary solvency and financial independance are mine mine mine!” until it dawns on me that my pocketful of money – remember per-Euro Italy? – will buy me about a coffee and a half and I am once more reduced to begging her intervention for the smallest purchase. Speaking of which, she always negotiates while I loiter out of view, as prices always triple as soon as I set foot in a shop.
I love the bookshops. Their shelves not only have the most beautiful picture books, which I generally buy a number of, if only to give myself a suitcase worthy of wrestling with for the return trip , but sport every author from Hedayat, Hemingway and Hafez to Hilary Clinton (yes, hubby Bill’s bio is there too) and the latest Harry Potter, all in Persian, months and months before they appear here in French or German.
But, the favourite place for this foreigner to linger is in the bazaar. I’m happy to loiter at any corner (keeping one eye on the alert for the porters with their carts or packs, which respectively bodycheck you into a neighbouring stall or clip your shins, sending you hopping and limping into a neighbouring stall) and just watch people go by. It is an ever-moving gallery of extraordinary portraits. I could spend days there.
I wonder if this tendancy to try to retain snapshots of what I see is normal or if it is something that the era of the instamatic has bequeathed us. Before the invention of cameras, painters snapped far slower portraits, composed as much of the essence of the subject as of its surfaces. How much of what we see of the world is snapshots rather than the product of a deeper regard ? Whatever, despite my musings on ocular philosophy, I happily loiter just about anywhere and click click click away with the shutter of my mind’s eye…
But then my wife reminded me that I was (stupidly) loitering in the sun and did I want to keel over and die of sunstroke and wasn’t I thirsty and watch out for that trolley and could I hurry up because we have a taxi to go catch.
Back to life as usual.
In the slow lane.
I won’t bore you with my vacation photos, but here are a couple..
