Hookah Days, Henna Nights

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The Muslim checklist wascomplete -- each man had three fistfuls of beard, colourful turbans and trousers that hung just above their ankles. And in an autumn morning visit to the town, in the height of his regime, Shah was moved by the devouts. With his fetish for changing town names, he christened it Zahedan, the city of devots. But Shah had just committed another error of judgement—the men were sikhs and not muslims. The ancient city town once hosted large number of sikhs and the town was called Dozda (thieves) with locals offering many explanations for the name. The more likely explanation is that the city was resting place of thieves and other and much more romantic explanation was the rain soaked water straight through the soil, thereby the ground stole by the water like a thief. The town lived up to its early name during the recent earth quakes when 90,000 tents of the Iranian Red Crescent for the victims were stolen from the town allegedly by the Balluchis. A much more personal explanation for calling it city of thieves is the Zahedan Tourist Inn, where we checked in, which rips foreign tourists off with $147 rooms! Today the town has lost its commercial importance, but has gained strategic prominence as the capital of trouble-torn Sistan and Balochistan province, the only legal crossing point between Pakistan and Afghanistan. A city that will figure more in Wikileaks than in Wikipaedia! As we land in Zahedan, the temperature on the ground is announced as zero degrees. Mahanair (Maha Nair, if you like), flight with shark-grey underneath lands among IL-62s. The Zahedan Tourist Inn is antiseptically clean. Three electric lamps hang low on the counter, making the counter clerks look like chicks in an incubator. Only food available for dinner is “vegetable pizza”. The first dinner in Iran is spoilt. Death to Amrika, Death to vegetable pizza! The only computer with internet connections is slow and Facebook is still faceless. Burqabook, I sigh!

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Try talking to them. Their goofy faces break into girlishness. “I like Shah Rukh Khan but Hindi movies always have similar endings,” says Aida, a part-time school teacher and master’s student in English literature. “Here everyone wants to learn English. Persian is a great language, but English will help you to go places,” she adds. We walk around in the night, allegedly a dangerous thing to do in Zahedan. The policemen in the street keep advising us to go back to the hotel. A lonely tea shop with countless hookah gives us refuge.

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Kerman is ISBT for all those drug peddling camels in the region. They imitate homing pigeon, but at a lesser RPM. Kilogrammes of opiates are surgically inserted into their humps and are left to walk from border to pre-determined places in Kerman. The camels are giving a tough challenge to Iran’s $400 million war on drugs.

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While moving towards Kerman, one gets to cross cultural borders separating the Persians of the central plateaus and the Baluchis, who resemble Pakistanis more than Iranians. Trailing caravan routes of forbidding Dasht-e-Lut, the grey desert is scrambled with flat-top mountains. On the way to Kerman, we share breakfast with a local tribe. We sit around the food, and eleven or twelve of us start eating. There is honey, cheese, minted milk, bread and dates, almost violet in colour. “Hope you like our curd,” says Mustafa, after we finish our olives and order more cheese. Mustafa claims to be hundred-and-three years old but looks much-much younger. Outside Baluchi soldiers in camouflage salwar kameez roam around drinking minted milk. A lonely soldier stands close to wild flowers, as if he is part of a bouquet, ready to be plucked. Kerman is home of the Sufi mystic Moshtaq Ali Shah. The man who added a fourth string to the Setar (literally meaning three stringed instruments). He fell out of favour with local mullahs and was stoned to death after Friday prayers. One can pay homage to the Sufi master at Moshtari-Ye Moshtaq Ali Shah. Kerman National library boasts itself as informational technology centre. But it will floor you with its architecture. A forest of columns supported by vaulted ceilings. The Qajar-era design was purpose built as a textile factory! Wish Coimbatore had Qajar architects.

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The Museum of Holy Defence commemorates Iran’s eight year war with her neighbour. Last letters of soldiers, bloodied uniforms, kalashnikovs, documents from war and an animated model of Karbala V, a celebrated battle. In a glass box the broken hands of the Shah from a mutilated statue are exhibited with vengeance. The Shah’s middle finger is pointed up, in lingua-franca of anger, at the visitors and of course, at the current regime. A college-goer with a well-barbered head appears offering help in English. “See the regime of Shah was important to our generation. The Islamic revolution helped to change his regime and bring in new hope for Iranians,” he says. Then he moves closes and adds “though I don’t believe so”. He’s the man to get chatting with. “How good is my English? I am a student of English literature.” I give him six out of ten and give myself two of ten for uninhibited talk with a absolute stranger.

“I like India, its people and its movies,” he says, a standard line you get to hear often. “Here we are under oppressive rule. We don’t have the freedom to live life as we want. If we speak against the volunteers, we face a tough time,” he says. He recounts the story of a friend who was picked up for his political leanings. “For three days, we didn’t know where he was. Later he turned, badly beaten up.”

He talks about his girlfriend. “She is sweet but stubborn at times,” he says. “In campus if you talk to girls for long the security guards will warn you. We talk to each other through SMS,” he says. Though it never occured to me to disbelieve the stuff he told me, he opens his message inbox to prove the point. “From where you got that funny shirt,” reads the message.

He opens up and goes on with all sort of queries, from mating habits of sub-continent’s adult population to shooting skills of cops in Hindi movies. “See sex and love are important to human beings. We are deprived of all these,” he insists. At times he looks like a victim of Letah, the Malaysian hysterical condition, whereby victims become convinced that their penis was about to shrink inside their body. My only hobby now is smoking,” he says. “May be I don’t need sex. My Government fucks me every day”.