Iran Snapshots: Riot in Thieves Alley; Part 3

theguardian.com

I drove out the alley and onto the big meidan. By now my heart was in my mouth and I was doing a hormonal sprint through a number of emotions. Stunned indignation hurled past, bitter humiliation came into view and was suddenly replaced with anger and disbelief. A nasty sense of injury and injustice settled in. As I was about to come off the roundabout onto the boulevard that would take me away towards the mountains and north Tehran where I lived, I knew I would go mad if I just went home.

As a woman I was subjected to endless annoying intrusions every time I was out in public, but this was not governmental and this was not political, and I would need to deal with it if I wanted to live with myself in the next few days. I would not get any sympathy at home, where the understanding was that wandering as I did, way too often and way too far south in the city, would bring with it such colourful experiences.

So I drove back into Thieves Alley, heading straight to a shop where they knew me as a regular customer. I was by now in the grip of hiccupping sobs. I was so angry, I was convulsing. The shopkeeper’s assistant, a bearded older man, greeted me with surprise. I told him about the incident.

And here something happened, something that took me beyond nostalgia – an idea, a story heard at another time, in another dimension, before my departure, before the revolution, before my return, came back to me and threw itself out in a phrase I could not recall hearing and had certainly never used in a lifetime of changes.

“I am not leaving this place until I see your neighbourhood’s hakam. I have been insulted and I will not leave until something is done. Who is the hakam of this neighbourhood? Where is he?”

I was demanding recourse through the old, traditional system of neighbourhood governance. The hakam, the concept I had spewed out from deep inside a memory long thought to be lost, is a kind of elder, a mediator. I had heard from my father that old Tehran neighbourhoods had their own systems of surviving amid new urban lifestyles. There would be a father figure, a wise one, much like there were in rural areas, to whom you could go for casual citizen mediation, to avoid the formal legal system. Before legal systems even existed, the hakam would work to reconcile feuding neighbours or aggrieved family members.

Mr M, the owner of the shop, told Ghasem, the assistant, to run out. First to get the lady a sweet drink, since she clearly looked pale and in need of something sugary as a pick-up, and then to go and get “Haj Agha”. Having put a bottle of chilled Canada Dry orange soda in my hand, Ghasem went out again to return just five minutes later. He called me onto the street where a well-built man of about 50 with salt-and-pepper stubble was walking towards us.

He wore his shirt over his trousers in the manner of those we call hezbollahis, fervently devout adherents of the regime. But he also wore a tailored suit jacket that made him seem more modern – maybe a merchant, or certainly someone who was not averse to the idea of a suit every now and then on special occasions, say a wedding. In one hand he twiddled some worry beads – he could be religious, or simply trying to quit smoking. But then there were his agate rings, tilting his appearance towards the devout again.

But hold on, what about the shoes? He was wearing woven cotton giveh, the traditional shoes of the Iranian rural proletariat, made unisex by cool urbanites with a hippy-trippy bent like myself. So it was hard to place him.

Years later, had I seen the same man in the street demonstrations after the 2009 election I would have run the other way, he looked so much like a high-ranking member of the Basij. But there was the air of a different archetype from old Tehran about him. It was in the way he walked – not busy and brusque and wary, but like a man who felt connected to the pavement he traversed, his steps sure and unhurried. I could imagine him dressed in the costume of another neighbourhood character from popular Iranian cinema before the revolution, the looti, the thug with a heart who wore a chapeau, drank and was wayward but stepped in to save the honour of his people.

Ghasem quickly and respectfully relayed the events. Haj Agha looked at me and gestured that I should follow him. He didn’t speak, just made a motion that we should go together into the side alley. By this time I was losing adrenalin, the sugar from the fizzy drink was kicking in and my need for justice was subsiding in reverse ratio.

“I think maybe I shouldn’t go back in there again,” I suggested helpfully.

“Natars! Biya! Man bahatam!” Don’t be afraid, I’m with you!

Right! And so we went back into the offstreet.

The little koucheh was completely deserted. Not a soul in sight, only broken glass on the asphalt and nothing else. Mr G, the metal scrap seller, was standing by his shop. When he saw Haj Agha he ran towards him. I won’t say he bowed but he was certainly at his most courteous. He corroborated my story and added some details.

“It’s the out-of-towners who are renting from” – he gave a name. “They were very rude to the lady.” He pointed to the broken windows. He didn’t have to say much more. Haj Agha just looked on and all seemed to be understood. Maybe they’d had trouble with this lot before.

Haj Agha stood in the middle of the koucheh, filling the width of the small alley with his presence, and addressed some unspecific window in the building where the culprits lived. He bellowed as if he was declaiming a soliloquy of Rostam’s, hero of the Shahnameh, for an audience in a tea house: “Whoever has broken this sister’s heart, I’ll break his heart. Whoever has brought tears to this sister’s eyes, I’ll bring tears to his. Whoever has been disrespectful to this sister of ours, he will have to face me.”

Then he turned to me and said, “Go home now, sister! Leave it to me!”

I felt like a bit-part actor who had overstayed her cue, uncertain as to what I should do next.