Outside of the box (An Iranian Story)
Based on a true story
It was another hot August morning in Tehran, choked with thick smog. Gordia was sitting on a long cement bench beside a bunch of Kurdish and Afghani men under a noisy highway bridge. She was forty-two years old with short, straight salt and pepper hair, and in men’s clothing. She looked like a nineteen year-old boy and everyone on the street knew her as Gol-Agha. She placed one leg over the other and lit a second cigarette. Most of the men were carrying small bags of heroine or lighter drugs for sale. She sometimes went there to buy heroine for her addicted friend, Sudi. This time, she had not yet seen Ardalan, the Kurdish man who knew her as an occasional customer. She took a drag of her cigarette and blew the smoke out into the sunrays, watching it curl away in the deafening street noise. The sound of thundering trucks on the high bridge above and motorbikes and tuk-tuks racing by were mingled with whistles, people yelling their destinations to the passing taxis, and old cars revving their engines, blowing hot licks, as they were heading off north and south. Gordia looked at the cloudless sky and the smog that was hiding the snow-capped Mount Damavand from sight. Nerve-wracking music from passing cars resonated through the air smelling of diesel, dust and pot. She took another long puff on her cigarette and blew it out slowly.
Suddenly two Police vans came off the autobahn onto the circular lane and pulled over to a stop in front of the mostly drug-dealing crowd. Gordia crushed her cigarette-butt on the bottom of her shoe and flicked it over her shoulder by force of habit. Out of each van jumped two policemen, shouting and rounding up everyone. "Get in, get in, all of you. You all get in. You too." They gathered every single man sitting, standing or lingering in that infamous open hangout. Within minutes, up to twenty men were pushed into the vans and taken away. Gordia was among them.
Inside the cramped van without a window, Gordia was pressed to sit in the middle, having to rest one cheek of her buttocks on the wet metallic floor, the other on Rashid’s thigh. He was a sickly man with a white beard, Kurdish turban and baggy pants. He was singing a Kurdish song, encouraging his fellow townsmen to join him. Gordia could feel the van driving at top speed. She thought that it was usually the Islamic militia who were after the druggies and traffickers, taking them to the Committee to see if they should be detained or freed upon paying their customary bribes. This time it was the police and God knows how they were going to be treated. An Afghani man called her name, bending his head down modestly with his hand on his chest.
"Your devoted servant, Gol-Agha," he said.
Gordia bowed her head in return. She had been keeping her hair short, wearing pants and appearing as a man in public since the summer of 1980. She was adamantly opposed to the wearing of the veil that became compulsory at that time. She was then twenty-five, an artist, making a living as a private English teacher; a job she kept through the years. She was aware of her good luck of being the only grandchild of a man who used to own the whole of a large strategic province. Her family wealth allowed her to buy off occasional Islamic authorities that pestered her. She lived in one of her grandfather’s homes in northern Tehran - a huge old house with a large walled backyard without inquisitive neighbours. Over the years, she had met and befriended several younger women who had chosen, like herself, to be dressed as boys. A few were from Tehran secular upper classes, who loved to shave their heads and ride fast motorcycles along the highways. But most of them were runaways or thrown-outs who came from lower classes of either Tehran or provincial towns or villages. They preferred to do odd jobs as males instead of being forced into selling their bodies as females to survive. Gordia’s kind heart and sense of compassion often made her come to the rescue of these destitute women whenever they needed help. Life on the streets of Tehran as a boy was harsh and unrelenting, even dangerous. Men were as much after boys as they were after girls. She always had a protector in the bazaar; namely Haj Esmail, who owned a beads-shop and knew her family as their servant in his youth. Through Haj Esmail, she had managed to find a few decent, influential men of the bazaar who agreed to be her friends’ protectors against full-time sexual predators. However, one of them, seventeen year-old Sudi, had been lured into taking heroine to suppress her sorrow at having lost her family. She was now addicted and unable to provide for her dependency. That morning, when she pounded on Gordia’s door and asked her friend for help, Gordia made a pact with her: she would provide her with one last fix to overcome her intense pain if she promised to present herself to the Addiction Clinic of Rouzbeh Hospital immediately afterwards. Sudi gave her word and Gordia rushed to the hangout of the drug pushers.
After fifteen minutes of driving through traffic, the van stopped for a long while and everyone held their breath for what they didn’t know was coming. Soon, it turned, started to back up slowly and came to a halt. The van’s side doors opened and the detainees were ordered to get out. Gordia’s brown eyes narrowed and began scanning the surrounding area. They were standing in the front courtyard of a Police Station, joined by the detainees from the other police van. She had been arrested twice before, but never carried to a Police station. On both occasions, she had drug in her pocket, but had paid off the Islamic militia and was immediately released. This time, although she was clean, she felt apprehensive by the unknown. The policemen slapped some of them on their heads and shouted invectives against the jittery detainees, ordering them inside the building. They made them work their way through a zigzagging corridor with old cracked walls, smell of stale tobacco smoke, and bare-looking offices on both sides. At the end of the corridor, they were pushed out into a foul-smelling backyard.
She saw different policemen coming out of the building and ordering the suspected drug-dealers to stand apart in rows of four, facing the southern wall. She reckoned that the policemen were about to search everyone for drugs, and as she had nothing illegal on her, she would be released. For a second, her fear of her arrest faded away. Then she heard something unbelievable, outlandish. One of the officers ordered everyone to strip to the skin, deposit their clothes on the ground on their right side. Did she hear it right? She saw some of the detainees beginning to take their shirts off. Her heart sank. Fear grew in the pit of her stomach. Everything had changed in a matter of seconds. She was seized by sheer terror of being naked in front of dozens of unsuspecting men and being discovered by the forces of the Islamic regime. She knew that she was going to be thrown into jail for indecency and immoral acts of impersonating a man and getting naked before strangers. She would be hanged or stoned to death. A cold sweat appeared on her forehead. She had to control this sheer terror that was about to make her faint.
Upon the bark of an officer snapping orders to get undressed completely, Gordia became an instinctive force. She began getting undressed as if in a dream. First she took off her jeans. Bending down to place them on the ground, she saw a naked man in the front row further to the left who was holding his hands in front of himself over his genitals. That was a precious thing, she thought. This custom of decency and shame was so very helpful to her now. She took off her light blue T-shirt and bent down to put it over her jeans and to see if her breasts would hang down too much. She had small breasts and had never been pregnant. She stood up, straightened her back and thought of fat Agha Karim with his sagging bosoms. This was not going to work; she was thin and so were all the detainees. She swiftly took off her underwear and covered her crotch with her left hand. She bent over, made a bundle out of her three pieces of clothing and left it on her right side on the ground. She anticipated the pain of the lashes on her body at the Evin prison. Or were they going to torture her right here in the police station? Was this smell coming from a mutilated body?
It was another hot August morning in Tehran, choked with thick smog. Gordia was sitting on a long cement bench beside a bunch of Kurdish and Afghani men under a noisy highway bridge. She was forty-two years old with short, straight salt and pepper hair, and in men’s clothing. She looked like a nineteen year-old boy and everyone on the street knew her as Gol-Agha. She placed one leg over the other and lit a second cigarette. Most of the men were carrying small bags of heroine or lighter drugs for sale. She sometimes went there to buy heroine for her addicted friend, Sudi. This time, she had not yet seen Ardalan, the Kurdish man who knew her as an occasional customer. She took a drag of her cigarette and blew the smoke out into the sunrays, watching it curl away in the deafening street noise. The sound of thundering trucks on the high bridge above and motorbikes and tuk-tuks racing by were mingled with whistles, people yelling their destinations to the passing taxis, and old cars revving their engines, blowing hot licks, as they were heading off north and south. Gordia looked at the cloudless sky and the smog that was hiding the snow-capped Mount Damavand from sight. Nerve-wracking music from passing cars resonated through the air smelling of diesel, dust and pot. She took another long puff on her cigarette and blew it out slowly.
Suddenly two Police vans came off the autobahn onto the circular lane and pulled over to a stop in front of the mostly drug-dealing crowd. Gordia crushed her cigarette-butt on the bottom of her shoe and flicked it over her shoulder by force of habit. Out of each van jumped two policemen, shouting and rounding up everyone. "Get in, get in, all of you. You all get in. You too." They gathered every single man sitting, standing or lingering in that infamous open hangout. Within minutes, up to twenty men were pushed into the vans and taken away. Gordia was among them.
Inside the cramped van without a window, Gordia was pressed to sit in the middle, having to rest one cheek of her buttocks on the wet metallic floor, the other on Rashid’s thigh. He was a sickly man with a white beard, Kurdish turban and baggy pants. He was singing a Kurdish song, encouraging his fellow townsmen to join him. Gordia could feel the van driving at top speed. She thought that it was usually the Islamic militia who were after the druggies and traffickers, taking them to the Committee to see if they should be detained or freed upon paying their customary bribes. This time it was the police and God knows how they were going to be treated. An Afghani man called her name, bending his head down modestly with his hand on his chest.
"Your devoted servant, Gol-Agha," he said.
Gordia bowed her head in return. She had been keeping her hair short, wearing pants and appearing as a man in public since the summer of 1980. She was adamantly opposed to the wearing of the veil that became compulsory at that time. She was then twenty-five, an artist, making a living as a private English teacher; a job she kept through the years. She was aware of her good luck of being the only grandchild of a man who used to own the whole of a large strategic province. Her family wealth allowed her to buy off occasional Islamic authorities that pestered her. She lived in one of her grandfather’s homes in northern Tehran - a huge old house with a large walled backyard without inquisitive neighbours. Over the years, she had met and befriended several younger women who had chosen, like herself, to be dressed as boys. A few were from Tehran secular upper classes, who loved to shave their heads and ride fast motorcycles along the highways. But most of them were runaways or thrown-outs who came from lower classes of either Tehran or provincial towns or villages. They preferred to do odd jobs as males instead of being forced into selling their bodies as females to survive. Gordia’s kind heart and sense of compassion often made her come to the rescue of these destitute women whenever they needed help. Life on the streets of Tehran as a boy was harsh and unrelenting, even dangerous. Men were as much after boys as they were after girls. She always had a protector in the bazaar; namely Haj Esmail, who owned a beads-shop and knew her family as their servant in his youth. Through Haj Esmail, she had managed to find a few decent, influential men of the bazaar who agreed to be her friends’ protectors against full-time sexual predators. However, one of them, seventeen year-old Sudi, had been lured into taking heroine to suppress her sorrow at having lost her family. She was now addicted and unable to provide for her dependency. That morning, when she pounded on Gordia’s door and asked her friend for help, Gordia made a pact with her: she would provide her with one last fix to overcome her intense pain if she promised to present herself to the Addiction Clinic of Rouzbeh Hospital immediately afterwards. Sudi gave her word and Gordia rushed to the hangout of the drug pushers.
After fifteen minutes of driving through traffic, the van stopped for a long while and everyone held their breath for what they didn’t know was coming. Soon, it turned, started to back up slowly and came to a halt. The van’s side doors opened and the detainees were ordered to get out. Gordia’s brown eyes narrowed and began scanning the surrounding area. They were standing in the front courtyard of a Police Station, joined by the detainees from the other police van. She had been arrested twice before, but never carried to a Police station. On both occasions, she had drug in her pocket, but had paid off the Islamic militia and was immediately released. This time, although she was clean, she felt apprehensive by the unknown. The policemen slapped some of them on their heads and shouted invectives against the jittery detainees, ordering them inside the building. They made them work their way through a zigzagging corridor with old cracked walls, smell of stale tobacco smoke, and bare-looking offices on both sides. At the end of the corridor, they were pushed out into a foul-smelling backyard.
She saw different policemen coming out of the building and ordering the suspected drug-dealers to stand apart in rows of four, facing the southern wall. She reckoned that the policemen were about to search everyone for drugs, and as she had nothing illegal on her, she would be released. For a second, her fear of her arrest faded away. Then she heard something unbelievable, outlandish. One of the officers ordered everyone to strip to the skin, deposit their clothes on the ground on their right side. Did she hear it right? She saw some of the detainees beginning to take their shirts off. Her heart sank. Fear grew in the pit of her stomach. Everything had changed in a matter of seconds. She was seized by sheer terror of being naked in front of dozens of unsuspecting men and being discovered by the forces of the Islamic regime. She knew that she was going to be thrown into jail for indecency and immoral acts of impersonating a man and getting naked before strangers. She would be hanged or stoned to death. A cold sweat appeared on her forehead. She had to control this sheer terror that was about to make her faint.
Upon the bark of an officer snapping orders to get undressed completely, Gordia became an instinctive force. She began getting undressed as if in a dream. First she took off her jeans. Bending down to place them on the ground, she saw a naked man in the front row further to the left who was holding his hands in front of himself over his genitals. That was a precious thing, she thought. This custom of decency and shame was so very helpful to her now. She took off her light blue T-shirt and bent down to put it over her jeans and to see if her breasts would hang down too much. She had small breasts and had never been pregnant. She stood up, straightened her back and thought of fat Agha Karim with his sagging bosoms. This was not going to work; she was thin and so were all the detainees. She swiftly took off her underwear and covered her crotch with her left hand. She bent over, made a bundle out of her three pieces of clothing and left it on her right side on the ground. She anticipated the pain of the lashes on her body at the Evin prison. Or were they going to torture her right here in the police station? Was this smell coming from a mutilated body?
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