Paul Theroux - The Great Railway Bazaar

Teheran, a boom town grafted on to a village, is a place of no antiquity and little interest, unless one has a particular fascination for bad driving and a traffic situation twenty times worse than New York's. There is talk of building a subway system, but the plumbing in Teheran is of the village variety; the sewage is pumped into the ground beneath each building, so the process of tunnelling would very likely produce a cholera epidemic of gigantic proportions. One man I met verified this by claiming that you had to dig down only ten feet anywhere in the city and you would strike sewage; in a few years it would be five.

In spite of its size and apparent newness it retains the most obnoxious features of a bazaar, as Dallas does, and Teheran has all the qualities of that oil-rich Texas city: the spurious glamour, the dust and heat, the taste for plastic, the evidence of cash. The women are lovely; they skitter around holding other women's hands – even the most chic – or else they are bent sideways, on the arm of a small shrouded granny. Wealth has allowed the Iranian little except the single excess of being overdressed; indeed, the freezing air conditioning seems to be designed for no other purpose than permitting rich Iranians to wear fashionable English clothes, for which they have a special fondness. There is about this decadence a peculiar absence of the physical that begins to look uncivilized in the most limiting way. Women are seldom seen with men; there are few couples, no lovers, and at dusk Teheran becomes a city of males, prowling in groups or loitering. The bars are exclusively male; the men drink in expensive suits, continually searching the room with anxious eyes, as if in expectation of a woman. But there are no women, and the lugubrious alternatives to sex are apparent: the film posters showing fat Persian girls in shortie pyjamas; nightclubs with belly dancers, strippers, kick lines, and comedians in ridiculous hats whose every Farsi joke is a reference to the sex the patrons are denied. Money pulls the Iranian in one direction, religion drags him in another, and the result is a stupid starved creature for whom woman is only meat. Thus spake Zarathustra: an ugly monomaniac with a diamond tiara, who calls himself 'The King of Kings', is their answer to government, a firing squad their answer to law.

Less frightening, but no less disgusting, is the Iranian taste for jam made out of carrots.

Because of the oil, Teheran is very much a city of foreigners. There are two daily papers in English, a French daily, Journal de Teheran, and a German weekly, Die Post. Not surprisingly, the sports page of the English-language Teheran Journal is taken up with such non-Persian news as a profile of Hank Aaron ('A Great Player – A Great Person'), who was then about to break Babe Ruth's lifetime homer record of 714 before an uninterested Atlanta crowd ('Atlanta is the disgrace of baseball'); the rest of the sports news was similarly American, except for one small item about Iran's cycling team. You do not have to go far in Teheran to find out whom these newspapers are written for. There is no shortage of Americans in the city, and even the American oil-rig fitters in outlying areas of the country are allowed seven days in Teheran for every seven they spend on the site. Consequently, the bars have the atmosphere of Wild West saloons.

Take the Caspien Hotel Bar. There are tall Americans lounging on sofas drinking Tuborg straight from the bottle, a few hard-faced wives and girlfriends chainsmoking near them, and one man holding forth at the bar.

'I go up to the son of a bitch and say, "X-ray them welds," and he just looks at me kind of dumb. Ain't been no X-raying here for three weeks. Whole goddamned thang gonna fall down sure as anything. He says to me-'

'We saw the Albrights down in Qom. She had just the prettiest dress,' says the lady on the sofa. She had kicked off her shoes. 'Bought it right here, she said.'

'Well, shit, I didn't know what to do,' says the man at the bar. 'I told him I wouldn't leave the site if it didn't look okay to me. If he keeps it up he can have his damned job. I can go back to Saudi any old time I want.'

A big middle-aged man in blue jeans comes in. He staggers a bit, but he is smiling.

'Gene, you old son of a bitch, get in here,' calls the man from the bar.

'Hi, Russ,' says the big man, and as he says it a few Iranians move aside.

'Sit down afore you fall down.'

'Buy me a drink, ya dirty bastard.'

'Your ass I will,' says Russ. He pulls out a lumpy wallet and shows Gene. 'Only got a hundred rials to my name.'

'They're Texas,' says the lady on the sofa. 'We're Oklahoma.'

The voices in the bar grow louder. Russ is saying 'ole buddy' to a man at the bar, who is hunched over a bottle and from the back looks wholly crapulous. Gene is standing a few feet away, drinking beer and smiling between pulls on his bottle.

'Hey, Wayne,' says Russ to the hunched-over man, 'who we gonna fight tonight?'

Wayne shakes his head, Gene rubs his cheek with a hand so sunburned, the tattoos barely show.

'Have a drink, Wayne,' says Russ. 'Have a drink, Gene. And ask Billy what he wants.'

Russ slaps Wayne on the back and there is a great crash as Wayne tumbles to the floor between the bar stools. His gold jersey is hiked up to his armpits. Billy comes over (he has been drinking with the women) and helps Russ and Gene get Wayne to his feet and propped against a stool. Wayne's pink back is exposed. His head is shaven, his ears stick out, his elbows are braced on the bar, and he takes hold of his bottle the way a sailor might grip a mast in a high wind, squinting at his two hands and muttering.

The Iranians, who have been silent the whole time, begin to babble in Farsi to the waiter. They look as if they want to start a scene, and Billy, sensing this, says, 'What are you telling him?' to one of the Iranians.

'Come here, ole buddy,' says Russ to the other Iranian. He winks at Wayne, and Wayne, recovering, stands up. Russ jerks the Iranian's jacket sleeve. 'I wanna talk to you real quick.'

The ladies on the sofa begin to leave, hugging handbags, making for the door.

'Hey!' says Russ to them.

'You boys are getting kinda roughhouse.'

The ladies leave, and, seeing what was about to happen, I follow them into the noisy street, swearing that I will flee Teheran on the next available train.

My original route, the one I had marked out on my map before I left London, took me south from Teheran to Khalidabad for the spur to Isfahan, and from there southeast to Yazd, Bafq, and Zarand, where the railway stops. I would then cross Baluchistan by bus and pick up Pakistan Western Railways at the Iranian station of Zahedan, and head eastward on the main lines of Pakistan.

'Sure it's possible,' said an embassy officer, 'but it's not advisable. It'll take you the best part of a week to get to Quetta, and apart from anything else that's a hell of a long time to go without a shower.'

I said that I had just gone five days without a shower and it hadn't worried me. What I was concerned about were the Baluchi tribesmen: were they fighting in that area?

'You better believe it!'

'So you don't think it's a very good idea for me to go that way?'

'I'd say you'd be a damned fool to risk it.'

Another traveller might have taken up the challenge to go southeast. I was grateful for the chance to turn my back on it. I thanked him for his advice and bought a ticket for a train northeast to Meshed.

Meshed, in the northeast of Iran – about ioo miles from the Afghanistan border and even fewer to the Soviet one – is a holy city; consequently, the most fervent Muslims take the Night Mail, and everywhere on it are Persians in the postures of devotion, murmuring prayers to get to Heaven, though