City of Lies: Love, Sex, Death, and the Search for Truth in Tehran

Vali Asr

The first snow of winter falls on a queue outside the barbari bread bakery on the north of Vali Asr – the price of a few pieces of bread is now the same as a hit of meth. The road is splashed with bursts of ruby red from the season’s pomegranates and beetroots. Two teenage boys with quiffs and ripped jeans dart between the cars, selling rap CDs and gum. On the pavement, an elegantly dressed woman with glasses sells cashmere headscarves; next to her an old man sits cross-legged, a pair of cracked scales in front of him. An eight-year-old girl on a piece of cardboard leans against a metal telephone exchange box, carefully writing in an exercise book as she takes a break from selling packets of tissues to do her homework.
Near Rah Ahan railway station, where Vali Asr begins its northbound ascent towards the mountains, thousands of mourners dressed in black stand in the cold outside a mosque. The crowd keeps swelling; part of Vali Asr has been closed off to traffic. An ambulance expels clouds of gritty black fumes as it waits beside the mourners. The mosque has opened its hosseinieh to cope with the numbers. Trays of dates, halva and herbed rice with lamb shanks are laid out on a table. After recitals from the Koran and the eulogy, the crowd outside parts as the body, covered in a sheet, is carried out on a stretcher and put in the back of the ambulance, which will make its way to Beheshteh Zahra cemetery where the body will be washed, wrapped in the white kafan shroud and placed in the earth.
‘That’s the end of the city as we know it. He won’t survive without her,’ says an old man in fingerless gloves as the doors of the van slam shut. He has taken a break from selling polyester socks on the corner of Vali Asr and Rah Ahan so he can pay his respects to the wife of Asghar the Brave, the toughest and most chivalrous jahel to have walked the streets of Tehran.
Two elderly women in chadors leave the crowd; one of them used to be a dancing girl with Pari. She limps from a bad hip. The women come across the stump of a sycamore tree. ‘It was in the news. They said they’re sick and they had to cut them down,’ says her companion. The old dancer shakes her head.
The government did not immediately respond to the controversial felling of Vali Asr’s sycamore trees. Now it says that the trees are diseased, that they are a danger to pedestrians. The women staring at the stump do not believe this. They have heard that the trees are obscuring police cameras, and that they are in the way of development plans.
But it is true. The sycamore trees are sick. They are slowly dying – mainly of thirst. A plan to pour concrete into the joobs went wrong; it prevented the water that ran down them from seeping through to the trees’ roots. Some say pollution is making matters worse, that like Tehran’s own residents the trees farther south of the city are choking. But everyone agrees on one thing: the trees were chopped down in the dead of night because the authorities knew there would be an outcry.
The women continue up Vali Asr, the gush of the water rushing down the joobs rising above the sound of car engines and horns. They walk under the dying trees, now grey, shimmering skeletons cloaked in a thin sheet of ice, stripped of their leaves by winter’s cold hand. Soon they will be clogged in snow, the water in the joobs hard as crystal before it will thaw with the first warm breeze that will breathe life into the green shoots and roots, encouraging them to sprout again. Buildings will be built and torn down, people will demonstrate and celebrate, cars will crash, citizens will be executed, lovers abandoned, police corrupted, political dissidents imprisoned and freed, presidents will come and go; but Vali Asr will remain, a constant, unchanged by wars, dictators and revolutions. With or without its sycamore trees.