Triumphal arches and decorations in Ahar for the coronation, in case the Shah should suddenly show up.
The people in Ahar prepared to celebrate the Shah's coronation. They used wooden scaffoldings to build triumphal arches across the main streets. They covered them with expensive carpets and canvas on which they painted messages of congratulation to His Imperial Majesty. Slogans praised both the Shah and his wife, Queen Farah. Large pictures of the royal family or representations of the jeweled crown sat on the crest of each arch. Every city in Iran duplicated the preparations as they had been directed by the central government in Teheran.
Near the bazaar, in the street that ran in front of the post office, workmen built the town's second traffic circle. In its center they created a large concrete monument, surfaced with square slabs of marble on which a craftsman inscribed a lengthy inscription.
"It is telling us about the Shah's White Revolution," said Usef when he it read it. "On this side it is listing the nine great reforms which the Shah has given us. One is to improve the condition of women, and there are being others."
"The monument looks expensive," I said. "It must have cost someone a lot of money."
"For sure," said Usef. "It has cost very much money. The government has made each owner of a store make some contributions toward this thing. Every person is angry about the monument and they are hating the Shah for this celebration."
When the men of Ahar walked past the new structure, they looked down or away. Nobody said anything but they resented the extravagance at their expense, especially when most lived in poverty.
"Everyone is painting his shop's door blue," I said as Mr. Kashavarz and I walked down the street one day.
"Yes," he said without comment.
"All over town all the doors are blue. Is there some reason?"
Triumphal arches and decorations in Ahar for the coronation, in case the Shah should suddenly show up.
"They must do it," he said. "This thing is required by the government. Every door must be painted and the color must be blue. And every shop must be showing the colors of the flag on the wall that is facing the street."
The only merchant in Ahar who sold the required blue paint was related to one of the government officials stationed in Ahar. Some of the men grumbled about the cost of the paint and the requirement. Not everyone found the coronation a cause for celebration.
But many did. Since the 1950s, when a coup briefly took away his throne, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi tried to reform Iran and modernize it. Women gained legal rights, the government built roads and schools, and the country moved toward universal literacy. The Shah's White Revolution attempted land reform and discouraged religious extremism. The liberals and radicals demanded more and faster action. The conservatives, especially the religious leaders who represented the poorest and most backward elements, hated the Shah who diminished their power and authority. Between the two Mohammad Reza Pahlavi walked a careful and precarious line. His family and friends made his task more difficult as many used their positions to acquire personal wealth. Corruption riddled the bureaucracy, and many Iranians openly told me that members of the royal family were themselves little more than thieves. True or not, the people believed the rumors. They envied the royal family's opulent lifestyle and looked for reasons to hate the Shah and his supporters. Gossip about corruption inside the palace conveniently filled that need.
People everywhere, however, are susceptible to pomp and pageantry. Most Iranians found themselves caught up in the glitter and drama of the coronation. Thousands tried to get to Teheran so that they could witness the parades, the decorations, and the thrill of being where an historic event would take place.
"I'll bet Teheran will really be something," I said to Usef.
"It will be beautiful," he answered.
"That settles it," I said. "I'm going. The school is closed now and I didn't have any classes yet anyway. There's nothing to do here. I'm on my way."
Huge arches festooned with hundreds of lights spanned the streets of Tabriz. More lights decorated stores and shops through the bazaar and along the main streets. In the evening when people turned on their lights at home, the strain overwhelmed the generating plant, the voltage dropped, and the decorative bulbs resembled so many glowing oranges. I saw the same thing in Ahar where I had to buy candles because the lamps in my house grew so dim.
I left on a bus the next morning. At Karadj, a suburb just northwest of Teheran, gendarmes operated a roadblock. They stopped the bus, entered, and asked each of us where we planned to stay while in the city. They forced those without accommodations to get off of the bus and return home. The rest of us went on, shortly entering brightly decorated streets and passing under hundreds of triumphal arches.
I stayed with two volunteers from my group who had a third floor apartment near the Peace Corps Office and also near Teheran University. The next day we went to the Commodore Hotel on Takhte Jamshid Street, bought a drink in the bar and watched the coronation on their television set. Then we walked a few blocks south and waited for the parade on Reza Shah Boulevard. People lined the street ten to twelve deep or more making it impossible to see anything. In the middle of the street, just beyond where the parade would turn south, reporters sat on a scaffolding. We flashed our plastic Peace Corps identification cards and cameras and the police, assuming that we held press passes, let us climb up where we had a good view.
After about an hour the royal coaches, patterned on the British style and looking completely out of place in the Middle East, came down the street. Military helicopters hovered over head while police and soldiers lined the sides of the road. The crowd cheered with ear-splitting shouts and whistles.
The Shah's coach in the coronation parade
"Javeed-a-Shah, Javeed-a-Shah [long live the Shah]" they screamed.
The Shah and his wife waved from their gold coach. The young crown prince, Reza, sat alone in the second horse-drawn carriage looking overwhelmed and lost. I wonder now how many of those same people joined demonstrations a dozen years later and yelled "Mar bar Am-reé-ka [death to America]."
After the procession passed the crowd flooded into the street, filling it as far to the east as I could see. The eerie feeling of floating on an ocean of heads quickly gave way to fear when the mass pushed up against the scaffolding and it threatened to topple. But it held, in time the crowd thinned, and we climbed down.
Thousands of people flooded the streets after the Shah passed by
On the day after the coronation the Shah scheduled a review of his military officers at the airfield next to the airport. I took a bus as far as it could go into the crowd, then got off and walked, eventually reaching the entrance to the parade area itself. My Peace Corps identification bluff worked and I passed the first set of barricades, but not the second. We heard the crowds cheer in the distance as the Shah, sitting in his bright purplish Rolls Royce approached.
Behind me a crowd pushed at the first barricade, finally breaking through and rushing toward us. From the other side soldiers came flailing their guns. One hit me on the leg with a rifle butt and I fell to one side. I managed to stay out of the way and when the crowd backed away I hobbled off. Having had enough I returned through the crowd and spent the rest of the day relaxing at the Peace Corps office. By the time I returned to Ahar I had a mark on my leg that matched the color of the Shah's car.
The Statue of Ferdowsi, the poet, in a central square, decorated for the Shah's coronation
I stayed two more days in Teheran. On the evening before I left for Ahar a group of us decided to visit Shara-noh, Teheran's red-light district. We hired a taxi and told the driver where we wanted to go.
"What does it mean when he does that with his fingers?" I asked.
"It's an obscene gesture," someone explained. He thinks we're going to Shara-noh for the obvious reason."
We drove into south Teheran. The driver took shortcuts through side streets, speeding, cutting off other cars, and generally following the 'survival-of-the-fittest' rules of Teheran traffic. He finally stopped, let us out, and pointed to the entrance to an alley a few yards away. We paid him and, still laughing and leering at us, he drove away.
The buildings along the street stood in front of a high wall that surrounded a six to eight square block area. It had one entrance next to a movie theater. A policeman stood on either side looking at the men who went in and came out. We noticed that no women walked on the sidewalks anywhere in the area.
"Are you sure we should go in there?" someone asked.
"Come on, we're just going in to look around. Nobody will hurt us."
Shara-noh, or 'New City' held Teheran's prostitutes. On the other side of the wall a mirror image of Iranian culture pandered to its customers prurient tastes. Most Iranian women wore veils, dressed conservatively, and lived sheltered lives away from the male dominated affairs of society. The men might discuss sex privately, but nowhere did it become an open topic of conversation. Just inside the gate at Shara-noh a vendor sold colorful packages of condoms.
"It's like a city inside the city," I said looking around.
"It is. It's a self-contained city right here in Teheran."
Along the street I saw shops and houses. And in the houses the women waited. They stood around in the doorways or sat in the windows and a few walked along the street talking to the men who strolled by. We saw men going into the houses, led by the girl of their choice.
The prostitutes wore revealing blouses of the sheerest material. Others had on mini-skirts. None wore chadores. As the women solicited, the men looked over the merchandise, holding their worry beads behind their backs, fiddling with them while they made their selections.
"Hello, Mister," a woman called from one doorway.
"Are you Americans?" another asked when she came up to us.
"Yes."
"We are having a very nice house," she said. "We will make you very happy."
"Where did you learn English?" I asked.
"I am learning from American soldiers," she answered.
One girl came up behind me and grabbed my leg. Everyone laughed when I pulled away.
We saw young women and old women. Most of them wore too much make-up and the younger ones openly advertised their wears while the older ones sat and watched. Nobody in Shara-noh made any attempt to hide the nature of their business. Men sometimes had three or four women stand in front of them while they looked over the selection and decided. Everything sat out in the open.
We walked around for about an hour, then left.
"I understand that people living in Teheran don't even know this place is here," said one of the local volunteers. "But the taxi drivers all know about it."
"Apparently the American soldiers stationed here do too."
We hired a taxi and went back to the apartment. Along the way we could see people already taking down the coronation decorations. I stopped at the bus station and found that I could only get a ticket for a night bus back to Tabriz. I left late the next evening.
Peace Corps officials discouraged night travel on Iranian busses because of the frequent accidents. Drivers fell asleep and ran their vehicles off the road into ditches, usually killing themselves and the people in the first few rows. Truck drivers often simply parked their rigs on the highway at night. Usually travelers saw them and drove around them, but too often groggy drivers crashed into them. The fronts of the busses telescoped into twisted tangles of metal and glass. Our supervisors told us that if we had to travel at night, we should sit at the back of the bus.
The Iranian method of turning off and on headlights while driving at night heightened the danger. Whenever a driver spotted someone coming in the opposite direction he turned off his headlights for three or four seconds. Then he turned them back on again. Seeing this, the driver of the oncoming car turned off his headlights. They continued this as they approached each other. Mr. Kashavarz explained that the system gave each person a few seconds to see the road clearly without being blinded by headlights from the other. It also meant that for a few seconds each driver rushed unseeing into the darkness. Kashavarz claimed that the system not only worked, but that it was more logical than the American and European way of driving at night where everyone drives all of the time directly into the blinding headlights of oncoming traffic.
Bus and truck drivers expressed their individuality with the decorations they put on their vehicles. Inside they put up decals and posters picturing Mohammad or Ali, his son-in-law. [Although Mohammad and Ali tended to look alike, Mohammad was always pictured holding a book - the Koran - and Ali always held a sword depicting him as the defender and spreader of the faith.] While Sunni Islam forbad images of the Prophet, Shi'ia Islam had no such injunctions. On the outside colored lights and displays on the grills gave the night highway a fairyland atmosphere. Between the decorations and the blinking headlights, the trip to Tabriz resembled nothing less than a circus sideshow.
I arrived safely in Tabriz the next morning and went directly to the Ahar bus garage arriving in time to board and leave almost immediately. In the back of the bus the men chanted, led by a young eager mullah who sat just behind me. At each of the narrow switch backs he and his minions increased their volume while the driver cursed and sweated as he fought and coaxed the full bus around the tight curves. On the downhill side we nearly collided with a bus coming from the other direction and that put renewed vigor into the mullah's exhortations. Allah must have heard because we finally rounded the last curve at the bottom of the hill and started across the flat to Ahar.
At a crumbling ancient caravan station just beyond the bottom of the pass villagers stood around tables piled high with locally grown fruit. Melons, which had just come into season, highlighted the selection.
"Hello, Mister. Garpuz Me-khoyed? [Do you want a melon]?" someone asked me.
They had excellent melons; shaped and colored like small watermelons about the size of basketballs. Most had red meat but a few had yellow pulp inside. I joined the rest and bought three, and like the others, I ate one right there. They tasted sweet and juicy. All of us stood around enjoying the last of the warm weather.
After about an hour the driver decided to continue toward Ahar. Sticky but happy, everyone got on the bus. From then on to Ahar we had to make frequent stops. The men gathered off the road on one side of the bus and the women on the other. It took an unusually long time for us to reach Ahar.