TONGBAS
AND MOMOS

Imagine, as part of some mid-life crisis, you decided to walk the length of the Silk Road, that ancient highway of riches and blood that flowed between Chang An and Rome.

You trip over monks in caves and quarrel with yaks on snow mountains, and months later, thousands of kilometres from where you had started, with scorpions in your boots and sand in your hair, your journey has led you to the gates of Persia. Salaam! Gryphon-tipped pillars rise out from the desert sand, and her people - archers from Africa, riders from the steppes – stand sentinel and immortal across the palace walls. 

Persia hgeili huubu! Persia very good! Her lands flowed with poetry and echoed with wine - the traders who once lived and died by the Silk Road would tell you, of this land that lay between Caesar and Kublai Khan.

But Persia today is not the Persia of antiquity. Modern day Iran’s idea of a reception party is its capital Tehran’s airport visa office, all seemingly run by the same man, a cultured man, who would rather watch the Turkish drama on the TV that has taken up much of his desk than to defile his quiet nobility by touching anything related to paperwork.

I was starting to guess it was not by random chance that the airport prayer room is situated next to the visa office. An old French lady who did not speak English nor Farsi impotently nudged her papers at the Visa guy. It also seemed like she had gotten the papers wrong. The only thing Visa Guy bothered about her was to signal her to put on a damn headscarf. I tried to be helpful and gesticulated and stabbed at the offending bits in her papers and at her hair, but of course all it did was to further her confusion. This old girl was born in 1932. She had survived World War 2, but her chances of surviving the Visa office was not looking good.

It was noon by the time Iran bureaucracy was satisfied with all of us infidel tourists out and spat us out into the Tehran smog. Martyrs from the 1980s Iran-Iraq war, painted 6 storeys tall on the side of apartment buildings, gazed down with angelic serenity upon our unreligious maggot lives. “If a martyr had lived in the apartment before the war, they would paint his face on the building,” I was told.

“Sometimes they would carry the caskets of martyrs into our university lectures too,” Said my Tehran friend. “And tell us how we should not forget their sacrifice. In the middle of a lecture about electrical wiring, the imams and the religious police would come and talk to us about some kid who had died twenty years ago. That’s how the government tries to distract us from the shitty way things are now in Iran.”

There are, fortunately, other kinds of distractions. There’s a fake shake shack burger joint beside an expressway that sold pretty good burgers and was populated by fancy urbane Tehran hipsters, and back at home there are also house parties where home-brewed beer and mysterious, equally home-brewed, blue liquor were the order of the night. Down some streetside nasty American degenerate beef, wash it down with some cyberpunk blue, and it is time to walk down the streets and be robbed blind by the breath-taking beauty of her sights - 

Behold sunset in the desert city of Yazd, her wind towers gleaming gold in the city lights, and her domes suspend timeless in the wine red sky. The sun falls drunk into the desert heat, handing over the world to the wash of silence and starlight. This is the sort of beauty that makes the desert bloom and the angels sing.

Isfahan is the fashionable, glamorous city that danced in your imagination when you first read 1001 Arabian Nights. For a time, she was the greatest city in Persia, if not the world. People here used to say, “Isfahan nesf-e jahan” – Isfahan is half the world – such was the scale of her beauty and her wealth, a center of trade and culture, nestled along a key route of the Silk Road. After rocking out for about 400 years, she suddenly found herself locked in the middle of a country where the party had moved on. Isfahan is now surrounded by boring middle-aged bearded men who burns other people’s flags and are angry at girls who dare to be girls! This was not the Persia that Isfahan grew up in. But Isfahan is cool, she can wait. Her fashion and taste is classic and timeless and forever. A city of sacred geometry, of fountains and gardens and shaded boulevards - the old Isfahan darts across the mischievous eyes of children who chases bicycles across the 17th century city square, framed by some of the most beautiful mosques and palaces dreamed by man.

A young man snuck me into the giant mosque looming over one side of the Isfahan square during Friday prayers. As Isfahans knelt and prayed around us, he asked me if I would like to pray with him. He asked me what I believed in. I had no god, I told him. I told him I am satisfied with how science explained the world. He was open-minded enough and was glad I am not patronizing him. As we walked from the mosque, Persian families started to crowd the grass in front of the mosque for some late night alcohol-free partying. Kids, way past their bedtime, ran circles around tired-looking policemen. A store that sold only sunglasses somehow remained open. 

Such is the journey that Persia has taken. It has weathered dozens of dynasties and rulers, but what makes it Persia always endures. Iranians today still keep sacred their ancient codes – At the police station, the guard at the gate, ceremoniously decorated with a fabulous red feather plume on his head and a gleaming AK 47 by his side, grabbed me by the shoulder. “You are a great friend my friend! Welcome to Iran!” He said. I had done nothing to deserve his warmth – not a single Infidel American slayed on the altar of the Iran Republic – but I was a traveller, who had dared to visit Iran despite the many misconceptions about her, and he, being Persian, had centuries worth of a tradition of hospitality flowing in his veins. Strangers are gifts from god. Persia was once the greatest and most enlightened civilisation in the world. Old matronly civilisations tend to take care of people passing through their guest houses.

Halfway between Isfahan and Shiraz, I stopped to couchsurf at a new friend’s place. The town is in the middle of a Mad Max desert, but I enjoyed the endless hospitality of my host, his spontaneous adventures, his anecdotes (“Do you know they tried to ban Backgammon? They thought it’s a game of chance and against God? What a bunch of –“), and the easy humour of him and his family. He was a nurse, and he wondered if Singapore was in need of nurses. “Maybe I can go first, and settle down?” His wife looked upon him with the tenderness of a schoolgirl - I can’t imagine them being apart. Somewhere in his bookshelf he even had a well-thumbed bootleg copy of Obama’s Dreams of My Father. “A good book. A good man.” Well, so were almost all the people I met in Persia - a land of good people, of wonderful history, of culture sacred and divine.