City of Lies by Ramita Navai Read Free Book Online Page A

coloured dark. Underneath she wore the benign uniform of the high-street chain: Zara, Mango, Topshop and Benetton.
    Some of the girls decided to go back to Mansoureh’s house after school as her family had a big living room. There were few public places to hang out in this part of town. The nearby parks were mostly full of drug addicts and there were no cool coffee shops. The traditional tea houses were men-only dens, full of hookah-pipe smoke and banter.
    Somayeh left the other girls; she had to help her mother prepare for a party. Tonight was a big night, they were celebrating Haj Agha’s latest pilgrimage trip and all the neighbours were invited. As she turned the corner into her street she saw them. Tahereh Azimi and her elderly parents were standing by a small van laden with their possessions, fleeing in shame, back to the village they came from.
    Tahereh Azimi had never fitted in. Her parents seemed normal: poor and working-class. They prayed and her mother only ever wore a chador in public. Tahereh’s mother was nearly fifty when she had given birth to her, after thirty barren years. Tahereh’s father, Sadegh, had endured decades of pressure from his family to leave his sterile wife for younger, more fecund ground. Sadegh had refused. He was a good man who could not stand to cause pain. Tahereh was their miracle baby, even if Hazrat Abol Fazl had responded to their
nazr
prayers with perverse delay.
    They were sturdy country people, but the city had sucked the vitality out of them. Tahereh’s parents had moved to Tehran in their youth when their village had crumbled to mounds of rubble after an earthquake had rumbled its way up from the earth’s crusty layers. Half their house had smashed in on the ground in less than six seconds. Whole lives were reduced to particles of brick and dust. A few scores were killed, including Tahereh’s extended family. Their bodies were buried in the cemetery under the orange trees. A village that had once been so vital, on a fertile plain, encircled by mountains that gushed water and fed orchards near where wild horses roamed, became a sad, forgotten place.
    The transition to the city had been less painful than they had expected. Although Tehran’s brash, ugly urbanity, its motorways, concrete high-rises and festering underbelly suggest an impersonal metropolis, it can still feel like a village. In Tehran, urban privileges like privacy and anonymity are still Western concepts. Hidden in its seams is the stitching that holds the city together: the bloodlines, the clans, the kindness, the prying and the meddling.
    Tahereh’s family soon stumbled on distant relatives and friends. But their new community did not last long. Many around them were felled by heart disease, cancer and medical incompetence. As their lives contracted, they became more solitary, leaning in towards each other, with Tahereh at their centre. The net began closing in on them too. Tahereh’s mother suffered a stroke. They had no medical insurance and Sadegh juggled three jobs. Tahereh began working as a seamstress in the tiny back room of a dressmaker’s shop in a shopping mall on Vali Asr, a job that was kept a secret. There would have been whispers if the neighbours found out that Tahereh was a working girl at sixteen, even if her time was spent with a Singer sewing machine sitting opposite an Afghan tailor in his seventies. Vali Asr opened a new world for Tahereh, where teenagers hung out in coffee shops and fast-food joints. Super Star and Super Star Fried Chicken were always brimming with teenage boys and girls flirting with each other, exchanging numbers and setting up dates.
    Tahereh spent all her free time walking up and down Vali Asr, marvelling at its beauty, which seemed to intensify the farther north she ventured. She started walking up as far as Bagh Ferdows near the furthest reaches of Vali Asr. She would sit on a bench and watch the city; people here seemed to come from a different race. It was on