Tehran's Big Bazaar

Outside Tehran's metro entrance a police car, predominantly white with a green stripe going down it's door, was parked. Two soldiers stood next to a cold, rigid looking woman eyeing the women pouring down the staircase checking to see if they were adhereing to the dress code. My mother, my aunt, my cousin, my sister and I were walking across the street on our way to Tehran's Big Bazaar and my cousin pointed the police car - police van pair out not as a threat but a mere observation, and we, as a group, calmly dodged traffic, (By now I've gotten to the point where dodging cars can be done calmly.) and made our way to the metro entrance.

As we stepped on the sidewalk the women quickly whispered something to the soldier next to her and the man marched towards my sister and went to grab her wrist while the second soldier simultaneously opened the van door. My sister cowered behind my mother in fear and they kept asking her to please step into the van. My aunt and my cousin immediately told them that she is a foreigner, and my sister, in Farsi, stated that she's from America.

"But, she can speak Farsi," the soldier stupidly asked, as if the only people in the world who can speak Farsi are Iranian citizens. (There are more Farsi speakers outside of Iran than there are in Iran.)

My sister in English snapped that she could speak English too and the moral police let her off, but the experience had thoroughly frightened her.

We moved on into the metro, and after stepping into a co-ed section of the train we moved onto another station, switched to another metro, went five to six stops, and walked a good fourth of a mile until we turned into a narrow alley that led into the age-old structure.

The life of the bazaar is chaotic. In the background there is a steady stream of commentary being screamed about this-and-that product, either from the stationary stores selling their cheap jewlery, hookas, samovars, etc., from grown men selling loaves of bread or a half-hour shoe-shine, to eight year old boys tugging at your pant leg to tell you your future for a few tomans. This audio deluge pours from every corner of the open four story structure adding to the overwheling eye-candy of the spectacle.

Aside from the rickety, dilapidated appearance of the structure, the crumbled brick walls, the quickly assembled box-like stores built in the middle of the bazaar floor, the glitter and twinkle of stained glass gleaming off the surface of the samovars and hookas, the gaudy gold that seems to show up in every Iranians household, aside from the remarkable layout of the bazaar are the people.

From young to old, women to men, from a little boy carrying a bag larger than his body filling it up with sellable items, to the flabbily obese, gruff Iranian male with sweat sticking his shirt to his chest sipping tea and occasionally calling out a passer-by to buy his carpets, there are people of all kinds. As we walked through the masses we saw a drug addict leaning his forehead half-asleep, half-high against a wall touching his face with his hands. Such sights have mitigated since the Iranian government is going at great lenghts to cut back on drug addiction. In fact, the punishment for smoking crack isn't jail time, it's a lynching.

Tehran's Big Bazaar is a beacon of Iranian culture. In the trade of tomans for trinkets the vendor is not mechanically selling his product with the calculated give-and-take of a vending machine, but is charitably giving his product and graciously receiving currency for being so kind. I'm not saying that the vendors in the bazaar don't expect money, that is far, far from the truth, they do, but the beauty of the exchange is that it retains the self-righteous aspects of the culture that emphasize selfless giving while keeping in mind that a human being, be they American or Iranian, is eons away from being genuinely charitable.