I was an Eyewitness

He looked kind of cute, this forty-something man with his pink stockings and his blue loafer. Tall and slim with a hat that he took off only once to show us that even a strand of hair was not growing over his head. Old wounds, large and small, showed on his hand, on his face and on his legs where the short pants he was wearing ended.

The gossip had it that he smuggled drugs into Malaysia. I do not recall whether I first heard it from Amir or Hossein who had worked in Amir’s restaurant for years. He frequented the restaurant so much that almost everybody knew what he was doing, from the cook to the waiter. He tipped well and this was more important than anything else. His four mobile phones and the backpacks that he occasionally moved around the restaurant showed that although Habib was wandering around in Malaysian restaurants and shopping centers, he was getting richer and richer.

Amir and his employees knew what Habib’s job was but it was as though there was an unwritten agreement between them that they would never talk about it face to face. “Habib is one of the few Iranian smugglers who have never been trapped by the Malaysian police,” a customer of Amir had said. This meant that he was very intelligent, but he must have been born with it because it was enough for him to open his mouth and you would know that at best he had finished only the primary school.

However, the same customer had said that he was not intelligent but cooperated with the Malaysian police. Another story had it that he never touched the drugs himself but connected buyers and sellers by phone.

At last he took off his round sunglasses and laid them on the table, next to the teapot and the plate of watermelon cuts. He said that he had purchased the glasses directly from Nikon in Japan, not personally of course but by mail order. He had been banned from entering Japan, the land of his dreams, for the past 15 years. He had been placed on the police black list after serving a 5-year prison sentence.

He talked about Japan as though he was talking about an old lover. I never found out what he loved about Japan. Perhaps it was because Japan was the first country he had entered after leaving Iran behind. Japan was the lover he was not allowed to see and yearned for it from dawn to dusk and from dusk to dawn. In Kuala Lumpur’s Bukit Bintang area, the heart of the city’s tourist area, there is a big and well-known shopping center named Pavilion and its top floor is called “Tokyo Street”, filled with Japanese restaurants, supermarkets and confectionaries. They said that Tokyo Street was one of the Habib’s main hang-outs, like an Iranian who has discovered a restaurant serving the favorite Iranian dish of kebab and rice in Iceland.

It was noon and we were having launch at Amir’s restaurant. In Malaysia you did not have to yearn for traditional Iranian food. If you wanted it, you could find a restaurant, a supermarket or something to stuff yourself. Even if you could not find an Iranian restaurant you could easily find an Arab supermarket or eating establishment. In Malaysia you could never feel that you were living in a strange land. Even as a joke, it was enough to speak Persian in the street and thirty people would turn around and look askance at you.

Nobody frequented our friend’s restaurant except Arabs and Iranians living in Malaysia. The little pond in the middle of the restaurant gave it a Iranian atmosphere, but the wooden decorations had Arabic motifs. When the song “Don’t become a sun and hide behind clouds” by the Iranian pop singer Shahram Shabpareh was playing in the restaurant, suddenly the Lebanese singer Ragheb Alama would interrupt him by calling to his lover, or “habib” in Arabic . Whenever Ragheb chanted ‘habibi, habibi’, Habib would laugh and say “don’t you feel any shame, man? Leave me alone.”

Malaysian or Chinese or Indian decorations could not be found in the restaurant. The same went for the music. Tea was served in teacups with narrow waists and classical Iranian teapots had the place of honor on the tables. Water pipes were served, but only on the balcony.

The Malaysians were not partial to Iranian food and Iranian tourists just loved McDonalds and KFC. So Iranian restaurants were not making such a brisk business. The first day when I met Habib the restaurant was more deserted than usual. Amir had left the cash register to sit with me and my spouse. Habib entered and sat next to him. When we offered him lunch, he went for it with gusto.

“I have not been eating lunch for quite a while,” he said. “Actually I don’t eat at all. Eating alone is no fun. You know, you must eat food with others. Eating alone is horrible.”

It was whispered that Habib had no relationships with anybody and worked alone. They said that he was a loner and lonely.

Loneliness showed all over him. He spoke in rapid fire and never shut up. He would not leave and he would not let others to get on with their lives. He talked about everything, from heaven to earth.

“My father owned a brick-making mill,” he would say, “and he always gave away his money to other people. I told him ‘dad, you have no right to give away our money. You have blown away your own money. Why don’t you leave ours alone?’

“I told my sister ‘look sis: I am not happy at all about you giving money to dad to squander it. What is it to me that this guy has no money or that guy is out of a job?’

“I am not stingy. If devil himself is willing to work I would help out but I have no free money to give out.”

His own words made him laugh or blow up in ager. The reactions of others were of no importance to him. When he laughed hard and then had enough, it was time to clean up his saliva which had run down as he had been laughing. He was adamant to treat us to tea after the meal. I was not too eager to drink that tea. I was in a difficult situation. Should I drink the tea that Habib had ordered or not? I played with my tea but he was not aware of it. He had so much to talk about that it made no difference to him whether you were drinking the tea or not. What mattered was enough ears to listen to him.

Even when he asked a question he would not wait for an answer.

“What do you do?”, he asked.

“I am a journalist.”

“You know, I am journalist too.” And when he saw my eyes open in surprise, he explained that “I went to Japan with a press pass. The guy looked at my pass first. It was not mine of course. It belonged to a Dutch guy and I had bought it. He said ‘but this is not you’. I put my purchased reporter ID on the desk and said [in English] ‘I am a good writer.’ He stamped it and said ‘welcome!’.”

He laughed so loud telling the story that I could not remain in my defensive position and not laugh. His laughter was so loud it made passers-by turn their heads towards the restaurant for a few moments.

I do not remember how many cups of tea he had slurped when I looked at him and noticed that the mark of injury on his throat looked more distinct than ever. The injury looked exactly like the one on the side of Rojan. Both consisted of straight lines with dots on both sides which were left over by sutures. But the stories behind them were worlds apart. Habib’s wound was a souvenir of gang violence in Japan. He did tell the story but I could not make sense of it. He talked excitedly and swallowed one cup of tea after another. It sounded more like a crime novel; like action movies where they shoot at the hero all the time but he proves to be invincible.

Habib was talking and I was thinking of Rojan’s wound.

*****

Even now when I want to write or talk about Rojan I cannot, as though there is someone inside me who wants to evade the task. I want to escape Rojan and her story, but it keeps coming back—with Habib’s wound mark, with the news about the arrest of two Iranian women at Malaysian airport, and even now with the girl in the building across the street who is staring at me and has an uncanny resemblance to Rojan, with her skinny face and the bangs over her tall forehead.

I met Rojan years before my emigration on the set of a TV series in the basement of an old house in Tehran’s Shapur Street. It was winter and very cold, so cold that the pond in the middle of the courtyard had frozen over and had created problems for the production team when they wanted to film scenes of spring or summer. We were busy working with the writers when Rojan entered carrying a big camera over her delicate shoulders. She was the backstage camerawoman. She was wearing a navy blue manteau and a black headscarf. In that freezing weather she had just a beige jacket over her manteau.

I did not pay Rojan much attention. Those days I was not paying attention to anyone. I had forced myself to return to work. I had just stopped taking tranquilizers. It was just after September 14th and I was not dead yet, but my only ray of hope was extinguished. Death had been casting a shadow over ne for a number of years. It started with the cancer and the death of my cousin. My grandfather was gone a short while after his grandson. My uncle came down with cancer and died on a hot summer day. My grandmother passed away on September 14th as we were preparing to commemorate the 40th day of my uncle’s death. And exactly one year later we were getting ready to observe the anniversary of my grandmother’s death when on September 14th my aunt’s only child, a young man of 17, drowned in the Caspian Sea. The last one hit me on the head like a ton of bricks.

I had come to believe in the absurdity of life and I was waiting for the death of myself or someone close to me. But September 14th came and went and nothing significant happened. Even a year and a half after that nobody died, but I was not in the mood for paying attention to new people.

Later, when the effects of a satirical project gave me a lift, I came to know Rojan better and learned that she had come to Tehran from a small town in Isfahan for the love of cinema. Her dreams waxed and waned. Sometimes she talked about her yearning to become a director or a producer; other times she would consent to wearing a flower-patterned chador and join the extras of the series to increase her chances of becoming an actor. I never figured out how her love for cinema had come about. She did not watch many movies and did not even follow TV series. Perhaps she was tired of watching others and wanted to be watched a little.

In a cold snowy day an agency car was caught in snow and it fell on me to drive three of the girls home. Rojan and Farzaneh, an assistance set designer, got off in front of Farzaneh’s home. It was only later that I leaned Rojan had no place to stay. Sometimes she camped at a boarding house and sometimes she stayed with friends. So much grief for the love of cinema? To be honest, I still don’t know.

****

Habib was still talking and pontificating. He felt no shame about his quarrels and fights or about recounting his adventures in bullying. He just claimed—claimed the he was intelligent, that he was strong, that he was fearless, that he was successful.

I don’t remember how many times he repeated the word “successful.”

“I said to him ‘go and become successful’. I succeeded by myself. Nobody helped me to succeed.”

He talked nonstop and incessantly about his prison in Japan, about the fast ones that he had pulled, about his fearlessness and his fistfights. Sometimes he would change his tune and even offered advice on how to become a successful reporter. I was so restless that I did not listen; otherwise perhaps I could have become a successful reporter. Without notice he suddenly started talking about the philosophy of love, exactly like Rojan that night when I had been stranded in her home.

That year Tehran was in the grips of a cold winter. The city was covered in white. Not unbroken, though. The moment that some of the snow melted, the mud took over the town. All the cars and all the people became muddy. The melted snow would start running and a cold biting wind would twist around alleyways.

The heaters in Rojan’s boarding house had stopped working. Filming of the series on which we were working was not yet complete. The satire of the series was going flat little by little. I decided to invite Rojan to our home for a few weeks so that she would not have to suffer the cold boarding house. I have no idea what made me do it. Perhaps it was out pf habit because I was still depressed. I still preferred silence to any kind of sound. I still liked to lie down on my bed, gaze at the ceiling and think about Ali whose adolescent joy and cheerfulness could sweep away all sorrows of death and funeral. But who would sweep away the sorrow of his death? But I had made my decision. Inviting Rojan was less due to affection and more because of sympathy towards a colleague. I even hoped that she would refuse the invitation, but she did not.

Rojan had a cold and was incessantly sniffling on set. She came to our house which ever since my childhood had had acted like a three-star hotel for travelers coming from abroad or other towns. It was such an open house that I was sure I did not have to coordinate it with other members of the family. Like me, they could not let go of their habit even when they were depressed or sad. I shared my room in my parent’s home with Rojan.

She arrived at our place with only a backpack and no more than two or three dresses. Her appearance showed that even if she had a rich family they were not supporting her. I witnessed only a couple of phone conversations with her sister and in the two months that Rojan was my guest she never said much about her family. I only learned that if her brother gave the others’ share of their inheritance, she would be able to invest in a short film and fulfil her wish. She was more into talking about cinema and her dreams and I was not eager to know more about her family. She recounted that once she had been forced to film a mourning ceremony with a rented camera to make some money.

At last the cold winter of 2008 was over and the filming of our serial was complete by the arrival of Iranian new year on march 21. Rojan packed her things to spend her new year holidays at her parent’s near Isfahan. Then I had no news of her for 6 month until on a cold day, when autumn had arrived at Tehran sooner than usual, she called me and invited me to her home. I was happy that she had been able to rent a place in such a short time. I was not even pissed that she had not contacted me after leaving my home. I guess I had learned well how to be a hotel manager and did not expect the guests at my parental home to contact me and express their thanks, not even if they were the closest relatives.

I bought her flowers and sweets and set out for eastern Tehran. I don’t remember anything about the flowers but I distinctly remember that whenever I went to pay a visit to somebody I would buy my favorite cream puff, hoping to get a share of it. I lost my way a few times until I found the address in an alley in the Estakhr neighborhood. It was a small house but cute and newly built, with stylish and expensive furniture—a typical house of Iranian newlyweds with the bride’s dowry and the bridegroom’s tiny property. Everything looked brand new.

I was happy to see the house but Rojan herself had lost weight and was thinner than before. She was wearing a satin robe which looked more like a sleeping gown and had colored her auburn hair blond. She had blow-dried her bangs meticulously.

She offered me tea and told me happily “I am married!”

I was both happy and uncomfortable because I was sprawled on the couch and was not looking forward to meeting the husband in that tiny house. “Don’t worry,” Rojan said. “He is not coming home tonight. He is traveling on business.”

It was dusk when I arrived. She had made lasagna for dinner and everything was ready. She was still arranging her bangs obsessively. She behaved the same way at work and while she was staying with us. She would constantly stand in front of the mirror and was anxious that her bangs would line up perfectly on her forehead. Should could just take one step from the mirror and light up the oven, but apparently she had decided to give me the full benefit of her looks before turning on the oven.

It was the same night that I first saw that glass pipe and that magical white powder. Rojan spread her stuff on the table, cleaned the glass pipe to a shine with cotton swabs, poured the white powder into the pipe, lighted a stone lighter under the pipe and started inhaling deeply, just like smoking a water pipe. The odorless white smoke wafted through the air and I was shocked.

Rojan talked without a pause. She talked about reaching god. The more the white smoke danced through the air, the more Rojan’s talk became spiritual and philosophical. Then she started to tell me about everything, from that fact that she had entered into a temporary marriage to how she had grown closer to god since she had started using that magic powder and how sometimes god visited her at her home.

Rojan just talked and talked without a pause. Sometimes she would press her teeth hard together and was oblivious of the pressure on her teeth and her jaw.

“Look at the shadow of Christ on the wall,” she said. “Christ is right here. This is not the first time that he has visited my home. Look! See how he is carrying his cross on his shoulder.”

She then pointed to cross pendant that she was wearing and said “I am carrying my own cross, too.”

She had changed into a poet and a philosopher, something that she had not been before. She would not read one line of poetry and all the time that she was staying with us she had not even once looked at my library but she was now talking big like a philosophy professor.

I was unable to breath and out of fear my heart was beating so loud that I was going deaf. They keys to my car and to Rojan’s home were nowhere to be seen. She had hidden them and was telling me that I should remain with her till the morning, although I later discovered that she had put them under the cushion she was sitting on.

I had no way to escape. I sat on the sofa till morning like a statue with my eyes open. I had one eye on Rojan and other on the door. One ear was listening to Rojan’s nonsense and the other to the grumblings of my belly which had been denied lasagna because Rojan was lost in her imaginary world.

Out of fear, anxiety and hunger I ate almost all the pastry which I had bought. I ate so many cream puffs that I thought I would not touch one for the next few months. In those moments nothing seemed far-fetched. Maybe her husband would pop in. Maybe it was all a scheme and they wanted to do something bad to me. I was cursing the house with open doors. No doubt she had talked about my parental home with her husband, they had been bewitched by that old and grand old house and now wanted to put the squeeze on me.

It was the same way the night that I met Habib and heard the rumors about him. I did not blink until morning and I was thinking what if the police were after Habib? What if they had followed him to the restaurant? What if they put me in jail because I had had launch and had talked to a drug smuggler? What somebody who knew Habib and had seen us with him would think about us? Immigrant Iranians who had simple lives and were minding their own business hated drug smugglers. The life of Iranians had become more difficult after the news about drug smuggling had spread around. Malaysian were no longer respecting Iranians as they did before.

Habib was a strange creature. On one hand fear and anxiety prevented me from getting close to him. On the other hand, however, it was the first time that I had met a crystal meth dealer from close-up and the curiosity for learning about him pushed me to get close to him. From the very first Habib was like the subject of a report for me, but a subject that I never thought I would have the courage to write about.

I have no idea how it happened that Habib and I crossed paths many, many times. One day I was sitting with a friend at a Starbucks café in the same Pavilion shopping center when he saw us from afar, came and sat with us and again launched into his speech. Another day I was crossing the street when he saw me and shouted “well, hello lady reporter!” And still another day I came across him in an Iranian restaurant. I started to ask him some questions and he eventually laughed and said “I bet you are going to write a story on me one of these days.” His eyes flashed strangely when he said this, so strange that when I write about him my hands go cold and a shiver runs through my back.

Habib was from the rough neighborhood of Khazaneh in Tehran. His memories were filled with fights and knives and cutlasses. Sometimes he would appear as a child of seven who poured his heart out by paying simple compliments like “oh, what a beautiful a hat!” and sometimes he was an aggressive and nervous man who believed that in a world of several billion people it would make no difference if one of them was taken out. He would then threaten others that he would hang them upside-down from a mast. He saw himself as a hero and believed that “success” was his registered trademark.

Later I learned that earlier his main occupation had been mugging. In Japan he robbed foreign tourists of their credit cards at knifepoint. Then he would empty out the cards quickly by buying famous brand-name products and he would then send them to Iran to be sold. But this mugger and smuggler had another side which he sometimes showed to people.

Amir told us that once Habib made an appointment with a car dealer to buy a white Malaysian-made Perodua Myvi. He was buying the car for a mother and her daughter and had laughingly told Amir “I have committed so many sins. Now let me do a good deed.” According to Amir, the mother and daughter were hard up and the mother had to go to a town near Kuala Lumpur to work but commuting was expensive and swallowed up half of her income.

Amir said that this was not the first time and Habib had even helped students or travelers who were in tight spots. But in between the help that he gave he talked about getting rid of troublesome people as though he was talking about eliminating flies. Nobody dared to joke with him as Amir did. We secretly laughed at the cellophane cover over Habib’s diamond-studded watch but Amir was the only one who dared to tell him “forget about the watch buddy. I am hooked on the cellophane around it which is so chic.”

I was afraid of Habib but at the same time loved to know more about the protagonist of my unwritten story. Sometimes I pitied him and other times I looked for an escape route so that I would never come face to face with him, especially when he talked about eliminating humans. And yet I would drag my spouse for lunch to the restaurant which Habib frequented to find out more about him. But every night I would toss and turn and cursed myself until morning and promised that I would not get more involved. Sometimes I would even imagine that the police officers were in front of our door. Or perhaps Habib had figured out the intent behind my curiosity and that night would eliminate me forever, just like the night that I spent at Rojan’s home and was thinking about all horror movies that I had seen in my life.

*****

Exactly at 6 o’clock in the morning when Rojan had been exhausted by talking and had left the cushion to sprawl on the sofa I took the key and escaped her house. I was dazed and was nauseated. I hated myself and hated every scene that I had witnessed. I was angry with myself for trusting human beings. My eyelids were heavy by sleepiness, the same eyes that had searched the walls of Rojan’s home in vain to find the shadow of Christ, the shadow that Rojan talked to.

All the time I was thinking about what the editor-in-chief of a newspaper which I used to work with a few years earlier had told me. It was an autumn day and we were returning from a news program in the car of another colleague. A drug-addict youngster fell over the windshield and the editor-in-chief gave him some money. My colleague and I were surprised and objected to what he had done. “You two are so confident of yourselves, aren’t you?” he said. “How do you know that one day we would not be in the same situation?

“We in the same situation? And you?”

“Yes, me. Yes, you,” he answered. “If one day I hear that my family has been in an accident, would I be so strong not to fall into this situation? Yes, each one of us can.”

I had just survived the great weight of grief and mourning, but I was neither happy nor lively nor hopeful. But Rojan was happy and her happiness scared me. I was scared of her dreams, her desires, her loud laughter and the world she was experiencing. No, I was not strong enough to bear the invasion of death into the lives of people around me and sleep at night without tranquillizers. No, I was not tough enough to survive Rojan and all her meth-induced joys.

I swore that I would never contact Rojan, just like the day that Amir was arrested in Malaysia. One night Amir’s car was in the repair shop and a restaurant customer told him that they were going in the same direction and he could take Amir home. But getting into the customer’s car only led to police.

Amir’s customer was a drug dealer who had hidden two kilos of meth in his car. When Amir’s co-worker Hossein told me his name I was shocked. He was a tall young man with green eyes, well-dressed and polite. I had met him many times. Even some time ago, at Amir’s invitation, we had joined them for an daytrip outside the town—people who, as I later learned, had their own registered brands for success and were competing with Habib. Those days I was constantly thinking of Amir. What made him to be pleasant towards these people? How much did he know about them? How much was deluding himself?

Apparently these restaurants were the hang-outs of all Iranian smugglers, whether for smuggling people into Australia or smuggling drugs. In the restaurants they played the role of generous customers but I leaned later that the restaurants functioned as their offices, too.

The same day that Amir was arrested Mohammad, the customer, escaped in his car, right from where Amir had got out.

The news of the chase and the shooting by the police went around the neighborhood ofMont Kiara. The morning after the incident everybody was talking about it, about how the police had turned the customer’s Mercedes CLS into a sieve and how he himself has escaped into the jungle and there was no news of him. But Amir who had gotten off the car and had claimed ignorance of the whole thing was arrested and spent a few months in prison until he proved that the guy had been merely a customer of his restaurant.

That day I decided to give up curiosity and inquiry and take a detour if I spotted Habib. I even decided not to go to Amir’s restaurant which, although it was still in business, had now acquired a bad reputation. People had issued their verdict against Amir before the judge had done so. Or perhaps many were afraid of frequenting the place as I was, even though the smugglers and dealers certainly no longer dared to set foot in the restaurant.

I was running away but everyday new names were added to the list, names that previously had only symbolized sports and clean living for me. It was as though a storm had ripped away all the curtains. It was a horrifying nakedness, more horrifying than death.

I was running away but it looked as if those handsome young boys were running faster than I was so that they could undress in front of me and show me more wound marks. I had to wake up at some point. I had to examine carefully what was happening around me. I was not a good eyewitness. I was scared. I was running away without looking. I had closed my mind until I was jolted out of sleep by the loudest sound that I had ever heard.

It turned out that the export-import company for which my husband and I had been working for a while was busy laundering the dirty money of the same handsome boys. This is what the Malaysian drug police said, right on the same day that I had come down with flue and we had taken a leave of absence. The police lined up all the employees next to the wall, took their pictures and fingerprinted them. I was a coward but apparently a lucky coward.

Now that the blinders before my eyes were removed it dawned on me why instead of bank transfers they were moving the money around in rolls and inside bags and suitcases. Just that day the Malaysian police seized 300 thousand ringgit in cash and detained Mahmoud, the young man who had put the organization together.

Mahmoud returned to work after exactly 14 days and nothing happened whatsoever, but he had become very suspicious of us. What raised his suspicions were the our leave of absence which had coincided with the police raid and, of course, me being a journalist. Right around that time a few reports were published with my byline which showed that I had returned to journalism.

Very soon our work visa was canceled. We were to become professional escapees and rent a new room every few months so that we would not be found, neither we nor my laptop where I had saved a collection of the pictures and the account numbers of the firm’s clients. I never figured out why exactly I was gathering so much information. Where in the world I would dare to talk about these people? I never discovered the reasons behind my contradictory behavior. On one hand there was this curiosity about the lives of these handsome boys each of which was an epitome of success and, on the other hand, I was scared to death of coming across them again.

But if in Tehran—a city so big that people could disappear like a drop of rain in the ocean—Rojan could reappear before my eyes, then how could expect not to come across Habib in the small Kuala Lumpur, especially in the community of Iranian expats? Not to hear new names? Perhaps I did hear names and saw shadows from far apart, but it seemed that our fates, mine and Habib’s, were intertwined. Perhaps the only smuggler that I had not come to hate was Habib. With all his bullying and with all his record of transgressions and offenses, he was not detestable. He was so simple and guileless that you could beguile him with a simple “you are so kind” and hear more stories.

Compared to Tehran, Kuala Lumpur was a small town—small but rising high, full of tall skyscrapers and convoluted expressways that in ninety percent of the cases if you did not know your way around town you could end up in the middle of nowhere; full of attractive shopping centers where you could find all the world-famous brands in just one luxury and fashionable shopping center; full of health centers which were as glitzy as the shopping centers were luxurious; full of sumptuous and inviting confectioneries. In short you could find whatever your heart desired in these shopping centers and everything was glitzy in an exaggerated style. The city was also filled with public holidays to celebrate and make merry.

But Kuala Lumpur had a different side as well. You could witness all the dirt and corruption in the winding alleyways hidden from tourists, from prostitution to child trafficking, drugs and so on. Prostitution was not legal in Malaysia but it was done as “hydrotherapy”. Five minutes in front of the HSBC branch in Sultan Ismael Street near Bukit Bintang, the same famous tourist center, for a few middle-aged men and an old woman to accost male tourists and push to guide them to the tenth floor of the same building and introduce them to their Chinese, Thai and Filipino girls.

You could buy the Malaysian police for anything. You could run a red light and get away with it for ten ringgits. You could kill someone and carry kilos of crystal meth and then spend a measly five hundred thousand ringgits and you were scot free. One day I paid 100 ringgits because I had forgotten my driver’s license and the other day paid a mere 200 ringgits for entering a one-way street from the wrong side. It could have been cheaper but I had been too scared. You could even pay a policeman 1000 ringgits and ask him to deposit somebody in prison, prisons which anybody who has experienced them says that they are the end of the world.

Kuala Lumpur was one of those towns that you loved until you came to know it. It had such an attractive disguise. Then when you came to know it, when you became familiar with its alleyways and its police and its laws nothing remained but the horror from all this mayhem—let alone if you had glimpsed something in the lives of people like Habib. What hurts most in its exaggeration of joy and beauty and happiness is that Malaysia wants to pretend to be what it is not. Wants to be an advanced first-world country and thinks it is, but it is not.

But Tehran was big, without a beginning or an end, unruly and disorderly. You would perhaps hate it if you were not familiar with it. But you would love it when you came to know its alleyways and could walk under hundred-year-old plane trees along its longest avenue. You would love all the tragedies which were unfolding silently in the cool of the night and the heat of the day. You would love its wide gutters, its colorful autumn, and its unshapely gray buildings scattered around the town which looks like the best place in the world for an end to a bitter tragedy. To be honest I want no more tragedies whatsoever but at the time that I was immersed in sorrow and pain by the invasion of death into the lives of people around me, Tehran was certainly the best place in the world. Tehran is the best place for failing at love, for the sorrow from the lost lover and the death of a love. Even the most clichéd love tragedies in the world become tearjerkers in Tehran.

I met Rojan again in the winter, the winter of 2008 when I had forgotten many things in the excitement of a new newspaper on the eve of the elections and my return to journalism. She was standing right in front of our door. She was freezing and her dress was flimsy.

“Let me in,” she said. She said that she had lost everything and now just wanted a little bit of money and a warm dress so she could go back to her parents.

“The bastard threw me out,” she said.

She said she had done everything to make a living and had kicked her drug habit. It was when she was putting on the warm clothing that I had given her that I first noticed the wound mark on her side. Before I had just been listening to her. As hard as I tried I had nothing to say to her. I really did not know what I should say to her. But when I saw the injury right on her side I could not bear it and asked about it. I had to know what were that deep line and those small holes which suggested a suture. I was guessing that only a sutured wound could make those marks.

I had guessed right. It was from a surgical procedure, an operation to remove a kidney. Rojan had sold a kidney. My feet went cold. I could not move and I could not stand up. My lips were paralyzed.

I did not even ask when, where or why. I only gave her the money that she had asked for so she would leave as soon as possible. I did not know whether she wanted the money to get a fix or she really wanted to go back to her town.

I asked nothing and wanted to know nothing. What I wanted was to forget Rojan forever. I wanted Rojan’s tragedy in Tehran to come to a close. I could not believe that I could be so cruel. Or maybe it was not cruelty but just shirking responsibility. If I had known, if I had asked questions, maybe I would have gotten more and more involved. I still have not figured out where and when this much cruelty, or perhaps the pretense of indifference, emerged. Once I told my mother if the world has no place for the 17-year-old Ali and all his hopes and his exuberance, what does it matter if it has room for anybody else or not. Where was Habib who said nothing would happen if one person goes missing in this world of billions? Which one was more horrifying, my indifference or Habib’s threats.

I pitied Rojan that among the 12 million who lived in Tehran she had to step into my friendship.

I promised myself that I would forget about Habib. Malaysia is not a good place for the final act of a tragedy. But Habib’s story was more like a crime novel and Malaysia is the best place in the world for the final chapter of a crime novel.

I met Habib a few days before leaving Malaysia. He had gotten into a fight and was injured. Blood was all over his clothes. He said that he had a fight with his Korean interior decorator who had been supposed tofinish the job for 180 thousand ringgits but was not done after 230 thousand ringgits.

He said it was not the money the was important but the fact he was not finishing the house. He was wounded and bloody—though I later learned the blood on his clothes was from the poor Korean—but talked incessantly and showed me pictures of his home on the tablet that he was carrying.

Perhaps this was the last time that I was seeing him. I don’t know. Or perhaps one day on this side of the world, in this little port city in the northern Europe which some people say is one the gateways for smuggling drugs into Norway, somebody in the street would suddenly shout “hello Lady Reporter!”

If Rojan is staring at me from behind the window in the building across the street and wants to know what her final act is, then it is not impossible that as I am standing in the bus stop Habib would shout from afar “hello Lady Reporter!”. Nothing is impossible in this world, not even the melting of a stone heart who would want to what has happened to a passerby who a while ago was pouring her hear out. Now perhaps not having any news of Rojan is a revenge for all my indifference and my stony heart. The same goes for the girl on the other side who does not move away from the window and is gazing at a point far away. Maybe one day this punishment would be over and I would learn what became of Rojan. The world is so small that I hope I would meet Habib just once more. And if I do I would definitely ask him “how many kidneys are worth 230 thousand ringgits?”