City of Lies Love, Sex, Death, and the Search for Truth in Tehran by Ramita Navai

Author:Ramita Navai
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9780297869504
Publisher: Orion
Published: 2014-05-07T22:00:00+00:00

five

LEYLA

Imam Khomeini Street, south Tehran, Motahari Street (Takht-e Tavous), midtown and Sa’adat Abad, north Tehran

Leyla was on her knees. Her hands gripped the edge of the brown velvet sofa. She flicked her hair over her back and arched her round bottom upwards. Taymour dropped his iPhone slightly as he started to pound faster. The small tea glasses on the side table chinked as the sofa rocked against it. On cue, Leyla started to moan loudly. Taymour grabbed her hair, pulling back her head. Then it was over. A few seconds of silence before the electricity meter on the wall clicked it away. Taymour threw her a towel and Leyla wiped herself down and put on her clothes. And so began Leyla’s career as a porn actress.

In truth, she was a prostitute who made home sex movies, but in her mind she was a porn actress. That is because making home-made porn changed Leyla’s life. She no longer felt like a prostitute; she was an actress, she told herself. And, more importantly, she was earning three times the money she could get from turning tricks. The grainy film she made with Taymour was an underground hit. Which meant she was a step nearer to fulfilling her dreams – of giving up hooking and setting up a happy home with a rich husband.

Leyla grew up a lower-middle-class kid in a middle-class neighbourhood in north-west Tehran. Her childhood was like thousands of others. Her mother was a secretary. Her father was an administrator in a bank who worked as a chauffeur to supplement the family income. If there was extra money, holidays were spent in a cheap chalet in Babolsar, a resort town on the Caspian coast. At the weekend, on Fridays, they picnicked in Park-e Mellat on Vali Asr.

Leyla was still a little child when her parents began to despise each other. It had dawned on Leyla’s mother that her husband would never amount to much, and that life would always consist of juggling their debts to stay afloat. It had dawned on Leyla’s father that his sex life would never recover after Leyla’s birth. He also realized there was a direct relation between the passage of time and nagging; the older his wife got, the more she nagged and belittled him. The few happy moments gave way to arguments and bitterness. They both took lovers. Leyla’s older sister escaped by marrying a doctor and moving out of the city, to the wealthy manicured suburbs of Lavasan. The doctor’s parents had tried to talk their son out of marrying beneath him, the daughter of a driver, but he had stood firm. To everyone’s relief, Leyla’s parents finally divorced when she was sixteen. Her parents soon both remarried, her father to a jealous young wife who forbade him from keeping in touch with his family.

By that time Leyla had fallen in love with a wild boy rebel. Babak was a year older and a teenage girl’s dream. He had a rap group, a nose job and wore his Versace sunglasses even when it was dark.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.