Western films.

The boom town atmosphere is oppressive. Fifteen years ago Teheran had a population of about three million. Today, it is approaching five million. This seems to cause neither alarm nor misgiving: Iranians are proud of their burgeoning megalopolis. They regard it as indispensable, a necessary attribute of modernity. One can almost literally see the city taking shape day by day. . Everywhere cranes rise into the sky. Everywhere there are excavators spewing up clouds of dust. To combat the menace of the traffic a Metro is being constructed by the French at a cost of untold millions: whatever Iran wants, Iran gets. Dense clusters of apartment blocks are being built on the outskirts of the city to meet the housing shortage. But, despite the spate of building, the cost of accommodation remains exorbitant. A perfectly ordinary twobedroomed flat can easily cost five hundred pounds a month. Often, a man must have more then one job if he is to meet his commitments. Landlords are reaping a rich harvest. But, as in all boom towns, little attention is paid to engineering proprieties. For Teheran, this negligence spells future catastrophe. The city is in a high-risk earthquake zone. On the fateful day of its destruction, it will be a death-trap. The flimsy towers of concrete and steel will collapse like packs of cards.

However, no one gives much thought to earthquakes: the present will do. So, the population continues to grow, money continues to be made, money continues to be spent. Unemployment is virtually unknown. The factories that line the western reaches of the city have to compete with each other for labour. 'Here,' the PRO of a firm making domestic appliances said, 'the simplest worker can get 1000 ryals (£8) a day.' A technician would earn 100,000 ryals a month. He himself earned 140,000 ryals a month. As for the directors, their salaries were anybody's guess. In fact, salaries of a million ryals a year are not all that uncom mon: Iran has one of the most skewed income distribution curves in the world. the PRO was a happy man. A Jew of Iranian birth, he had been lured back from Israel by the government. He told fif the bonuses, the low taxes, the 49 per cent of the shares owned by the workers this last one of the edicts of the Shah's 'white' revolution. 'Very nice policies,' he mur mured. 'It is very nice for all of us.' Did the workers have a union? 'They have very nice union. For your surprise we even have strikes! One of them lasted three days.' He grinned delightedly at me.

The factories are devoted to the assembly of consumer goods. They cannot satisfy the hunger for their products. The 150,000 washing Machines (all parts imported from Italy) turned out every year by the Arj works comes nowhere near meeting exist ing domestic demand. At the Paykan car plant the story is much the same: they make four hundred Hillman-type cars a week, but the waiting lists grow longer. Iran's revolu tion is founded on affluence, on consumption. It requires no austerity and no sacrifice. The process of development has been turned on its head. Money buys everything; and the money is there in quantity. 'We're running,' the pessimistic economist conceded, 'before we've learnt how to walk. The balloon's bound to burst. What a bang that will be!'

Agriculture has suffered because the farmers cannot always compete with the wages offered in the factories and on the building sites. Some land has actually gone out of use. Many of the villages round and about Teheran are half-deserted. Neglected orchards line the roadsides. It is a rare sight to see anyone actually at work in the fields. One of the consequences is that Iran has to import more and more of its food. Subsidies are used to keep prices down meat, for example, brought in from France, is generously subsidised; so is wheat. The chances are that if you order tea in a restaurant you will be provided with a cup of boiling water, an English teabag and an English packet of dried milk.

So acute is the scarcity of labour'and skill that Iran now has one million foreign workers, mainly Turks, Indians and Pakistanis. Large numbers of Indian and Pakistani doctors staff the Medical Corps who work in the countryside. A dearth of doctors is not the only cause of this: the fact is that not many Iranians show any keenness for the idea. They prefer to stay in the towns -or emigrate to the United States. For the expatriate, Iran is paradise.

One afternoon I ran into a cheerful Indian working (illegally) in a smallish, family-run hotel. He had come to Iran `touristing', but had found the pickings so good he had stayed on: indeed, the owner of the hotel (at which he had originally turned up as a bona fide client) had become so dependent on his electrical know-how that he would not hear of his leaving. 'I am making too much money,' he said happily, 'too much money. These people can do nothing. They want me to do all their work for them. If a light-bulb goes wrong, they cannot fix it. They call me. If the air-conditioning stops working, again it is me they call. They can do nothing at all for themselves.' He wagged his head in • gleeful despair. 'I cannot respect these people. They have too much money but they seem to have no wish to learn. Too much money has made them stupid. They do not know what to do with themselves.'

He cited as a typical example of Iranian idleness and decadence the son of the hotel owner. 'That boy cannot sit still. He's always travelling somewhere, wasting his father's money. Europe, UK, America. Always going somewhere. He says he is studying. But what can he be studying? If yo q ask him something, he knows nothing. He is always only boasting of fucking the foreign girls. No, I cannot respect these people.' All the same, he was going to stay the money was too good. Wasn't he afraid of the police catching up with him? `Maybe they will ask me to fix the locks in their jail for them. They too might want me to do their work.' He laughed fearlessly.

Proud dependence, aggressive helPr lessness these are the chief symptoms of the Iranian disease. 'Iranians really believe they are God's gift to mankind,' the expat riate complained. `One of them said to me the other day, "We are not human beings.

We are Iranians". So you laugh or cry?' One cries, I suppose. Take computers, very fashionable but also very troublesome. In one office I visited a sophisticated machine had been installed a couple of years previously. Every time it broke down an Israeli had to be flown in to do the repairs. The breakdowns became so frequent (its operators were bewildered by the thing) that, in the end, the Israeli had to be invited to take up permanent residence in Teheran. Often though, sophisticated machinery is simply abandoned. An American technician who had been in the country for some years was sunk in gloom. He had no faith in his Iranian assistant, a man equipped with all the paper qualifications. 'Put that guy ia front of a machine and he goes dumb. But you should see the fancy digital watch he wears. Never stops playing with it. The guY isn't stupid he's quite good mathematically. But to translate that mathematicS into practice. . .' He sighed. `I can't figure it out. If all the foreigners cleared out tomorrow, there's be ruins everywhere. This place would be a twentieth-century Persepolis.'

There are Iranians who understand such as the well-heeled but melancholY businessman I met at a dinner party. 'Indus' trial revolution? What industrial revolution? Listen. The other day I was looking at a catalogue from South Korea. I suddenlY thought why, we couldn't eyen make the goddamned catalogue. We couldn't even make the staples that hold the pages together. All this talk about industry is a fraud. What's going to happen to us when the oil runs out in twenty-five years? Are we going to live off pistachios and carpets? An oil-less Iran is going to be worse off than Bangladesh at least, they still know how to grow food. We would have forgotten even how to do that.'

He raised his brandy-filled glass. 'Cheers!'

Intellectual life in Iran is dead, a death symbolised by the knots of soldiery, bay' onetted rifles at the ready, who keep guard outside the gates of Teheran University; bY the censored, sycophantic newspapers; bY the paid ideologues of the regime who compare the Shah to Napoleon and call hun the saviour of mankind. 'I don't like the word intellectual,' the lady with courtly connections observed, 'because that usuallY means anti-establishment.'

'It's bad,' the poet said. 'I sometimes think it can't possibly get any worse, that we can't sink any lower than we have alreadY done.' He had given up trying to write. Tbe atmosphere did not lend itself to creation. Who, in any case, would publish his work? Who, outside a tiny coterie of friends, would read it? Writers cannot survive without an audience and in Iran there was no audience left. 'I'm just standing still, doing nothing, trying to preserve my mental balance, to keep sane.' Yet the went on) Iran was no trumped-up Country. It wasn't like Kuwait or, even, Saudi Arabia — oil-rich deserts peopled by nomads. Thousands of years of culture could not be abolished just like that. 'They're cramming this so-called Western culture down our throats, force-feeding us With all kinds of rubbish and bad dreams.

But I know in my heart that our people Won't accept it. Maybe this generation is lost. But in the end we'll reject the bad dreams they're ramming down our throats.'

But, if Iran rejected the West, what would it put in its place? Was it possible —or desirable — to go back to a fundamentalist Islam that lopped off the hands of thieves, locked women away out of sight and attacked banks because they charged inter est? Did he approve of those young men Who called themselves Islamic Marxists, Who, in one breath, called for radical social and economic reform and, in the next, threatened to throw acid in the faces of Women who had taken the road to 'liberation'?

No, of course he did not believe in anything like that. Islamic Marxism was Merely one of the symptoms of confusion, of mental disturbance. That kind of reactionary past was dead —or ought to be dead. The mullahs were as undesirable in one direction as the Shah and his 'clique' were in another. 'We're not Arabs, you know. We are Persians, descendants of Cyrus and Darius and Xerxes. The Arabs may have conquered us, but it was we who civilised them.'

I had been in Iran long enough not to be surprised at this sudden eruption of national fervour; it was often there, just below the surface, tempering the decadence and the West-made inanity.

'We are a people with thousands of years of civilisation behind us, do not forget that.'

He spoke with rising warmth. Iranians were possessed of a profound national sense, a profound sense of their identity, of who they were. 'They' were doing their best to destroy it. But it would destroy them. 'Iran will reassert itself. It may take fifty years for this madness to work itself out. It may even take a century. But we will come back to ourselves. We will win out.' Iran had always absorbed its conquerors. It had absorbed Alexander's Greeks, it had absorbed the Arabs and the Mongols. Ultimately, it would absorb the West too, it would create something quite new, something uniquely Iranian. What that something would be, what shape it would take, he could not say. But if the Japanese could absorb the West and survive, so could the Iranians. It was to Japan he looked for comfort.

I felt he was whistling in the dark.