It's my visa and I'll cry if I want to: How I got kicked out of Iran

Let's hope these girls are allowed to cry and become judges

It was not a good day to have a bout of pre-menstrual tears.

This is a lesson in how little decisions and seemingly small gestures turn into big events.

I set off from the Parasto Hotel in Tehran in search of an imaginary ‘Foreign Aliens Office’ (dreamt up by the Lonely Planet) with a heavy heart. My friend from London, Katherine, had left Iran and our trip was over. I wouldn’t be going back to London anytime soon. I felt sad and when I hit the streets in the rain I knew the tears were mounting in the dam behind my eyelids.

With my map in hand I easily found the street that the shamefully outdated, incorrect and dangerously misleading Lonely Planet guide to Iran directed me to. I knew as soon as I turned on to it that there was no visa office on this industrial thoroughfare. But I blindly followed its instructions anyway and paid an incorrect fee of 550,000IR to Bank Melli.

I walked up and down the street four times in my attractive purple raincoat, with people helping me cross the road in the treacherous traffic and asking the occasional passer-by if they knew where the so-called Foreign Aliens Office was. Nobody did because it doesn’t exist but I didn’t know that then. After about an hour I decided to give up, go back to the hotel, and follow the advice of the locals not to try to extend my visa in Tehran.

Just before jumping in a taxi, I gave it one last shot and asked a male shopkeeper if he spoke English. He didn’t, but he asked a woman passing if she did. She stopped and asked me if she could help. I told her I was looking for the Foreign Aliens Office, she didn’t understand, so I showed her my notepad with the address, which also had other notes on which metro to catch and which branch of the bank to pay the visa fee to. Unfortunately she misread my scribbled notes and understood that I needed to go to the bank at the metro stop I had written down. But I didn’t know that then. She said she knew where it was. She meant the metro stop. I thought she meant the Foreign Aliens Office.

A nurse made me cry
But this lady was so nice and even after I suspected she had misunderstood, I couldn’t leave her or convince her to leave me. I discovered that she was from Syria, but had moved to Iran with her family because they were Shi’ites. I discovered she was a nurse, like my mum. I discovered her mother was very sick and her father died four months ago. I discovered she was a beautiful, beautiful person. And I cried. And once I started I couldn’t stop. Once I started, for more and more reasons, I had to keep crying.

I cried because women on the bus were nice to me, offered for me to stay at their homes, told me they loved me and then gave me tissues to wipe up the tears they induced. I cried because a poor nurse refused to let me pay my own bus fare. I cried because a busy bank manager took time out of his day to accompany me to a visa office because I was a guest in his country and I had the wrong address in my notepad. I cried because he was genuinely concerned at the bad impression the west has of Iran and Iranians. I cried because it was one of those days when I just needed to let the tears go. I cried for London and for friends I was leaving behind and I cried because the generosity of the human spirit was on display in lurid detail in a country that people told me was dangerous.

When we got to Bank Melli near the metro stop I had written down, I felt so bad about taking this woman so far out of her way, especially knowing we were clearly on the wrong track, that I thought it more polite to just carry on until somebody gave us the right address. This looked like Bank Melli’s head office. Surely they would know where the visa office was. I thought somebody would tell us the address and I could just leave and go back to the hotel, well and truly over the visa situation, as I was. But no, somebody called the manager, who was so distressed at my tears, he went off to find the correct address of the visa office and then personally accompanied me and the nurse in a taxi, for which he paid.

While we were waiting for him, I was given water, chocolates, a chair, a heater and tissues to dry myself with - both my tears and my coat of the rain.

Unfortunately, I could not communicate to anybody that I wasn’t crying because I was scared or lost. Apparently Iranians don’t cry when people are nice to them. Unfortunately, the tourist police don’t like it when two locals bring in a foreign woman who’s been crying, is wet, alone and has an incorrect address in her notepad.

Nobody listens to a cry baby
They were very nice to me, but demanded to know where I was staying and how I got the visa to Iran. I explained that I had been on a tour, but it had ended. They rang Reza – my divine, composed and urbane tour director – but they called me Catherine, my middle name. They had not asked me my name, just read it from my passport incorrectly. I tried to interfere.

‘My name is Gabrielle,’ I insisted, first talking directly to the police officer, then to the bank manager and finally to the nurse. Nobody listened. I knew Reza would be confused because Katherine, who was also on the tour, had left the night before. I said it over and over, and even though I was no longer crying, nobody was listening to a word I said.

I don’t speak Farsi, but I didn’t need to in order to understand that the policeman was angry and Reza was copping it. Eventually he put me on the phone to Reza and I was able to explain that it was Gabrielle and that I was trying to extend my visa in Tehran, against his better judgement. His calm and confident manner almost made me cry again, but not quite. By this time I suspected I might be in trouble, and I don’t cry when I’m scared.

In his own inimitable way, Reza told me not to worry, assured me everything was fine, that he would send somebody over from the hotel who would ‘act as my host’ in Tehran. And then they would give me my visa.

All seemed fine. The bank manager and nurse left and as I was waving goodbye Mustafa arrived. Mustafa worked for Reza and we had met in Yazd. I was so pleased to see him that I even forgave him for the stories he’d told me about tormenting donkeys and throwing a kitten off a roof when he was a kid (although I still might not trust him with my pets).

He asked me why I was crying when nothing was wrong. I told him I was crying because Iranian people are so nice. He looked at me strangely but carried on to the office of the head honcho tourist police dude.

Hand over your licence, buddy!
Mustafa has a face that could melt an ice queen and you know before you talk to him that he has been bewitching women since birth. But in a day of unforunates, unfortunately, his cheeky charm did not impress the tourist police. Pretty soon after Mustafa entered the office, he’d had both his tour license and driver’s license confiscated. Angry policeman kicked us both out of his office with no advice on what to do next.

Mustafa was scolded for leaving me alone and giving me the wrong address and for letting me walk the streets of Tehran alone in the rain. When he explained that I got the address from the Lonely Planet, that the tour had ended and that, as an Australian, I was free to roam the country alone, the policeman lost it. Apparently, he did not like to be told he was wrong.

In the course of the six hours he kept us sitting in the visa office, long after it was closed and everybody else had gone home, it emerged that he was cross because I had been found alone and surrounded by Afghan men under a wooden bridge. Which was why I was crying. And it’s there I was saved by the nurse.

It was no use trying to explain that this story was mad and completely and utterly untrue. I was crying; there had to be a reason, and to this very angry man, that seemed like a reasonable explanation.

Neither Mustafa nor I could fathom from where this story had come, but we decided it was counter-productive to keep insisting I was crying because people were nice to me and my friend had left for London the night before.

It’s for her own protection
‘What if something should happen to her?’ angry policeman asked Mustafa. ‘It would reflect badly on Iran. The western media would blow it all out of proportion.’

'She has been to much more dangerous cities than Tehran', Mustafa said. But every time Mustafa spoke, no matter how calmly, this man saw red. His anger was palpable and we could tell, by this stage, he felt he had something to prove.

Although Mustafa had befriended other officers there and had calls put through from his tourist police friends in Shiraz, our dude was the ranking officer on duty and he had a grudge.

Eventually, he decided I couldn’t stay if I wasn’t on a tour: an arbitrary and unlawful decision, but one that I was, frankly, ready to accept by then. I had terrible guilt about getting Mustafa’s livelihood confiscated and hijacking his whole day.

You may now go home to your mother
The police officer said he would give me my passport back, along with Mustafa’s various licenses, if I got a flight back to Australia. It was for my own protection, he insisted. I said I wasn’t going to Australia, I would go to Turkey or Georgia. He said, ‘Why can’t you just go back to your home country?’

‘Because I don’t want to and it’s none of your business actually,’ I didn’t say. I just stared at him in disbelief. He shook his head and walked off. He didn’t like it.

We waited.

Eventually, after our hours in purgatory, head honcho angry dude said that if another tour guide could come and vouch for Mustafa, and they bought me a flight for the next day, they would let us all go. Oh, and by the way, Bank Melli had paid my visa fee to the wrong account and the visa office couldn’t accept it, so I had to go back to the same branch (by now far away) and get my money back and pay it again to a different account. But the bank closes for a couple of days in, like, 20 minutes. Sorry we didn’t mention it six hours ago when you gave us the receipt. Only joking, they didn’t apologise.

Mohammed, another of Reza’s contacts swept in to save the day. We were able to go to another bank, pay the visa fee again (300,000IR this time, without a refund on the other 550,000IR I’d already paid) and Mustafa and Mohammed kindly bought me a flight to Istanbul. It took about an hour for the ticket to arrive and then we were all set free. Me with my passport, Mustafa and Mohammed with their licenses.

I’ll cry if I want to
It felt like a relief, but only for a little while. I left the visa office feeling embarrassed and ashamed. I was so sorry to have got Mustafa and Reza in trouble and mortified about wasting Mustafa’s whole day. All because I cried.

I had spent two weeks in Iran speculating that women there were much more free than I had thought. Sure, they have to wear the hejab, but they wear it in such a way that expresses their protest every day. Everybody talks about the hejab and how they hate it and women work and date and go out at night. And then, there in that visa office, it became clear how much further they’ve got to go.

For while my country also has a long way to go till we reach equality, I am allowed to choose to travel alone; go anywhere alone, in fact. That’s how I’ve lived in Sydney, New York and London and even spent a little stint in Barcelona. It’s how I’ve already travelled through Greece and Turkey by myself. I’ve been out alone and travelled around these very dangerous places all by myself and nobody has ever stopped me or kicked me out for crying. And believe me, I’ve cried a lot on the streets of these cities. I remember, back in 2007, crying on the 38 bus at least once a week late at night, all alone, for many different reasons. I never got kicked out of London, although nobody ever offered me a tissue either.

This piece was originally entitled ‘The day I let all Iranian women down.’ I thought I’d let them down by proving the male belief that women are emotional and irrational: the very reason women are not allowed to become judges in Iran. I thought I’d proven them right. But I hadn’t. I cried that day, yes. Let me get this straight, though, because it’s important: at no point did I sob or break down or make, like, crying noises. I just had tears coming out of my eyes. I was laughing about it most of the time. I never lost my reason.

On the other hand, that police officer lost his. His anger was just as raw – if not more so – than mine. He made totally unreasonable demands and statements. He made up scenarios to support his position.

The day the tourist police let Iran down
When I think about how the tourist police officer behaved and I behaved, I am sure, on balance, he was acting more irrationally that day than I was. But it’s OK to lose it with anger, because that’s a male thing, is the underlying belief structure. There is no doubt in my mind that anger and ego corrupt reason more than a few tears. And that is what Iranian society, and western society I suppose, must somehow face.

I’m not ashamed anymore, nor am I embarrassed. If I want to cry on a bus because women are nice to me, I am going to bloody well going to cry on the bus because women are nice to me. I didn’t let those women down that day. It was the day, rather, that one man in the tourist police let Iran down. If it weren’t for him, you see, I’d leave Iran with only fond memories.