This morning I arrived for another session of cooking, eating and napping to find Vahid alone at home. “My mom teaches Arabic lessons on Wednesday mornings” he said. “Both my parents are out but they suggested that I take you sightseeing.”
We walked along a dusty road toward what looked like two stone hill towers in the distance. “I couldn’t sleep at all last night,” said Vahid. “I kept thinking about what you said to me. It was going around and around in my mind.”
We reached the base of one of the hills. It was one of the old Zoroastrian ‘dakmeh’ that I had read about. Dakmeh were special hilltop structures known as ‘Towers of Silence’. There was one for men and one for women. They had been used up until the late 1960’s by the Zoroastrians for laying out their dead.
As we climbed over the rocks and up the dusty path to the top he occasionally reached his hand out to me. I didn’t really need it but he insisted.
The Zoroastrians didn’t believe in burials. Instead they laid the bodies of the deceased out in the open in high towers for vultures to come and feed on. The bodies were laid out in a sitting position and a priest would sit with the naked corpses to watch which eyeball would be plucked out first by the scavenging birds. If it was the right eye first it signified luck for the deceased, if it was the left, it meant unrest in the afterlife. It was fascinating and a little bit creepy.
“Can I ask you a question?” said Vahid. “How are you going to manage for one month in Iran without having sex? I mean won’t you try to have sex with someone while you are here?”
