Otherworldly Dudes and Iranian Refugees

Tom and I used to debate whether there were actually more crazy people in New York or whether they were just more visible. Some days it seemed like every corner and every subway stop revealed someone collecting used metro cards or talking into a shoe. These are the weirdos you generally avoid. But there are other weirdos with stories and they linger in your caged city imagination. Why is that man walking down the street with a cat on his head? Who is that guy on the blue line who yells at me to Help Feed the Homeless, and why does he have such a large duffel bag?

There's a universal rule of travel, the law of Weirdo Gravitation. When you're traveling, you're immediately attracted to oddballs for the possibility of an adventure or an easy anecdote. This was definitely the case in August in Kyrgyzstan. There was the policeman we met in a yurt camp on Lake Issakol who announced that his daughter was looking for a husband, and later offered to "introduce" Nick to her if he had over $40,000 or an apartment with more than two rooms. There was a Canadian defense attorney who had quit his private practice to travel the world for two years because he was "sick of whiners who don't want to pay."

In the hostel in Bishkek we met a guy we called "The Otherworldly Dude" (for his serene manner) and "German Taliban" (for his long beard and strange dress). By his own description, he had been traveling continuously since 1993, stopping for a few years at a time in various African countries and in India, where he founded a commune. With traditional clothes and his beard as a guise, he had walked across northern Afghanistan sometime after the start of the war. He wore baggy black capri shorts which were tied around the waist with a cloth belt. When asked where he got them, he sighed with otherworldly indifference and said: "They're just ordinary Thai fisherman's pants."

One of the more detailed and unique stories I heard was from an Iranian student in Bishkek. We'll call him "S." I've told his story to a number of friends and the usual reaction is skepticism. I met him over beers and shashlik four or five times and he seemed like a genuinely nice and interesting guy.

It starts like this: S was an art student living in Tehran until about two years ago. He came from a secular family with little interest in the regime or Islam. Looking at him, he could have just arrived from New York - tight pants, checkered slip-on shoes, metal studded belt, ironic t-shirt, earrings and hair to his shoulders. Not the sober ideal of a revolutionary Muslim.

In Tehran he met a girl whose grandparents had moved to Iran after the Russian revolution. Her family, too, was secular. She spoke both Russian and Farsi, and didn't look like an Iranian girl - her skin was paler, her features lighter. Clearly a foreigner, not Persian.

After dating for a while, they decided to move together to Bishkek so that S could learn Russian. Living there for a few months, making some friends, they decided to get "married." The quotation marks indicate that it wasn't a marriage that the Islamic Republic of Iran would recognize when they returned home, but something they did for themselves.

Eventually they did return to Tehran, in time for Nowruz celebrations in March. This was when things started going very badly for S. While home, his Russian love left him and moved in with someone else. S was so distraught that he spent the next week wandering aimlessly in the mountains outside of Tehran and roaming the streets of the city. At the end of that week, tired, disheveled, disoriented, he was sitting on the sidewalk when the religious police approached him. They thought he was a drug addict. They hauled him to the basement of a local mosque to interrogate him.

While they were asking him about his long hair, his piercings, his possible drug use, they went through his backpack. They turned on his laptop and found video clips that one of his friends had taken of the wedding in Bishkek. They immediately recognized that the bride wasn't Iranian and that it wasn't a standard Muslim ceremony.

They held him in the prison for days, beat him, tried to find out his connection to the foreigners, the infidels. Who are these people? Why are you drinking? What were you doing in Bishkek? S claimed that it was a video he shot as part of a drama production for a university project. They didn't believe him.

They only released him after his father came to the Mosque and signed over his house and car as bail for a future hearing in a religious court. Out of jail, his father bought him a plane ticket for the next flight back to Bishkek. He fled the country. The next day, S was back in Kyrgyzstan where Iranian citizens can easily get an entry visa.

Using the money left in his bank account, he enrolled in Russian classes at the university in Bishkek and was therefore able to get a longer-term student visa. He kept in touch with a friend in Tehran by email, using a new address and never including his name or important information. A few months later, the friend reported that his father had been arrested. At the time S told me this story, he said his father had been in jail for about a year and he had heard nothing from him since.

S says he applied for refugee status but it went nowhere. With limited opportunities to work and study in Kyrgyzstan, he was looking for visas to Russia or Europe, but passport issues are tricky when you're an Iranian on the run from the government. The last time I saw him, we met for breakfast and he introduced me to his girlfriend - an employee of the American embassy.

It's a strange and almost unbelievable story. Almost. I'm inclined to take it as a live confirmation of everything I know about the Iranian regime, and another reason why change is overdue in that country.