The hollow boy

Carl Stellweg She was 34 and still unmarried. Seven suitors had presented themselves and they were all rejected. But when she saw Sayyed, she knew instantly she had found her husband. The Hidden Imam had introduced him to her in a dream. The former living quarters of the late imam Khomeini (1902–1989) in North Tehran are startlingly modest for a man of his stature: a simple room with a sofa bed and a tiny kitchen, hidden by a curtain. It goes without question, though, that the popular narrative of a revolutionary ascetic bringing down a vain imperial despot could not have been illustrated more poignantly. A footbridge connects the abode with an equally unassuming mosque, where the ayatollah preached to his most devoted followers. Now there’s a sound of wild sobbing, coming from a dark figure hiding its face behind a veil — a grieving spectre.  “My daughter,” a woman says apologetically. “Every time she comes here, she loses control. No matter how long th

Carl Stellweg Luxury hotels in crisis areas are peculiar places.  They aren’t places at all. They’re metaphors. They’re hubs of alienation, with their clientele of businesspeople, aid workers and journalists from all over the world.  Outside you may be confronted with the blatant ubiquity of third world-squalor, but inside, there is nothing to disturb you. There is absence of squalor. There’s luxury and comfort and so on, and that’s, well, comforting. You are nowhere. You are an astronaut on your own planet. You are in a spaceship, paradoxically anchored to the ground.  Through bulletproof windows you catch a glimpse of the place you’ve travelled to, a place that seems terrible in many respects, a place that has radically nothing to do with you, and in your more mournful, dispirited moments, after a day of unanswered calls and cancelled appointments, you fantasise about the spaceship taking off and bringing you back to a world that you can comprehend and trust.