STAINS ON THE CARPET
SIR,—I would have thought that Dr. Esfandiary would at least know whether or not elections in his country had yet taken place. He asks: 'Were the elections not . . declared void and new elections held'?' No, Doctor, new elections have not been held yet. And although when I left a couple of weeks ago people had been saying for some time that they were imminent and that a date was on the point of being announced, as far as I know there has been no action yet.
Commenting on the rigging of the elections, the Doctor makes the odd point that 'there was so much freedom that the people abused it.' Does he mean that it was the people who rigged the elections? Or that had they not been rigged the wrong candidates would have got in? This latter construction would appear to be consistent with the Iranian conception of democracy.
Two of the Doctor's claims about Teheran I can refute from my own experience. Domestic help is in
fact very easy to obtain, and wages are low. We paid our housekeeper eleven pounds a month, and many competent observers thought we were over-generous —but we liked her cooking. Labour is plentiful. Every morning thousands of labourers line the streets hoping to pick up a day's work from a building or road contractor. Only a small percentage succeed.
And he says Teheran 'has become so modernised' that not even a small corner can be found that has not shared in this evolution.' A photographer on the paper I worked for stumbled on just such a corner and produced a squalid but moving photo of family life in a gutter : he could have found similar scenes in almost any street in the southern half of the city. I wrote a caption for his picture pointing out that 'this is the part of the city that foreigners arc not often shown.' The Security Department fumed, and, to avoid the paper's being suspended, I was dis- missed.—Yours faithfully,
Tylden, Warn/tam, Sussex
MICHAEL. LEAPIMAN
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