Rory Stewart on walking through Iran
‘A group of young men, pressing themselves against a wall as the mule and the saddlebags squeezed past, stared into my eyes unblinking. When I was ten yards down the street one muttered: “Kurdish smugglers, bringing things from Iraq.”
It is not the pessimism of these assumptions, or even what follows from them, that I found unsettling. It is particularly hard to define yourself when you have no fixed relationships. To be an Afghan drug dealer one day and a Kurdish freedom fighter the next (not just in idle fantasy but all the way to the police station) troubled me.’
