What Sandro noticed first about London was its smells. In Iran he was conditioned by the invisible clouds of incense gently wafting through the open tenament windows on his street in the city, and the oud pots perpetually smoking in the public squares. He missed the iconic blend of scents of his former home—incense and spice and goat fur and dust and fried eggplant and fresh bread; these defnined his nationality as much as his Iranian passport, revoked when he claimed refugee status, or his religion which depsite all that had happened he still believed in.

London, he said, reeked of car exhaust and vinegar and gaudy perfumes and offensive, nose-wrinkling whiffs of creosote forced up through grates in the sidewalks by trains passing through the tube stations below. He would get used to the smells of Britian, just as he would learn the timetables of the trains and how to shop in Neiman-Markus. Yet the first time he slept with an English man it was the absence of odour he noticed, as if these polite, self-conscious blokes had done their best to wash away the pheromones from their skin. The strong smell of soap and lather on English men disappointed him, and though he had slept with few men in Iran he recalled it was their masculine Arab musk that excited him as much as their bodies. Sandro would remain obsessed with odour as long as I knew him, and preferred meeting men in dim corners of British bathhouses where no matter how hard we tried we could not in the steam and sweat and the proximal darkness wash away entirely the aromatic signature of our breed.

As a teenager Sandro discovered there were queer men in Iran, but said to be so was as dangerous there as being the only person with Manchester green painted on your face at an Arsenal match. By instinct and observation he found some queer cruising spots in his city, frequented by the either deeply closeted or young unmarried horny straight men forbidden to have sex before marriage and wanting to get their rocks off. “You can take the queer out of the man,” Sandro liked to say when telling his story, “but you can’t take the queer out of Tehran.”

When he was seventeen he met a man in a dark alley beside a halal meat-packing factory and sucked his dick. Judging by Sandro’s clothes that he was from a wealthy family the man threatened to report him unless he was given money. Terrified Sandro gave all that was in his purse and ran away.

Sandro stopped looking for sex in the back alleys and dark corners of Tehran after that. Internet porn was not easily accessible, and just looking for it could bring the morality police to your door, so he satisfied himself by jerking off in his room to fantasies of his older cousins or men he knew from the neighborhood. The Iranian Republic had not yet learned how to spy inside of a person’s head, Sandro said, though he did not doubt that day too was coming.

At seventeen Sandro began to show interest in his father’s job, which was as the director of the Department of Culture, Islamic Arts, and Handi-work. To be the director of the Department of Culture, Islamic Arts, and Handi-work in Iran was such an honored  position that the Supreme Leader made it a non-secular post due to the percieved sacredness of the work. Sandro’s father Hyla Hussein was not an Imam, or a holy man, but was an efficient and loyal director embedded deep in political circles of the Republic.

Hyla Hussein’s job, as director of The Department of Culture, Islamic Arts, and Handi-work, was to oversee and curate the collections of several large museums in Tehran. These contained rugs and paintings and ceramics and tiling and glass works, along with sacred relics like wall hangings said to have once belonged to Mohhamed, and pieces of movable architecture (lone columns, buttressed mesis) acquired and brought to the country centuries before from Mecca and Medina. Items of interest were constantly being acquired, the process of which Sandro’s father oversaw and was delighted to relay to his only son.

Another aspect of his father’s job was to divest the department of works by artists who were judged as having become deviant or un-devout. These items were removed once a year in January from the musuems and burned in Azidi Square—the largest in the city—to which people from all over the city flocked to what had become an ersatz public holiday.

Each year Hyla Hussein took Sandro to the burning. As director his job was to approve the items brought to the pyre to be doused with gasoline and lit afire as the crowd surged excitely and shouted approval as they watched the purge. It pained Sandro to see such beautiful carpets and paintings destroyed, and such lovingly and painstakingly decorated ceramics and tiles dashed to peices on the ground. Sandro standing beside his fire well-back from the blaze learned to falsely shout his approval too. The year Sandro turned seventeen, after being blackmailed by the man in the alley next to the meat factory, his father suggested at dinner with his three sisters and mother the day after the purge that in future they should consider throwing the artists on the fire as well.

Sandro knew his father was joking, but that was when he decided to feign more interest in The Department of Culture, Islamic Arts and Handi-work. Sandro began talking about succeeding his father, and asking questions about a U.K. education by which he would learn the ways of the world in order to come back and contribute to the glory of Islam, but through which in reality he would make his escape. I sometimes regret writing the article that would put Sandro in the sights of the Iranian Republic again, and get us both in so much hot water. But Sandro told me not to worry about it. He said we were just two more sorry, sad-sack artists deviating from the sacred path of Allah, and tossed on top of the pile of burning art by the Department of Culture, Islamic Arts and Handiwork.