Page from the book I am reading "Among the Believers" by V.S.Naipaul

The author is travelling by train with his guide Behzad and Behzad's girl.

Page 74 (Iran: The Twin Revolutions) Behzad's girl read with determination, but what she was reading did'nt seem to hold her. She stopped turning the pages. She put the open booklet face down on the seat and she and Behzad talked. She took her leg off the seat, and they began to play cards again, the same simple game. We stopped at a station. And - after Behzad's rebuke at Mashhad about my attitude to the 'poor classes' which had prevented me buying the fourth bunk - both he and his girl were now gigglingly anxious to keep out strangers. He drew the curtains on the corridor side.

The train started. There was a knock at the door, and almost at the same time the door was slid open. It was the sleeping-car attendant. He slung in blue sacks with bedding: a blanket, a pillow, sheets, a pillow-case. There was another knock. Behzad drew one side of the curtain. I drew the other. It was a small young man in soldier's uniform, with a revolver. He slid the door open, spoke to Behzad and closed the door. He wore black boots. I said "Army man?" Behzad said, "He is from the komiteh. He said we were not to play cards. Do you know what he called me? "Brother". I am his brother in Islam. I am not to play cards. It is a new rule." After his shock, he was angry. So was his girl. She said nothing; her face went closed. To Behzad now fell his man's role, and it was to me, witness of his humiliation, that he turned; working his anger out in English. "I don't mind about the cards. It's the power I mind about. He is only doing it to show me his power. To show me their power. I don't see how Mohammed would have known about cards. They weren't invented in his time." I said, "But he spoke out against gambling." "He did. But we were not gambling." "The man from the komiteh wouldn't have known that." "He knew. Of course he knew." My own sense of shock was developing. The appearance of the man in khaki had altered the journey, given irritationality to a land which, while the light lasted, I had been studying with an interest that now seemed inappropriate and absurd: trucks, roads, pylons and villages were not what they had seemed. Behzad said, "You see what I've been telling you. The power has to belong to the people. The workers and the farmers. The upper classes are all just wanting to show their power." I thought that the power now did belong to the people, that what had just happened was a demonstration of that power. I said, "Was the man from the komiteh an upper-class man?" "He is upper-class. The army always serves the upper classes. That is why I call him an upper-class man." We didn't argue. Neither of us wanted it; and his dialectic would have been as difficult for me as Ayatollah Shirazi's had been in Qom.