COLUMN ONE : In Tehran, Veil Lifts, but Slowly : As the grip of revolutionary fervor relaxes, city walls that had been emblazoned with ‘Death to America!’ now sport billboards for Western products.

It’s 8 a.m. on 94 FM, and the show “Good Morning, How Are You?” wants listeners to know that traffic is already backed up almost to the central city on-ramp of the Ayatollah Sadr Expressway and it doesn’t look like it’s going to get any better soon.

A caller on the morning phone-in program wants to know why yesterday’s blackout in North Tehran lasted more than two hours. Another caller says she saw prostitutes-- real ones--near a downtown square. They were holding up two fingers and then a flat palm, meaning, a listener explained later, “We can sleep together without penetration, 2,000 tomans (about $140).”

Drive-time radio shows? With discussions of public sex? In the land of the Islamic revolution?

Tehran, a decade ago a city of marching students and enraged mullahs, is more and more a city of people irritated over the price of chicken and wondering when an illegal copy of “Terminator 2,” wrapped in a newspaper, will be furtively delivered by the neighborhood video man in his unmarked car.

Nowhere in the Middle East is there a city with so revolutionary a reputation and so cosmopolitan an air. From the crowded old alleys of the bazaar, filled with a permanent haze of sunlight and dust and shouted curses over the price of a carpet, to the ski slopes above the city, where women perch sporty caps atop daringly short veils, Tehran these days has a way of surging irrepressibly around the edges of the Islamically correct.

Recently, dozens of bus drivers simply refused to work when the blood money to be paid under Islamic law to the family of someone killed increased sharply to 70 million rials (about $48,000), proof that ubiquitous inflation was now rising heavenward, as well. “Drive Slowly,” advised a newspaper sympathetic to the angry drivers, adding, “70-million-rial human beings are moving fast in the streets.”

On the streets of Tehran, there is good reason for caution.

In a rigidly controlled society where theft is punishable with a severed hand and most forms of dress, music, drama, painting and political expression are under tight rein, the spirit of the city spills daily out into its streets, a rushing, honking, terrifying melee that each month claims the lives of more than 90 Tehranians and sends 500 more to hospitals.

The city walls that once were covered with slogans like “Death to America!”--some still are, but they appear weather-beaten and the new mayor has had many painted over--now are emblazoned with billboards for Toshiba computers and Dole bananas.

There also is a new slogan scrawled on fences all over affluent North Tehran. It says, simply, “The Outlaws.”

“I stayed away for years because I couldn’t stand this place,” said a middle-aged woman with a shock of wavy hair pushing errantly out from under her head scarf. She spent most of the last 13 years since the Islamic revolution in Paris. Recently, though, she flew home--not because of the financial incentives the government is offering many returning exiles but because of something harder to define.

“I came back because I felt something was happening here. It’s like a laboratory,” she said. “Something is bubbling here; we’re not sure whether it’s an angel or a monster. But I didn’t want to miss it.”

More and more, the conservative chador--the sweeping black cape that enshrouds women from head to toe--is being replaced by stylish, colorful overcoats and bright, printed scarves that reveal impossibly elevated curls in a city that only recently believed a visible strand of hair to be a sin.

College women often push their scarves way back on their heads and tie them high on the chin in a madcap parody of the traditional hijab , or Islamic dress. This is an affectation that religious conservatives, shaking their heads, place into a category of shame known simply as “bad hijab. “

All this has sparked not a little resentment among the faithful. A gang of young hezbollahis tore through several hairdressers’ shops last week, ripping hairstyle photos from the walls; in central Tehran, a warning was penned ominously on the wall of a shopping center: “The bad hijab of a woman is the result of the unmanliness of her husband.”

It was in this atmosphere of anything-could-happen that a woman director mounted a production of “Uncle Vanya,” Anton Chekhov’s tale of the decadent Russian aristocracy, in a theater in a downtown park.

The play, it was whispered, would feature simulated vodka drinking on stage; it had a plot in which two men fall in love with a married woman--this in a country that did not even allow actresses on stage until a few years ago.

All of Tehran was there for the unofficial preview, the night before opening night. A friend of the director’s arrived at a downtown hotel to pick up three foreign journalists for the performance. Though usually from the fashionable overcoat set, she wore a long black chador, and, despite the onset of dusk, she was bedecked with huge sunglasses.

“I have to be careful,” she said lowly, walking slightly ahead of the journalists and surveying the parking lot carefully. “When we get there, don’t expect me to be friendly. Try to blend in with the others. Pretend you are diplomats.”

She led the reporters down a narrow subterranean staircase into the theater lobby. A gate behind them was closed and padlocked.

Already, the censor had complained that the female lead had displayed too many “erotic attractions,” revealing too much of her neck and her ears. For this night’s performance, her Russian headdress was pulled down snugly on her head, but apparently not far enough. Or maybe it was the vodka. Or Chekhov’s plot?

No one can figure out exactly why, but so far, the play has not been allowed to open.

“Since the revolution, there hasn’t been any first-class Iranian painter or artist or musician,” an Iranian writer said bitterly. “Islam cannot produce musicians because music is prohibited. Anything which moves you inwardly to joy is prohibited. Islam has not shown anyone how to enjoy life. They showed us how to feel pain, and to portray the pain, but they never showed us how to feel joy.”

Yet some Tehranians are not yet ready to blame the revolution for every ill. Some blame themselves. “We had just as much censorship before, with the shah,” said Morteza Momayez, a well-known graphics artist whose pre-revolution movie poster of a scantily clothed woman was excised from all the copies of his most recent book.

“There are two kinds of censorship,” she said. “One is political and is done by the government, and it is done according to ideology. The shah had his ideology, and Khomeini had his. But there is another censorship which is worse--and it is in each Iranian’s mind. No one is ready to talk about this second one. . . .

“In our culture,” Momayez continued, “in our work, in our life, there are always two faces, and both sides are real. This Islamic regime is one side of the coin, and the shah was the other side of the coin. We are both. Khomeini was our grandfather, and the shah was our elder brother.”

It is this duality that allows North Tehran women to wear dangerously low-cut sweaters and miniskirts under their chadors and to order homemade vodka from a local Armenian who with his young son delivers it secretively door to door.

It is there in an old house in West Tehran, where three artists last week were rapidly painting the walls, floors and ceilings before the scheduled demolition of the house next month. The images they painted showed white birds in flight; the horror of burning oil wells; the corpses of the Gulf War dead; a beautiful woman in a low-cut red dress, and the head of John the Baptist. All are encircled with a halo that formed the name of the revered Shiite Muslim martyr, Ali.

“You see,” said Charrokh Ghiassi, the artist who conceived the idea, “one of the important aspects of this is that we’re painting something which is going to be destroyed, which itself is important. We are not interested in the duration of a work, that it should last. The most important message is the action of painting itself.”

It is Tehran’s artists who have been the first to lure the Iranians into confronting the devastation of their violent history and Iran’s eight-year war with Iraq, which reduced two Iranian cities to rubble and left hundreds of thousands dead on both sides and thousands more maimed. The streets of the capital are haunted by the wounded, years after the cease-fire. In every crowd, in many offices, there is a man in a wheelchair or carrying a crutch or missing an eye or a hand.

At the tomb of the late Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, a man drags himself into the main chamber on one leg and must be helped to the floor. At the headquarters of President Hashemi Rafsanjani’s political supporters, a man with both legs cut off at the pelvis by a mortar round sits in a wheelchair, chatting and sipping tea.

“It wasn’t a question of a good war or a bad war,” he says. “They came like a thief, and it was a question of defending our land. Khomeini was right; he tried to tell you this man was a thief, that it was not just a war between Iran and Iraq, that anyone could be next.”

At the Imam Relief Foundation headquarters, a woman in a black chador who has been denied aid suddenly begins wailing, banging her fists on the walls and flailing. “Why did you die?” she screams as employees struggle to hold her down. “Shall I go and sell myself? Shall I go and steal?”

Inside his office in the next room, foundation director Askar Oladi shrugs and observes: “We have been giving her help, but she’s crazy. She just goes out and gives the money away and then comes back here for more.”

For years, no one was allowed to depict the Iran-Iraq War as anything but a glorious chapter in the Iranian jihad against the infidels. Films that took a different line were banned. Now, cinemas across Tehran are filled with images of bloody battles and the devastation and heartache they leave behind when they are over.

In “Flight in the Night,” several soldiers are separated from their unit and surrounded by the Iraqis. “Throughout the movie, they face various troubles,” says Sayed Mohammed Beheshti, who heads Tehran’s annual international film festival. “At the end, not only do they not find any victory, all of them are either very seriously injured or dead. There is no triumph in this movie.”

Mohsen Makhmalbaf’s “Marriage of the Blessed” shows eerie scenes of a hospital ward of shellshock victims; its hero is a combat photographer who finds the war has left him on the verge of insanity and disillusioned with the loss of the Islamic revolution’s ideals. “The oppressors are coming back,” the man warns.

Khomeini’s tomb has become a mecca of sorts for the faithful who fear Iran may be straying from his path. On any given day, the cavernous mosque that surrounds the coffin is full of families who spread out a carpet, sit and socialize quietly in the comforting presence of the imam’s remains.

The glass chamber around the coffin itself has its walls piled three feet high with currency--money donated to finance the building boom going on outside. Beside the mosque where the body lies, cranes are constructing a new Islamic studies university, an advertising center and a shopping mall. Trees and parks are rising.

A mini-mall is in place already, featuring beach towels and T-shirts with whimsical designs and large bamboo blinds painted with Khomeini’s image. A poster shows the late imam perched next to a rainbow, ascending into paradise. “With a tranquil and confident heart, joyous spirit and conscience hopeful of God’s grace, I leave you, sisters and brothers, and depart for the eternal abode,” it says.

Cassette tapes of the holy will are available in Farsi, Arabic, English, German and French.

“Everybody asks where the money of Tehran goes. Now you can see where the money of Tehran goes,” a taxi driver said, shaking his head. “This all has been paid by our money, and why? This is a graveyard!”

The building boom hasn’t stopped at Khomeini’s tomb. Gholam Karbaschi, Tehran’s beloved and feared new mayor, is whipping the city into shape, to the delight and chagrin of its residents.

New parks are going in everywhere. The rubbish collection system is being beefed up. Stray dogs have been rounded up and killed. Traffic fines, in an attempt to cut down on the carnage, have been increased tenfold.

North Tehranians are being told to build on vacant lots next to their villas or see them turned into neighborhood playgrounds. Large numbers of new apartment buildings and offices are going up, despite the bad economy; each of them is being assessed hefty, occasionally back-breaking fees for building permits and utilities.

One recent morning, a hospital that had been slow to pay city fees found a bulldozer outside its door, engines gunning. It paid.

Karbaschi unabashedly admits that the city budget has gone from 50 billion rials ($34.48 million) per year when he took over two years ago to 500 billion rials ($344.8 million), nearly all of it supplied by local taxes and user fees.

“Tehran is a fairly old city, and when this city was built, nobody followed a plan, so that everything would be in its place,” he said. “So we ended up with all the problems that go along with that--smog, water pollution, noise pollution, traffic, shortages of libraries and theaters, things like that.

“The way we are trying to do our work is to provide our budget from the people we are providing services for,” he said. “This is the same in cities all over the world.”