Zendegi

Nasim called in sick and prepared to spend the day at home, watching rumours and snippets of news ricochet between the satellite channels and the Persian blogosphere. She didn’t have to go through the charade of making her voice sound pitifully hoarse and congested; the department’s new personnel system made it as simple as choosing an option on her phone’s menu, and for a single day’s absence she wouldn’t need a medical certificate.

The truth was, she really did have a cold coming on, which always happened when she was short of sleep, but normally she would have brushed off the symptoms and joined her colleagues in the lab. Her mother was more disciplined; she too had stayed up half the night, channel-hopping beside Nasim, but she’d still gone in to work. Her students needed her, she’d declared. Ordinary life couldn’t grind to a halt just because there were people battling for the future of their country half a world away.

Nasim sat in the living room with her laptop beside her, listening for the ping of News Alerts while she cycled the TV between the BBC, Al Jazeera and IRIB. The Iranian government had ordered the country’s internet providers to shut down all domestic accounts and coffeenets, but they had not yet disabled business access or international phone lines, so journalists and some bloggers were still getting news out. Nasim suspected that the government didn’t really care; they were far more interested in keeping their own people in the dark than they were in fretting over international opinion.

IRIB, the national broadcaster, wasn’t ignoring the unrest, but it was covering it as a kind of social malaise arising directly out of unemployment. The poor state of the economy was not an unmentionable topic, but the network’s commentators blathered platitudes about the need for people to be patient and give the ‘new’ Majlis time to address the problem.

Nasim had almost dozed off when a brief coda to IRIB’s main news bulletin brought her fully awake. ‘Guardian Council member Mr Hassan Jabari says his research into the drug problem has been misrepresented by malicious elements of the foreign media.’ Nasim thumbed up the volume. ‘Mr Jabari issued a statement in Tehran this afternoon, describing a recent visit he made to an area of the city frequented by drug users, in order to gain insight into this tragedy. Having met one confused young man in urgent need of spiritual counselling, Mr Jabari agreed to drive him to his own mosque, in order to obtain advice from the mullah there. Unfortunately Mr Jabari’s car was involved in an accident, and now his act of charity has been portrayed in some quarters as an act of immorality. Mr Jabari stated that he would not take legal action against the slanderers, as his reputation among honest Iranians has not been affected by these lies.’

Nasim experienced a strange sense of cultural dislocation. This sounded exactly like the kind of story a senator in Washington might try to spin, as an intermediate step between the initial flat-out denial and the inevitable, tearful press conference with spouse, booking into rehab and finding of Jesus. She tried to picture Hassan Jabari standing at a podium with his wife beside him, blaming everything on prescription pills, then announcing that he was off to Qom for six months to get in touch with his spiritual side.

The doorbell rang. Nasim ignored it, hoping it was an easily discouraged Jehovah’s Witness, but the caller was persistent. She muted the TV and walked down the hall.

She opened the door to a smartly dressed middle-aged woman who asked, ‘Nasim Golestani?’ When Nasim nodded, she went on, ‘My name’s Jane Frampton, I’m a science journalist. I was hoping to have a word with you.’

‘A journalist?’

Frampton must have mistaken Nasim’s expression of alarm for some kind of struggle to place her name, because she added helpfully, ‘You might remember me from such New York Times bestsellers as The Sociobiology of The Simpsons and The Metaphysics of Melrose Place.’

‘I… don’t have much time to read outside my field,’ Nasim managed diplomatically.

‘May I come in?’

‘What is it you wanted to talk about?’ By now her mother would have had the woman ensconced in the living room, sipping tea and chewing gaz, but Nasim considered hospitality to be a greatly overrated virtue.

Frampton smiled. ‘The HCP. Off the record, of course-’

Nasim replied firmly, ‘I’m sorry, that’s not possible. You should direct all your questions to the MIT News Office.’

‘There’ll be no comeback, I promise,’ Frampton insisted. ‘I know how to protect my sources.’

‘I’m not a source! I don’t want to be a source!’ Nasim was bewildered. Why would any journalist go to the trouble of tracking her down? She was all in favour of academic free speech, but a costly, politically sensitive project still awaiting funding was never going to get off the ground if every postdoc who hoped to play a part in it started acting as a self-appointed spokesperson.