Zendegi

With that, he ran out of steam; he just stopped and waited for her reply. Nasim couldn’t argue with anything he’d said, and though she still felt somewhat flustered to be put on the spot, she could hardly blame him for asking. Every time he’d discussed the project with her in the past, she’d told him how much she admired the idea.

But she’d worked too hard to get where she was to risk taking a detour. It was one thing to say that, in principle, it was all good experience, but she knew what the competition would be like for the HCP, and she knew which projects would shift her résumé towards the top of the pile, and which would shift it towards the bottom.

She said, ‘You’ll find someone else for the job. Someone who’s as keen on the whole thing as you are.’

Dinesh slumped against the table theatrically, trying to look suitably disappointed, but he was obviously still elated that the project was going ahead at all. ‘Ah well. If you’d said yes that would have been perfect, but it was too much to expect.’

When he’d left, Nasim sat toying with the unappetising remains of her cold ragoût. How would it feel, she wondered, to know you’d been part of an endeavour that had saved a few million lives? Such a triumph was no foregone conclusion, of course, but now that she’d ruled out any part in it for herself it was hard not to feel a twinge of regret. Fate and distance had robbed her of her chance to rage against the ayatollahs; missing out on the war against cholera and dysentery had been her choice alone.

Still, the brain beckoned. Trying to turn a blurred jigsaw puzzle of snapshots from a thousand dead finches into something that could mimic their song was a very strange job, but she had to keep hoping that it would be good for something eventually.

5

Martin left his office at ten o’clock in order to cover the protest scheduled for noon outside the Majlis, but by the time he and Behrouz arrived at Baharestan Square the crowd already filled the street and they could get no closer than the Mosque of Sepahsalar, a hundred metres south of the centre of the gathering. Martin’s permit to travel to Shiraz had, unsurprisingly, come too late for him to cover the big march there the week before, but it looked as if the Tehranis were determined to outdo their cousins and reclaim the record for the biggest demonstration since the fall of the Shah. Police lined the street, and though they were heavily outnumbered and were not intervening so far, every one of the protesters would be aware of the bashings and shootings by militia in this very location, just three years before. Simply being here took a great deal of courage.

The Mosque of Sepahsalar also functioned as a madrassa, and Martin took the opportunity to buttonhole a few of the young men who were squeezing their way through the crowd to reach its gates. Most of these pious Islamic students turned out to be noncommittal, rather than angrily opposed to the protests. ‘The people have many legitimate grievances,’ one ventured. ‘I won’t march with them, but they deserve to be heard.’ The uprising had become far too broad to be dismissed as a conspiracy of traitors and stooges; apart from a solid core of die-hard loyalists who refused to accept any criticism of the regime, many conservative Iranians had started to take a highly jaundiced view of the status quo. Once your children had been jobless for a decade, the streets were flooded with heroin and the guardians of morality had proven themselves to be hypocrites, what was left to fear from reformists who preached transparency and offered new economic ideas?

Certainly the demographics were changing: this crowd was dotted with grey-haired men in suit coats, and there were quite a few middle-aged women. Most of the latter declined to be interviewed, but Martin managed to get a quote from one woman who looked to be in her fifties. ‘I marched against the Shah,’ Behrouz translated, ‘because he shot his own people and imprisoned his opponents. Why wouldn’t I march against thugs in clerical robes who think they can settle disputes the same way?’

Given that she was willing to speak so plainly, Martin decided to risk asking her opinion of Jabari.

She smiled. ‘Really, I don’t care about that stupid man. It gives us all some encouragement to see a tyrant with his trousers around his ankles, but having seen it once we don’t need to stop and stare.’

Martin had been trying to wend his way through the crowd towards the Majlis as he fished for vox pops, but a steady stream of people were squeezing in from other directions, and he still couldn’t catch a glimpse of the parliament’s distinctive pyramid-shaped chamber. Whether or not the symbolism was intentional, the architectural heart of Iranian democracy was dwarfed and obscured by the tall, rectangular towers full of government offices that rose up beside it, so you could only see the thing itself if you were standing directly in front of it.