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Weeping in Tehran:

Scenes from the uprising

I visited a friend recently, a painter, and she told me she still found it impossible to put on some music or even turn on the radio. Her brushes were in jars, heads down in the turpentine. On the second Friday after the election she had hoped to heed the opposition’s call to release one or two green balloons from her balcony, having first filled them with gas from the stove, but she hadn’t found any balloons in her local shop, and a vague sense of unease had dissuaded her from straying farther afield. Going onto the balcony, she had seen a young man on the roof of the apartment block opposite, in his early twenties, holding five balloons. One by one, he had released the balloons, but the gas hadn’t done its job, and they all drifted into the street below while he looked on disconsolately. The young man had seen her, standing on her balcony, and before she had time to say, “Good for you! You’re doing what I had hoped to do!” he had got frightened and gone inside. Then she looked around, at the other roofs in her area of central Tehran and up into the sky. She saw only a few balloons in the sky, no more.

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SEE ALSO: Career as president of Iran; Contested elections; Demonstrations; Iran; Ahmadinejad, Mahmoud; 2009-; Political corruption; Political participation; Tehran (Iran); Youth

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