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throttle, roaring into the morning. There was never a gradual awakening in this part of town, just a sudden bang of activity that burst onto the streets. A line of shopkeepers were hosing down their patches of pavement. The day’s newspapers were piled in stacks on the ground next to the tobacconist’s stand; the Supreme Leader’s face stared up from some of them, headlines speaking of martyrs, Zionists, blackmail and America: IRAN’S HEAVY FIST SMASHES THE FACE OF IMPERALISM and IRAN’S MILITARY EXCERCISE STRIKES FEAR IN ITS ENEMIES’ HEARTS .
    Meydan-e Khorasan is a small island, and Somayeh had seen its shores slowly eroded by waves of modernity and youth. Shiny marble slabs and glossy stone cladding have risen up from the ruins of old houses, oiled by backhanders to foremen and civil servants to avoid expensive earthquake building codes. Yet religious, working-class values remain at the core of Meydan-e Khorasan; its residents battle to keep social strictures in place. For families like Somayeh’s, religion means living by the words of the Koran and the Supreme Leader’s fatwas to earn a place in paradise. In the knot of streets surrounding Somayeh’s home, most of the women still wear chadors, as they have done for hundreds of years. Somayeh’s family have been rooted in Meydan-e Khorasan for generations: it was the only world that Somayeh had ever known.
    At school, the lessons were predictably uninspiring and Somayeh concentrated on her daydreams of life as an actress, an absurd fantasy considering that she was in agreement with her parents that acting was a dubious profession suited to those with loose morals. At break time the girls discussed the latest gossip. They were hooked on the Islamic-approved soap operas, where the evildoers were clean-shaven Iranians with old Persian names like Cyrus and Dariush and the heroes had Muslim names and beards. About half the pupils had satellite television at home and obsessively watched Latin American telenovelas on Farsi 1 , the Dubai-based channel part-owned by Rupert Murdoch. Satellite dishes are all over Iran, from Tehran to rooftops of remote villages, hanging off the homes of those from all classes, secular and religious alike. Even a member of government announced there were 4 . 5 million satellite television receivers in Iran. Somayeh’s father declared foreign television an unnecessary and un-Islamic extravagance, and no amount of pleading could change his mind.
    At two o’clock, just before the end of school, the girls were summoned by the headmistress they called Dog-Duck, an angry woman with the face of a bulldog and the waddling gait of a duck.
    ‘Tahereh Azimi has been expelled for having improper relations with a boy,’ barked Dog-Duck. There was a collective gasp. Everyone knew about the incident, Tahereh had not been to school since it happened, but nobody had been expelled before. It took over five minutes for Dog-Duck to calm the girls. She shuffled her big bottom across the room and launched into a lecture about modesty and God, lying to your parents and the corrupting influence of satellite television. It did not matter that Tahereh Azimi’s hymen was still intact, that she rarely lied or that her family had never owned a satellite dish. The fact that she had been caught leaving a boy’s house while his parents were out was enough to brand her a whore, which is what her teachers, classmates and it seemed most of the neighbourhood intimated. It did not help that Tahereh Azimi was beautiful, a fact that no
hejab
and lack of make-up would ever hide.
    Dog-Duck soon ran out of steam, her crusade interrupted by stabs of hunger brought on by the succulent smell of grilled
shishlik
that was wafting through the windows. The girls grouped urgently outside the school gates.
    ‘She’s a
jendeh
through and through,’ said Mansoureh, spitting out the word
jendeh
– whore – with surprising force. ‘You can see it in her eyes and the way she walks.