TEHRAN — The streets are clogged with traffic so we get on the highway, the windows down and music blaring. I am with two friends, driving through Tehran after midnight, enjoying the cool air with no particular destination.
One of them grabs a poster for Mahmoud Ahmadinejad from a passing motorcyclist and begins waving it at the other drivers, most of them stunned that a fashionable woman wearing hijab lite would support the hard-line Iranian president.
"Are you serious?" one man tells her. "Do you know what Ahmadinejad's [Islamic] Guidance Patrol would do to you if they saw you?"
A car full of other friends pulls up alongside. They are holding up posters of former Prime Minister Mir-Hossein Mousavi, a moderate who is Ahmadinejad's top rival in the presidential election Friday.
"Doctor, go to the doctor!" they chant, a popular slogan mocking both Ahmadinejad's doctoral degree in traffic management and his mental health.
"Only Ahmadinejad!" my friends chant back, laughing. We speed up, and they speed up, two Peugeot 206 hatchbacks racing down the highway into the early morning, dancing perilously past each other at 70 mph.
The cars jamming the streets of late-night Tehran, mostly full of young people, are talking to each other: beep, beep, beep-beep-beep.
Even though it's a workweek night, all sorts of people are out, holding up flags and banners of green, the Mousavi campaign's official color, as the cars inch past the crowds, their horns honking in what has emerged as a distinctive call sign of Mousavi's supporters.
One street rally has turned into a disco, with young men dancing to pop music and women standing up through sunroofs cheering them on.
"You don't know how to dance!" one woman calls out cheerily to a group of young men wearing green T-shirts. "Dance better!"
These are strange, magical days in Iran, where a landmark presidential race pitting Ahmadinejad against Mousavi and two other challengers has opened up the country's political and public spaces to an extent not seen since the 1979 Islamic Revolution. Students have called the president a liar to his face. Carnival-like demonstrations erupt on the streets. Ordinary people engage in lively political debates with strangers on street corners.
