Anousheh's hazel eyes burned from the smoke. She caught her breath. Up the boulevard, amid the hazy din, the riot police were beating people with batons and threatening others. Screams erupted, as young men and women ran for cover.
The 29-year-old Iranian interior designer and her brother, Babak, had just been up there, at the northern end of Tehran's Africa Boulevard, where the crowds were chanting, "Death to the dictator!" -- a burgeoning mass of hundreds of people protesting alleged vote count fraud in the reelection of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.
As bearded, truncheon-wielding Ansar-e Hezbollah militiamen began storming the gathering crowds, Anousheh and Babak sprinted down the street, losing sight of each other in the chaos. She searched for him on side streets with no luck. She thought about going back home, but knew there was no way her protective big brother would leave the scene without first finding her.
She imagined him lying in agony on the roadway, or locked up in a wagon and taken to prison, perhaps Evin and its solitary confinement wing, where she said her mother had spent 40 grueling days in 2003.
Before going back into the crowd and risking arrest or a beating, she decided to jettison her backpack, which contained a digital camera packed with potentially provocative images of stone-throwing demonstrators, a wallet full of identification cards, and her and her brother's cellphones, with numbers of all their contacts.
"Can you please take this?" she said to a group of strangers sitting in a car, observing the unrest ahead. "I need to find my brother."
The baffled passengers took the bag, opened it quickly to be make sure the contents were not dangerous, and watched as she sprinted back into the melee, a solitary figure in a beige coat and light green head scarf.
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Trained as a graphic artist, Anousheh makes an unlikely political activist. She lives with her parents. She stayed home on election day, unlike her brother and parents, who voted for moderate candidate Mir-Hossein Mousavi, who has accused Ahmadinejad of vote fraud. But she believes Mousavi should have won.
"I don't accept any of them," Anousheh, who asked that her last name not be published, says in steady voice. "None of them can do anything."
She's driven, she says, not by politics but by a heartfelt sense of the injustice of it all, and a strong commitment to her country, her city and her neighborhood, called Jordan, among the Iranian capital's most urbane districts.
