Anousheh lived in London briefly and in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, for two years, studying English and working an administrative job.
After returning to Tehran, she decided one day to dress in an elegant, foot-to-toe Arabian abaya, in the style worn by women in the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain. For fun, she decided to wear a colorful Thai print blouse over it.
As a result, she says, she was stopped on the streets.
"You look like a billboard," a woman from the Guidance Patrol, the morality police, told her.
"Excuse me?" Anousheh recalled responding. "Everyone is looking at you," the woman said.
Anousheh became furious. "My legs are covered, my arms are covered, my clothes aren't tight," she said. "What could you possibly complain about?"
Such experiences made her want to move abroad. But she was continually drawn back by close-knit friendships and her country's breezy familiarity, a society in which someone could drop off a backpack with a digital camera, cellphone and cash inside with random strangers on the street and be reasonably sure she'd get it all back in a day or so.
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Unbeknown to her, she had dropped her bag off Saturday night with a group of journalists discreetly making mental notes while watching the storm outside.
We used her cellphone to call her Sunday morning and told her we had her bag. "Come on over," we said.
"I trust people," she explained during a late-morning chat, as she nursed deep purple welts on her legs and thigh. "If you never steal something from someone, no one will ever steal from you."
She then explained what happened after she left us Saturday night. Anousheh said that when she raced to find her brother, the anti-riot police screamed at her to go home. "Get out of here, or we'll hit you, crush you," one militiaman told her.
"Go ahead, crush me, but I still have to find my brother," she told them.
It was a chaotic gantlet, she says. There were chubby, helmeted militiamen swinging clubs. There were black-uniformed special police units on motorcycles. There were anti-riot police. And along the sidelines, there were bearded, plainclothes security officials, barking orders into walkie-talkies.
As she navigated the layers of armed authorities, she endured insults and baton swings, about five judging from the number of bruises on her lower body. The security forces then began spreading out into the side streets.
"Anousheh," a neighbor told her, "your brother is looking for you."
After 90 minutes, she found him hovering inside the doorway of a building along a side street, just as worried about her as he was about him, and just as bloodied.
But instead of going home, she says, they jumped back into the fray, chanting slogans and playing cat and mouse with the police until just before 6 a.m.
"My brother said Nelson Mandela was in prison for 20 years until he reached his goal," she says. "I learned from my mother that you fight for your rights.
"Your rights are something you take, not something you're given."
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daragahi@latimes.com
