The Gaze of the Gazelle – Arash Hejazi

The story of an Iranian generation

Copyright © Arash Hejazi, 2011

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

To Neda,

whom I knew for only 47 seconds

To Emad, a friend whose courage made all this possible And to

Hussein Tahmasbi (27), Bahman Jenabi (20), Mehdi Karami (25), Nasser Amirnejad (26), Mohammad Hussein Barzegar (25), Reza Tabatabaii (30), Iman Hashemi (27), Parisa Keli (25), Mohsen Haddadi (24), Mohammad Nikzadi (26), Ali Shahedi (24), Abolfazl Abdollahi (21), Salar Tahmasbi (27), Fahimeh Salahshour (25), Reza Tabatabaii (29), Ashkan Sohrabi (18), Kaveh Alipour (19), Saiid Abbasi (24), Alireza Eftekhari (24), Salar Ghorbani (22), Maryam MehrAzadeh (24), Hamed Besha-rati (26), Mohammad Hussein Feizi (26), Ramin Ramezani (22), Sohrab Arabi (19), and the hundreds of other innocents slain, detained or tortured during the post-election protests, most of whom belonged to a generation that was not even born when its destiny was sealed during the Islamic Revolution of Iran in 1979.

All the events in this book are real. I have changed the names of a few characters and their relationships with me in order to protect them, both from being prosecuted for being part of my life and from the invasion of their privacy.