4

god’s zoo nothing of her Iranian childhood and is fi rmly rooted in the English language. She is, however, so very Persian. A too rigorous system of enquiry, when applied to people, will not allow for the accidental seepage, the trickle of a phrase, that shows up in it more microcosms than the ocean it feeds into. ‘You would play upon me; you would seem to know my stops; you would pluck out the heart of my mystery,’ says Hamlet, and he exclaims, ‘’Sblood, do you think I am easier to be played on than a pipe?’ Whether he whispers or bellows this is something for a good director to determine, but there can be few lines that argue more eff ectively against the academic marshalling of human nature. It was this very line, incidentally, which in Pasternak’s translation won the applause of Soviet audiences. Th ey waited breathlessly for it, seeing in this a coded reference to their own plight. Th at plight is, really, everyone’s. So fi ne, then: I betook myself, small blue MZ-N707 Type-R Walkman recorder in hand, through a city which, in cultural and ethnographical terms, is the world’s most diverse. Whenever possible I allowed myself to be guided by circumstance. Sometimes this amounted to no more than a gut feeling that here was somebody with whom I could converse. Th e choices I made were not always the most logical ones. If I did not write about the most obvious fi gures maybe it was because enough has been said about them already, so often I approached people who have not had the attention they deserve, but in the main I went for those whose stories intrigued me. Absolutely imperative was that I felt sympathy for their work, because without it I’d rapidly decelerate and fi nally splutter to a stop. If they happened to be people with whom I’d already crossed paths once or twice, then so much the better. What it meant was that something about them had stuck in the brain and, such is one rule of thumb, what sticks there is probably worth sticking onto the page. Absolutely paramount to any understanding of my intentions is that this is not a book of interviews. It is, rather, a series of ‘constructions’ based on many hours of recorded conversations. I made it a point of principle never to go to any of my subjects with prepared questions. Th is is because I believe that the words of greatest value arise from good talk rather than interrogation. Such questions as I did ask belonged wholly to the moment as they would in the natural