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“Salaam, Aghayeh Bahari,” he said. “Hello, Mr. Bahari. How about that Mousavi? It seems that we are winning!”

I was surprised to hear him say this. When I had spoken to Mr. Roosta a couple of weeks earlier, he had told me that he didn’t intend to vote. I had urged him to reconsider his position. “Can you stand four more years of this idiot Ahmadinejad?” I’d asked him.

“I can’t even stand one more day of him,” Mr. Roosta had replied. Then he’d looked at me with a knowing smile. “My dear Mr. Bahari, our votes will never count. Khodeshoon”—“they”—“will choose who will rule over us.”

This is not uncommon thinking among Iranians. For twenty-five hundred years Iran was ruled by tyrannical and often corrupt men, and in the two centuries prior to the Islamic Revolution, Russia, Great Britain, and America interfered freely in Iran’s internal affairs. With this long history of foreign invasions and successive dictatorships, many Iranians believe that the shape of events in Iran is decided by this shadowy “they”—an imaginary conglomerate composed of Western nations, multinational companies, and corrupt Iranian politicians.

I had never liked the expression khodeshoon. My father had always believed that blaming your problems on “them” was a cowardly way of escaping responsibilities. “It’s maa, us,” he used to say. “We fuck up and blame it on them. It’s as simple as that.” My father always added a bit of spice to his language to make his points.

I told Mr. Roosta that I really didn’t know who “they” were but, regardless, we had to use the only weapon at our disposal to get rid of them: our vote. Mousavi’s election, I argued, would send a positive message about Iran to the rest of the world, which was at best agitated and at worst provoked by Ahmadinejad’s irresponsible comments and policies. While nobody could describe Mousavi as a Jeffersonian democrat, at least he wasn’t denying the Holocaust, insulting world leaders, and threatening countries with destruction, as Ahmadinejad did on a consistent basis. If nothing else, he would be a solid step in the right direction.

Now, just two weeks after this discussion, I was happy to see that Mr. Roosta had changed his mind and was planning to vote. He’d even taped a large picture of Mousavi on the back window of his cab.

“Have you put Mousavi’s picture on the rear window so you can’t look back in anger anymore?” I joked.

“In this country, Mr. Bahari, it helps not being able to look back,” Mr. Roosta said. “And with this heat, it also helps that he doesn’t let the sunlight through.”

Exhausted from the flight, I settled into the seat for the hour-long drive to my mother’s apartment in central Tehran, where I stayed whenever I was in Iran. The billboards along the Persian Gulf Highway—some advertising luxury items like BMW cars and Tag Heuer watches, others bearing the faces of Ruhollah Khomeini and Ali Khamenei—were familiar and did not reveal much about the state of the country as it neared the elections. But more than half an hour later, when we finally reached Navab Street, I felt as if we had entered a whole new Tehran. The walls around the city were covered with posters and banners for the candidates—far more than had been there when I’d left Iran just a week earlier. Plastered with their vibrant red, white, and green posters, the colors of the Iranian flag, the city walls looked like an Iranian version of a Jasper Johns collage. I noticed a few posters in support of the two fringe candidates, Mehdi Karroubi, the former speaker of parliament, and Mohsen Rezaei, a former Revolutionary Guards commander, but the main fight for space on the walls was between Ahmadinejad and Mousavi.

In some of his campaign posters, Ahmadinejad wore his trademark beige jacket and duplicitous smile. The three intertwined circles—the symbol of nuclear energy—were noticeable in many posters. Ahmadinejad had made Iran’s controversial nuclear program a matter of national pride, presenting himself