Azadeh, Morvarid, Marjan and Golshabeh sit on benches outside Golestan shopping centre in west Tehran, watching people. The four young women are the closest of friends, all aged between 18 and 22. The centre, in an upper middle class neighbourhood near a university campus, is one of the few places where young people can meet in the capital without being harassed by fundamentalist vigilantes.
"Look at those guys!" Marjan says, giggling and pointing at two young men who turn back to glance at her. She has an impish, mischievous face, and her friends call her `the satanic one'. On this cold February day, the girls wear grunge-style baggy jumpers and trousers beneath their black headscarves and loosely fastened manteaux, intended to preserve the modesty of Iranian womanhood.
Golshabeh, the eldest of the four - the reliable one whom her friends call "the driver" - wears Nike runners with her track suit, but her friends prefer the chunky mountain boots so fashionable in Tehran.
One of the boys is a weight-lifter wearing a tight, short-sleeved T-shirt, despite the cold. "He's showing off his muscles!" Golshabeh says. "Oooh. Only a girl of 15 or 16 would be impressed by a guy like that!" Marjan remarks with mock disgust. Anywhere else in the world, the four girls would be ordinary college students on a break between classes. But the young women, all of whom voted for President Mohammad Khatami's Islamic Participation Front on February 18th, have bottled up a lifetime of frustration and despair. "We voted for the bad to avoid the worst," Gholshabeh says. "There'll be a few less mullahs in parliament."
Azadeh's father manufactures refrigerators. Morvarid's is a car salesman. Marjan's mother teaches in a primary school and her dad makes tyres. Golshabeh's father is a manager in a cigarette company. None have known poverty, but one has been lashed with a whip, the others have seen friends drug themselves and attempt suicide. "Everyone in our generation is very sad," Azadeh says.
"The other day we were listening to Siyavash Qomaishi's Eyes that are Waiting and we all started crying - because the eyes are waiting to see something good, something new, and there is nothing so far."
The disillusionment of Iranian youth was a strong theme in this month's general election campaign. "We must begin to respond to the aspirations of the young - if not we will have anarchy," Dr Mohamed-Reza Khatami, the younger brother of President Khatami who led the winning reformers' list, predicted. Half of Iran's population of 61.9 million are under the age of 30. More than a third fall into the rebellious, 16- to 25-year-old bracket.
President Khatami owes his own election to young voters. But he knows they are a time bomb. He and his new parliament are now their only hope.
The young of Iran are a disorganised, pent-up force. In recent years they have alarmed the ruling clergy by pouring into the streets in their tens of thousands. They did it when Iran qualified for the World Cup in 1997. They rioted for a week last July, and they have turned the annual Halloween-like chara shanbeh souri holiday in March into a massive protest demonstration.
Iran's other invisible youth army are the unemployed - 20 per cent officially, but at least 30 per cent according to experts.
Close to a million young people enter the job market every year, and there are nowhere near enough jobs for them. Between 6 a.m. and 8 a.m. each day, crowds of young men can been seen on Tehran's main squares - day labourers, hoping to find work in the construction industry. Until recently they came from small towns outside the capital. But the economic crisis has grown so severe that men from border areas are looking for work in Tehran. The problem is aggravated by the world's highest refugee population - nearly three million Afghans, Iraqi Shias and Turkish Kurds.
In the Iranian middle classes, the children of the 1980s grew up indoors, because of fear of the revolutionary komitehs and Iraqi bombardments. "In many cases, it was a very westernised environment," says Kianoushe Dorranie, a journalist who writes extensively about the problems of Iranian youth. "The mothers stayed at home, making themselves up and trying on scanty outfits. Little girls of four or five used their mothers' make-up - a bit more than was natural. The boys saw their fathers as models, and the fathers stayed home smoking opium and drinking in front of the children, who learned very early to separate completely what happened inside and outside the house."
Over the past few years, and especially since President Khatami's election, the young have taken to the streets. On Thursday nights, the beginning of the Iranian weekend, carloads of teenage boys and girls drive up and down the road known as Jordan (its pre-revolutionary name) or Africa, looking at one another.
Through open car windows, they hand one another slips of paper with telephone numbers, then arrange to meet later out of sight of the police. A similar rite takes place in Gisha Street, near Tehran University, except that the students there are walking.
Lack of freedom is a constant refrain among Iranian young people. One of the most striking examples was the trial last October of four university students who wrote a play about Shia Islam's 12th Imam. The play was deemed sacriligious, and three of the students were sentenced to three years in prison.
Back at the Golestan shopping centre, Azadeh speaks mostly of freedom. Ironically, her revolution-era name means "freedom". She has coloured her hair, several inches of which show beyond the edge of her black scarf, a fair honey colour, to match her topaz eyes. She plucks her eyebrows and shapes her long nails - her friends call her "the beauty". "At high school, they wouldn't have let me get away with it," she says. "But at university the teachers assume I'm married." Married women are allowed to colour their hair and pluck their eyebrows to please their husbands; single girls are not.
"We want very simple freedoms - things any wise person would accept," Azadeh says. "For example, if I wear mascara at the university, they make me take it off. They don't respect us. They won't let us talk to boys." That morning, the "behaviour committee" had threatened Marjan for letting her punk-style fringe protrude from under her scarf.
The four friends admit to having met boys by "cruising" Jordan Street. "We have no choice," Azadeh says. "If we didn't do this, what would we do? The komiteh would come and take us." Three years ago, when Azadeh was still in high school, the vigilantes found her in a parked car with her boyfriend. Her parents had to pay the equivalent of £50 to obtain her freedom from the "Judiciary Committee of Guidance" in Vozara Street. But before she was released, she had to lie on a table, to be whipped 10 times on the back by a woman. Her boyfriend, Hessam, received 15 lashes.
Azadeh's eyes fill with tears as she tells me the story, and Morvarid, "the little one", puts her arm around Azadeh's shoulder to comfort her. "For a month afterwards, I couldn't talk," Azadeh says. "I was in shock. When I pass that building it still gives me bad memories, and I try not to look at it." She considers herself lucky that she was not taken to a doctor to have her virginity confirmed. She and her friends have just seen The Girl with the Sports Shoes, a popular new Iranian film which begins with the heroine being taken to the doctor by the komiteh after she is caught with her boyfriend. The film heroine is shown looking out of a window, dazed and humiliated.
Iranian newspapers often tell of young people who die of drug overdoses. Drug dealers ply the pavement of Arya Shahr Square in west Tehran, and Almahdi Park in central Tehran every evening.
Hashish from Afghanistan - said to be the best in the world - is cheap. It costs about £1 per day to maintain a hashish habit.
"A lot of our friends smoke `bang'," Azadeh admits, using the Iranian slang for hashish. "If our lives weren't so restricted, if we lived in a normal place, we wouldn't do these things. We use `bang' to be able to laugh. We use drugs and do crazy things like driving too fast. We don't know what is right and wrong."
A young man wearing blue jeans, with greased black hair and sunglasses asks if he can join our little group. He is Mike, 22, from Texas. His mother is Iranian and he has spent the past year in Tehran with his grandmother and sister, finalising marriage arrangements with his Iranian fiancee. Mike has been attending underground "techno rave" parties in houses outside the city.
"You can find anything you want there - ecstasy, cocaine, heroin, alcohol. Even in America they don't have such parties. The men who give them are real gentlemen, businessmen in their 30s, guys from rich families who drive Mercedes and BMWs."
In Mike's mind, the "gentlemen" who throw techno rave drug-parties are good Samaritans, trying to alleviate the oppressiveness of life in Tehran. "They invite their friends and their friends invite friends. A guy brings his girlfriend and she uses drugs. Once she uses it, she gets hooked and then she doesn't have the money for it. Those girls, their lives are ruined."
Mike has decided to return to the US. "In Texas, on Saturday and Sunday you get a six-pack of beer and go to the beach with your girlfriend. In Iran on the weekend you get some drugs and sit in a room and get high - there's nothing else to do here."
But like young people everywhere, Iranians want to be in fashion. "I like techno music," the "driver", Gholshabeh says. "Venga boys, Cat Girls, the Spice Girls, Tony Bragstone's Unbreak My Heart. We used to like Celine Dion, but we had too much of Titanic." In poor south Tehran, they buy Iranian-made jeans and mountain shoes. In better-off north Tehran, the jeans are American, the shoes Dr K, Timberland, Doc Martens or Caterpillar. The boys wear rap-style, low-slung baggy jeans, the girls skimpy tank-tops at their parties.
In two hours of conversation with the young women at Golestan shopping centre, I heard tales of komiteh brutality, narrow-minded university professors and strict parents. Not a single happy story. Suicide is widespread among Iranian young people, and Marjan is haunted by the memory of a girl she met two years ago, while visiting her aunt in hospital. "She was so beautiful," Marjan said, still in wonder. "Long black hair, a little nose and blue eyes. The doctors all came to stare at her. She had cuts all over her arm and I asked her what had happened."
The young woman was from Shahra Rey, a small town south of Tehran, and she had tried to slash her veins with a broken bottle. "She had seven brothers," Marjan explains. "She said, `Whatever I do, my brothers give me a hard time.' It was the fifth time she had attempted suicide, and she said she'd keep trying until she succeeded. One of the psychiatrists came and said, `I'm going to help you'. But the girl told her, `No, the next place I'm going is the Ekbatan buildings." The Ekbatan buildings are the Golden Gate Bridge of Iran, a high-rise housing complex near Mehrabad airport, famous because so many young women go there to kill themselves.
The friends have named their group "four crazy girls". They do everything together and sneaked off to Morvarid's parent's cottage in the mountains last Tuesday afternoon to celebrate her boyfriend Kamyar's 21st birthday. "We don't smoke or drink, we just laugh and play cards," Morvarid said. To avoid problems with the police, the girls drive in one car, the boys in another, and they come home early in the evening, so their parents won't get suspicious. "But it's a risk," Azadeh says. "A big risk. We do what we want to, but always with fear."
The four have missed their afternoon classes, but they don't seem to mind. They are nice girls who still believe in God, but never go to a mosque or pray. They are against pre-marital sex but admit to a lot of hugging and kissing with their boyfriends.
Their group friendship - a widespread phenomenon among Iranian teenagers - gives them strength. "I love my girlfriends more than my family," Marjan says. They all insist they love their country too - they just can't stand the regime they've had until now. Iran is like another planet, Azadeh says. "But I hope it will change for the next generation." At 20, she says she feels old already. "We are escaping from the university. We are escaping from the house. We are looking for something new, and we don't find it."
I am sorry to leave them in such sadness. But as the "four crazy girls" walk away arm-in-arm, their laughter drifts back across the esplanade, like music, like a hint of promise. Their generation is a lost generation, which barely dares to hope in President Khatami and his reformers. To save his country, he must save them.