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When she was 14 her mother sent one of her poems to Mohammad Taqi Bahar, in effect poet laureate and the editor of a literary journal. After high school she joined the youth movement of the Tudeh (communist) party. In the late 1940s she did a stint of nursing, but fell out with the director of the nursing school over an article she was falsely accused of writing that had criticised the school’s management. This led to the astonishing incident of the two slapping each other. She was promptly expelled. After her marriage to Hassan Behbahani ended in divorce, she took a law degree at the University of Tehran but, instead of practising law, taught at a Tehran high school while composing poetry.
