by Adib Khorram
The Rezaeis’ garden was very different from Babou’s. There were no fruit trees, no planters of jasmine, only long rows of hyacinths and a collection of huge pots filled with different herbs. The largest was right next to the kitchen—it was nearly two feet across and three feet high—and it was being assimilated by fresh mint.
Mint is the Borg of herbs. If you let it, it will take over each and every patch of ground it encounters, adding the soil’s biological and technological distinctiveness to its own.
There was a charcoal grill in the middle of the garden, the big round kind that looked like a miniature red Starbase. The only table was a Ping-Pong table, close to the door where I stood holding the dripping romaine leaves.
“Khanum Rezaei?”
There was no answer.
Was the Ping-Pong table the one I was supposed to put the romaine on?
Did Iranians say Ping-Pong, or did they say table tennis?
We didn’t cover the history of Ping-Pong/table tennis in Iran during our Net Sports Unit in physical education, which now seemed like a ridiculous oversight.
Khanum Rezaei popped up behind me. I almost dropped the lettuce in fright.
“I forgot this,” she said, squeezing behind me and flapping a giant white-and-blue tablecloth over the Ping-Pong table. It tented up over the little posts for the net. “You can spread the leaves out to dry some.”
“Okay.” I did what she asked, spreading the leaves out so they overlapped as little as possible. The water seeped into the tablecloth, turning it translucent.
“Darioush!”
Sohrab grabbed me around the shoulders from behind and swayed me back and forth.
My neck tingled.
“Oh. Hi.”
He was wearing plaid pajama pants so huge, he could have fit his entire body down one leg. They were cinched around his waist with a drawstring. I could tell because he had tucked his green polo shirt into his pants.
As soon as Sohrab saw the lettuce, he let me go and ran back inside, talking to his mom in Farsi at warp 9.
I had become invisible.
As I watched Sohrab through the doorway, he seemed younger somehow, swimming in his pajama pants with his shirt tucked in.
I knew without him saying it that he was missing his dad.
I felt terrible for him.
And I felt terrible feeling sorry for myself. Another Nowruz had come and gone for Sohrab without his father, and I was worried about feeling invisible.
But then Sohrab looked back at me as I watched him from the doorway, and his eyes squinted up again. His smile was a supernova.
“Darioush, you like sekanjabin?”
“What?”
“Sekanjabin. You’ve had it?”
“No,” I said. “What is it?
He pulled a short, wide-mouthed jar out of the fridge, said something quick to his mom, and came back outside. “It’s mint syrup. Here.” He unscrewed the jar, shook the water off a piece of lettuce, and dipped it in the sauce.
If his face was a supernova before, it became an accretion disc—one of the brightest objects in the universe—as soon as he tasted his lettuce.
I loved that Sohrab could be transported like that.
I took a tiny leaf and tried the sauce. It was sweet and minty, but there was something sour too.
“Vinegar?”
“Yes. Babou always adds a little.”
“Babou made this?”
“Yes. You never had it?”
“No. I never heard of it before.”
How did I not know my grandfather made sekanjabin?
How did I not know how delicious sekanjabin was?
“He is famous for it. My dad . . . He always grew extra mint, for Babou to use when he made it.” He gestured out to the garden. “You saw our mint?”
“Yeah.”
“Now it grows too much. Babou hasn’t made it for a while.”
“Oh.”
Sohrab dipped another leaf and then passed me the jar.
It was perfect.
“Thank you for coming over, Darioush.”
“It’s tradition to visit your friends the day after Nowruz.” I took another leaf to dip. “Right?”
Sohrab squeezed my shoulder as he inhaled another piece of lettuce. He nodded and chewed and swallowed and then squinted right at me.
“Right.”
* * *
After I helped Sohrab polish off every piece of lettuce on the table—two whole heads—he ran to get dressed, while I watched Khanum Rezaei make her bread. She pounded out the dough with her floured palms, then sprinkled a mixture of dried herbs and spices on top.
“Do you like this bread, Darioush-jan? Noon-e barbari?”
“Um. Yeah. Mom gets it from the Persian bakery sometimes.”
“You don’t make it at home?”
“Not really.”
“I’ll make some for you. You can put it in the freezer and take it home with you.”
“Maman!” Sohrab had reappeared in the doorway, dressed in real pants and a white polo shirt. He said something to his mom in Farsi, something about dinner, but it was too quick. “Come on, Darioush. Let’s go.”
“Um. Thank you,” I said to his mom. I followed Sohrab to the door and laced up my Vans.
There was something he wanted to show me.
THE KHAKI KINGDOM
We headed down Sohrab’s street, away from Mamou’s. A breeze had picked up, and the air smelled crisp and a little bit dusty.
As we passed an intersection, Sohrab pointed to our right.
“My school is about five kilometers that way.”
He put the accent on the ki in kilometers, instead of the lo, which was cool.
“Do you like it?”
“It’s okay.” He shrugged. “I have class with Ali-Reza and Hossein there.”
“Oh.”
No matter where you went to school, Soulless Minions of Orthodoxy were unavoidable.
We passed a long white wall, the backside of a row of shops. The sun shone off it.
I sneezed.
“But you have friends there too. Right?”
“Some. Not as good as you, Darioush.”
I smiled, but it turned into another sneeze.
“Sorry. Are they all Bahá’ís?”
“No. Only a few.” He chuckled. “Most people are not like Ali-Reza, Darioush. They aren’t so prejudiced.”
“Sorry.” My ears burned. “Your school is all boys. Right?”
“Yes.”
We reached a crosswalk. Sohrab chewed his cheek and looked at me while we waited for the cars to pass.
“So you don’t have a girlfriend, Darioush?”
I swallowed. “No.”
I tried to keep my voice neutral, but no matter how you answer that question, people will always read too much into it. The fire in my ears spread to my cheeks.
“How come?”
I didn’t know how to answer that.
It wasn’t like I could lie to Sohrab.
I think Sohrab realized how uncomfortable I was, though, because before I could say anything else, he said, “It’s okay. I don’t have one either.”
I almost smiled.
Almost.
He said, “It’s different here. Boys and girls don’t . . .”
He chewed on his sentence for a moment.
“There is not much interaction. Until we are older. Yazd is very conservative. You know?”
“Oh. I guess.”
I didn’t know. Not really.
But before I could ask, Sohrab looked away and pointed.
The khaki wall on our right had given way to a wide green park. Scrubby trees dotted the lawn, casting dappled shadows over the benches scattered around. A squat publi
c bathroom stood in the corner, surrounded by a chain-link fence.
Who puts a fence around a bathroom?
The breeze came up again, stirring the grass. Sohrab closed his eyes and breathed in.
“This is our favorite park,” he said. “We come here for Sizdeh Bedar.”
Sizdeh Bedar is the thirteenth day after Nowruz, when Persians go for a picnic.
Persians are crazy about picnics, especially Sizdeh Bedar. Back home, every family makes too much of whatever dish they are most famous for—dolmeh and salad olivieh and kotlet—and we commandeer an entire park so there’s room for pretty much every Persian, Fractional or otherwise, in a fifty-mile radius.
Because Nowruz moves around every year, depending on the equinox, so does Sizdeh Bedar, which means it sometimes falls on my birthday. But somehow I could never manage to correctly calculate it.
“It’s April first this year. Right?”
Sohrab looked up as he did the calculations from the Iranian calendar to the Gregorian one.
“April two.”
“Oh. That’s my birthday.”
“You’ll still be here?”
I nodded.
“Good. We can celebrate both.”
Sohrab grabbed me by the shoulder and led me toward the bathroom.
“We play football here, sometimes. When the field is too full.”
“Oh.” I hoped we weren’t about to play soccer/non-American football. I wasn’t ready for that. “Cool.”
“Come on,” Sohrab said, leading me around the back of the squat building. “I want to show you something.”
Sohrab spared me a brief squinty smile, then stuck his fingers in the chain-link fence surrounding the bathroom and started to climb. The metal flexed and bowed under his slender weight as he wedged the toes of his sneakers into the diamond-shaped gaps.
“Come on!” he said again as he scrambled onto the bathroom’s roof.
I was heavier than Sohrab, and the fence’s structural integrity was highly dubious. I was certain it would experience a non-passive failure if I tried to climb it.
“Darioush!” Sohrab called. The roof clattered as he shifted his feet. “Come see!”
I bit my lip and grabbed the fence. The sun had been shining on it all day, and the links were hot beneath my fingers. I clambered up after Sohrab, convinced the fence was going to peel off the building like the lid of a soup can just before I reached the top. But it held, and Sohrab offered a black-smudged hand to pull me up onto the roof. My own hands were crisscrossed with perfect black mesh marks too, and they smelled like old coins.
I rubbed my palms together but only managed to smear the dirt around even worse.
Sohrab laughed and threw his arm over my shoulder, which no doubt left a black handprint on my shirt.
“Look.” He nodded straight ahead.
“Wow.”
I did not know how I had missed the two turquoise points sticking up above the pale flat rooftops spread before us. They looked like the jeweled spires of some Elven palace from a prior age of this world, made of mithril and sapphire and magic and will.
I blinked. It seemed like a mirage—too beautiful to be real—but it was still there when I looked again.
“What is it?”
“The Masjid-e-Jameh. It’s a very famous mosque. Hundreds of years old.”
“Wow. It’s huge.”
“Those are just the . . .” He thought for a second. “Minarets. Yes?”
I nodded. Sohrab’s English vocabulary was immense.
“And below there are two domes. Huge domes. And the garden and the mosque.”
“Wow.”
My own vocabulary had become somewhat less immense in the face of the majestic mosque.
The Masjid-e-Jameh towered above the other buildings in Yazd. Everything around it was short and tan, and even the domes were only a few stories high.
From up here, it felt like looking out over a fantasy world, a world wrought by Dwarvish cunning and Elven magic.
“What are those things?” I pointed to the spires sticking up from some of the roofs between us and the Masjid-e-Jameh.
“We call them baad gir. Wind catcher.”
“Oh.”
“It’s ancient Persian air-conditioning.”
“Cool.”
Sohrab left his arm resting on my shoulder as he pointed out the other buildings nearby: newer, smaller mosques, and bazaars, and farther away, looming over Yazd, the mountains we were going to visit soon. I could smell his deodorant—something medicinal, like cough syrup mixed with pine needles—and then I couldn’t remember if I had put on my own deodorant after showering.
I leaned down to surreptitiously sniff my armpit. It did not smell like “mountain breeze”—whatever that is supposed to smell like—but it didn’t smell like cooked onions, either, which is what I usually smelled like when I forgot my deodorant and began producing biotoxins.
We sat on the ledge of the roof for a long time, swinging our legs and surveying the khaki kingdom laid out before us. Clouds blew by, and the breeze tossed my hair and kept it from turning into a Level Eight Fire Hazard.
Across the street from us, a pair of women walked down the sidewalk. One was older, with a blue headscarf so faded it was practically gray. It reminded me of the old rag Dad used to polish his dress shoes.
The younger woman wore a shiny red headscarf, and a stylish jacket that came down to her hips. Mom said those were called manteaux, which was yet another word Farsi may or may not have borrowed from the French.
I did not understand the Iranian obsession with French loan words.
The minarets of the Jameh Mosque sparkled in the sunlight as I used my tongue to dig a piece of lettuce out from between my teeth.
I could still taste the sweet and minty sekanjabin.
My grandfather made it.
“Hey Sohrab?”
“Yes?”
“What did you mean yesterday? After Babou . . . when you said that wasn’t how he really is?”
“He was not himself. Because of the tumor.”
“But you’ve known him a long time. Right?”
Sohrab nodded. “He and Mamou helped. So much. When my dad went to prison.”
“What was he like? Before?”
Sohrab let his arm fall from my shoulder and folded his hands in his lap. He chewed on his lip for a moment.
“I remember one time. Three, four years ago. Mamou and Babou came to our house for ghormeh sabzi. My mom loves to make it.”
Ghormeh sabzi is a stew made with tons of herbs and greens. I always found it suspicious, because it had red kidney beans in it that looked like tiny eyes, corpse lights lit in the swamp of the green stew to draw weary Hobbitses to their graves.
“Babou had just got his new phone. He needed me to help him with it. Babou is not very good with technology.”
“Really?”
“Yes. I help with their computer too. So they can Skype with your mom.”
“Oh. Thanks.”
“Of course. I love your grandparents.”
Sohrab bopped me on my shoulder. “Anyway. He was trying to put his background photo to a picture of you. From school.”
“Me?”
“Yes. He was so proud. He always talks about his grandchildren in America. Always.”
It didn’t make sense.
Ardeshir Bahrami, proud of me?
He didn’t even know me.
Sohrab was more of a grandson to him than I would ever be.
“He talked so much about you. When you came here, I thought I already knew you. I knew we would be friends.”
My throat squeezed shut.
I loved how Sohrab could say things like that without feeling weird. How there were no walls inside him.
“I wish I could have known him back then,” I said. “I wish . . .”
I was cut off by the azan sounding. Up on the rooftop, it was loud and clear, richer than I had ever heard it before.
We listened to the voice in the speakers chant, and I imagined everyone in the Jameh Mosque kneeling to pray, and all the people in Yazd heeding the call, and even farther out, a neural network spread throughout the entire country and to the Iranian diaspora across the whole planet.
I felt very Persian just then, even though I didn’t understand the chanting. Even though I wasn’t Muslim.
I was one tiny pulsar in a swirling, luminous galaxy of Iranians, held together by the gravity of thousands of years of culture and heritage.
There was nothing like it back home.
Maybe the Super Bowl.
When it finished, I wiped off my eyes with my sleeve.
I would have felt nervous excreting stress hormones in front of someone else, but not Sohrab. Not when he told me he felt like he already knew me.
Maybe I already knew him too.
Maybe I did.
“It’s beautiful,” Sohrab said.
“Yeah.”
“We only pray in the morning and night. Not to the azan.”
“Oh.”
“Sometimes I wish we had it. It feels . . .”
“Like you’re connected?”
“Yes.” He picked up a loose sliver of tile and tossed it off the roof.
I scratched at the collar of my shirt, wishing it had tassels on it, because the silence between us had grown suddenly heavy. It was not unpleasant, but it was full, like the hush before a sudden downpour.
Sohrab swallowed. “Darioush. Do you believe in God?”
I looked away.
Like I said, I didn’t really believe in any sort of higher power, The Picard notwithstanding.
I found my own chunk of roof to throw off.
“I guess not,” I said.
I felt ashamed and inadequate.
Sohrab kicked his heels against the fence beneath us and studied the shadows we cast on the ground below.
“Does it bother you?”
“No,” Sohrab said.
I could tell without him saying that it did.
“Sorry,” I whispered.