Ardeshir Bahrami—my grandfather—had leaned a ladder against the side of the house, right next to the little round window above my bed, and he was halfway up to the roof.
Babou was taller than I expected. He wore khaki dress pants, a white pinstriped button-up shirt, and dress shoes, with the socks bunched around his ankles. And he was climbing a ladder.
He looked healthy to me, even though Mom and Dad said he wasn’t. Even though Mamou said he was sleeping more.
He looked fine.
I cleared my throat and pushed my hair off my face. I had serious bed head (it was one of the burdens of having Persian hair), even though I hadn’t slept for that long. I thought. Maybe what had felt like a few hours had actually been an entire day.
Maybe it was already tomorrow.
I tried to say hello, but my throat had closed off, and I made a sort of squeaking sound instead.
It felt weird to speak, knowing he could hear me. Knowing I could reach out and touch him—if he ever came down from the roof.
I guess I had pictured our first meeting a bit differently.
Babou hoisted himself onto the roof, teetering for a moment at the top, and I was convinced I was about to witness my grandfather plummet to his death off his own rooftop.
“Sohrab!” he shouted. He was staring out into the garden, past the rows of herbs, toward a shed hidden behind a trellised kiwi tree.
Persian children—even Fractional ones—learn their fruit-bearing trees at an early age.
There was a boy stringing a hose from the shed,un-looping and wrestling the knots and kinks out of it as he went.
I had never seen the boy before. He looked about my age, which meant he couldn’t be one of my cousins, because they were all older than me.
I glanced at Babou, who shouted “Sohrab!” again, and then at the boy, who shouted back in Farsi.
“Um.”
Babou swayed for a moment and then looked down at me.
His eyebrows lifted.
“Eh! Hello, Darioush. I will be down soon. Go help Sohrab.”
Sohrab shouted back and then waved me over. The sun pressed against the back of my neck as I ran out to meet him, the rough stone of the patio giving way to scrubby grass and then back to stone again. It was warm against the soles of my bare feet.
Sohrab was shorter than me, compact and lean. His black hair was cropped close, and he had the most elegant Persian nose of anyone I had ever met. He had brown eyes, just like me, but there was some light hidden behind them.
It made me think maybe brown eyes weren’t so boring after all.
“Um,” I said. “Hey.”
And then I realized that was quite possibly the most inane greeting in the history of American-Iranian relations.
So I said, “I mean,salaam.”
Salaammeans “peace.” It’s not a Farsi word—it’s an Arabic one—but it’s the standard greeting for most True Persians.
“Salaam,” Sohrab said.
“Um.Khaylee kami Farsi harf mizanam.”
I knew just enough Farsi to stutter that I barely knew how to speak Farsi.
Sohrab’s eyes crinkled up when he smiled. He almost looked like he was squinting.
