“But you are my guest.”
This was another taarof: Sohrab giving me his nicer cleats. And invoking my being a guest was one of the strongest strategies you could employ in taarof.
I felt terrible for using his nice cleats, but I couldn’t see any way out of it.
“Thank you.”
I took my new kit into a stall to change, which was awkward because I kept banging my elbows into the walls and my knees into the toilet. My boxers were not suited for providing structural integrity while I was running around, and I wished I had thought to bring some compression shorts or something.
I would not have borrowed any of Sohrab’s, even if he had offered.
There are some garments you should never share.
I hopped my way into the borrowed Adidas. They fit okay—a little tight, but okay. And they felt light and agile compared to my gray Vans.
Even though the shirt was stretched across my chest, and the shorts kept riding up my butt, I felt very Iranian when I emerged from the stall in my borrowed kit and cleats.
But then I saw Sohrab in his red shirt and shorts, and his white cleats. He looked fit and ready for a real game.
It made me feel very inadequate.
I was only a Fractional Persian, after all.
“Ready?”
“Um.”
I wasn’t so sure I wanted to play anymore.
But Sohrab squinted at me, and the knot of nerves in my chest melted a little bit.
Some friends just have that effect on you.
“Ready.”
Two boys waited on the field for us. Sohrab hollered at them in Farsi and then waved his hand for me to jog after him.
“This is Darioush. Agha Bahrami’s grandson. From America.”
I said, “Salaam.”
“Salaam,” Iranian Boy Number One said. He talked out of the side of his mouth, which made it seem like he was half smiling. He was almost my height, but he was rail thin, and he had his hair spiked up in front, almost like a Soulless Minion of Orthodoxy.
I held out my hand, and he shook it, though it was loose and fleeting and felt kind of weird.
“Nice to meet you. Um.”
“Ali-Reza,” he said.
Ali and Reza are both popular Iranian names—maybe even more popular than Sohrab—though both are technically Arabic in origin.
I held out my hand to the other boy, who had lost the genetic lottery and ended up with the dreaded Persian Unibrow. I thought he would be hairy everywhere else too, but his hairwas cut shorter than Sohrab’s, and he had pale, hairless arms.
“Hossein,” he said. His voice was thick and dark like coffee. He was shorter than me too—shorter even than Sohrab—but with his unibrow and the ghost mustache haunting his upper lip, he looked older: ready to get a job interrogating temporally-displaced Fractional Persians as they arrived at Customs in Imam Khomeini International Airport.
Hossein didn’t smile at all as he glanced from me to Sohrab.
“Thanks for letting me play with you,” I said.
