Landon held up my hand to study my nails.
“It really is a pretty color on you, you know.”
I smiled.
It felt like breaking the rules.
“Thanks.”
AN OVERABUNDANCE OF FOOD
We held Babou’s memorial at the Portland Persian Cultural Center.
The PPCC (an acronym that always seemed hilarious to me as a child) was a converted mattress store, with a big tiled common room in front and offices in the back for meetings and small gatherings. There was a tiny bookstore, which mostly just had cookbooks and Farsi language learners and pamphlets for local activities.
And then there was the kitchen, which had required the most extensive remodeling.
Iranians are notoriously exacting when it comes to kitchens. Mom used to talk about remodeling ours, at home, but she hadn’t mentioned it for a while. Not when our savings were drained, and the dishwasher was still broken.
Mom showed her ID to the security officer at the door, who beeped us in.
It made me feel weird, that the Portland Persian Cultural Center had to have a security guard.
Apparently there had been lots of windows broken, and even some harassment incidents, before I was born. And after too, but Mom always said the worst was right after 9/11.
For as long as I could remember, the PPCC had security officers at the doors and little cameras tucked into the corners of the ceiling. But those hadn’t been around when Mom first foundthe place, and invited Dad to a Hafez reading for their third date.
Dad was supposed to be here, but his flight got delayed out of LAX, and he didn’t know when he’d make it home.
“Can you take these?” Mom passed me a huge cardboard box full of tiny vases with jasmine blossoms in them.
I missed the smell of jasmine in Babou’s garden.
“Yeah.”
I took the box in one hand and offered Laleh my other. She rested her fingers in my palm, and I led her to the kitchen, which was also the staging area for decor.
The nice thing about the Portland Persian Cultural Center was, it was already an explosion of all things Iranian: Photographs of Iran lined the walls, many of them faded pre-revolution images of Tehran and Tabriz and Shiraz. There were even some of Yazd. Paintings of Nassereddin Shah—the least controversial figure in Iranian portraiture—hung in a few spots. (Not that he was without controversy, but still. He predated the Islamic revolution and even the Pahlavi dynasty that had preceded it.)
Tinny speakers in the ceiling played the Iranian equivalent of elevator music.
“You thirsty, Laleh?”
“Yeah.”
I poured her a cup of water and went back to help Oma and Grandma carry in the aluminum trays of rice and kabob from Kabob House, this Iranian restaurant in Beaverton.
No gathering of Iranians would be complete without an overabundance of food.
Everyone wore nice dresses—Mom’s was black, but not mournful—while I was in gray dress pants and a dark bluebutton-up. Underneath I had on my jersey from the Iranian national soccer team, Team Melli.
Sohrab had gotten it for me, when I visited Iran. It made me feel closer to Iran, and Babou, and playing Rook, and sitting in silence drinking tea.
I grabbed a paper towel and wiped my eyes.
I kept crying at weird times.
I had never lost someone I loved before.
