“Can I help?” Landon asked.
“Sure.”
Laleh manned the bread station—her favorite—while Landon scooped rice onto people’s plates, and I portioned out the tah dig, which Kabob House made with thinly sliced potatoes on the bottom of the pot.
The line moved slowly, as everyone took time to talk to each other, sometimes in Farsi and sometimes in English and sometimes both, arguing and taarofing and catching up with friends they hadn’t seen since the last time everyone came to the PPCC.
Landon gave me this bewildered smile when two older Iranian ladies, who I recognized vaguely but whose names I didn’t know, stopped in front of us, arguing in Farsi. Their voices rose, shrill and sharp over the din, until they suddenly cackled. They turned to me.
“Darioush!”
“Hi.”
“Look at you. You’ve lost weight.”
“Um.”
My ears burned.
“Who is this? Your friend from school?”
“My boyfriend,” I said. “Landon.”
The woman on my left, who wore her brown hair in an elaborate bun, turned to her friend and asked something in Farsi.
Her friend, who was taller, with long black hair and ornategold hoop earrings, said something back. She eyed me, and then Landon, then said something else to her friend. “Just tah dig for me, Darioush,” she said.
I gave her a wedge with a nice chunk of potato. “This okay?”
“Perfect.”
Her friend kept looking from me to Landon and back.
“No rice for me, thank you,” she said.
And then she said, “Nice to meet you,” and moved along.
“What just happened?” Landon whispered to me. “What were they talking about?”
I didn’t catch enough to understand.
I was pretty sure I didn’t want to understand.
“Not sure.”
Javaneh’s dad, a doctor, held his plate out for Landon to spoon him a wedge of rice. He had a mustache that reminded me of Babou’s, though his was black and trimmed instead of gray and bushy. “Oh, just a little,” he said, when Landon offered him a big scoop.
“Sorry,” Landon said, and started to put back half the rice.
Panic flashed across Dr. Esfahani’s face.
“Please have more. There’s lots,” I said.
“If you insist.”
Landon glanced at me, baffled, and then gave Dr. Esfahani his rice.
Like I said, Landon still hadn’t mastered the art of taarof, which required you to politely decline food even if you actually wanted it, and to force people to take food they said they didn’t want.
