In my early years, my father and I were partners in crime. Every night I
would wait for him on the stoop of our house in Isfahan, Iran. I would
tease him by greeting the melons and sour cherries hidden in his coat
before saying hello to him. We would sneak ice cream together, eating it
with spatulas in the bedroom so my mother wouldn’t see. I walked
barefoot on his aching back. I was always on his lap at dinner tables. I
have his chin, his eyes, his smile that looks as if it belongs on a
six-year-old’s face.
In 1987, when I was eight, my mother, brother, and I escaped our home.
My father was rooted to his childhood village, and, when we found out
that it was harder for entire families to leave together, he stayed
behind. On our way to the airport, we were driven past my father’s
dental office so we could wave goodbye to a darkened figure in a
third-floor window. My encounters with him since then have been brief;
I’ve seen my father four times in thirty years, for a total of forty
days, give or take. The first visit was in Oklahoma, a year into our
American asylum. I was eleven and everything had changed. I had lived in
refugee hostels. I had learned English and endured the South. I refused
to let him touch me or kiss me. This must have stung the most—he is a
hugger, a kisser. He wanted to pick me up and wave me around like he
used to do, to squeeze my face and bite my cheek and check my teeth. I
hardly said hello, arms crossed over my very American T-shirt. At that
age, all I wanted was to disappear, but this stocky, red-haired,
mustachioed man had shown up ready to experience America loudly. He ate
ice cream twice a day, counted the price of everything by the number of
root canals he would have to perform to earn it. Despite our shared
bookishness, he laughed at the intensity of my ambition to go to Harvard
or Yale. He offered pistachios to the plumber. Though we lived in a
small town, he found Iranians with whom to drink and recite poetry until
the early hours. He bought us season passes to a local waterpark, where
he spoke loud, boisterous Farsi and flashed a wad of cash wrapped in a
rubber band. He stood shirtless by his deck chair, hands on hips, pale
body covered in red hair, surveying the place. When he asked me to apply
sunscreen to his back, I gave him a few cursory dabs and stopped the
instant the stuff started to foam.
Later, as we ate lunch on the balcony of a rib joint, I noticed a
teen-ager loitering near our table. Without a word, my father got up,
gave him two cigarettes, and returned to the table and tore open his
daily Twinkie. Later, when I caught the same kid trying to jimmy open
our locker, I realized Baba had been giving loose bills and cigarettes
to gangs of teen-agers in exchange for beach chairs and towels and
errands. I was mortified. Soon, he became addicted to one of the scarier
waterslides, one that included a second of free fall. “That slide is
like a shot of whiskey,” he said as he breezed by us. But Baba had a
taste for stronger substances, and, even in a foreign town, he knew
where to look. On the last day before he left, I found him in a trance,
slumped on the bathroom floor, sweating through his shirt, his eyes far
away.
The second time he visited, I was fourteen and had adopted a rigorous
Tae Kwon Do practice as part of my Ivy League entrance strategy. I never
smiled. I baffled him. My brother kept protesting about his cigarettes.
Neither of us asked about Iran. Baba was older, of course. His age was
jarring—his bulbous nose, the unnatural arc of his back, his varicose
veins and hashish smell. I saw more clearly the risks he took, the
smuggled caviar and pipes sewn into his suitcase lining, the phone calls
to random Iranians who lived nearby, the foggy spells. I kept my
distance and hushed him when he spoke Farsi.
He took us to a restaurant called Shogun, and when he started on the
sake I demanded to go home. He said, “Next time, before I visit, maybe I
should stop in Dallas for a brain disinfection and stomach pump, to wash
away all the embarrassing Iranian things.” Later, he asked why I had
chosen to play a boy’s sport. I explained that fewer girls competing
meant I could win more trophies and get into Harvard. “Huh,” he said.
And then, “Enjoy this life, Dinajoon.” He downed more sake. A few days
later he brought home some nails. “These are to nail down your good
name,” he said, “So you can stop worrying about misplacing it all the
time.”
Within a few days, he seemed exhausted by our piece of America. When my
mother’s church tried to convert him, he said “O.K., I believe,” and let
them baptize him the following Sunday. He made a good show of it,
brandishing his Bible. In private, he said, “Dinajoon, this God business
will mess you up. There are two things in life: science and poetry.”
In 2001, Baba tried to come to my college graduation. His visa
application was rejected in both Dubai and Istanbul. In 2003, he tried
to come to my wedding. That visa request also failed. I wrote to Hillary
Clinton, explaining all my efforts and asking for help. An intern called
me back and sent me to the U.S. immigration Web site. Secretly I was
relieved, not in small part because we were now living in the age of
suitcase scans. I left a seat empty for him at my wedding: place card,
chocolate box, napkin.
The third time, we met Baba in London. I was twenty-five and my brother
Daniel, twenty-two. Daniel had just graduated from N.Y.U. and was
working in publishing. I had just left my job as a strategy consultant,
at McKinsey & Company, working fifteen hours a day, to take a job as a
strategic manager at Saks Fifth Avenue. I was a Princeton grad with a
job managing people twice my age. I had just married my college
boyfriend, a man who definitely thought his family was better than mine.
I was proud, and insecure, and insufferable.
My brother and I were so preoccupied with our new lives in New York that
we almost missed the fact that our father had brought his second wife
and a two-year-old daughter to London. What did we have in common with
an overindulged, fat little Iranian girl begging for Kit-Kats? We were
children of asylum and borrowed books and multi-variable calculus, of
the Socratic method and cram sessions and lecture halls and alumni
grants. We had hard bodies and East Coast brains and pale-faced partners
who believed in themselves and adored us for our neuroses. My new
stepmother wore floral-print polyester, her toenails painted cherry red
and a touch too long. Her daughter’s accent was atrocious. “Babajoon,
stop calling her my sister,” I told my father. I asked him to enroll his
daughter in an English class. He dropped his head, nodded, and said, “I
hope one day, maybe with your new husband, you learn to enjoy this
life.”
The next day, in the National Portrait Gallery, I started to panic—for
many reasons. The only one I revealed to Baba was that I had
accidentally taken an extra birth-control pill. “Is just hormones,” he
assured me. Then he asked to see my pills. Before I could object, he had
eaten one. “See? Now we both took one too many.”
The fourth time, we met in Istanbul. I was living in Amsterdam with my
husband, who had begun to spend all his time at work but who made our
lives comfortable in ways I had never before experienced. My brother,
too, was married. This time, we brought our partners. Philip and I were
coming from Amsterdam, Daniel and Alexandra from New York, and Baba from
Isfahan. We had rented three rooms in the old district of Istanbul, and
our flights were arriving two hours apart from each other: first Baba,
then my brother and his wife, then us. Philip and I went to reception
and asked if our party had arrived. The manager, a Turk who had
obviously worked in service for decades, glanced at Philip’s Barbour
jacket and European haircut, then back at the roster and said, “No.
We’ll let you know when.”
So we checked in, dropped our bags in our room, and went for a walk. An
hour later we checked at reception again. The man said our party still
hadn’t arrived. Another walk. The hotel was situated on a beautiful
tree-lined side street overlooking the Hagia Sophia. Up above was a
balcony café where, from across the road, I saw an old man leaning over
the railing, a cup of Turkish tea in his hand. He had a cane and gray
hair. He looked in another world, but when he saw me, he jumped up and
rushed down to us, hobbling on his cane, looking at my husband with
admiration. I hugged him and introduced him and he tried, with his few
English words, to express to Philip his happiness to see us.
When he told us that he had arrived hours ago, I stormed off toward
reception. The manager was already watching us. He apologized,
explaining that, since we were a European couple, he had been waiting
for someone else for us, and for an Iranian family to meet my father. I
asked, again, whether it was possible that my brother had also arrived.
“Well,” the receptionist said. “There’s an American couple.”
My brother, too, had arrived hours before. Finally reunited, we set off
to see Istanbul. My father was thoroughly charmed by Alexandra, Daniel’s
pretty blond American wife. Arm in arm, they whispered and sampled
sweets together. She called him Babajoon, in her American accent; he
called her daughterjoon. It hurt a little.
Again, I was struck by his age. He used counting beads. His memory was
fading, and he complained that the meat wasn’t cooked right—we had to
eat at the same kabob house, Hamdi, every night. Soon we had amassed a
large collection of the restaurant’s wet naps, which my brother called
Hamdi wipes. I laughed. Baba didn’t get it. “What is funny about Hamdi
wipe?” He spoke to us in poetry and in food. He taught Philip a poetry
drinking game. He said in broken English, “Philip, my son, you take
Hafez book”—he had brought it in his suitcase—“and you take shot. You
ask a question about future. You open book. Your answer is on that
page.” We played the game all night. Daniel tossed his shots into the
plant while Philip and my dad got drunk together, threw their arms
around each other, and predicted the future. This was something they had
in common: the easy ways of men who had once been the golden child of
their respective families.
One night we went to see some whirling dervishes. My father adores Rumi;
if he didn’t hate religion and believe himself to be his own god, he
would be a follower of the Mevlevi order. Enraptured, he watched the
dervishes, his counting beads turning in his fingers, his head nodding
in meditation. Behind us, a group of Americans chatted, reading aloud
from guidebooks and wondering when it would end. I knew Baba was
annoyed. The Americans behaved with such entitlement that it took me ten
minutes to find the courage to overcome the sense that it was my family
who was out of place, my father who was embarrassing. Finally, I turned
to the family and said, “This is a religious ceremony. Be quiet or
leave.” My father looked at me aghast. He whispered, “Dinajoon, let
everyone enjoy it their own way. Americans enjoy by talking.”
On the last day, we left in shifts. First a car arrived for Daniel and
Alexandra. Philip, my father, and I had a quiet lunch on the balcony,
and the staff was extra attentive. My father’s head hung a bit lower.
His six-year-old smile was gone. We got free cappuccinos. Then our car
came. We climbed in, promising Baba that we would meet again. From the
back of the car, I turned to wave goodbye. I expected to see him
standing alone in the road but two hotel staffers had him by each arm
and were escorting him to the balcony, where strong Turkish teas had
awaited him all week. He wiped his face with a swollen hand, his ring
glinting in the sun.
For many years after, we didn’t talk. Daniel had a baby who became a
toddler. I moved to New York again. Daniel tried to see Baba again in
Dubai, but Baba didn’t buy the plane ticket. We heard that he married a
third time, a woman two years younger than me. Then I had a baby, too,
and he got back in touch. I was in Provence for the summer and he
promised to come see me. As had happened with my brother, he didn’t even
book a ticket. It’s been years since we’ve seen each other, and much has
changed. My brother and I have suffered failures, a divorce (mine), the
pain of children, how they hold your heart in their sticky, careless
fists. I know that Baba will never live in the West with us. It would
end him, his big personality, his glorious sense of himself. He knows
this, too; maybe that’s why he no longer buys tickets to see us. But he
has Instagram, and he writes messages for my daughter in Farsi, using
English letters. Every few days, his name pings on my phone screen. Dr. Nayeri commented on your video. Dr. Nayeri likes your photo.
Sourse: newyorker.com
