“Your aunts and uncles,” Randah says. “Your grandmother, your grandfather. Your cousins.” She explains each person’s exact relation to Hannah, but the words are as foreign as if she’s speaking in Arabic. Hannah can’t tell these people apart, and yet they seem part of her. They’ve missed her, and she has no idea who they are. They kiss her on both cheeks. The women touch her sleeves, her hair, her cheeks, her ears, as though she were a young child. She nearly kisses a man, introduced as her Uncle Hassan, on the mouth, because she misjudges the direction of their air kisses.

“The men can be here because they’re our father, our brothers,” Randah says.

Flush with human contact, Hannah sits on the floor cushions between her aunt and maternal grandmother.

She tells her grandfather she has his letters in her purse. She wishes she’d brought her sketch pad so she could draw his face, so like her mom’s.

“Do you want me to translate them?” he says.

She wants to say yes, but she also doesn’t want to let the letters go.

“If I give them to you, you have to give them back.”

“Promise,” he says. He puts the letters in his pocket. “Come visit me next week and I’ll return them to you.” His English is better, less accented than she expected. It sounds almost British.

Randah’s Sudanese cook, Lateefah, has made rice and lamb stewed in milk, diced cucumbers and tomatoes, and a kind of salsa. Eaten with hands and spoons, dinner is served after eleven o’clock. After the guests leave, Randah will not let Hannah go.

Randah’s formal sitting room is decorated with traditional touches that somehow have a modern vibe—like Randah has taken care to reclaim the most relevant parts of the past. Embroidered dresses have been framed and hung on the walls. Instead of Western sofas or Eastern cushions, there are custom-made divans on wood frames. The little carved-wood side tables are topped with glass. A silk rug in dark blues and reds covers the floor from wall to wall. It is the kind of rug Hannah would call Persian, like she would call the gulf on the Eastern coast of this country Persian, when people here call it Arabian.