“Try some on.” She tilted the bottle on her finger again and put some perfume on my sleeve before I could resist. My father walked in, wearing the striped blue and white shirt I had given to him. (I had given a similar one to Darius.) He said, “Your uncle and aunt are here.”

My father’s younger brother and his wife appeared in the courtyard. They took off their shoes before entering the room. Ziba reached for her chador and we both got up to greet them. My uncle embraced me awkwardly, then my aunt did.

“You’re back after all these years,” he said. His voice still sounded young and strong, vibrating with emotion. Except for the graying hair and a few lines on his face, he was very much the same as years before—swarthy looking with alert dark eyes and oiled hair, neatly combed and parted in the middle. He wore khaki pants and a checkered shirt with the top buttons open.

He had been a rebellious young man, staying up late, coming home drunk and throwing up. I remembered riding with him on a train—he wore a striped blue suit and a red tie, his cheeks were flushed. I sat on one side of him and on the other side sat a young woman, wearing a thin, transparent chador. It was night and only a small lamp lit our carriage. When we reached our station she got up and walked away. My uncle and I got up also and went in the other direction. He stopped by a shop and bought me a rag doll and some candies. He handed them to me, winked, and pinched my cheek. “You won’t say anything to anyone about her, will you? She was a nice lady, wasn’t she?”

At another time he stood in front of a mirror, shaving while I watched. He put down the razor, turned to me, and said, “I’ll work all my life and be nowhere, no one, just a civil servant.” A moment later (or was it another day?), he added, “I wish I could live somewhere else, somewhere more lively.”

“What made you disappear like that?” his wife, Munir, asked me now. She was a gentle, pretty woman with soft brown hair piled in curls around her face.

“I didn’t mean to disappear.” I smiled.

“You went away and forgot about us,” my uncle said, sitting next to me.

“I really didn’t forget.”

“I sent her to America to learn something and come back. Instead she went there and forgot about us,” my father said as if he had not heard my feeble attempt to defend myself. A familiar film of pain spread over his eyes.

“You didn’t do that even for your son,” my aunt said.

“No, Darius was a wild boy.”

“He said studying would make all his hair fall out,” I said.

“You were very smart from the time you were a baby,” my father said. “Did you know that you talked in full sentences before you could walk? Once you learned how to walk you went on and on. You learned to walk but not how to stop.”