After the Iranian Revolution, my father, unable to find a job in Southern California, had stayed with Mehdi’s family while working in Northern California. Mehdi’s oldest son, Darius, and Darius’s younger brother, Ryan, had moved into one room so that my father could have his own room. Twenty years later, my husband and I cleared out a room in our house so Darius could stay with us while working as an intern at a nearby computer firm. “I guess it’s payback time,” he said when he arrived. We all laughed, knowing that the thread of kindness and generosity in our family has no beginning and no end. “Just make sure you have room in your house,” I told Darius. “Someday, my kids will be coming.”

When Darius’s grandmother Sedigeh was a young girl, she was, according to my father, “the smartest one of all.” Times being what they were, Sedigeh was not allowed to pursue her education past sixth grade and was married shortly thereafter. All her brothers became engineers and doctors. My father found this a huge injustice. He always told me that if his sister had been able to pursue her education, she would have become the best doctor of them all, for not only was she smart, she was resourceful as well. He loved to tell the story of how one year, all the family’s chickens were dying and nobody knew why. Sedigeh was determined to find the cause. She began to observe the chickens closely and noticed that they appeared to have trouble swallowing. She then performed an autopsy on one of the dead chicks and discovered a tumor in its throat. She then took each chick that was still alive, made a small incision in its throat, removed the tumor, and sewed it back up. They all survived.

Whenever my father told me this story, his eyes welled up. “What an injustice to deny a mind like that an education,” he always said, his voice getting smaller and smaller, before he exclaimed: “And you, Firoozeh, will go to a university!” My father could not change the past, but the past had most certainly changed him. “I don’t care if you do nothing with your college diploma, but you will have one!” he adamantly declared. It was payback time for my father, whose daughter was destined to claim the education denied his sister.