The language of Shushtari, with its abundance of animal and plant imagery, reflects the simple agricultural life of its residents. Many words exist in Shushtari that do not exist in Persian. For instance, the word peshkel means animal droppings that are round, like a goat’s or sheep’s. When two people look alike, my aunt Sedigeh describes them as being “like two halves of a peshkel.” And to reveal what is truly valuable in life, my aunt Fatimeh always uses the Shushtari proverb “Any gift from a true friend is valuable, even if it’s a hollow walnut shell.”

It’s fair to say that the Shushtari floating in my house did not give me any edge in the French language. It did, however, teach me that people sometimes talk louder and laugh harder in their native tongue, as evidenced by my father and his siblings. It also trained my ear for accents and thus eventually got me into trouble.

Even though I was the youngest contestant in the impromptu-speech contest, I placed first. Unbeknownst to me, this was met with suspicion. Apparently, some people thought that my Parisian accent was too authentic for a foreigner. Perhaps taking their cue from Detective Clouseau, a couple of the judges decided to do a little investigative work.

After the contest, my parents started receiving phone calls in French. They became a somewhat regular, though inexplicable, part of our lives; the phone would ring, and then my father or mother would say, “Vait, vait, pehleeze . . . Firoozeh.” I would pick up the receiver to find somebody from the Alliance Française with a piddling question or comment.

“I would like to verify the spelling of your last name.”

“I would like to congratulate you personally.”

“Have you read anything by Camus? He’s quite good.”

These French phone calls made my already nervous parents even more anxious. “Why do they keep speaking French with us if they know we don’t speak the language?” they always asked me. I had no clue. I just assumed they were forgetful. My mother finally reached her own conclusion. “Nobody understands their English,” concluded my mother. “And they know that.”

Two weeks after my seventeenth birthday, I was on an airplane bound for Paris. I was scheduled to arrive two days before the national celebration of the French Revolution, Bastille Day. I had never been so excited in my entire life. I couldn’t wait to meet my host family. I couldn’t wait to eat an authentic baguette. I couldn’t wait to make French friends. This was going to be the best summer of my entire life, the kind of summer that somebody would want to make a movie out of. And as soon as I set foot in the Paris airport, I was whisked away by two gendarmes.