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1 " The mystic Al-Ghazali said that the inhabitants of heaven remain forever thirty-three. It reminds me of Iran, stuck in 1976 in the imagination of every exile. Iranians often say that when they visit Tehran or Shiraz or Isfahan, they find even the smallest changes confusing and painful - a beloved corner shop gone to dust, the smell of bread that once filled a street, a rose garden neglected. In their memories, they always change it back. Iran is like an aging parent, they say. "
― Dina Nayeri , Refuge
2 " You can't fight instinct. You can't teach genuine restraint. I got my instincts from a man whose supply of restraint was as limited and unpredictable as the supply of black market music tapes or the last stash of sour cherries in the freezer. "
3 " ...sorrow isn't a devil's contract that you forge in the dark. Sometimes you trip and fall in. "
4 " I decided that I had been foolish to be ashamed of Baba, to let my need for security conquer every other instinct. I had spent years nursing the wrong fears. Baba's Iranianness, his village ways, weren't the problem. Just the opposite: if Baba were to uproot, every special thing about him - the Ardestoon he carried in his easy gait and his yellow fingers and his lion cane - all of that would be lost. Home would be lost. Living in American or Europe would end him, his lofty, infectious personality, his wonderful sense of himself. Deep down, Baba must have known this. "
5 " As a child, she believed he was the kindest man she knew. But slowly over the years, Baba became a stranger and she feels nothing but a dull ache for the energetic, gleeful father she once knew. People change. Everyone. And all love ends. She knows this now. Only hardened exiles refuse to change; they dig their feet in and try to root everywhere they land, even if the soil poisons them. They hang on and on, afraid to move forward. They don't let go of dead things. They don't toss the lime juice. They hoard trinkets in ragged suitcases. They pile up photographs of long-ago days, begging their children for doubles. They build a fortress in the corner of a closet. Maybe Gui was right. You're still waiting, he said - it's true. She's so terrified of losing her every small advantage that now her own Baba poses a threat. If she had accepted Gui as her home, would she shield herself so zealously? Would she be a secure kind of woman with a dozen purses strewn everywhere, each containing an old ID or a document she once thought important - none of it vital enough to save, because her entitlement to her life isn't granted by these things, but intrinsic? No one can snatch it away. Maybe that's the difference between refugees and expats. The difference isn't Yale or naturalization papers, a fat bank account or invitations to native homes. In that way, she is the same as Mam'mad and Karim. When you learn to release that first great windfall after the long migration, when you trust that you'll still be you in a year or a decade, even without the treasures you've picked up along the way, always capable of more - when you stop carrying it all on your back - maybe that's when the refugee years end. "
6 " What I don't tell him is that I don't want to see him. My real Baba is a thirty-three-year-old storybook hero: untouchable, unquenchable, a star. When we meet, a weight drags down my shoulders, like the time a shelf broke and a row of books crashed into my arms. My fingers tremble and my mouth fills with sour. All I see are more details erased from my original Baba, replaced with slackening cheeks and rotting teeth. And then I'm a different Niloo, not a sensible academic who toils and believes that she's made herself over into something great, but a kid who just saw her father age twenty years in a second. That other Niloo, the one with the plaque on her door, would never admit these things. She'd never say: I don't want to see Baba because I'm afraid of decaying too. "