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against my soles. Sensation itself was enough. More than enough. I felt complete. And I couldn’t remember feeling anything like it.

3
    The Opening
    I mran was strange. Uncommonly reclusive for a four-year-old, he was given to hours of silent play in his room surrounded by the crayons and colored pencils that appeared to be his only pleasure. I had difficulty believing he was Mina’s son, and not only because he shared nothing of her exuberance or magnetism. Dark, with tiny eyes and short, sharp features crammed tightly into the middle of his face, he looked nothing like her. Mother wanted me to take him under my wing and treat him like the little brother I didn’t have. I did my best. I played with him. I lent him my special catcher’s mitt, which I lent no one. I put up with the tantrums he threw when he lost pieces in our games of checkers and chess. I read him stories—even though I didn’t enjoy it—in the forts we built down in the family room out of sheets. But no matter what we did, I never seemed to have his full attention. Sooner or later, Imran would grow bored and head off to his room. More than once, I followed him there to find him lying on his bed, a coloring book open in his lap, as he mumbled to the black-and-white picture that stood propped against his bedside lamp.
    Noticing me at the doorway, he would turn and say, proudly:
    “That’s Hamed, my dad.”
    Imran’s picture of his father showed a well-groomed man in a white oxford shirt peering out at the viewer with a paradoxical expression I found striking for the fact that I’d already seen it on Imran’s own face countless times: a pair of small eyes wide with what looked like fear, but gazing out from beneath a smooth brow that showed not a ripple of worry; and down at the bottom of the face, another conundrum: a mouth dangling open, slack-jawed, unconcerned, but with the tip of a pointed tongue tensely curled around the bottom of the top teeth, as if nervously seeking its way into the small gap there.
    Almost from the moment Imran could speak, he’d been asking about his father. And, sensing there was more to know than the vague, unsettling outline of a story his mother told him—that there had once been a man who had been his father, but then he’d left, and so was his father no more—Imran turned to others for answers. Indeed, it wasn’t long before each new male visitor to the house would find himself besieged by the young boy; Imran would climb up a leg and into the man’s embrace. “Are you my dad?” he would ask.
    When Imran was three, Mina finally decided to show her son her only photograph of her ex-husband. As she feared, the picture fueled the boy’s obsession. Now, nightly, Imran refused to sleep until his mother pulled out the picture and propped it against the lamp by his bed. He would talk to the photo, asking it the questions his mother was never able to answer: Where was he? When was he coming back? It broke Mina’s heart to see her son talking to a picture, and so now when she tucked him in, it was always with a promise: that she was going to find Imran a real man to be his father someday.
    Weeks into their stay with us, I noticed Imran had taken to sitting every evening at the bottom stair in the front vestibule, waiting for Father’s return. And once he heard the rumble of Father’s car coming up the driveway, and the thrum and whir of the garage door yawning open, Imran would already be on his feet, jumping about in front of the door he was so eagerly waiting to see open. And Father would appear, dropping his briefcase to his feet as he lifted the boy aloft with a kiss to the cheek. “You’re home!” Imran would squeal with glee. So began their evening jaunt through the house, like cricket groundskeepers making the rounds on a pleasant, summer evening. They checked on Mother and the dinner being prepared in the kitchen, peering over the steaming pots and into the oven, where naan s usually lay in neat rows,