Besides being my father, Padar was many things: a businessman, a property owner, a communications engineer employed by the American embassy, fluent in seven languages, a man of great bravery, and, to our great family shame, an alcoholic. But before he was any of these things, he was a poet. He had memorized most of Rumi’s and Hafiz’s poems. The other passion in his life was his total devotion to his wife, our mother, Miriam, who took that dedication with a dram of insouciance that could be at times subversively hostile.
