Akbar got out.
“When you get off the train,” his uncle had told him, “don’t go anywhere. Wait right there until an old man with glasses and a cane comes to get you.”
And that’s what must have happened, because years later a black-and-white photograph of a bespectacled man with a cane stood on the mantel in Aga Akbar’s living room. If you examined the picture closely, you could see faint traces of the word “Isfahan” on the wall behind him.
Aga Akbar lived in Isfahan for a year and a half. He worked from sunrise to sunset in the workshop at the rear of the store. When the store closed, he went to his sleeping place on the roof.
Isfahan made a lasting impression on him. In the years that followed he never missed an opportunity to broach the subject. If he happened to see an Isfahan carpet, he would say, “Look, this carpet comes from Isfahan. Have you ever been there?”
Or he would talk about the mosques. He would point up at the sky to describe the blue tiles of the Sheikh Lotfallah Mosque. A dome located defiantly opposite the dome of the universe.
To express his admiration for the ancient Jomah Mosque, he would pick up a brick, then drop it. This was his way of saying that the tiles used in the mosque had come from heaven.
When he talked about the bazaar, he would put his hand over his mouth and look around in astonishment. What he meant was that the magic carpets unfurled by the shopkeepers made your jaw drop in amazement.
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