Everyone asks what it felt like. What I remember is the bag.
My birth brother came from Tabriz with a plastic shopping bag containing a school report from 1986, two photographs of a courtyard, a shenasnameh page folded four times, and a letter my mother wrote in 1994 that he had never been able to send, because he did not have an address and did not know how to find one.
We sat in a café near the arrival hall and put all of it on the table between us, and a stranger would have watched two men in their forties pointing at paper and saying this, this, this is you. Nobody filmed it. There was no music. It took three hours and we ran out of tea.
The part the articles leave out
Reunion is not the end of a search, it is the beginning of a second one. The week after, I could not sleep, I was rude to my partner over nothing, and I read the school report eleven times looking for the thing it did not say. The literature calls this ambivalence. It is a very clean word for a very unclean fortnight.
Then in 2020 I flew back and met my uncle, who corrected the given name I had been mourning. The name on the register was never the name at home. It was not a lost mother, it was a clerk.
I help people read Iranian civil records now because I know exactly what one piece of paper does to you when you have waited three decades for paper. Bring someone with you to the first read. Do not read it alone in a room.
And the letter from 1994 — I have it. I did not want it for two years. That is my own story and I am still in it.