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That's normal. Right?
Darius’s frequent refrain throughout the novel laments, in this case, that boys are not supposed to love and enjoy being with their little sisters. It’s acceptable to be protective of them, but not to love them in tender or affectionate ways. In spite of this, Darius loves playing with dolls and having tea with Laleh, and he claims he’s not ashamed of it. At the same time, he tells no one about it. Darius struggles to recognize his tendency to look outward rather than inward to fairly judge his own behaviors and thoughts. As noted, Darius asks this same question about the normalcy of his actions several times in the novel, and always after describing his own habits. He usually says it somewhat sarcastically, suggesting that even if the behavior is considered normal because everyone does it, he still thinks it doesn’t make sense.
I'd been dealing with jokes like that my entire life—well ever since I started school anyway—so it was nothing new. But that time it set me off like a high-yield quantum torpedo.…I really hated Boy Scouts. I hated camping, and I hated the other boys, who were all on their way to becoming Soulless Minions of Orthodoxy.
In this quotation from Chapter 5, Darius describes the first time he remembers experiencing a mood swing that made him feel out of control. He uses the term “slingshot maneuvers” to describe the severe mood swings sometimes exacerbated when his medicines aren’t working or he’s in a stressful situation. Significantly, the mood he remembers here came in response to someone mocking Shirin’s accent. Darius points out that while he can bear people mocking him, he rages when they do it to a person he loves. The experience leaves him feeling confused because he’s angry about losing control but proud of standing up for his mom.
Back home, all Persians—even Fractional Persians like me and Laleh—were united in our Persian-ness. We celebrated Nowruz and Chahrashanbeh Suri together in big parties, Baha’is and Muslims and Jews and Christians and Zoroastrians and even secular humanists like Stephen Kellner and it didn't matter. Not really. Not when we were so few in number. But here, surrounded by Persians, Sohrab was singled out for being Baha’i.
In this quotation from the end of Chapter 14, Darius responds to learning that many people are prejudiced against Baha’is in Iran. Darius once thought of Iran as a Persian homeland where he would be fully embraced for his Persian blood, but he realizes that even among so-called True Persians, there are distinctions and prejudices and levels of Persian-ness that don’t exist among Persian people in the United States. Even Stephen Kellner is accepted as a member of the Persian community. At home, Darius applies levels of Persian-ness to people because he feels inadequate, but he is surprised to find the same behavior in Iran, where everyone is presumably a True Persian.
