Daniel and His Father · extract

Reading orientation

The fragment begins with a violent dream before returning to coffee and the observation of a father and child outside. Daniel’s bicycle, the father’s helmet and army boots are concrete details within a narrator’s uneasy attention. The shift from dream to street does not immediately settle his relation to what he sees. Source 2

Later, the narrator’s care work and a conversation with Tom bring another father and an absent son into the passage. Domestic routines and repeated checking connect the different encounters. Read this as a selected portion of a novel, whose local voice cannot by itself supply the whole book’s resolution. Source 2

Publication and language

Baang dates the Persian extract 9 May 2024. Its headnote gives the publishing context separately from the fiction. The supplied fragment is not a new English edition, and its web date does not establish the novel’s first publication. Source 1

The story Tom wants to hear

Tom repeatedly asks his carer for the promised story of Rostam and Sohrab. The narrator says he knows it through hearing it, rather than through reading the whole book. Tom’s own son died at twenty-one, while his fear of political violence enters their conversation. The legendary father and son are therefore present as a story one man needs another to tell. Source 3

Care is also paid work: shopping, a wheelchair and arrangements for a substitute. Elsewhere the narrator introduces himself as a pianist. The difference between the work he performs and the identity he wishes to claim follows him through the day. His account of an airport visit conceals his intended journey to the maternity hospital. Source 3

People encountered on the way

A baby on a bus provokes an uncomfortable exchange of looks. The narrator’s thoughts turn to a missing child and the punishment he imagines for its parents. These judgments reveal his own agitation; they give the reader no independent basis for deciding what those strangers deserve. Source 3

In a pub, an older woman describes losing her home to her daughter and being sent into care. She recognises his work as a carer while he insists on his musical profession. Their argument about his injured finger, a bandage and the means of lighting a cigarette places dependency inside an encounter neither can easily control. Source 3

Birth beside the memory of a dying father

The hospital sequence continually crosses between events, apprehensions and dreams. The image of a stillborn infant is explicitly part of the narrator’s dream; it does not establish that the baby in the hospital has died. His uncertainty about becoming a father persists even after he reasons that the child must be his. Source 3

A recollection of his own father interrupts the maternity ward. The father, a former army non-commissioned officer, is in severe pain, and the narrator thinks about an act of mercy involving opium. Family members must stay beside the hospital bed. The fragment brings an impending birth into contact with an earlier demand to accompany someone who is dying. Source 3

Leyli’s questions about his switched-off phone and the smell of alcohol press against his attempts to manage the encounter. Care is now something she asks of him directly. The red mark on his forehead also recalls the dream with which the extract began, joining a physical detail to an image that remains difficult to dismiss. Source 3

The extract’s last voice

Gol, seen cutting sheets into strips, opens another account of maternity. She remembers expecting a son and being brought a daughter, and suspects a substitution. The extract stops within her recollection. It leaves her suspicion as a character’s belief and leaves the narrator’s larger story unfinished; the published fragment cannot supply the novel’s eventual resolution. Source 3

Sources & credits

1. Daniel and His Father · extract · publication

   Baang. 9 May 2024. Persian. By Ghazi Rabihavi.

2. Daniel and His Father · extract · reading evidence

   A disturbing dream opens a novel fragment in which a narrator observes Daniel, his father and the fragile routines of neighbours and care. The website paragraphs are editorial orientation to this source.

3. Daniel and His Father · novel extract · extended reading evidence

   Baang, 9 May 2024. Original source 332, literary body paragraphs 79–557; the dossier caption at 265 and illustration credit at 387 are excluded. Paragraph 77 identifies an extract supplied by publisher Jalal Rostami. All observations concern this fragment, rather than the complete novel. The website sections are original English editorial orientations; literary passages are not reproduced.