Reza Jalali of Falmouth is a former refugee from Iran. His essays, poems and stories have appeared in literary magazines and anthologies.

My father was a mysterious man. Agha, Sir in Farsi, as we called him, was a Sufi, who seemingly talked to plants. Often, he sat cross-legged on thick cushions on the floor and wept reading poetry, written in his native language, Azeri Turkish, a language the rest of us, as Farsi and Kurdish speakers, did not know.

By the time I came about, the youngest of nine children, he looked like an old man, with poor health. By then, he had given up drinking the locally made vodka-like Arak and smoking opium, though he still swallowed pea-sized balls of opium the way others took aspirins. Despite suffering from asthma, he smoked hand-rolled cigarettes filled with local tobacco. He claimed he took opium, also known as poppy tears, to ease his pain.

I knew better: his agony had more to do with being away from his Turkish clan and living among strangers in the Iranian Kurdistan.

He showed me how to protect the unripe grapes we grew in our large yard from the hungry sparrows and taught me lessons on honoring non-Muslims since our border town included many Armenians, Assyrians, Yazidis and Jews forced out of Iraq. My father spoke of an era when in Kurdistan, Muslims extinguished their cigarettes out of respect when crossing paths with their Jewish neighbors during Shabbat.

Years before I was born, he had done financially well, living on a farm with horses and servants. I heard stories of my eldest sister, Baji, horseback riding when in her teens in the 1940s, going from one village to another, resembling a furious female warrior from the 10th century Persian epic “Shahnameh,” the “Book of Kings.”

Now, my father worked in a one-man government office, once a residential house located in our neighborhood, collecting monthly rental fees from peasants, who grew food on lands owned by the Shah of Iran. When lunch was ready, my mother sent me running to the “office” to have him come home to eat, catching him bent over a large ledger, with glasses perched over his nose, writing down by hand how much each farmer owed the king.

My father, an Azeri Turk, was sent to Kurdistan by my grandfather to search for his brother who, on a pilgrimage to the holy city of Karbala in neighboring Iraq, had left Azerbaijan only to disappear without a trace. My father, then a young man, along with a cousin of the same age, was given a handful of silver coins and a silk rug to sell should there be an emergency and sent on a mission that ended in failure.

My father did not go back; he and the cousin married two Kurdish women and started their own families. Too ashamed to return to his family, my father stayed away from Azerbaijan for good. Now that I have lived in Maine for decades, I find similarities in our destinies. I imagine he must have felt homesick at times, just as I do whenever I hear a song from my childhood. Despite his short temper, his dark mood and the tobacco smell, I loved him.

He died when I was 16. Once I reached the age at which he had died, I felt vulnerable and sad. My father never owned a passport or traveled by air. Maybe listening to the large radio, with the dial needle that could be moved to get signals from Berlin, Paris, Moscow, London and Cairo, was his way of escaping our little border town and traveling beyond.

My father died the same way he lived: unassuming and simply. He died at home on his bed on the floor, with no nurses monitoring him and no beeping medical equipment.

The older I get, I become shy, speak softer and think of my own mortality. Of all the different images of him, I see my father, lying in bed helplessly, taking, with difficulty, his last breath just as those of us sitting by his bed sobbed quietly, the hallowed silence of the room broken by the soft reading of verses from the Qur’an and my mother’s long sighs.

Now that I have lived longer than him, I feel blessed and remain grateful. By gardening and writing, I pay homage to a mysterious man, who wept reading Rumi’s poetry.