WHEN NAZ AND HER LITTLE SISTER, ROJAN, WERE KIDS IN Tehran, the year before their father died, he bought them a little telescope for one of their birthdays, to take up to the roof of their apartment building to try to spot constellations. The girls both went every night, but for different reasons. In truth, Naz could have cared less about it. She was already old enough to be allowed into the specialized sports section of the gymnasium after school, where the bows were kept. She helped drag the heavy metal instrument up the stairs as soon as darkness fell because Rojan cared. Because she had never seen her little sister so spellbound. Astronomy had become Rojan’s version of Naz’s archery. So every night Naz grabbed one end of the telescope and helped Rojan edge up the dark stairwell.
The rest of the family used to joke that those two things never really seemed to go together, archery and astronomy. To Naz there seemed to be a connection, though. The dark sky, the stars. The white gold of the sun. Her arrow arcing through the air beneath them. She wanted to watch Rojan watch the stars forever. But when Naz won nationals at the age of twenty-one, and the man who would become her coach called from faraway Boston, his English fast and whining and almost impossible for them to understand, and she heard his offer—athlete visa, sponsorship, the Olympics in a few years . . .
After Naz moved to Boston, she went back home only once. That was the last time she saw her sister. She hadn’t meant to mention her first American boyfriend to her mother, or dating at all. It had just slipped out. But then in the heat of the ensuing argument, she spitefully told the old woman everything about him—and the ones after.
She wasn’t welcome in the house anymore after that. Her mother swore she’d never speak to Naz again. Naz swore the same. She left that night and went to visit Rojan at her university, where she was studying—Naz’s heart swelled for her—astronomy. She’d managed to win a full scholarship. The next evening, they sneaked into Rojan’s lab to see her research. By then Rojan knew far more than Naz did about the sky, but Naz followed as best she could. She’d remember forever the stolen looks through the telescopes she shared with her—the glow of distant planets, the streaks as comets shot by.
Naz often wondered now what happened to all of them. The telescopes. It would be strange to find them again someday, if any of them were still standing in this new world changed. Survivors would come upon them in their silent domed houses and look through their tiny glass eyepieces and think they were magic. Sometimes science seemed like magic. To watch Hemu Joshi live and breathe without his shadow was like watching magic.
There were attempts to turn his mystery into science, of course. And actually, there was some science to it. It was an obscure astronomy fact, but Naz had learned it from her sister. It turned out that actually, in a few countries, shadows disappearing happened every single year on a specific date.
It sounded impossible, but it was just physics. It had to do with the angle of the sun and the seasons—the lands between the Tropics of Cancer and Capricorn, and sometime in late spring to early summer, to be exact. “No matter where you live, you always think of the sun as directly above you at noon each day, but that isn’t actually true,” Rojan had explained to her once, when she still lived in Tehran. Naz had tried to explain it to her coach and teammates as they watched Hemu on TV—the looks on their faces had made her laugh. But it was true. The earth was too big and too curved. Even though it looked like it, the sun was actually never exactly overhead. Except in India, on a certain day in mid-May.
Or as the locals called it, Zero Shadow Day.
The most insane, unbelievable thing, and it happened every year. Rojan had always wanted to visit. Zero Shadow Day had become a small festival there over the decades, celebrated on successive days as the earth tilted each dawn to position a different city directly under the sun—complete with basic astronomy lessons, parades, and kite flying. Every year just before noon, huge crowds would flock to open squares in the markets to wait for the moment that the sun was so exactly poised above them that their shadows would disappear for a few stunning seconds. Teachers encouraged kids to place various objects in the street—flashlights, basketballs, cricket bats—to see if they could outsmart the sun. They never could. Under the rolling hum of hand drums and sitars, as the earth and sun became perfectly aligned, all the shadows in the city and beneath the people slowly would shrink to tiny little dark specks on the ground, vanish, and then come back as the earth rotated on and away. Always.
A perfectly scientific explanation.