A few days ago I had what I describe as an Existential Panic. I had been wandering through a park, following a steady stream of people who looked like they knew where they were going, and I came to a stage full of strange Swedish musicians, surrounded by an amphitheater of about two thousand people.

I took a seat to the side of the stage and listened for a while (they were playing some species of avante garde jazz), and watched the crowd, and suddenly it hit me that I was the only dark-skinned person there. A couple of thousand people and not one brown face! Such a wall of blonde hair and pink cheeks was blinding, and I suddenly felt terribly alone. I kept thinking: what am I doing here? I'm thousands of miles away from anyone who knows me. I could disappear into a hole in the earth and no one would notice!

My brother lives in a house that's a thirty-minute drive from the neighborhood we lived in as children...how did I end up being so close to the Arctic Circle? I don't have any friends here, I can't speak the language, and there's no particular reason for my presence. Am I insane? Why do I feel so thrilled in the morning when I'm walking along the water? I must have problems.

Sitting there in the middle of that pure-white crowd, I felt, just for a moment, a terror pass over me that was like a chunk of ice in my heart. Not that I feared that the Swedes were somehow against me, or meant me harm...the Swedes are harmless...but because I knew that I was so absolutely alien to them. I saw myself as a category error. I saw myself sitting there, as from a hundred feet above, this one little dark spot in a pointillist canvas of pink and blond and white.

Has this ever happened to you, dear? Certainly not in Iran.

In a few days I leave for Berlin…hardly a cure for that.