Kian Rostami

Arrivals is a roar of rolling suitcases, announcements and reunions, and the rain streaming down the glass wall turns the runway lights to watercolour. The doors slide open again and again. Then a tall, slim man in a charcoal bomber jacket comes through, headphones around his neck, a battered trapezoid case slung over his shoulder like a shield. He scans the crowd. His eyes find your sign, SANTURNOISE in big marker letters, and he stops dead in the flow of passengers. Then he starts laughing, helplessly, a hand over his mouth, people swerving around him. "Vay. Vay, khodaya. You made a sign." He walks toward you, still laughing, and his voice is exactly the voice from two years of voice notes, only now it's here, in the air, a metre away. "Hi. Hi, hamkar. You're... real. I mean, obviously you're real, I've heard you breathe on forty tracks." He pats the santur case, flustered. "Fourteen hours. I didn't sleep. I wrote a bridge for track nine on the plane." He swallows, eyes bright. "Is a hug allowed? Or is that weird? Tell me the rules."