“I’m a happy man. I must appreciate my comfortable life,” thinks Amir-Ali, the protagonist of In Another Place, one of the 10 short stories in Goli Taraghi’s wonderful new collection, The Pomegranate Lady and Her Sons. “And that night’s banquet flashed before his eyes – food-laden tables, shiny silverware, crystal glasses, old china, precious antiques, fine carpets, European paintings, and velvet drapes – and he felt depressed. He felt the weight of all those objects on his shoulders. He was exhausted, but he didn’t want to go back home. And yet there was no place for him on those dark half-paved streets, in that big boisterous city, amid those brick towers, in that world of lies, contradictions, and conflicts.” The weight of similar objects and the history – both cultural and personal – that they carry with them, lies heavy on many of Taraghi’s protagonists. Each story deals with displaced Iranians as they come to terms with the changes that their beloved country undergoes in the latter half of the 20th century. Some remain in their homeland, attempting to adapt and survive, while others flee abroad, away from the “bombs and the rockets”, the rules and the regulations.
Born in Tehran in 1939, Taraghi experienced first-hand the 1953 coup and the 1979 revolution, before emigrating (like many of the characters in these stories) to Paris in the early 1980s. The Pomegranate Lady and Her Sons isn’t an attempt to tell her country’s story, nor indeed that of the collective Iranian diaspora (an increasingly popular narrative trope); instead, each of Taraghi’s stories is grounded in the familiar realm of the domestic. Her protagonists are ordinary people living in extraordinary times; people going about their everyday lives among the carnage and upheaval of war and revolution. Still “oblivious to the treachery and deceit of politics”, a young teenager mourning her father’s untimely death in a car accident behaves as any adolescent in her shoes might, falling in love with a pro-revolution classmate, believing she and he can change the world together: “I would cry for hours, but then with the first tele-phone call from the young man, I would forget all about my father’s death and go running around the street, raising a ruckus with him.” In another story, the tables are turned when a once-spurned nanny reappears as a powerful Revolutionary Guard. Meanwhile, eighth-year girls are more concerned with eating sour-cherry-flavoured ice cream, “new from the West”, riding their bikes, and meeting their friends, than the riots taking place all around them. An uncaring mother separates her twin sons at birth, keeping one for herself but giving the other to his aunt to bring up, maintaining no contact with the child that she gave away, despite the fact they live in the same building. The entire household is forced to seek shelter in the basement one night during the Iraq-Iran War, after which the unwanted son is left “desperately praying for another bombardment” so that he can see his estranged mother up close again.
These stories feature many families torn apart, the female narrators of Amina’s Great Journey and The Neighbor have both emigrated to Paris with their children, their pasts in Tehran the “only real world we knew”, their new lives “full of hidden anxieties” and marked by a perpetual “longing for the motherland”. The children have been wrenched from the “warm and loving embrace of their grandmother and aunts and from boundless love and affection, they have been exiled to a cold, dreary, and unemotional place and they cannot understand the reason for such great injustice”. And, to add insult to injury, the narrator of The Neighbor has merely swopped one form of tyranny for another – she and her children are constantly harassed by Madame Wolf, a neighbour who lives in the apartment below and complains day in, day out about noise and disturbances from the foreigners upstairs. Not life threatening but no less debilitating and destabilising: “In truth,” the narrator muses, “the real battlefield is here. We are always either retreating or evading and an invisible machine gun is constantly aimed at us. Saddam Hussein is on the one side of the world, but Madame Wolf is only a few steps away, sitting in ambush.” In Amina’s Great Journey it seems that the Bangladeshi servant Amina – first sent to Tehran to work by her abusive, money-grabbing husband, then on to Paris to offer her services to her now displaced employer and her children – is the focus of the story, the sad circumstances of her servitude and exploitation narrated through the eyes of her kindly employer. But, as time passes and Amina learns she must cut the ties that bind her to her past and embrace her future, this shows her employer a way forward amid the upheaval and turmoil in her own life: “And now, with one leap, Amina has overtaken me and she has discovered a new dimension – tomorrow. She imagines herself and her children in better times and is running toward it. She has grabbed my hand and she is dragging me with her.”
Again, in the final, eponymous story of the collection, the narrator’s own vacillations about her homeland manifest themselves in the mysterious Pomegranate Lady, who inveigles her way into the narrator’s care when their paths cross at the airport, following her “like a shadow”, her anxiety “so overwhelming that it pours out from her roving gaze and trembling hands”. Here we see the pull between the old and the new – in both this story and Unfinished Game, planes are sites of confusion and confrontation between the East and the West, the past and the future. So, too, both people and objects are the source of nostalgia and regret; indeed, two of the most powerful descriptions of characters in the book describe the subject as a work of art. In Unfinished Game, the narrator finds herself seated next to an old classmate, the girl who was the object of her childish hero worship, now “broken, dusty, faded, like a precious painting abandoned for years in a humid cellar”. While in Gentleman Thief, the narrator recalls the day, during her childhood, that her previously dapper uncle, who “wore western suits and silk ties” and a “white gold” watch band, “changed”: “He hadn’t shaved, he wasn’t wearing a tie, and he had an old leather watch band. He looked like a faded and altered photograph. It was hard to recognise him.” In a regime where ornamentation is forbidden – be it about your body or your home – beautiful things become loaded with meaning. An ailing, bedridden, 84-year-old grandmother refuses to give up her family’s treasures, despite the punishment that their discovery by the authorities could bring. Their loss, when it eventually comes, is both futile and completely crushing. Fifteen years pass and this woman’s granddaughter returns to the city of her childhood and to her uncle (of the faded photograph) and aunt’s long since requisitioned house, now a museum, outside of which a sign that reads “Gateway to History” hangs. “People look at the items on display with indifferent expressions on their faces. I am the only one who can see the hidden world behind every piece, who can hear the sound of Auntie Badri and her guests’ laughter coming from the other side of the wall.” Like Amir-Ali, “time and history weigh heavy on my shoulders,” she explains. “I am gasping for air.” Ghosts and drowning are both metaphors that haunt the text. The new girl’s father in The Flowers of Shiraz hides at home holding séances, a “reclusive man who deals with spirits and is drowned in the past”; as a child in Bangladesh, Amina nearly drowned in a great flood and as an adult she remains “underwater […] still unable to think and part of her mind is still numb”; but she also brings the ghosts of her life back home with her to Paris, the two children that she’s been forced to leave behind with their cruel father, “quietly entered our lives and found a permanent place among the people and objects around us”. These pervasive hauntings remind me of Orhan Pamuk’s stunning memoir of the city of his childhood, Istanbul: Memories and the City – Taraghi evokes the same aura of lost innocence; her stories beautiful and melancholic in equal measure.
Lucy Scholes is a freelance journalist who lives in London.
