The Pomegranate
The Pomegranate
Short Story
915 words
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The Pomegranate
Pomegranate. Pomme granade. A corruption of the elegant French, twisted into the
phrase ‘seed apple.’ She crunched on the seeds, rolling them beneath her tongue,
letting the rich red juice drip ripe and sticky down her fingers as she pummelled the
fruit’s hard case, knocking more seeds into her palm.
Pomegranate. What an odd fruit to be produced so prolifically by her nation. She
giggled at the thought of Iranian pomegranates being whirled around the world by
the Reza Shah, shipped to those bold Americans he loved so well, so they could test
the fruit’s flavour. It would be exotic, she supposed. The tang would dance upon their
tongues, mould their mouths into obscure twisted shapes as they tried to swallow the
Farsi. Anar. Pomegranate.
It was not always so exotic, before the new traditions, the modernisation of the 70’s.
Before the Shah made it so.
To the poet herself, it was simply the scent of her grandmother’s garden. It was
picking pomegranates and persimmons in the fall, and clutching them in her skirts to
sit under the bowed tree and eat them, red juice falling amid the long grass.
“Anar,” her grandmother would insist, “anar, anar, not this Western phrase. The
Persian, you must remember, or else you will have nothing to tell your grandchildren
one day.”
She wondered what her grandmother would think of the chaos of this time. Nobody
used English anymore –the West had fallen silent in the face of a new figure rising in
the Shah’s place. Khomeini.
Today Iran had become a nation rich in paradoxes and beauty of a stressful kind.
Her children danced in the same long grass, and sat in the same tall shade eating
pomegranates. They listened to the same folk tales and tried to make out their
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The Pomegranate
grandmother’s garbled Farsi. But the pomegranates they ate were no longer flown
around the world. Their dancing was cloaked in black. The West was not heard of.
The cool of the evening did not bring the calm Simin Behbahani had been hoping for.
She had been longing for a moment to write, to reflect. To find solace in the midst of
the chaos of Tehran. Simin had fashioned a few lines already, memories of a distant
land, the land of her childhood and a Tehran she was unsure her children would ever
see.
“I swear I cannot endure being separated from my homeland.
Til my last day you will hear in my bones that same tale of the reed.”
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She thought of Rumi sitting in Tehran centuries ago, composing the “Song of the
Reed.” The displacement he captured was timeless. Her thoughts were underscored
by a crash, the piercing sound of metal on metal. A whistling noise, cutting through
the canopy above her home. Rushing to her mother’s room, she drew her sleeping
figure close and sighed. These were not the sounds of her era, they sullied her
mother’s memory of a triumphant Iran. Yet they did not surprise Simin anymore. The
echo of the air raid siren, the headlines conceding yet another apartment block had
been bombed, another community decimated by Iraqi forces, had become mundane
features of another day of conflict. Preparing to black out the lights, she considered
she would have to leave her writing for another night and cringed. There would be no
other night. Surely this chaos would continue – there was no foreseeable end. Their
sky would continue to burn with the agitation of fire and molten metal. The lamps
would continue to be extinguished.
There were many who had fled, leaving behind the pomegranate seeds and the long
grass for new lands and foreign tongues, where their nation’s fruits remained exotic
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The Pomegranate
and their language a riddle. “You Leave, I’ll Stay,” she whispered and considered the
phrase. The ground shook, the impact of the oncoming attack rattling the street’s
foundations. Perhaps tonight it would be their house. Perhaps tonight they would
finally be forced to leave. She could not fathom the thought of leaving this life behind,
if her home and its shade collapsed.
To her, it would be to become people without a tellable history, nervously attempting
to twist their tongues around a new language, to render a foreign life exotic when all
they longed for was home. Home.
How could she build herself a home when her own history was so uncertain it was
impossible to lay foundations? She could not leave with the knowledge it would
mean never returning. Never allowing her children’s children to dance in the long
grass or pick persimmons and pomegranates.
To them it would be simply a pomegranate. Pomme granade. An odd ‘seed apple.’ It
would not be anar. It would not be the sign of the fall or the most luxurious
indulgence after school. It would not be a cause for celebration, for dancing and
storytelling.
Lying in bed under a canopy of Eastern stars, she thought of those grandchildren of
the future and wondered where they might grow old, whose stars they might see in
the evening. The watchmen called out into the darkness, sounds of the city exploded
around her, chaotic and beautiful. The canopy spread above her, as infinite as
always. The leaves of the pomegranate trees rustled in the shade of her
grandmother’s garden. It was decided. Clutching her completed poem to her chest,
she whispered the final lines.
“Where will my heart escape? I take one step, then another.
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The Pomegranate
You Leave, I’ll Stay.” 1
1: Simin Behbahani, You Leave I’ll Stay – A Cup of Sin: Selected Poems (1980)
Word Count: 915 words
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