The Saffron Kitchen

1. London

A solitude ten thousand fathoms deep

Sustains the bed on which we lie, my dear;

Although I love you, you will have to leap;

Our dream of safety has to disappear.

—W. H. Auden

Strange not to know that you’re alive or even that you’re about to die. That’s what it must have been like for my unborn baby. I’d been kicked in the guts by my young cousin, as I hauled him back from trying to jump over the bridge’s railings into the cold green water rushing out to sea. My mother’s scream rang in my ears as she ran toward us and the world froze: the churn of the Thames at high tide, the rumble of going-home school traffic and the tremble of the bridge. In that moment, my baby started to die.

And then the world unfroze. The traffic rolled by as if nothing had happened, and my cousin, Saeed, and I clung together on the pavement. When my mother finally reached us, she hauled Saeed to his feet, shook him hard, and shouted in Farsi so that I half expected him to make another run for the hungry river. But it had claimed its life for the day. Saeed looked at his feet. My mother shook her open palms at him and the sky, and asked what she or his dead mother had done that he should treat his life so lightly. Only when she stopped for breath did she turn to see the spreading bloodstain on my pale blue skirt.

Oh, Sara. She knelt on the wet pavement. Saeed, find her phone. She pushed my rucksack toward him and out, onto the bridge, fell the rest of my life: my school books for marking, sixth-form essays on Othello and Desdemona, an apple, a bottle of folic acid tablets, cherry lip salve, my diary, a small photo album, and, beneath it all, my phone. One of them dialed 999 and I felt Saeed wrap his anorak around me, his thin brown arms goose-bumped in the cold and bruised from the bullying. I rested my head on my mother’s knee between the convulsions of my body and cried for the lost life I had never known; for Julian, my husband, somewhere oblivious of it all; and for myself.

What am I doing here? my mother had asked in tears earlier that summer as she tidied her immaculate kitchen, her head shaking as she again wiped down the surfaces, rearranged the fruit bowl, and refused to sit down.

Her younger sister, my aunt Mara, was dead and my mother had not seen her for over a year. When I thought of Mara, I mainly remembered her laugh, how it had bubbled and rippled from her. Everything about her had been generous. Even when she was in a wheelchair with cropped hair and swollen with drugs, she was beautiful. And they had not had the chance for a final good-bye. More or less five decades and two continents, stretching from Paris to Berlin, Vienna, Prague, Bucharest, Istanbul, Baku, Mosul, Kirkūk and Tabrīz, lay between my mother’s life in London and her sister’s death in Tehran.

It did not help that Mara’s husband had already remarried. My mother had cried and shouted down the phone at the betrayal, full of her own guilt. Mara’s two oldest children were already grown up, but the youngest, Saeed, was just twelve. He was tall but slight, with the dark skin of his father, a solemn, angular face, and large green eyes that rarely blinked beneath their thick lashes. He arrived on my parents’ doorstep early that autumn and moved into my old bedroom, squeezing his stuff into the gaps my mother made, between the old clothes, books, toys, and photos that I had left or stored there over the fifteen years since I had moved out.

The following weekend, I had driven over to my parents’ from my home in Hammersmith. It was a Sunday morning and I’d woken early, the window rattling in its casement with a dry wind that had blown up from the Sahara and Arabia before that, leaving sand on the window ledges and car bonnets, and bending the stiff old London trees in the night. I’d woken with Julian curled round me, his hand on my growing belly, and the warm air billowing through the window.

Come with me for lunch, to meet Saeed. I rolled toward him.

Next time. He stroked my back. I’ve got a busy few weeks coming up. You go and do your Iranian thing and I’ll get everything straight here.

All right, but promise you’ll come and say hello soon.

I promise. He kissed my neck. I’ll miss your mother’s cooking.

My parents’ home was on Richmond Hill, large and set back from the road, far away from the rest of grimy London. The pine trees at the gate always welcomed me first, with their lemon green scent and the memory of childhood summers, scrambling up to the top branches, often away from my parents’ arguing, to sit in the peace and dust motes with blood on my shins. I walked along the tidy, tiled, black-and-white path to the front door, which my father opened before I knocked.

We hugged. You look well. He held me back from himself.

How are things here? I asked, and he rolled his eyes.

Saeed’s upstairs, settling into his room. He seems well enough. Your mother’s in the garden. She wanted some quiet. A bit overwhelmed, I think.

I’ll go find her, I said, and he disappeared back into his book-lined study.

Along the hall, the house was full of the smell of her cooking, the soft, starchy scent of basmati, saffron, and roasting lamb. I went through the kitchen with steam on its windows and along the narrow blue corridor with its long cupboards full of henna, herbs, dried figs, and limes from her last trip home. The air was cool above the terra-cotta floor, before the steps down to the back door and into the garden.

I could hear my old tape player from behind the yew hedge and beyond the rose garden, the tinny sound of tombok drums and sitar. I passed the greenhouse, figs and jasmine growing up one side, overhanging the path, and found her on the bottom lawn, kneeling quietly, eyes concentrating on her hands, weeding and tidying. She was still beautiful at over sixty: high cheekbones and dark hair to her shoulders.

"Salaam, Maman." I spoke quietly but she turned quickly, startled, breaking into a smile as she saw me, eyes full of tears.

She wiped her face with the back of her hand, leaving a smudge of mud on her cheek. Hello. She pushed herself up, a little stiff. I’ve been thinking of Mara; how I wish she was here. We spent so little time together.

I hugged her, and she felt small and fragile. I remember you and Mara both dancing out here to this music a few summers ago.

It had been a dance from their childhood, arms raised, sinuous, slow, small footsteps and hips shaken with mock sensuality, one almond-eyed sister to the other.

She smiled. I’m not sure what the neighbors made of it.

We both looked out across the tidy clipped hedges.

Later, I went upstairs to fetch Saeed for lunch. Ten oak doors led off the large landing, lit from a stained-glass window that stretched the height of the stairwell to the west. I knocked gently before going in to introduce myself. He stood to shake my hand with a polite bow that made me smile. His courtesy was a contrast to the mischievous twelve-year-olds I taught back at school. That’s lovely, I said, looking over his shoulder at my old acrylic paints on the desk. He had painted a gazelle in full flight, amber and gold, with its front and back legs stretched out like a rocking horse. What gave you that idea?

He told me about an old Persian carpet that had hung by his bed in Tehran. The gazelle used to be in the corner close to my pillow. When my mother was ill and I couldn’t sleep, I’d trace it with my finger. As he talked, he held up his hand and drew the gazelle’s outline again in the air between us.

My mother joined us then from the garden and rested her hand on Saeed’s shoulder to look at the picture as well. Mara drew beautifully too, she said. When I first came to England, I used to send Elvis Presley tapes to her in Iran, and she’d send me her drawings of home, the village and our family. She closed her eyes in the yellow sunlight.

Have you kept them? Saeed asked, gazing up at her.

In the loft somewhere. They made me sad. I missed them all so much. I’ll show you them one day . . . soon. But come on, it’s time to eat.

Why did you first come to England, Aunt Maryam? Saeed asked as we walked down the stairs, a child’s curiosity in his voice.

Well, she answered, keeping her eyes on each step, I’d finished my nurse’s training in Tehran and I couldn’t go back to Mashhad. It seemed like an adventure back then. My father was pleased to send me, I suppose. Her hand slid down the oak banister, blue veins and white knuckles, faded cuts and scars from the garden.

Saeed followed behind her, turning to look at the Hansel and Gretel cottage in the stained-glass window as he passed.

In the dining room, my parents talked about the school he would start in a few weeks’ time and his eyes flickered from one to the other. Your English will improve, my father said, slicing the leg of lamb. When Maryam first came here, she only knew a few lines of poetry, which was remarkable, but not much use.

Our eyes crossed to her face, cheeks flushed as she served rice on to the plates.

My mother said you had your own English tutor, said Saeed.

Her hand hovered above the plate, grains of saffron rice falling on to the cream linen tablecloth. Yes, that’s true. She frowned, distant for a moment, rolling the fallen grains beneath her fingers, so they broke and smudged the linen. It was a long time ago; another life.

My father leaned forward in his chair. Are you quite all right, Maryam?

Yes. She held the back of her hand to her forehead. Sorry, let me get a cloth and clear this up. It’s all this talk of Mara, the past. You bring it all back, Saeed—the dead and gone.

He bowed his head as she walked from the room, and I squeezed his hand.

By the day on the bridge, Saeed had been at school for a month, and been bullied from the start. I had received an anxious call from my mother to say that the police had found him looking lost in King’s Mall shopping center during school hours. They had taken him to Hammersmith police station until he could be safely collected. Her call came at lunchtime and, as I had no lessons that afternoon, I said I would meet them there in an hour.

I walked through Ravenscourt Park. It was a beautiful autumn day, with red maple leaves fallen on the path and a hint of woodsmoke in the air. As I hurried along past mothers pushing their prams, I thought of the child growing inside me, and of Saeed, here among strangers. Beyond the park, I walked along streets of smart terraced houses, gentrified in soft pastels, canary yellow and apple green, with sports cars in the road and lush curtains at the windows. Late honeysuckle and foxgloves still flowered in the small front gardens.

I tried to remember being twelve, Saeed’s age. Fatima had come from Iran to stay with us at about that time. She had looked after my mother when she was growing up in Mashhad in northeast Iran. She would make me laugh, sitting on the garden wall with her skirt above her knees. She wore long powder blue bloomers underneath, with hidden pockets full of safety pins and buttons, and a small prayer tablet etched with the mosque at Haram. That had been 1978, the year before the Revolution. In the early days, during that spring over twenty years ago, Fatima had treated me as a child. Maybe the foxgloves had reminded me of it. She had brought a small bag of grainy black poppy seeds with her on the plane, and while she sat on the wall, bloomers in the sunshine, I ran up and down the garden in my school pinafore and white socks, sowing the seeds where they fell.

They’re from Afghanistan, Fatima had looked into my eyes while my mother translated, near to where your mother grew up. They will still be here after we’re dead. She had smiled and pinched my cheek.

By the summer they had grown into tall, ragged opium poppies, pink, red, and purple petals fluttering above the roses, stocks, and gladioli. My mother had shown me how to score the seedpods with a razor, sap oozing out to be scraped away and made into the resin her father smoked at the end of his life. Don’t tell your father, she whispered to me, and there in the middle of our herb and vegetable garden, I touched something strange and dangerous, a world where flowers became poison and smoke.

Fatima always wore a headscarf in those days, which would slip back over her badly dyed purple-black hair as the day passed, and I took to wearing one too, knotted like a gypsy’s at the back of my head. She would pull me on to her lap and tell me I looked just like my mother when she was small, and how she had always been my grandfather’s favorite and that was why he had chosen her to come to England.

Do you miss your dad? I asked my mother once.

No. He’s always with me, in my head.

I don’t recall much, if any, talk of her mother.

Then, with the summer and the poppies, the bleeding started. One morning I woke up and there was a warm dampness on my nightie. I sat up in bed, put my hand down there and brought it back sticky and dark, not like the bright red blood when I cut my knee, but smelling strong: of inside me, I guessed. After that, once Fatima had found out, everything changed. I would run in the garden with my skinny legs in shorts, jumping through the water sprinkler, and she would bite the side of her hand and tut-tut, looking away.

She’s used to girls covering their bodies, my mother explained. I used to bind my breasts down with a bandage, and look at you, wet through.

She had seemed angry somehow, impatient with me. Almost overnight, I became painfully self-conscious of myself, my body, its protuberances, shape, flow, and juices: all bad, all spoiling, all beyond my control. That had been me at twelve.

The houses grew scruffier as I turned onto Shepherd’s Bush Road and the traffic grew louder, car windows rolled down and hip-hop bouncing into the street. I passed the Thai supermarket; the little old lady at the till by the door looked up and recognized me. She smiled and I waved. This was my patch—past the off license, delicatessen, and newsagent’s. Brook Green stretched out on the left, the parched plane trees dropping their skin-colored leaves where a group of tramps and drunks always gathered on two benches facing each other. You could smell them from a few yards away. The same lone woman was usually in their midst. She was worn but ageless, thin in tight jeans, with white flaking skin and thick Afro hair. I crossed the street if I ever saw her walking toward me, asking for money. I guess it was her patch, too.

Then, at last, the police station came into view on the right, its blue lantern left above the door from another time. Beyond it was the fire station, opposite the library and before the PoNaNa nightclub, where girls in stockings and school uniforms hung out on Friday nights with hairy-kneed young men dressed like schoolboys, tongues hanging out like wolves. God knows what Fatima would have made of it all. I wasn’t sure what I made of it myself. I half admitted I hoped my baby would be a son. Life for a boy somehow seemed less messy; there was less to go wrong than with a daughter.

Up the steps and inside the police station, smelling of linoleum, I saw my mother and Saeed, sitting side by side on a bench in the hallway. Both looked straight ahead, not talking. I put on a big smile and walked up to them. Hello, mischief. I ruffled Saeed’s hair and he pulled away, eyes full of angry tears that I hadn’t seen before. All right, Maman? I asked.

The shame of it. She shook her head as if she had dirt in her mouth. Why have you brought me here, Saeed? What would your mother say? Her hands rubbed over each other, and there was a fleck of spit on her chin.

Come on, lighten up. I knelt beside Saeed. Don’t worry, she’s just a bit upset. She doesn’t like places like this. It’s not you. I reached out and rubbed her arm. Let’s get out of here. How about going to the river and seeing if we can find some tea?

We walked in silence toward the squall of the Broadway, awash with exhaust fumes, sirens, and the distant shudder of the flyover heading toward Richmond and Heathrow. Saeed walked slightly apart from us. His anorak hung off his shoulder and the laces from one of his shoes dragged on the ground. He shrunk into his collar, and his new, short haircut left him looking cold and diminished. My mother was detached, with a weary resignation in each step. Her mouth was pinched and plum lipstick bled into her wrinkles.

We reached the riverside and turned right, passed the red-brick mansion block and boat clubs. It looked barren, abandoned by the weekend crowd of rowers and boozers. The traffic rumbled over the bridge, glorious khaki green and gold in the late afternoon, shadows and light playing off the water. A tall timber mast stuck up from the riverbed, about thirty feet into the flow, with an owl carved into it, like a totem pole where seagulls circled. It looked out over the tides, downriver to Putney, Battersea, Westminster, Greenwich, and away. I pointed it out to Saeed, and he smiled with sad eyes.

We arrived at some trestle tables outside a pub. The door was ajar but it was lifeless within. You grab a seat, I told them, hunting for chocolate biscuits in my rucksack, a weapon of last resort with my junior classes. I’ll see if we can get coffees.

Inside, I persuaded a New Zealander, looking lost and cold in his surf garb, to organize some filter coffee. Waiting, I looked over my shoulder through the large windows and watched my mother staring upriver, Saeed reading the side of the biscuit packet. Then she focused on him, her mouth moving, as I relaxed and rubbed the taut skin across my belly. Eventually she reached over and took Saeed’s chin in her hand. I smiled, waiting for her to stroke the side of his face: poor boy, all would be well. Instead, she drew back her hand and slapped him so hard his head jerked to the side. I felt as if I had been hit myself and hurried outside, stumbling hard against the door. Saeed was backing away from the table, his hand holding his cheek. He flinched as I put my arms around him. I could feel him shaking.

What are you doing? I demanded of my mother, her thick-veined hands trembling on the table, her cheeks spotted pink. He’s bullied at school and then he comes home to this. You’re supposed to look after him, protect him.

And make him weak? she replied. You don’t understand, Sara.

No, I don’t.

When I was a child, if I was weak, I was punished. It made me strong. When I humiliated my father, he humiliated me. It made me strong. Look at Saeed. He’s weak at school and you tell me to pity him. That won’t make him the son Mara wanted, the grandson my father deserved, the nephew I want. Her voice caught in her throat.

I can’t listen to this. Saeed, why didn’t you go to school?

He sat, half turned away, and spoke quietly, slowly: This morning I went to the bus stop, and got on the bus at the back. I was tired as I don’t sleep well here. It was warm and I fell asleep. When I woke up, the bus was in Hammersmith. I tried to find your house, Sara, to wait, but I got lost. A police lady in the shopping mall helped me.

My mother shook her head. Saeed’s face was wet with tears. He leaned forward and rested his head in his hands. Our coffees were brought out and I sat watching them both. I couldn’t quite believe what had happened. Come on, drink up, I said. I’ll drive you two home.

Saeed stared at me, his eyes flooded and simmering. I don’t want to go home with her. He wouldn’t look at my mother.

You didn’t mean it, did you? You’re really sorry, aren’t you, Maman?

I needed to hear her apology as much as Saeed did, but she looked over my shoulder, toward the moored houseboats, their walkways and nodding geraniums.

It’s not the first time, he whispered.

What isn’t? I asked, frowning.

That she’s hit me.

I turned to my mother.

He’s too weak. She blew on her coffee, her hands trembling.

Saeed stood up and walked away from the table. I tried to hold on to his sleeve, but it slipped through my fingers. Come back, I said softly. He walked slowly at first, but when he was out of easy reach, he started to run toward the bridge. What have you done, Maman? I asked, and made to follow him, walking briskly and then trying to jog as Saeed ran up the steps.

I put my hand under my belly, breaking into a sweat. My mother pushed herself up from the table and turned to follow us, as I panted up the steps with my eyes half closed. Saeed had made it to the middle of the bridge and stood there as I drew closer. He looked at me like a frightened animal, and then glanced down at my mother, still on the riverside. The railing was low and he suddenly leaned forward to swing one leg over it. At that, I heard a shrill cry of distress from my mother, a deathly scream, as she saw what was happening, and I felt a surge of adrenaline shoot through me. I flung myself toward my little cousin, balanced a few yards away, and grabbed him as he wavered. With all my weight, I pulled him back on top of me, his foot kicking into my gut as we crashed down onto the pavement. I felt a cramp like life being wrung out of me, and clung to Saeed on the damp ground.

A little while later, I heard sirens straining to clear a way through the clot of traffic around the Broadway. I kept my eyes closed and disappeared inside myself, away from the violent shivering that ground my teeth and bent me double.

When I woke up, pale blue light flickered across my eyelids and I lay still with my eyes closed. I could be dead. I listened to the distant traffic, insistent horns and screeching brakes mingling with echoes from the depths of the hospital: its trolleys, swinging doors, births and deaths. I must be quite high up, I thought, above the menagerie. Nearer, I heard the soft squeak of shoes trying to tread quietly, and whispers. I could smell lilies. I didn’t want to open my eyes, but I was still breathing: I felt the rise and fall of my rib cage. Beyond the heavy scent of pollen and disinfectant, I could smell something acrid: my own skin and the dried scent of panic. I ran my tongue over my parched lips and licked the salty tears pooled at their edges before I felt a hand on my forehead and a kiss on my mouth.

My beautiful wife.

His words twisted through me and I opened my eyes, lifting my arms to