Let Me Tell You Where I've Been: New Writing by Women of the Iranian Diaspora

Pomegranates

Pomegranates H PERSIS M. KARIM In loving memory of my Baba To root themselves in their new home Mother and Baba planted native trees: madrone, oak and the manzanita at the end of the drive. To remind them of their foreignness they planted olive, almond, quince, pomegranate. The first time my mother packed one in my lunch I shrank in embarrassment, quickly returning the leathery bulb to the brown bag. How to eat a pomegranate without being conspicuous? It is a slow and exacting endeavor, an act of worship. You never slice them with a knife, my father would say when the September heat made the trees sag with the ornaments of autumn. In his world, men sold them on the streets for a few toumans, shouting,“Anar-e Khoshmazeh!” “Delicious pomegranates!” rolling the sun-flushed hides between two palms. Customers at the corner of a cart, kneaded, coaxed the last of the blood-red juice from a hole, allowing it to touch only their lips. Our American sensibility refused this technique. We never took their exotic form for granted. 102 PERSIS M. KARIM “Throw them in the air, let them crack open!” my brothers yelled, waiting for the quiet thud and then, the invisible seam that split them open like an unhealed wound. We liked the splatter of color on face and hands, evidence of pomegranate carnage. In my twenties, I finally understood the fecund symbol. A magazine in the chiropractor’s office advised women wanting to conceive: Eat estrogen-rich foods—shrimp, scallops, pomegranates. Like the larvae of some magical butterfly the red ovules offered a cure for barren women. There are two kinds of people in the world: those who pluck the seeds from the waxy yellow membrane, tossing them into their mouths— and those who hoard the ruby jewels, jealously guarding the pile until the last crimson kernel is extracted. Once in a child’s game of war, my brother plucked a pomegranate, tore its feathery crown, and with a heave mimicked the sound of a grenade exploding with his mouth full of saliva. “Bury it!” I said, looking at its inedible remains. Baba would not tolerate such sacrilege. When I learned a Sephardic version of the fall— that it was a pomegranate and not an apple— I felt a kind of secret pride. It’s too cold for apples in the Garden of Eden, POMEGRANATES 103 I told a friend, knowing with certainty they wouldn’t be wearing fig leaves. This fall, my two-year-old son, undaunted, eats his first pomegranate. His tiny, probing fingers harvest the seeds one by one.With hands stained by this baptism, he offers them to me like the remnants of an untold story inherited in the womb. 104 PERSIS M. KARIM ...