My father was the cherry tree at the end of the yard. The kind whose highest branches no one could reach, but whose shade and fruit belonged to the whole alley. His stories were like that too: distant, tangled, covered in thousand-year-old mist. Every time he told them, they changed shape slightly. Different details, different endings. I am not even sure he himself knew anymore which one was true.

I don’t think he realised how much sorrow had quietly sedimented in those stories. He never complained. His grief had no tears. It came out in painful breaths I once saw trembling through his shoulders – just once. Some people carry sadness so modestly, as if suffering should not inconvenience others.

His only memory of his father was a coffin being carried out of the house on the shoulders of men dressed in black. Whenever I think of my father, I see a three-year-old boy with wide, shining black eyes, clinging to the doorframe, stunned, not yet understanding that his life has been permanently split open.

My grandfather owned a traditional felt-hat workshop. Then the Pahlavi hat became fashionable as Reza Shah tried to dress Iran in the clothes of modern Europe, ordering the gendarmes to shut down the old workshops. When they finally reopened the place, all that remained of the mountains of felt was sad grey dust and fattened moths. His whole livelihood whirled in the shape of thick-bodied moths dancing through the clouds of dust, and that same year he died young, perhaps more of grief than illness, leaving behind Touba, whose beauty was legendary among the relatives, with her long black hair and her three half-grown sons.

Nobody in the family spoke much about Touba’s second husband. He was not considered ‘worthy’ of the Yavar Sultan daughter. Uncle Ali was the only fruit of that cursed marriage, and Touba died shortly after giving birth to him. My father – the second son of Touba and Ahmad – learned from those early years how to wash and feed a baby brother, how to grow up in other people’s houses, how never to really be a child at all.

His heart grew tired far too early, refusing to keep going all the way to sixty. I knew him for only fifteen years before it stopped beating.

This is what the doctor said: ‘Inside his chest, the coronary arteries slowly closed around the last small light. Oxygen abandoned the myocardium. The ventricles forgot their ancient rhythm, fluttering like frightened birds before the great red muscle fell into silence.’

He cooked beautifully and dangerously, mostly for himself. He used to say a person dies only once. The last thing he cooked for us was aloo Mosamma, plum stew, swimming in nearly an inch of oil. But then again could plum stew exist without oil? Because that deep orange-red only becomes truly seductive when a shimmering layer of oil multiplies its glow a hundred times over.

Whenever I miss him, I slice onions into thin crescents and drop them into oil that’s hot but not too hot. Patiently, I stir them and watch them slowly surrender: translucent, then soft and golden. When their smell fills the house, I scatter over them a generous spoonful of turmeric to deepen their gold. I gather them gently with a wooden spoon and press them against the side of the pot so the excess amber oil slides back down and stays behind for frying the chicken. The onion strands, now collapsed into one another, a glowing bundle of gold, rest quietly aside while I place the chicken pieces into the oil. Once both sides gain colour, I add the swollen Barghani plums I had soaked earlier – though if you cannot find Barghani plums, the soft pitted Lidl ones will do, even if the difference between the two is, as we say in Persian, the difference between my beloved moon and the celestial moon, as vast as the earth and the sky. Then comes a little tomato paste. Not too much. Just enough to tint the stew. This is not a deep red dish. It lives somewhere between gold and orange and red, like the summer sunsets of childhood, when an inexplicable joy used to run beneath our skin.

Everything turns together in the oil. The onions return to the pot. Salt, cinnamon, and enough water. I close the lid. They become acquainted in private, slowly settling into one another.

Then I turn to grinding saffron. Carefully, like a restorer handling relics, I open the jar of red gold and pour the brittle crimson threads, once alive in purple flowers in the plains of eastern Iran, into the stone mortar. My mother always added a few grains of sugar before grinding, to battle the dampness hidden in the strands. The humidity of this coastal city of mine is no less cruel than the coastal city where I was born.

I pour the sugar over the saffron and press the pestle down. My wrist aches. The saffron cracks softly, loosening, preparing to release its hidden colour into the cold stone. If only the dampness lodged inside my bones could be cured so simply.

I have seen people place ice cubes on saffron to draw out its redness. But my mother always used hot water, covering it gently, letting it bloom slowly. If I were saffron, I too would choose warmth and steeping over the violent shock of ice.

Sometimes I think someone must come into our lives to sprinkle sugar over us, absorb our dampness, crack open our stiffness, warm us gently, and leave us alone long enough to steep, so that perhaps our true essence may finally bleed outwards. Perhaps we never allow ourselves enough time because we are terrified of discovering our own impurity, terrified the world will realise we are counterfeit. As Khayyam said: ‘Once the curtain falls, neither you remain nor I.’

But assaying a human soul does not take six seconds. Nor six days.

For now, I am meant to spend six days in an apartment in a block of flats where T. S. Eliot once lived. But imagining Thomas inside these seductive red wall none of this feels strange to me.

Transition has always been difficult for me. It took two days before the ice inside me thawed and I could finally start to write. It is now the third day and my anxious saffron threads are only just beginning to adjust to the walls around me. But they still carry the smell of the open plains. Their essence has not yet begun to flow.

The first time I heard Eliot’s name I was in my first year at university. In our dramatic literature class, we had to read Four Quartets in the translation of our professor, Dr Farhad N. Kermani, who had lived in England for years. Only much later, when my English had finally become strong enough, did I read the poems in their original language and fall in love with the architecture of Eliot’s mind. Only then did I understand why, at nineteen, my feverish avant-garde-loving brain had experienced his language like scripture, why I imagined him as some prophet from a thousand years ago. It was all the fault of poetry’s stubbornness in translation: that precise place where language fails, translation collapses exhausted, and the poem remains standing among the ruins.

You need stillness to solve it.

And I have traded youthful frustration for a newfound patience, discovering that some poetry requires the passage of time. What once felt like an impenetrable wall now feels like a mirror; I no longer seek to conquer Eliot’s words, but simply let his meditations on memory wash over me in a rhythm I have finally learned to breathe. Just like plum stew: every household in Iran makes it differently. I remember the last meal my dad made before going to hospital on a wintery night just two months after my fifteenth birthday.

I am sitting beneath floorboards Eliot once walked across, listening to the echo of my broken voice, reading:

So we moved, and they, in a formal pattern,
Along the empty alley, into the box circle,
To look down into the drained pool.
Dry the pool, dry concrete, brown edged,
And the pool was filled with water out of sunlight.

Tears fall and dissolve the very paragraph I cut out of this morning’s draft because I had convinced myself it was too abstract, too fragmented. Who would care about the broken shards of memory rattling round the labyrinth of my mind anyway? Certainly not the publishing industry. They prefer trauma neatly arranged with chapter titles and redeemable endings.

I am thrown back to a window overlooking the rear courtyard of a doctor’s office somewhere in central Tehran. An empty swimming pool carpeted with orange leaves dissolving into the exhausted brown of the walls around it. In the dying light of that autumn afternoon, the whole scene lodged itself inside my eighteen-year-old mind as the most beautiful and devastating image I had ever seen. Nothing happened that day. No tragedy. No revelation. Nobody died. Yet for the first time I felt the unbearable lightness of existence settling onto my narrow shoulders. Shoulders that had probably learned long before I was born to fold themselves inwards, occupy less space, remain braced for impact, finally manifesting decades later in the elegant medical disguise called tension myalgia. A condition that sounds almost sophisticated until you realise it simply means the body has spent forty years clenching against life like an unpaid intern in the Ministry of Catastrophe.

It probably began the day three terrified wild horses hurled their bodies onto my father’s tiny brown Zhiyan while I was still floating quietly inside my mother’s womb. Cells remember; mine certainly did. I made the decision right there, suspended in amniotic fluid and generational anxiety, that I would never drive.

Thirty years later, I tried to betray this prenatal vow. During my second driving lesson, a seagull – strutting with the level of confidence that, had I possessed even one thousandth of it, I would by now certainly hold political office somewhere – marched slowly and ceremoniously in front of the car like a decorated military commander inspecting troops.

I turned the engine off, stepped out of the car, and said ‘That’s it. I can never drive. What if he stopped and I ran him over?’

My father stopped just in time, just before the tiny car crumpled beneath the weight of three horses, managing to save himself, his wife, and the three and a half children inside the car.

That might have been the last collective journey the Shams family took before the storm of the Revolution arrived and rearranged everybody’s fate. Even my own brief little life – I was only two months old – was apparently worthy of historical interruption. We were all still trembling from the aftershocks of the Revolution when the war began. A war that lasted eight years and has now been sanctified for forty-five, polished endlessly until grief itself became state property.

I was thirteen kilos of pale anxiety with straight black hair when my twenty-five-year-old uncle disappeared in the war. Shortly after, my father had a stroke before reaching forty. The memories from those years survive in my mind like the torn serial pages of my mother’s old magazines: out of order, incomplete, sometimes impossible to distinguish from nightmares.

I hear the sound of whipping coming from a small makeshift headquarters crowded with bearded men intoxicated by ideology and cheap authority. I wedge one tiny foot onto the curved spine of our sour orange tree and drag my frail body upwards, trying to see what’s happening behind the barbed wire they have stretched between our house and their little torture theatre. I am too short to see anything, so I do what children in war zones do best: I imagine the rest.

Even now, when I close my eyes, I can still feel the rough black bark of the twisted orange tree scraping against my delicate skin. I remember the small protruding knot where a young branch had once grown before being hacked away, leaving behind a large misshapen button on the trunk – a perfect foothold for my thin nervous feet. I remember the colour of the moss, green enough to leave stains on my clothes if I wasn’t careful. I remember the smell of young citrus leaves in the garden of house number 31.

Those memories arrive trembling like the silent eight-millimetre films my father occasionally showed us on his Kodak Brownie projector: rare, magical events. The film reel of my own childhood seems to have been edited by an incompetent amateur using cheap tape: abrupt cuts, frightened fast-forwarded images, forbidden books buried in the garden by flashlight, photographs from the coronation hidden behind a yellow-and-black stained-glass portrait of Ayatollah Taleghani, the elderly neighbour collapsing after hearing her son’s execution announced on the morning radio, my mum quietly crying, my dad repeating over and over: ‘Ali will come back. Ali will come back.’

And Ali did come back. In a box perhaps. Or a bag. I never understood exactly. A handful of bones and a military tag with, presumably, his name on it. He finally arrived from Karbala-5. Shalamcheh.

The only surviving image I have of Uncle Ali is him standing beside the courtyard pond holding a plastic giraffe, filling its hollow stomach with water and then spraying me and his little son Mohsen while we screamed with delight. That single bright image floats alone among the disordered scenes in my memory, a surviving frame from a film whose reels were burned long ago.

My father was the cherry tree at the end of the yard. On Monday, when I return home, I will make plum stew in his memory. And I will read Eliot aloud while the stew patiently comes into itself:

Time and the bell have buried the day,
The black cloud carries the sun away…
the light is still
At the still point of the turning world.

The post Plum Stew appeared first on English PEN.

It’s a suburb in Birmingham, just two miles east of the city centre, named for the road that snakes through its middle: Alum Rock Road.

Imagine, if you will, a high street filled with all manner of shops, of clothes and food, but not the brands we’ve come to recognise as bastions of the High Street – there is no H&M to be found here, no WHSmith, no Boots or Superdrug, no McDonalds or Subway. There’s a Greggs and there’s a Lloyds Bank, and that’s about as close we get to those mainstream shops. Instead, there’s a plethora of locally owned restaurants and takeaways, internationally sourced Pakistani clothing shops, where people from all over come to shop for weddings, funerals, birthdays, graduations – we have it all.

The people who know Alum Rock are always surprised when I tell them I’m from there. As famous as it is for its clothes and its endless array of food options, it’s also known for being rough, dangerous, unsafe. When I was younger, I took this as a compliment – feeling seen – but as I’ve grown, I’ve come to find it insulting, for all its layers of classism and racism.

I moved out when I left to go to university at 18, disappearing into the white folds of Derby. I then moved to South West London, where I saw no one who looked like me, and then to Newark, a small town on the edge of Nottingham, where people watched me as I walked by, crossing roads to avoid me, security guards floating around me as I shopped. I spent a little while in South Shields, where people often asked me where I was from (I never knew if it was because of the colour of my skin or the sound of my voice). Now, I have settled in North London, on a road that has a mosque at the end of it, not far from a church, five minutes away from a bounty of Turkish and Kurdish shops.

As unsafe and dangerous as Alum Rock was thought to be, it never felt that way to me. It was my home – a place where I knew shortcuts and which corner shop would sell you cigarettes when your dad sent you out for some; which places might give you extra chips if you asked nicely; in which parks to spend a Saturday afternoon without being harassed by older kids who were smoking weed and didn’t want to get caught.

For the last ten years, I have been searching for somewhere akin to home. I have always been the kind of person who learns about and understands the thrum of the place in which I live. I can still tell you how to cut across Newark to get to the train station quickly from my old house, which road in Derby has the pub that me and my friends would go to on Tuesdays when they had half off for students, how to walk to the cinema in South Shields (a 45-minute trek that takes you over a river, across two bridges, and through a particularly quiet patch of forest).

But as much as I map these places out in my mind, I am never there long enough to feel settled – to feel like I have roots. Three years at Derby, two in Newark, nine months in South Shields. I’ve been in London for nearly four years, now – eight months in my first flat, eighteen months in my second, eighteen months in my third and current. I haven’t yet spent the kind of time here I need to feel that somewhere is home to me the way Alum Rock will always be.

It was October and my flatmate – who had recently moved in, replacing one of my closest friends – told me she wanted a samosa. We had tried to make samoseh earlier that year, seeking out a recipe on YouTube and making the dough from scratch, but they were too thick to cook all the way through yet too thin to stay together in the bubbling oil, and the kitchen a mess when we were done. Keen to not replicate the disaster, I did what a millennial of my time would and Googled where to find some. A result popped up, just an eight-minute walk away: Salims.

We went that night, and when I saw where the shop was, I was surprised that I’d never noticed it before. It stands right in the middle of my running route. I have no idea how many times I’ve passed it by, its white sign sticking out from the building: SALIMS / OPEN / 7 days a week.

When we stepped in, for a moment, it was as if the last ten years had disappeared from underneath me and I was back home, in Alum Rock, walking into one of its many restaurants and takeaways to order roti and salaan for my father (because my mother was somewhere else that day), or to pick up food because there was a celebration or a mourning.

There were seats at the back and a long buffet-like counter with see-through glass, metal trays of food sitting underneath. It was all familiar to me. I caught snatches of the men behind the counter speaking Urdu, a language that I understand but can’t speak, my speech faltering, my brain always a dozen steps behind the conversation with its lack of practice.

I spoke to one of the men that night – me asking for samoseh in English, and him responding in Urdu that they had none. We left without any food but said we’d go back.

We did, a few days later. This time, we wanted to buy dinner. When I walked in, I looked at the array of salaan sat under the glass – the chicken, the mince, the lamb, the dhal and the vegetarian staple, the aloo saag. All of it sang to me of my mother’s hands, memories from childhood of watching her as she cooked, and the endless attempts I’d made to recreate her dishes in the years since, something always missing.

I bought chicken that night with two naan made right in front of me, the sound of the dough being slapped between two hands a nursery rhyme, a calling of who I was and where I came from. My flatmate opted for dhal, and that night, when I closed my eyes as we ate, I was able to imagine that I wasn’t me now, but me then.

I went to Salims again, alone this time, my flatmate in the shower, from where an order of vegetable samoseh floated out. When I walked into the shop, I didn’t notice the woman immediately – I was too busy looking through the glass, trying to find the samoseh my flatmate wanted. It was only when I heard her voice that I looked up. She looked to be in her late 50s or early 60s, a scarf loosely wrapped around her head, Urdu flying out of her mouth with the rhythm of someone who has never spoken another language in her life. For a second, the world turned dizzy. A year and a half before this moment, my grandmother died. Cancer. I saw her everywhere at first – in every South Asian woman who wore a scarf, who spoke Urdu or Mirpuri, who reminded me of the vastness of her life. For a second, here she was again, standing before me, telling one of the men (maybe her son, maybe a nephew) that they were nearly running out of rice, and that he needed to fetch some more.

Her eyes never landed on me. And for that I am thankful, because if she had I’m not entirely sure I would have able to keep my cool and not run out of there. She vanished, into the kitchen to the side of the counter, and one of the men asked me what I wanted. ‘Can I get a portion of the chicken saag, the sabzi, two naans, and one vegetable samosa?’

Another time, I stood there by myself, waiting to be served, my stomach empty.

A middle-aged white man stood from the table at the back, brushed down his clothes, picked up his bags, and made his way out of the restaurant.

He stopped by the counter, knocking on it to attract the attention of one of the men. For a second, I caught the man’s eyes, and I wondered if we were both thinking the same thing then: Is this white guy going to start something?

To our surprise, he said ‘Mashallah, the food is fantastic, every time, Mashallah, Mashallah,’ and as he walked out said it a few more times.

When the door closed, the man laughed, and I joined him.

I have spent ten years being the cliché.

The child of immigrants, caught between this world and the one that I am meant to have come from, never entirely feeling of either, seeking out the feeling of home everywhere I can find it, except for the one place that it truly exists.

I have spent ten years mapping out roads and finding shortcuts, to feel settled. Maybe I’ll never feel that way, maybe home will always be the Alum Rock of my childhood. But at least now I can step back into those memories every so often to order myself two naan, dhal, and a portion of samoseh.

Kasim Ali works as an editor in publishing. He was longlisted for the B4ME Short Story Prize (hosted by his now UK publisher Fourth Estate), and Good Intentions was shortlisted for the Mo Siewcherran Prize. He’s also had a short story published in the Good Journal.

The post An Ode to Salims: A Pocket of Home appeared first on English PEN.