Pomegrante Soup By Marsha Mehran
Random House; 222 pages
***

Reviewed by Manreet Sodhi Someshwar

 

Women writers of Persian origin have come into prominence of late: witness Marjane Satrapi, Azar Nafisi, Firoozeh Dumas. Marsha Mehran with her debut novel, Pomegranate Soup, a tale of a Persian café run by three sisters in a small Irish town, joins the rank of delightful storytellers. She escaped the upheaval of the Iranian revolution with her family and grew up in Argentina where her parents ran a Middle Eastern café. Debut fiction usually draws inspiration from life – in a similar vein, Pomegranate Soup is infused with elements from Ms. Mehran’s life. Babylon Café is run by three Persian sisters, Marjan, Bahar and Layla, who fled their country to escape revolution. In Ireland, the land of “crazed sheep and dizzying roads”, they hope to find home.

The exotic aromas of saffron, cardamom, cinnamon waft down the Main Mall of Ballinacroagh and set many a local nose tingling and tongue wagging. Dervla Quigley, crabby gossip who roosts on her bedroom window opposite the café, regards the smells a “nasty reek of foreignness” and decides to warn parishioners against the sinful food. Thomas McGuire, the village’s Donald Trump, had set his mind on buying the old, deserted Pastry shop next door and build a disco to add to his growing empire of pubs, inn and spirit shops. However, mortified to find that piece of real estate emitting spicy aromas that promise to snuff out his expansion plans, he marches off to the town council to complain on the “dangers of foreign smells”.

The sisters and their exotic food offerings eventually find supporters in Father Fegal Mahoney, a one-time aspiring actor, Estelle Delmonico, the widowed landlady of the café, and Fiona Athey, the feisty hairdresser. Meanwhile, Layla, the beautiful youngest sister gets romantically involved with Malachy McGuire, Thomas McGuire’s younger son. Bahar, the middle sister, who suffers frequent migraine attacks and is tortured by her past, receives a mysterious phone call. Afraid that it is her past catching up, she decamps to avoid unsettling the new life that her sisters have made for themselves. Now Marjan, the eldest sister, chef, responsible for running the café, and nurturing her siblings, must marshall her band of supporters and scour the countryside in search of the neurotic Bahar before it is too late.

Pomegranate Soup is reminiscent of Joanne Harris’ Chocolat in its warm, vivid evocation of a much-loved food, in this case the Persian cuisine itself. Each chapter opens with a recipe for a Persian dish that later gets incorporated in the narration as if it were a character. The recipes for lavash bread, dolmeh, chelow rice, red lentil soup seem beguilingly easy and could tempt even a non-cook on a chef-like adventure. Ms. Mehran also adds a dash of magic realism – people exuding rosewater scent, drops of blood that bloom into roses – which is rather superfluous to a simple narrative engagingly told. By belabouring the background of each character, however minor, she bloats the book. With its emphasis on food, flavours and fragrances, Pomegranate Soup stands the danger of being labelled a ‘girlie’ novel. However, in a schizophrenic world that is both global and conflicted, this story of East meets West where hope and humour wins is a feel-good read.

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