Book Excerpts: Read, cry and cook with ‘The Evin Prison Bakers’ Club’

The Disgrace

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She is pregnant. She doesn’t know it yet. What will happen when she does?

A pack of card-carrying murderers handcuff her and take her to the car. They don’t know that she’s pregnant yet, either. Wait and see what happens when they learn that she is. Even the prospect of it, from all the way over here in the third person, is terrifying, never mind the reality.

Inside the prison cell, the young woman dives into a corner. Nausea has made her desperate. There’s no window, no water to drink, no place to throw up. There’s nothing but silence and death, and herself. She is freezing cold, wrapped in foul-smelling blankets over- run with bedbugs. Days like this are going to repeat themselves over and over, with a few minor variations. Little by little, she’ll get used to the reek of the blankets.

Desperately tired, sometimes she’ll fall unconscious; the sounds of the agents’ footsteps will awaken her, and it’ll go on. Everything is going to repeat itself, and she already knows it all perfectly, from the smell of the blankets to the itching and the gashes left by the bed- bugs’ stings. She knows that she is going to piss herself. These things she knows, but not that she is pregnant.

Not at the moment, anyhow. Right now she’s preoccupied solely by these repetitive events, so repetitive and predictable she can even tell which bedbug was the last to sting her in the groin. Hell, she knows the total number of bedbugs in the cell. Not only this: she knows the woman in the neighbouring cell is refusing to confess, and that’s why the door to her cell will never open. This neighbour suspects what she doesn’t yet realise; that she is pregnant. That ignorance won’t last. The young woman pulls up her blanket. She will get used to the smell of vomit.

They take her to another car, still unaware that she is pregnant. They beat her and throw a thick piece of sacking over her head. She and the faces that she cannot see have nothing in common – except for the fact that not one of them knows she is pregnant.

With a bag on her head and a body turning frail, the young woman is driven off towards an unknown destination. The hours crawl by. In the car, she can’t discern whether or not they’re heading for hotter or colder climes, into sun or into shadow. It hardly seems to matter. There are five individuals in the car. One of them is hidden in the belly of the young woman, who is our story.

Now she wakes with a start. She implores God for the two-thousandth time not to let her be dis- graced today. Maybe all women wake up thinking this. Disgrace is always right around the corner. It’s dormant in their throats, in their minds. Will she be disgraced today? It’s a roll of the dice.

The young woman is gaunt. Not so very long ago, one of her sisters died. Not long after that, a second sister followed the first into the grave. News of the second sister’s death had yet to be confirmed to her when a third sister passed away.

All her sisters were young and tall, and all had sonorous voices. The first was Somayeh, who had a round face and jet-black hair. The second was Makieh, who had eyes the colour of honey and a scorched chest: her brother-in-law had burned it with boiling water. Makieh’s life had been bereft of colour, save for her eyes. With those honey-coloured eyes, she’d witnessed her brother’s murder. Her chest never stopped burning. Perhaps it hadn’t stopped burning, even at the end. Her infant child’s name was ‘Halva’ (Halva, a popular confectionery of Persian origin, consists of a thick paste made from fried wheat flour, butter and oil, flavoured with saffron, rosewater and sugar).

The third sister, Mahin, happened to love halva as well. It had been her constant sweet companion during pregnancy. Mahin had been in the habit of twisting the halva around her finger and licking it off. Finger-twist halva is a real thing that comes from Bushehr. It contains equal parts flour and sugar, and also a lot of oil. If you’re diabetic, run for the hills. But if you’re pregnant like Mahin and have a craving for sweets, it’s a dream come true.

Finger-twist halva

Finger-twist halva comes from the Persian Gulf city of Bushehr, and is so called because you can stretch it, wrap it around your finger, then pop it straight into your adorable mouth. It’s comforting, soft and smooth. Play a folk song from that region. All the ingredients are combined in equal amounts, so it’s easy to remember.

Ingredients

1 cup water

1 cup rosewater

1 cup sugar

1 cup cooking oil

1 cup flour

1 cup saffron … No, stop, just kidding, we’re not trying to bankrupt you. Just a bit of ground saffron will be fine.

Directions

Mix the sugar, water, rosewater and saffron together, and heat on the stove until the sugar is completely dissolved. That’s your syrup. Now, in a separate pan, toast the flour and slowly add the oil, then cook this paste until it turns a gorgeous brown. Then add the syrup, little by little. Mix thoroughly and flip it about until all the oil is emulsified. It is delicious.

— Excerpted with permission from HarperCollins