An extract from The Nights Are Quiet in Tehran by Shida Bazyar, translated by Ruth Martin

The Revolution is a month old, and Dayeh is making stuffed vine leaves. They’re all sitting on the floor, my mother, my sisters, my cousins, my aunts. The wives of my older brothers. They have laid the sofrehs out on the living-room floor and are sitting around them with bowls full of rice and minced meat, herbs, lentils, and they are folding vine leaves, one after another, and laying them in a pot and talking and laughing and talking and laughing.  

There were just as many women when we were little, though they were different women. Our dayeh would send my sisters and me outside; we weren’t supposed to hear the women’s conversation, to interrupt the neighbourhood gossip. You mustn’t bother people while they’re cooking, we were told, or the food will take longer to make, and we went outside, where we played marbles or pretended to shoot down the murderer of the great and oh-so-honourable Imam Hossein. That was Sohrab’s favourite game. Sohrab didn’t have any siblings of his own yet, and he would always hang around outside the house so that we and the other children would come and release him from his boredom. He’ll be waiting for me again in a few hours. Not bored, not any longer, but driven by a restlessness that we have carried within us since the first stirrings of the Revolution and since it broke out and for the whole of the past month — and which we know we must hide. Restlessness is uncertainty, and future leaders must not show any uncertainty. Only someone who has known Sohrab since he was a child can see it in him.  

Dayeh doesn’t send me out these days, though she would like me to leave. Everything about her eyes, her posture says that I shouldn’t be here, that I should only come into contact with the vine leaves once they land hot and cooked and round and gleaming on the sofreh, and I shouldn’t talk about them before that, either, because before that they have no business being in my world. Dayeh has a look that is just for me. For me, sitting in the corner and smoking, a man who needs to leave already so that the women can have the interesting conversations they’ve been looking forward to all morning. Even as a child, I quite quickly realised that it was more interesting with the women. The men either talked about the politics of ages past or played cards, and I wasn’t allowed to join the game. But the women talked about real people and real problems. Which neighbour had argued with her mother-in-law; whose daughter was engaged to whose son but had shown herself to be immoral; which families had drifted into an American lifestyle; which market vendor sold the best-tasting eggplant.  

My nieces and nephews run and play between the women, knowing that the moment is approaching when first I and then they will be sent out and they will have to find a new game. There isn’t much to snack on when vine leaves are being stuffed; the rice mixture isn’t very interesting, and the leaves don’t taste good without their filling. When there’s nothing to snack on, you can make a nuisance of yourself. My niece is the smallest, and she wants the smallest dolmeh. My brother Mehrdad is the fattest, and he wants the fattest dolmeh. The women give in with a laugh, planting kisses on the children’s cheeks.  

If I were a mother, a sister, an aunt, I would be sitting there doing the same; I would take every opportunity to kiss these little souls, because they’re so joyful, and no matter what is happening outside, no matter what they’re learning at school, no matter that their schoolbooks are suddenly endorsing the opposite of what they did a few weeks previously, no matter if a while ago their parents were still spending their nights on the roof and their days on the streets, returning with bloodied clothes — the children still spend their days laughing, questioning, eating, interrupting, sleeping. They deserve all the kisses in the world, I think, but maybe the life that is just around the corner, still wavering a little — maybe that is the much greater gift.