Jessica

I mostly remember its skinny frame, pale and meatless. It had been months since we’d tasted meat. The chaos following the revolution, then the Iraq war creeping across the borders, brought more and more refugees to the quiet streets of Shiraz. On our way to school, we passed makeshift homes of cardboard and shabby tents. Once lined with fragrant naranj trees and home to poets Hafez and Saadi, the streets were now unkempt and filthy. Rumours spread of a typhus outbreak, and our teacher ordered us to cut our hair short, as if we were in a wartime film about lice. Hijab was gradually being enforced, even for us ten-year-old girls. So how would she know, anyway?

Food was scarce, and strict rationing was in place. There were long lines for everything — bread, milk, rice — and cars queued for hours to claim their meagre petrol rations. Pink and blue ration stubs lay about the house and piled up in the glove compartment of our Peugeot 504 station wagon. White on the outside, with three rows of pale blue leather bench seats, it was the car we’d picked up in Bristol six years earlier and driven to Tehran — the four of us alongside our uncle to see family — then on to Shiraz, where we made our home. I was four and a half.

I know it was a great adventure from the photo album and the adults’ tales. We had camped along the way in the former Yugoslavia, where one night the rain came down so hard our tents nearly slid into the Danube. In Bulgaria, our mum Jila (we called our parents by their first names) complained about the lack of treats under communism. When we reached Turkey, she and her younger brother leaped out at the first store to stock up on nuts, seeds, and lokum — much to our dad Farhad’s disapproval. Shaking his head as they tumbled back into the Peugeot, he called them hopelessly bourgeois. The siblings just giggled, cracking sunflower seeds.

It was a cool autumnal morning. Or maybe it was spring. Those hazy months following the revolution have lost all sense of linearity. So much happened, and so fast. Let’s just call it autumn — a perfect Shirazi snail-pace evolving autumn day, the leaves taking their time to turn yellow, orange, red.

Jila and Susan, with whom we were staying since losing our home, had scored a whole chicken on the black market. The gardener had known someone who knew someone who knew someone influential in poultry, and a live chicken was smuggled into the backyard via the discreet garden gates. The komiteh (the new street patrols) kept a close watch on everyone, and being caught meant certain punishment. We’d heard horror stories of the lashings, each tale at school more gruesome than the one before.

Eager-eyed, my sister Laleh — exactly two and a half years older — and I, along with Susan’s younger son, Ramin, who was my age, and his little sister Samira, gathered in the garden, circling the chicken. Our two mums were glowing with excitement. 

Susan, an American expat from Wisconsin, had married an Iranian doctor and moved to Shiraz over a decade ago to raise a family. She loved to cook American classics. Pies, cakes, breads filled their farmhouse on the edge of Shiraz with the sweet aroma of ginger and cinnamon. They had moved there just a year earlier. I can still taste her pecan pie: a buttery, perfectly crisp crust cradling a rich, syrupy filling, its crown of toasted pecans firm enough to hold their shape. Jila too was a keen amateur cook.

The two women were sort of friends; their husbands were colleagues at the local Namazi Hospital, and we kids had been inseparable since the day we’d met on our arrival in Shiraz. They couldn’t have been more different — Jila, full of life, always in motion, the kind of person who filled a room, Susan softly-spoken, often with a book in her lap, listening more than she talked. But those six months we lived together pulled them into an easy, unspoken bond over a shared love of cooking. They talked about the evening roast with such excitement.

We named the chicken Jessica. It seemed right. After all, these were to be her last hours on Earth. Susan’s elder son, Koorosh, refused to get involved, smirking as if the whole thing were beneath him. Not deterred, we circled Jessica and performed a makeshift naming ceremony. We lit a candle and prayed for her soul. Jessica looked bewildered.

It was a school day, and in the usual morning scramble we were bundled into the Peugeot. Laleh and I were dropped at the local Ardavan school, while Ramin and Samira went to the international school favoured by Shiraz’s expat community. Not long after, the new regime closed down the school. How I resented our parents for refusing to send us there, like the other children from the Namazi compound. They said it was ideological. They believed we would grow more among locals. They said life in Namazi — a gated compound reserved for the families of doctors at the nearby namesake hospital — had little connection to the lives of others.

A few months before Jessica's arrival, we were forced to leave Namazi and move in with Susan and her family. Things had turned ugly since the clerics took over. Locals didn't want to risk renting to families in trouble with the new regime. Both our dads, along with many other doctors and academics from Namazi whose intellectual outlook was seen as “anti-revolutionary”, were detained, their homes confiscated and handed to cronies. Our communal Namazi swimming pool — where we had learnt to swim, taught ourselves somersault dives, and spent every daylight hour of Shiraz’s long, sticky summers — was filled with cement (swimming was seen as anti-revolutionary). The neatly kept grounds of the compound were left to decay.

We returned from school to be told, as gently as possible, that Jessica had been killed by the gardener and would need plucking. The two mums felt it important we take on the task — both as skill-building and as a way of appreciating the hard-earned meal. Koorosh got away by pretending he had exams to study for. So the four of us plucked feather by feather, turning our heads now and then for a gasp of fresh air. The down stuck to our rubber gloves, clinging in little tufts, and every so often a warm, faintly metallic smell rose from the skin beneath. It took hours, and the smell lingered for days. That scent is fixed in memory.

As evening fell, the aroma of cooking drifted up from the old farmhouse kitchen, where Jila and Susan were preparing their feast with whatever their joint rations could stretch to. I could smell our mum’s signature blend of herbs and spices, learned from our neighbour Bonnie when we lived in Bristol — the same American Bonnie who had taught her to make a cheesecake that earned respect among their English friends, with its dense gingerbread crust and big chunks of pickled ginger folded through the mix.

We were called down to dinner. The big wooden table was set with care, though it held only a dish of potatoes, a pile of green beans and carrots, and a basket of Susan’s cornbread. There was the usual clatter of plates and cutlery, the squeak of chairs on the wooden floorboards as one by one we took our seats. Jila pushed through the blue swinging kitchen door carrying a large dish of roast chicken, its savoury stuffing of bread, herbs, onion, and celery scenting the air. Her smile was wide — generous and cheeky at once. Susan gave the table a playful ceremonial drumbeat.

Jessica lay motionless on the serving plate, her skin shiny and golden, no longer the pale pink of that morning. Jila and Susan carved eagerly, ladling silky-smooth gravy and spooning out the vegetables, but our faces remained blank. Ramin picked up his novel from the table (unlike us he was allowed to read at mealtimes) and abruptly left the room. Koorosh laughed. Laleh, always more polite than me, took a piece of the roast, making playful yummy gestures. Samira cried. I neither left nor cried, but it was impossible to eat Jessica. Years later, in New York, Samira became a vegetarian.

In my thirties, living in London, my husband and I trekked to Billingsgate fish market for lobster. We came home with one missing a leg — lost at sea — and the seller offered her for half price. On the way back, I quietly named her Jessica. We froze her first, having been told it was the kinder ending, then prepared the garlic, butter, herbs. The grill was already hot.

When the time came, I couldn’t eat Jessica.

Nargess Banks
London, 2025

“Jessica” is part of a forthcoming collection “Cheddar and Marmalade”.