May 16-2014
Novelist Marsha Mehran, whose body was discovered a week after she died in a rented house in Ireland, had been seriously ill for weeks before her death, an Irish coroner’s inquest was told last Tuesday.
An inquest into her death was told by rental agent Teresa Walsh that the author informed her by text on April 12 that she had “been vomiting for the last few weeks,” the Irish Times reported.
The Tehran-born Mehran, 36, was the author of award-winning novels Pomegranate Soup and Rosewater and Soda Bread. Her Baha’i family fled Iran at the time of the revolution for Argentina, where she spent her youth. Later, she moved to Florida, Australia, back to the United States and finally Ireland, after she married an Irishman she met in New York. They traveled back and forth between homes in Brooklyn and County Mayo. (See detailed story in last week’s Iran Times, page four.)
She and her husband divorced last year and in January she signed a lease on a house in the Irish Atlantic coast village of Lecanvey, with a population of about 3,000.
Walsh, the landlady, said she became seriously concerned when she could not contact Mehran after being informed she was ill. After numerous phone calls between April 12 and April 21 went unanswered, she went to the house on three occasions. On the final occasion, on April 30, she banged on doors and windows. After failing to get a reply, she said she used her key to enter and found the writer face down on the floor. She then called the gardai, the Irish national police.
Mehran’s ex-husband, Christopher Collins, whom she met while he was a bartender in New York, told the coroner’s inquest there was “definitely something medically wrong” with his wife.
Pathologist Dr. Tiede Nemeth, who carried out the postmortem, said he had not been able to establish the cause of death and the results of toxicology tests were still awaited.
The internationally-acclaimed novel Pomegranate Soup tells the story of three Persian sisters—Marjan, Bahar and Layla Aminpour—who, having fled the revolution, find themselves in the mythical Irish town of Ballinacroagh where they decide to open a Middle Eastern restaurant, called the Babylon Cafe. While many locals are suspicious of foreigners in their remote locale, they are soon lured to the cafe by the spicy aromas of such exotic dishes as dolmeh and abgusht.
Not everyone welcomes the Aminpours with open arms. The machinations of the uncrowned king of the area, the devious Thomas McGuire, who uses all his power to stifle the “nasty reek of foreignness [which] was definitely in the air,” are stymied by his son, Malachy, who becomes smitten by the youngest sister, Layla.
Marsha Mehran’s parents, Abbas Mehran and Shahin Heirati-Pour, were not religious, but they came from old Baha’i families and knew they could not stay in Iran after the revolution. Their plans to find a new life in the US were foiled when they were scheduled to file their visa applications at the American Embassy on November 4, 1979, the day it was seized and closed.
Luckier than many others, the Mehrans had a modest nest-egg that helped them move to Buenos Aires, Argentina, where they opened a cafe named El Pollo Loco (The Crazy Chicken), which initiated the four-year-old Marsha’s love-affair with food.
Her connection to Ireland began on a busy Friday night in Ryan’s Irish Pub on Second Avenue in New York in 1999, where she met bartender Christopher Collins. She had no business being in a bar since she was not yet 21.
“When she walked into that bar, she lit it up,” says Christopher, who is four years older than Marsha. “I knew there were only two ways I could go: either ID her and kick her out, or ask her out!”
“After several Malibu Bay Breezers,” Marsha later told an interviewer, “I thought the Irish bartender was starting to look good.”
“She blew me off the first few times I asked her out,” said Christopher.
Marsha’s arrival in New York was another chapter in a very cosmopolitan and eventful life. Her family escaped to Buenos Aires but with military coups, the Falklands War with Britain and a teetering Argen-tinean economy, the Mehran family subsequently moved to Miami, and, following her parents’ divorce, Marsha, then 14, went to live in Australia with her mother,
At 19, she left Australia and arrived in New York with only $200 in her pocket. “I worked, initially, as a hostess in a restaurant owned by Russian mobsters. There were no customers there, which I thought was a bit odd at first, until I realized that the restaurant was just a front for their other dealings.”
Christopher was always destined to be involved in the bar business, having grown up with a family involvement in a bar in Claremorris, one of Ireland’s biggest entertainment venues.
When Marsha saw Christopher kissing another girl after she had turned him down, a ploy he claims was engineered to make her jealous, she realized she harbored feelings for him too.
“He was very charming and very kind, with a huge heart.”
He moved in with her two weeks later, and she proposed to him two months after that.
“I called him up one night and said, ‘Hey, do you want to get married?’ And he said, ‘Are you serious?’ So we did, eight months later, in Australia. We hadn’t planned it. It was a spur-of-the-moment thing because I’m not the most romantic person,” Marsha told the Independent of London years later after her first novel was published. “We didn’t even have wedding bands and still don’t, but we know we’ll be together for the rest of our lives.”
That didn’t happen. But neither has told the media what caused them to break up last year.
The couple stayed in Australia for a year, then decided to come to Ireland. They moved to Dublin, and Christopher got a job managing a pub while Marsha was a receptionist.
“It was at that time that I realized that I wanted to be a writer,” she says. “I started out writing a letter to my brother. It turned into a short story, and then a novella. Christopher was working a lot of late nights, so I was often home on my own in a new city. I was lonely, so writing started becoming my outlet.
“I was walking across the Millennium Bridge [a pedestrian bridge in Dublin] one day when it suddenly hit me like a lightning bolt. I know that this sounds really cheesy, but it was an epiphanous moment. I stopped and looked around at the beautiful lights and the people walking past, and said out loud, ‘I’m going to be a writer.’ From that moment on, I really pursued it with drive and commitment, and I eventually found an agent who I instantly liked and was interested in representing me.”
Marsha and Christopher eventually made their way back to New York via Australia, and Christopher worked at his specialty—turning ailing bars into success stories. Meanwhile, Marsha worked on her book, a novel about Iranian-American women.
Six weeks before the book was due to be delivered to the agent, and having worked on it for almost two years, Marsha decided she didn’t like it. “It was depressing and dark, and I realized that if I wasn’t touched by it, nobody else would be,” she said.
“So I got up the next morning and started a new book, Pomegranate Soup. I wrote it in six weeks flat—I just constantly wrote, and ate!”
“Ice-cream and chocolate,” interjected Christopher.
“Luckily, my agent loved it,” she said, “and sold it a couple of weeks later to Random House.”
At the time of the publication of Pomegranate Soup in 2005, Mehran spoke about living in a small cottage in County Mayo in remote Western Ireland “that boasted an awesome view of Croagh Patrick.” Croagh means mountain in the Gaelic language, and Patrick is very high at 2,500 feet for Ireland, where the highest point is 3,400 feet.
“The mountain quickly came to inhabit my imagination. Its dispassionate presence is so powerful, so evocative. That along with the smell of peat fires, the spirited fiddle sessions, and the cracking humor of the Irish,” she said. She explained that her fascination with Celtic culture, landscape and people was sparked during her early education at a private Scottish school in Argentina where pupils wore kilts and were regularly serenaded by the bagpipes.
But the deep impact of her Middle Eastern origins never left her, and Pomegranate Soup is a celebration of that and Irish culture. She said, “There is a happiness and vitality that is particular to Iranians, to Persian culture itself. I wanted to express the beauty of my birthplace—a vision, I know, only too well, that was incongruous with the dark and violent images Westerners see when they think of Iran. Above all, I wanted readers to smell and taste one of Iran’s greatest contributions to the world: its delicate, perfumed cuisine.”