From under the Dining Table

I met the great Iranian novelist Mahmoud Dowlatabadi in 2006. We had the same publisher, and through them he sent me a message inviting me to tea at the Azadi Hotel in northern Tehran. At one point he told me: ‘Everyone says great writers know what to write and how to write. But everybody can figure that out. What matters is knowing where to write from.’

I was too young to get his point. Many of Dowlatabadi’s books are set in his hometown in Khorasan, and I assumed he was championing a sort of primordial loyalty to one’s origins. I didn’t want to be that kind of writer. I longed to be metropolitan and worldly, the kind of eastern writer the West notices and praises. It wasn’t until two decades later, in June 2025, as I watched Israeli jets bomb Tehran with impunity, that I understood what he meant.

In the early hours of the attack I called to check on my friends and family in Tehran. I asked them where they hide when they hear the explosions and the planes. Nowhere, they said. There was no public shelter, no bunker, nowhere to go.

‘You’re going to have to do the dining table thing again,’ I told my father. He didn’t find that funny.

I grew up in Ahvaz, in southern Iran, during the war with Iraq. A few years ago, as I was researching a novel set during the early days of the war, I found (online) a newsreel about a blackout in Ahvaz. It reminded me of my mother waking me up in the middle of a sweltering summer night to give me a cold shower with my clothes still on, then putting me back to bed so I could sleep a few more hours through the heat. It ended with a footage of people crammed into bunkers and under stairs, which reminded me of the basement of our house, its ceiling so low an adult couldn’t stand upright, the room bare except for a picnic stove that we’d huddle round as we took shelter from air raids.

Towards the end of writing my book, I went to a birthday party for one of my son’s preschool friends in Beacon, NY, where I got chatting to a grandfather who’d recently moved into a beach house with his second wife. He loved it, except that he had no space for his carpentry.

‘What about the basement?’ I asked.

‘The houses on the beach don’t have basements,’ he said. ‘Dig the ground a couple feet and you hit the water.’

He kept talking and I nodded along, but my mind was elsewhere. I was recalling my family gathered around the picnic stove in the dark basement, waiting out the air raids. It never happened. Ahvaz is at sea level. None of the houses had a basement. So where did we go when the sirens wailed?

The next day I called my father.

‘You don’t remember the dining table?’ he said.

I didn’t. During the first few days of the war, he explained, a friend of his, a construction engineer, told him that all the haphazardly built bunkers on ther streets were useless. Better to put your dining table up against the wall and bury it under sandbags. So for much of the war, during air raids, we crawled under the sandbagged dining table, and waited.

‘Don’t you remember?’ my father kept asking, surprised. He had always been impressed by how much I remembered from those very early years. I spent hours in the makeshift bunker he was describing, yet I have no recollection of it.

No conscious recollection, that is. The first story in my first book, published in Iran in 2004, is about a child in a car without headlights, driving down a pitch-dark road. In my first novel, written in 2005, there’s a scene where a young boy hides under the stairs during an air raid. A bomb falls on the roof and the debris piles up by the stairs, trapping him inside. He sits in darkness, waiting to be rescued.

Forty years later, my parents have been targeted again. There is no bunker. They sat in their apartment beneath a sky dominated by the Israeli air force, watching as the planes arrived, dropped their bombs and vanished.

I have long shed the illusion that writing, at least the kind I do, has the power to make much difference to the world. But it’s all I know how to do. And I think I understand now what Dowlatabadi meant, and now I have an answer for it: everything I’ve written that’s any good was written from the darkness under the dining table.

I couldn’t sell that Iran-Iraq War novel. Editors said there was no market for it, that no one would want to read a novel set in 1980s Iran, that it wasn’t book club material and had no potential for screen adaptation. I was told to speed up the plot, set my stories in America, sprinkle in more exciting incidents.

Since 2013, after the Iranian censorship office banned three of my books, I have lived in Australia and the United States and written in English. I left behind my country, my family, my friends and my mother tongue so I could write without worrying about the censor. I wasn’t going to let the ‘market’ make those sacrifices futile. So I got straight to work on my next book: fast-paced and topical, written to satisfy the American taste.

The morning after the US bombed Iran to prevent it from making a bomb it was not making, I woke up early, went to my desk and spent an hour staring at the fast-paced, topical novel I’d been working on. I couldn’t care less about the story. I was embarrassed to have written it. It felt as if I were betraying my five-year-old self, sitting in the pitch dark under the dining table, shaken up by the boom of falling bombs and missiles.

I closed the document and opened a new one.