She had gone to the library today on her lunch break to borrow books for him. And a curious thing happened when she stepped into the reading room, bathed in silence. At first, she didn’t notice it, hidden between the bookstacks. Suddenly she saw it.
There it was.
The turban.
The turban she had seen before, out in the street, on the Feast of Santa Rosalia.
Giulia was dumbfounded. The stranger was standing with his back to her. She couldn’t see his face. He moved to another row. She followed him, intrigued. When he reached for a book, she saw his face at last. It really was him, the man who had been arrested by the carabinieri. He seemed to be looking for something, but unable to find it. Struck by the coincidence, Giulia watched him for a moment. He hadn’t seen her.
Finally, she approached him. She had no idea what to say—she wasn’t in the habit of talking to men she didn’t know. As a rule, they were the ones who came to flirt with her. Giulia was beautiful, people often told her so. Despite her tomboy looks, there was an innocence about her, coupled with a sensuality that seldom left men indifferent. She felt their eyes on her as she passed by. Italian males were skilled talkers. Fine words, the usual overtures, she knew where it could lead. But she was surprised by her own audacity today.
“Buongiorno.”
The stranger turned, in surprise. He didn’t seem to recognize her. Giulia hesitated, awkwardly.
“I saw you the other day, in the street, during the procession. When the police . . .”
She paused. She was embarrassed now. What if it upset him to be reminded of the incident? She regretted being so forward. She wanted to disappear, she wished she had never approached him. But the man had recognized her now. He nodded. Giulia went on:
“I was afraid . . . they’d put you in prison.”
The man smiled, and his expression was frank and amused. Who was this strange girl who seemed so worried about him?
“They kept me in for the afternoon, and then they let me go.”
Giulia studied his face. His skin was dark, but his eyes were astonishingly pale. She could see them clearly now. They were blue, bordering on green—or perhaps the opposite. An intriguing mixture. She felt emboldened.
“I can help you. I know all these shelves. Are you looking for something in particular?”
The man said he wanted to read a book in Italian. Nothing too complicated, he told her. He spoke the language fluently, but he still had trouble with the written word. He wanted to improve. Giulia nodded. She took him to the Italian literature section. She hesitated—the contemporary authors were difficult, inaccessible, she thought. Finally, she recommended a novel by Salgari that she had read as a child: I figli dell’aria, her favorite. The man took it and thanked her. Any Sicilian man would try to keep her from leaving, engage her in conversation, take advantage of the moment to try to seduce her. Not him. He simply wished her a pleasant afternoon and walked away.
Giulia watched as he left the library, armed with the book he had just borrowed. She felt something tighten around her heart and regretted not having the courage to go after him. Such things weren’t done here. No one ran after a man they had just met. Regretfully, Giulia knew she was still that young girl who leans on her elbows to watch every passing event but does nothing to alter their course. She cursed herself there and then, for her shyness, her passive nature.
Of course there had been boyfriends, flirtations, romantic encounters. Stolen kisses and caresses. Giulia had gone along with them, responding to the show of interest. But she had never gone out of her way to attract men.
She returned to the workshop, thinking about the stranger with his turban, which made him look out of place, out of time. She thought about the hair it concealed. And his body, too, beneath the crumpled shirt. At that thought, she blushed.
She went back to the library the next day, secretly hoping to meet him again. She didn’t need any more books; she hadn’t finished the ones she was reading to Papà. She entered the reading room and froze. There he was. In the same spot as the day before. He lifted his eyes to her, as if he had been waiting. At that moment, Giulia felt her heart leap.
He came over to her, standing so close she could feel his warm, sweet breath. He wanted to thank her for the book she had recommended. He didn’t know what to offer her in return, and so he had brought a small bottle of olive oil from the cooperative where he worked. Giulia was touched. She looked at him, saw a mixture of gentleness and dignity that moved her deeply. It was the first time a man had made her feel that way.
She took the little bottle in surprise. He told her he had gathered and pressed the olives himself. He was preparing to leave, but Giulia stopped him. She felt quite brazen now. Perhaps they could take a walk together? The sea was close by, the sky was clear . . .
The stranger hesitated, then agreed.
His name was Kamaljit Singh. He was very quiet—which surprised Giulia. Sicilian men were talkative, they enjoyed making conversation with one another. The woman’s role was to listen, as her mother had told her. The man must be allowed to shine. Kamal was different. He didn’t open up easily. But he agreed to tell Giulia his story.
He was a Sikh. He had left Kashmir at the age of twenty, fleeing the violence against his people. After the events of 1984, when the Indian army had crushed a Sikh independence movement and massacred the faithful in the Golden Temple, their fate had been sealed. Kamal had arrived in Sicily one night, in the icy cold, without his parents. Many chose to send their children to the West once they came of age. He had been welcomed into the island’s large Sikh community.
Italy had taken in the second largest number of Sikhs in Europe, after Great Britain, he said. He had found work through the caporalato, the traditional system for hiring cheap labor. He told her how the caporale recruited undocumented workers and arranged their transport. The gangmaster covered the cost of this, and the bottled water and meager panino he provided for his workers, by taking a percentage of their earnings, sometimes as much as half. Kamal remembered working for one or two euros an hour. He had picked everything that grew on the island: lemons, olives, cherry tomatoes, oranges, artichokes, zucchini, almonds. The pickers’ working conditions were nonnegotiable. They could take what the caporale offered or leave it. His patience had finally been rewarded: after three years as an illegal immigrant, Kamal had obtained refugee status and a permanent residence permit. He had found a job working nights for a cooperative that produced olive oil. He enjoyed the work. He described how he combed the branches of the olive trees with a kind of rake to pull down the fruit. He liked the company of the trees: some were over a thousand years old. He was fascinated by their longevity, he said. The olive is a noble foodstuff, he concluded, smiling. A symbol of peace.
The authorities had given him his papers, but the country had not adopted him as its own. Sicilian society eyed the immigrant population warily, from a distance. The two worlds seldom mixed. Kamal missed his home country, he said. When he talked about it, a great veil of sadness seemed to wrap itself around him, like a cloak.
Giulia came back to the workshop two hours late that day. She reassured her anxious Nonna by telling her that her bicycle had suffered a puncture.
She kept the truth to herself: her bike was intact, but her soul had veered wildly off course.
Sarah
Montreal, Canada
The bomb had detonated, right there in the office of an awkward doctor who had no idea how to tell her the news. He had plenty of experience, years of practice, but there it was—he could never get used to it. Too much empathy with his patients, no doubt, all the young and not-so-young women who saw their lives change forever in just a few moments, when the dreaded diagnosis was delivered.
BRCA2. Sarah would learn the name of the mutant gene soon enough. The curse of Ashkenazi women. As if they hadn’t suffered enough, she would say. The pogroms, the Shoah . . . Why this, now, for her and her people?
She saw it spelled out in
black and white in a medical article: Ashkenazi Jewish women have a one-in-forty chance of developing breast cancer, compared with one in five hundred in the world’s population as a whole. It was a scientifically established fact. There were other aggravating factors: a previous history of cancer in the immediate family, falling pregnant with twins . . . All the signs were there, thought Sarah. Plain to see, obvious. But she hadn’t seen them. Or hadn’t wanted to see them.
The doctor sat opposite her. He had dark, bushy eyebrows. Sarah was transfixed by them. How strange: this man she didn’t know was talking to her about the tumor on her X-rays—the size of a mandarin, he said—and yet she was unable to concentrate on his words. All she could see, it seemed, were his brown, bushy eyebrows, like heathland, populated with wild beasts. There was hair coming out of his ears, too. Astonishingly, months later, when Sarah thought about that day, that was the memory that came to her first: the eyebrows of the doctor who had told her she had cancer.
He didn’t say the actual word, of course; no one spoke the word, you had to spot it, lurking behind all the euphemisms, the paraphrases, the deluge of medical jargon. As if it was some kind of insult, a taboo, a curse. And that was exactly what it was.
The size of a mandarin orange, he said. It’s there. It’s really there. And yet Sarah had done everything to put off the inevitable, to ignore the nagging pain, the extreme tiredness. She had pushed the idea from her mind whenever it occurred; whenever she could—or should—have put it into words. But she had to face it now. It was there. It was real.
A mandarin was huge and insignificant at the same time, she thought. The disease had taken her by surprise, just when she least expected it. The tumor was malignant, devious, it had gone about its work silently, in the shadows, preparing to strike.
Sarah listened to the doctor, watched his lips move, but his words seemed incapable of reaching her, as if she heard them through a thick, soft blanket, as if they weren’t really anything to do with her at all. She would have felt anxious for a close friend, horrified, distraught. But strangely, for herself, she felt nothing. She listened to the doctor in genuine disbelief, as if he were talking about someone else, someone outside her world, a complete stranger.
When the consultation was over, he asked her if she had any questions. Sarah shook her head and smiled the smile she knew so well, the one she used for all occasions, the one that said: Don’t worry, everything will be fine. It was a decoy, of course, a mask behind which her sorrows and questions and fears clustered. The truth was, she was a mess inside.
Sarah’s smile was smooth, gracious, perfect. She didn’t ask the doctor what her chances were, she refused to see her future summarized in a statistic. Some people wanted to know, but she didn’t. She wouldn’t let the figures seep into her consciousness, her imagination. If she let them, they would spread like the tumor itself, and undermine her morale, her confidence, her healing process.
In the taxi back to the office, she reviewed the situation. She was a warrior. She would fight. Sarah Cohen would handle this case like she handled all the others. She, who never (or hardly ever) lost in court, was not going to be scared by a mandarin, however malignant it might be. In the case of Sarah Cohen v. M.—because that would be the code name, she decided—there would be attacks and counterattacks and low cunning, too. Her enemy would not admit defeat easily, Sarah knew that: M. was vicious, the trickiest adversary she had ever faced. The trial would be lengthy, a war of nerves, a succession of hopes and doubts, and other moments when she would fear everything was lost. She must stay the course, give as good as she got. Wars like this were won over the long term, Sarah knew that.
Just as when preparing a case, she sketched the broad outline of her attack. She would say nothing to anyone. No one at work must find out. The news would be a bombshell to the team and, worse still, the clients. It would provoke needless anxiety. Sarah was a pillar of the practice, she was built into its foundations, she must stand strong, or the whole edifice would subside. And nor did she want their pity, their compassion. Yes, she was ill, but that was no reason for her life to change. She would be highly organized, no one would suspect a thing. She would invent a secret code in her diary, to cover her hospital appointments; she would justify her absences. She would need to be creative, methodical, sly. Like the heroine of a spy novel, Sarah would wage war underground. Like a secret extramarital affair, she would arrange to keep her illness out of sight. She knew how to do that, how to compartmentalize her life, she’d had years of practice. She would build the wall higher still, and higher again. She had kept her pregnancies hidden; she would do the same for her cancer. It would be her secret baby, her illegitimate child, its existence utterly unsuspected. Invisible, inadmissible.
Sarah returned to the office and got straight back to work. Imperceptibly, she watched for her colleagues’ reactions, their looks, their tone of voice. No one had noticed a thing, she saw with relief.
No: she did not have the word “cancer” branded across her forehead; no one could see she was ill.
Inside, she was in pieces, but she would never let it show.
Smita
Badlapur, Uttar Pradesh, India
Leave.
The thought had come to Smita like a command from heaven. They must leave Badlapur.
Lalita would not go back to school. The teacher had beaten her because she had refused to sweep the floor in front of her classmates. Later, the same children would be farmers, and her daughter would empty their latrines. There could be no question of that. Smita would not allow it. She remembers what Mahatma Gandhi said once, a doctor at the dispensary in the next village had told her about it one time: no one should have to clear away human excreta bare-handed.
It seemed that the Mahatma had declared the status of “untouchable” illegal, unconstitutional, a violation of human rights, but nothing had changed since. Most of the Dalits accepted their lot without protest. Others converted to Buddhism to escape the caste system, like Babasaheb, the spiritual leader of the Dalits. Smita has heard of the huge ceremonies at which thousands of people change their religion. The movement was seen as a threat to authority, and anti-conversion laws had even been introduced. Candidates for conversion must obtain a permit or be prosecuted. A cruel irony: you might as well ask your jailer for permission to escape.
It was a choice Smita could not accept. She was too attached to the gods her parents had venerated before her. More than anything, she believed in the protection of Vishnu, to whom she had addressed all her prayers, morning and night, since childhood. She confided her dreams, her doubts, her hopes, to him. To abandon him would bring too much suffering. Vishnu’s absence would leave a gaping void, impossible to fill. She would feel more orphaned even than at the deaths of her parents.
But she feels no attachment to the village where she grew up. The filth that she must clean relentlessly, day after day, has given her nothing. Nothing but the scrawny rats—the sad trophies that Nagarajan brings home at night.
They must leave, flee this place, it is the only way.
Smita wakes Nagarajan in the morning. He has slept deeply, while she has lain awake. She envies her husband’s peaceful sleep. At night, he is a still lake, its surface untroubled, while she tosses and turns for hours. The darkness offers no respite from her torments. No, the dark only makes them echo, louder, more hideous than ever. In the dead of night, everything seems tragic, and final. Often, she prays that it will stop: the swirl of thoughts that leaves her no peace. Sometimes, she spends whole nights awake, her eyes wide open. People are not made equal when it comes to sleep, she thinks. People are not made equal at all.
Nagarajan grumbles as he wakes. Smita pulls him up from his bed. She has been thinking: they must leave. They can expect nothing from this life, the life that has robbed them of their dignity. It is not too late for Lalita; hers is just beginning. Everything is possible. Smita will not let the others take that from her.
My wife is raving, thinks Nagaraja
n. She has had another restless night. Smita insists: they must leave Badlapur. They say that in the city, there are places reserved for Dalits at school and university, places for people like them. They would have a chance there. Nagarajan shakes his head. The city is an illusion, a false dream. The Dalits are homeless there, huddled on the street or in the squatter camps that cluster all around, like warts on the soles of your feet. At least here, they have a roof over their heads and food to eat. Smita’s anger flares: they eat rat meat, and they collect shit. In the city, they would find work, they would have dignity. She is ready to rise to the challenge, she has courage, she is tough, she’ll take whatever is offered, anything rather than this life. She begs him. For herself, for him. For Lalita.
Nagarajan is wide awake now. Has she completely lost her head? Does she think she can take control of her own life just like that? He reminds her of the dreadful business that shook the village not long ago. The daughter of one of their neighbors, a Dalit like her, had decided to study in the city. The Jatts had caught her as she fled across the country. They had taken her to a remote field and raped her, eight of them, for two whole days. When she had returned home to her parents, she could barely walk. They had filed a complaint with the Panchayat, the village council, the lawmakers in rural areas. The council was controlled by the Jatts, of course. They left no seat for a woman, or a Dalit, though they were required to do so by law. Every decision taken by the council was binding, even if it was contrary to the Indian constitution. This parallel system of justice was never contested. The council had offered the family cash as compensation, in exchange for the withdrawal of their complaint. But the young woman had refused the tainted money. Her father had stood by her at first, but he had buckled under pressure from his community, and killed himself. He had left his family with no income and condemned his wife to the horrors of widowhood. She and her children were banished from the village. They were forced to abandon their home, and they had ended up destitute, living by the side of the road.
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