The Braid

by Laetitia Colombani

  Smita knows this story. No need to remind her. She knows that here, in her own country, victims of rape are often considered culpable. There is little respect for women, still less if they are untouchable. These creatures that must not be touched, or even looked at, can still be raped, with impunity. Rape is meted out as punishment to the wife of a man who has got himself into debt. To the sisters of a man who commits adultery with a married woman. Rape is a powerful weapon, a weapon of mass destruction. Some even talk of an epidemic. A recent judgment by a village council not far away had sparked widespread debate: two young women were sentenced to be undressed and raped in public to expiate the crime of their brother, who had run away with a married woman from a higher caste. The sentence had been carried out.

  Nagarajan tries to reason with Smita: if they run away, they are sure to suffer terrible reprisals. People would come for Lalita, too. A child’s life was worth no more than its mother’s: both of them would be raped, and strung up from a tree, like the two young Dalit girls from a neighboring village last month. Smita has already heard the statistic; it makes her shiver: over two million women killed across the country every year, to the indifference of all. Victims of the barbarity of men. The whole world cares nothing. The world has abandoned them.

  Who does she think she is, in the face of such violence, such overwhelming hatred? Does she think she can escape it? Does she think she is stronger than all the others?

  But Nagarajan’s terrifying arguments cannot break Smita’s stubborn determination. They will leave by night, she tells him. She will prepare their departure in secret. They will go to Varanasi, the holy city, sixty miles away, and from there they will take the train across India to Chennai: her mother’s cousins live there, they will help them. Chennai is beside the sea; people say a man has created a fishing community for the scavengers, for people like her. There are schools for the Dalit children. Lalita will learn to read and write. They will find work. They will never have to eat rat meat again.

  Nagarajan stares at Smita in disbelief. How will they pay for the journey? Train tickets cost more than everything they have. They have given their meager savings to the Brahmin, to send Lalita to school. There is nothing left. Smita lowers her voice. She is exhausted by her sleepless nights, but strangely, she feels stronger than ever, here in the dark hut. They will have to go and take their money back. She knows where to find it. She saw the Brahmin woman, once, hiding her savings in the kitchen when Smita went into their house to empty the latrines. She goes there every day. One minute is all it will take . . .

  Nagarajan explodes: Is she possessed, by some asura?! Her dreadful scheme will get them all killed, her and all her family. He would prefer to eat rats all his life and catch rabies than go along with her crazy plans! If Smita was caught, they would all die, in the worst possible way. It was a dangerous game, and not worth the risk. There was no hope for them in Chennai, nor anywhere else. There was no hope for them in this life, only in the next. If they conducted themselves well, perhaps the cycle of reincarnation would be kind.

  Secretly, Nagarajan dreams of being reincarnated as a rat, not the hairy, starving rats he catches with his bare hands in the fields, and grills over the fire each evening, but the sacred rats of the temple in Deshnoke, near the border with Pakistan, where his father took him once when he was a child. The temple’s feral brown rats numbered some twenty thousand. They are treated like gods, protected and fed by the local people, who bring them milk. The priest is responsible for their well-being; people bring them offerings from all over. Nagarajan remembers the story his father told him of the goddess Karminata: She had lost a child, and begged for it to be returned to her, but it had been reincarnated as a rat. The temple was built in homage to the lost son. Nagarajan’s days out in the fields hunting rodents had taught him to respect them, he felt a strange solidarity with them, like a law enforcer who respects the outlaw he has been pursuing his whole life. Besides, he tells himself, the creatures are just like him: hungry and struggling to survive. Yes, it would be sweet indeed to be reincarnated as a rat in the temple at Deshnoke, and to spend your life drinking milk. Sometimes, after a hard day’s work, the idea comforted him and helped him to sleep. A strange lullaby, indeed, but he didn’t care, it was his.

  Smita has no desire to wait for the next life. It’s this life, here and now, that she wants, for herself and for Lalita. She reminds Nagarajan of the Dalit woman who has risen to the highest post in their state: Kumari Mayawati. An untouchable who has become a governor! They say she travels around by helicopter. She did not cower, she did not wait for death to deliver her from this life; she fought for herself and for all of them. Nagarajan becomes even angrier: Smita knows full well that nothing has changed, the woman who rose to prominence preaching the Dalits’ cause wants nothing more to do with them now. She has abandoned them. She flies through the air while they flounder in shit. That’s the truth! There is no one to lift them out of here, out of this life, this karma. Not Mayawati, not anyone else. Only death can free them. And while they wait, they will stay here in the village where they were born and have always lived. And with these words, delivered like the deadly swipes of a machete, Nagarajan leaves the hut.

  So be it, says Smita to herself. If you do not want to come, I will leave without you.

  Giulia

  Palermo, Sicily

  Now every living thing

  has voice and blood.

  Now earth and sky

  are a deepened spasm

  racked by hope,

  overthrown by morning,

  flooded by your step,

  your dawn breathing.I

  Kamal and Giulia saw one another every day. They had got into the habit of meeting at the library at lunchtime. Often, they would walk beside the sea. Giulia was intrigued by this man, so unlike anyone she had ever known. He didn’t look or behave like Sicilian men, and perhaps that was what she liked about him. The men in her family were authoritarian, outspoken, moody, set in their ways and attitudes. Kamal was the complete opposite.

  She could never be sure he would come. Every lunchtime, when she walked into the reading room, she would look around for him. Sometimes he would be standing there, other times not. And this delicious uncertainty only served to heighten Giulia’s curiosity. The butterflies in her stomach would wake her up at night—a new, exquisite sensation. She read and reread Pavese’s poems. Their words were the only remedy for the lack of him that she felt now, so urgently.

  It happened one lunchtime, when they were walking on the jetty. Giulia had taken him further than usual, to a beach unfrequented by tourists. She wanted to show him the place where she went sometimes to read—a sea cave that no one knew, she said. At least, that was what she liked to think.

  The creek was deserted at that time of day. The cave was quiet, damp and dark, sheltered from the world. Giulia undressed without a word. Her summer dress slipped down to her feet. Kamal stood motionless, as if hesitating to pick a flower for fear of damaging it. Giulia held out her hand: the gesture was more than encouragement, it was an invitation. Slowly, he unwound his turban, removed the comb that held his hair captive. It unfurled like a skein of wool, down to his waist, black as jet. Giulia shivered. She had never seen a man with hair so long—only women. And yet there was nothing feminine about Kamal. He kissed her very softly, as one might kiss the feet of an idol, hardly daring to touch the surface.

  Giulia had never felt anything like this; Kamal made love like an act of prayer, his eyes closed, as if his life depended on it. His hands were coarse from his nights at work but curiously, his body was soft, like an artist’s brush on her skin. She trembled at his slightest touch.

  After making love, they stayed wrapped in each other’s arms for a long time. The women at the workshop would laugh about men who fell asleep right away afterward, but Kamal was not one of them. He held Giulia close against him, like a priceless treasure from which he could not bear to be parted. She could stay that way for hours
, she thought, his body burning against hers, her pale skin against his, soft and dark.

  They began to meet there, in the cave, beside the sea. Kamal worked nights at the cooperative, and Giulia worked days at the workshop. They met at midday. They made love at noon, and their embrace had the savor of stolen moments together. The whole of Sicily was hard at work, busy in the office, or the banks, or the markets, but not them. Those hours were theirs alone, they used and abused them, counting one another’s freckles and marks, noting their scars, tasting every portion of each other’s skin. Lovemaking by day is not the same as by night; there is something bolder, something strangely brutal, about discovering another’s body in the full light of day.

  Meeting one another in this way, it seemed to Giulia that they were like the tarantella dancers that she had watched as a child, at the street balls on summer nights: coming together, touching one another, moving apart—this was the dance of their relationship, governed by the ebb and flow of their work, their days, their nights. Frustrating, disconnected from life, but romantic in equal measure.

  Kamal was a man of mystery. Giulia knew nothing about him, or very little. He never spoke of his past life, the life he had been forced to abandon to come here. Sometimes, watching the sea, he would gaze far into the distance; then, his cloak of sorrow would descend, enveloping him completely. For Giulia, water was life, a source of endless pleasure, sensuality itself. She loved to swim, to feel the water slipping over the surface of her body. One day, she had tried to lead him into the water. But Kamal had refused. The sea is a cemetery, he said. She had no idea what he had experienced, what the water had taken from him. He would tell her one day, perhaps. Or perhaps not.

  When they were together, they never talked about the future, or the past. Giulia expected nothing of him, nothing but those stolen midday hours. All that mattered was the present, the moment when their bodies would come together as one, like two pieces of a puzzle, melding one into the other, a perfect fit.

  Kamal never talked about himself, but he spoke readily about his country. Giulia could listen to him for hours on end. He was like an open book about a place that was deliciously unknown to her. She would close her eyes and feel as if she were stepping aboard a boat on which she was the only passenger. Kamal told her about the mountains of Kashmir, the banks of the river Jhelum, Lake Dhal, and its floating hotels. He told her about the red of the trees in autumn, the luxuriant gardens, the tulips spreading as far as the eye could see, to the Himalayas. Giulia urged him to tell her more; she wanted to know, she said. Tell me.

  Kamal told her about his religion, his beliefs, the Rehat Maryada, the code of conduct that forbade Sikhs from cutting their hair or their beard, from drinking alcohol, eating meat, or gambling. He told her about his god, who preached a pure and whole life, a single, creator god who was neither Christian nor Hindu nor of any faith but who was ONE, that was all. Sikhs believed that all religions led to the same god, and that as such, all deserved respect. Giulia loved the idea of a faith without original sin, without heaven or hell. Heaven and hell existed only in this life, said Kamal, and it seemed to her that he was right.

  The Sikh religion considers a woman to have the same soul as a man, he said. Sikhism treated both sexes alike. Women were allowed to recite hymns in the temple, to officiate at all the ceremonies, including baptisms. Women were to be respected, honored for their role in the family and society. A Sikh must treat another man’s wife as a sister or a mother, and the daughter of another man as his own. As a symbol of that equality, Sikh names applied to both sexes alike. Only their second name distinguished them. “Singh” for men, which meant “lion”; and “Kaur” for women—a word he translated as “princess.”

  Principessa.

  Giulia loved it when Kamal called her that. She found it harder and harder to leave him and go back to work. How sweet it would be to spend whole days like this, she thought. Days, and nights, too. It seemed to her that she could spend the rest of her life making love to Kamal and listening to him talk.

  And yet she knew that she had no right to be there. Kamal’s skin, and his god, were not those of the Lanfredi. Giulia knew what her mother would say: a dark-skinned man, and not even a Christian! She would be mortified. The news would be all over the neighborhood. And so Giulia loved Kamal in secret. Their love was clandestine. With no official papers.

  She returned to the workshop later and later after lunch. La Nonna was beginning to suspect something. She had seen the smile on Giulia’s face, the new sparkle in her eyes. Giulia claimed to be going to the library every day, but she would come back out of breath, her cheeks aflame. One afternoon, La Nonna even thought she could see sand in Giulia’s hair, under her headscarf. The women began to gossip: Did she have a lover? Was he a boy from the neighborhood? Was he younger than her? Older? She denied anything was going on, and her insistence was tantamount to a confession.

  Poor Gino, sighed Alda, his heart will be broken! At the workshop, everyone knew that Gino Battagliola, the owner of the neighborhood’s hair salon, was mad about Giulia. He had been courting her for years. He came each week to sell his cut hair. Sometimes, he would come for no reason at all, just to say hello. All the women laughed about it. They laughed at the presents he brought her, to no avail. Giulia was unmoved, but Gino lived in hope, and came back time and again, tirelessly, bearing fig buccellatini, which the women all devoured.

  In the evening, after the workshop had closed, Giulia would go to her father’s bedside and read to him. At times, she felt guilty to be so alive in the midst of this tragedy. Her body was filled with joy, shimmering with pleasure such as she had never felt before, while her father was fighting for his life. And yet Giulia clung to her joy as a vital need; it was her way of telling herself that she would carry on, that she would not give in to pain and exhaustion. Kamal’s skin was a balm, a salve, a remedy for the sorrows of this world. She wanted to be just that, a body abandoned to pleasure, the pleasure was what kept her on her feet, kept her alive. She felt torn between extremes, both defeated and exalted; like an acrobat on the high wire, she swayed with the wind. This is how it is, she told herself, our darkest and brightest moments come all at once. Life gives, and it takes away, all at the same time.

  Today, Mamma had entrusted her with a mission—to go and fetch a paper from her father’s desk at the workshop. The hospital was asking for some document, but her mother couldn’t find it. Dio mio, everything is so complicated, she moaned. Giulia hadn’t the heart to refuse. But she didn’t want to go into Papà’s office. She hadn’t set foot there since the accident; she didn’t want to touch her father’s things. She wanted him to find the place just as he had left it, when he emerged from the coma. That way he would know that they had all been waiting for him.

  She pushed the door of the old projection room, which her father had made his office. Slowly, she stepped inside. There was a framed photograph of Pietro on the wall, beside the pictures of his father and grandfather, three generations of Lanfredi, each one succeeding the other at the helm of the workshop. Farther along, other pictures were pinned up: Francesca as a baby, Giulia on the Vespa, Adela at her first communion, Mamma in her wedding dress, with her fixed smile. The Pope, too, not Francis but John Paul II, whom everyone admired the most.

  The room was just as her father had left it before his accident. Giulia looked at his chair, his files, the glazed terracotta ashtray that she had made and given to him when she was little, in which he stubbed out his cigarette. His world seemed emptied of its substance, its life force, and yet strangely haunted. On the desk, the diary was open at the fateful page—July 13. Giulia could not turn it. It was as if her father was suddenly there, in the Moleskine diary with its black leather cover, as if a little of him lingered between the notebook’s ruled lines, in the ink of its words, even in the small blot frozen in time at the bottom of the page. Giulia had the strange feeling he was there, in every molecule of air, every atom of furniture.

  For a mome
nt, she was tempted to turn around and shut the door behind her. But she didn’t move. She had promised Mamma she would bring her the piece of paper. Slowly, she opened the first drawer, then the second. The third at the bottom was locked. Giulia was surprised. She felt a strange sense of foreboding. Papà had no secrets, the Lanfredi had nothing to hide. So why was the drawer locked?

  Her mind spun with questions. Her imagination raced, like a horse released into the wild. Did her father have a mistress? A secret life? Had he been caught by the mafia? The Lanfredi had always kept out of it. Why these doubts, like a premonition, a dark cloud filling the horizon?

  She searched, and quickly found the key inside a box of cigars, a present from Mamma. Giulia shivered. Should she even be here? She could still turn back . . .

  With a trembling hand, she turned the key in the lock. The drawer opened at last. It contained a thick bundle of papers.

  Giulia took them out.

  And the ground opened beneath her feet.

  * * *

  I. Cesare Pavese, “You, Wind of March,” trans. Duncan Bush.

  Sarah

  Montreal, Canada

  Sarah’s plan worked just fine, at first.

  She took two weeks off for the operation. She needed three—the doctor had insisted, a week in the hospital and two weeks’ complete rest at home, which she reduced to one without telling him. She couldn’t honestly take more without arousing suspicion at the firm. She’d taken no vacations for two years, the children were in school—who would take three weeks in November, when hearings came thick and fast, like the snow that fell over the city?