Giggi, it’s your birthday today. I don’t know what you’re doing, but I’ve decided to celebrate.
Lia, my landlady, is the guest. She’s there in the living room in front of the TV and I’m here in the kitchen cooking the aubergines. First I toasted them slowly over the fire, now I’ve put them in cold water to remove the skins, and then I’ll add the onions and tomatoes, as mum used to do. Do you remember Giggi when we would stay in the kitchen beside to her to help her make our paranthe? I never could roll out the dough into round or square pieces -- my paranthe all came out in funny shapes, but mum cooked them for me just as they were.
Do you know that now I can make them right? Perfectly shaped, round or square, with the dough so thin it melts in your mouth. Lia loves them. I’ve taught her how to make paranthe and roti and naan. Last month it snowed a lot and it was hard to walk into town to buy bread so I cooked roti for both of us for several days running. If you think about it, our roti aren’t so very different from the piadine they make here, you just have to use refined flour and add a bit of yeast to the dough. But I still prefer the roti, with their whole-wheat flour. So does Lia. She says they help her have regular bowel movements. My friends think I cook Indian dishes really well. I think that when it’s me who does the cooking they don’t have to pay and if they went to a restaurant they would, so it’s easy for them to sing the praises of my culinary art. But I think it’s true: I’ve become a really good cook.
Giggi, you know how strange it is here! You’re only one year older than I am but I can’t call you by your name. For me you are just Giggi, my older sister. Whereas Lia is almost 74 and I call her by her name, like someone my age. That’s the custom here -- to call everyone by their name. No one calls you brother or uncle. Today is your 31st birthday. When I was a child I thought people who were 31 were really old, but here being 31 is like being a child still. The girls often don’t get married before 35 or 38 and it’s quite common for them to live with someone without being married. They don’t want children. At most one, but if children don’t come that’s fine with them. They all want to live their own lives and, in then end, they all think mainly about themselves.
When it’s hot out even Lia puts on a bikini and stretches out on a blanket in the field to sunbathe. I found this very strange at first. It embarrassed me to see her like that, I would only look at her in secret. Then gradually I got used to seeing her body. When she walked around all naked in front of me how could I avoid seeing her? Her woman’s body. Her old woman’s body. In the end a body is only a body, neither more nor less. It took me a long time to understand that.
But even when you’ve understood, our own history, the one alive inside us, makes it hard for us to change. I’d understood that a body is only a body but I still couldn’t wear shorts in front of her. She would say: "How can you go around covered up like that all the time? In your country do the men have to cover their bodies with a veil like the women?"
It was useless speaking with Lia about the differences between Muslims and Hindus. How could I talk to her about the sense of shame for your own body taught to you from the time you were a child if I can’t even explain it to myself? And how can you talk about these things with other people?
It took some time, but in the end I was able to do it. It takes courage the first time, when you’ve never done it before, but then you realize that these fears are silly. Now in summertime I go around in shorts and without a top, too. At the beginning it felt like everyone was staring at my strange body and maybe laughing at it. Now I think we’re all strange, and no one cares about my strange body! And then, who looks at me here? There’s only Lia.
I have to prepare the massala for the chicken. I’ll cut up the onions, some garlic cloves and a few pieces of ginger, then I’ll put them in the blender. While I’m doing that, I’ll keep on talking to you. The words in your letter are buzzing in my head. I missed my usual coach, so I got home late. I didn’t stop off at Lia’s to say hello, but maybe she was expecting me. I heard someone calling me from behind and then she handed me your letter. I didn’t even open it. I already know what you wrote. You write the same things every time. I don’t know what to answer you, Giggi. Every time I sit down to write to you I can’t think of anything. Do you remember how much we talked when we were small? Why have we built these walls between us now? I can’t understand what you tell me and I can’t tell you anything about the things I’d like to say. This is the only way I can talk to you, with words shut up inside me.
Lia’s dog Emilio has come into the kitchen. He may have smelled the chicken. He’s sitting in front of me and looking at me with two eyes that make you think of the starving children in Ethiopia. It would seem that the poor thing hasn’t eaten in days. I know it’s all an act, but I like feeding him from my plate. Lia says I’ve spoiled him. That may be so. These days the poor thing has three medicated stitches on his head. He looks like something out of a film. Some village idiot has done this bold deed.
Emilio is a nice dog. I’ve never heard him bark. Let’s say he’s a bit strange, but in a good way. It’s not normal for a dog to be like that, ready to follow anyone, with his tail wagging like a car window-wiper when it rains. Who knows if there are dogs with Down syndrome? Anyway, what can a dog do against the village bullies?
The village kids have it in for Lia. At night they write obscenities on the low wall around our house. Sometimes they throw stones at the windows. I didn’t use to understand the reason for this hatred. I can understand that kids like that have it in for immigrants, for people like me with darker skins. But why for an old lady of 75? I just couldn’t get it. Then one day I asked Lia about the tattoo on her arm, and that’s how I understood. Lia is Jewish.
When she was 11, they took her to a horrible place. Lia calls it the concentration camp. Said like that, it sounds like a place to make tinned tomatoes or tubes of milk, but Lia says it was a terrible place. It was a prison where her family died. Her parents, her brother who was 16 and her sister, who was 2 years younger than she was. That tattoo is the mark of the prison.
On the day she told me that, I decided to remain in this house. When I first arrived here I couldn’t find anywhere to stay. Lia was the only one who accepted me. Now I know a lot of people and if I wanted I could find a more comfortable room somewhere closer to the factory. But now I don’t want to leave Lia alone.
She’s full of life, Lia is. I’d love for you to come here and meet her. That way maybe you could become braver, too. I don’t know why we haven’t been able to talk about our past like Lia. She cries. She shouts. Especially when she’s had something to drink. She tells me about her life before the concentration camp. Many times I can’t control myself and I cry along with her.
"They all died, why not me?" she asks. How can you answer such a question, Giggi? Do you ever think about mum? Do you ask yourself why she died and we didn’t? Why we didn’t die along with her, why we are alive?
"Giggi, I’ve received your letter and I’m glad you are well." Every time I start writing to you I can’t get beyond those few words. How many things I’d like to tell you, but I feel surrounded by high walls I don’t know how to climb over. The walls that separate me from you. I’ve grown good at telling lies. I’m not able to write what I really feel, and so each time I write the same three or four lies on the postcard. "I’m fine. Pardon me for writing a postcard but I’m so busy. Your respectful brother."
But what I really want to do is to take your letters, take every phrase and discuss it with you. The things you write are like knives, they cut me whenever I think about them. You write: "Dear Munna, I ask God for your happiness ". How can you write that when you know it isn’t true? If you really wanted me to be happy why would you ignore what I tell you? You pretend not to understand but I’m certain you really know what I wish for more than anything in the world. You’ve decided to sacrifice yourself, you want to kill yourself a little at a time, slowly, each and every day. What you call "our moral and ethical duty" is a form of suicide. What is this morality that is founded on immorality? What society wants us to behave like this? And if this is what they ask, how could they dare ask it of you or of me? I don’t think anyone has asked you to do this, you’re the one who’s decided what your sins are and what your punishment is. And this is the wall that divides the two of us. This wall of lies. This wall made up of things unsaid. This wall born of the lack of courage to call things by their names. How can the two of us talk if we can’t even call things by their real names?
You’re lying to me, Giggi, you don’t want what’s best for me. You’d like me to bow to the moral duty of children to their parents, like you, without any discussion or recriminations. This is what you have defined as morality. I’ll never do that. How can you say you want me to be happy and then ask me to do something that goes against my deepest instincts? If you really want me to be happy, don’t even ask me that again.
Lia says that this is her life, the life she’s taken in big bites so it won’t escape her. "I sacrificed my family for this life. I’ll cry. I’ll shout. But I’ll live this life the way I want to. Not only for myself. For them, too, who died in the gas chambers, killed by butchers. This life of mine belongs to all of them. They live in my breath", says Lia. And our mother’s life, Giggi, doesn’t that ask you for the right to live?
I know what you’ll answer, "I didn’t write about any of this in my letter ". It’s true, you manage to say all this without any words. Your eyes say it. When you pray for hours dressed in your torn, dirty old sari, what else are you saying? What can I think when you smile at me and say, "Eat. I made it for you. I’ll eat later." Who asked you to deny life and wear the mask of a widow in memory of a man thirty years older than you, who demanded you in payment of his debt?
What are we talking about when you speak to me of a child’s duty? It’s true, you haven’t written that, but I can understand what you mean between the lines. These things aren’t pronounced, they’re the barbs contained in your phrases. Be truthful. You want to say all of them, but you hide them behind banalities.
Giggi, don’t you remember how we could understand one another without saying a single word? You and I together to protect mum. Do you remember the talks we had? Or have you forgotten them? When I was a boy I could understand you even if you didn’t speak, and now I can’t understand your words, maybe because I can no longer talk to you normally. I can only ask you angry questions... and only when I am alone.
Lia has come into the kitchen asking for a glass of water. She said she called me, but I didn’t hear her. I dry my eyes and try to smile at her: "These onions! How can you cut these onions without crying?" I can feel how false my smile is, but Lia pretends not to notice. She doesn’t ask any questions. She understands. She knows that today’s celebration is for your birthday. Lia knows about wounds of the soul that never heal. I don’t have to explain anything to her.
Isn’t is strange that today for your birthday we’ll eat chicken and rice, while you’ll eat lentils and rice secretly in the kitchen, like a thief, like someone who hasn’t got the right to eat? How can I explain to you that if it weren’t for you being in that house, I wouldn’t send one penny for him? He could even die of hunger and I wouldn’t care.
"Thank God, we are all fine", you wrote. Who are these "all", Giggi? And how did God come in between the two of us? Where was this God of yours when we needed him? Why has he arrived now, does he want to make fun of us? Why are we fine, Giggi? If everything is over, ruined, how can we be fine? They’re all lies. Lies, from start to finish. Nothing is fine, and nothing will be fine if you go on killing yourself like this.
Do you remember mum, Giggi? Do you remember when she would give me a pot to eat the milk stuck on the bottom and you would watch me? Do you remember when we would go together to gather cow dung? Warm, soft dung. Do you remember how it felt in our hands? Do you remember the smell of our sandals hanging on the wall, with the dried cow dung on them? Ento, bento, dove mento, ottanta, novanta, tutte cento. Do you remember our game with the tamarind seeds? If you remember all these things, then you surely remember our mum, Giggi. So tell me, then, how can we be fine? Can we ever be fine, forgetting our mum?
"Thanks be to God ...", did your hand tremble when you wrote that? Don’t you remember mum coughing? With the edge of her sari in her mouth so she wouldn’t make a noise, do you remember how she coughed softly in the night? "Whore bastard, you worthless bitch, I’ll bloody show you, now you’ll see! You won’t let me sleep at night, you witch you?!” Do you remember the sound of fists hitting flesh? You can’t forget that sound. When the bottom of a shoe beats against ribs it makes a noise like a twig snapping -- do you remember that sound? Did your husband beat you like that, too?
Her coughing won’t let me sleep, Giggi. She would cough all through the night. Do you remember the blood on her sari? Why didn’t God come to save her? Where was this God of yours when they pulled her out of the well? Do you remember mum lying beside the well? So white and swollen. And the cloud of flies buzzing around her? Suicide, they said. I know you remember it all, you haven’t forgotten anything.
But if you haven’t forgotten, how could you have gone to live with him? That is what I can’t understand. That is the wall between us. I can’t understand you, Giggi. How could you have changed so much?
"I’d like to see you happily married with a family," you wrote. Why Giggi? After the farce that was your marriage, how can you think of marriages? Do you remember that old man with a big white moustache who bought you? How you cried, for how many days! But he had no pity on you. What did it get you, being the dutiful daughter? You got two sons, older than you, to cook and clean for. The same sons who took you back home when the old man died.
I don’t want a family. I’ve seen your marriage and that’s enough for me. I talk to you inside my head and I can feel my mind whirling like a top. The same questions keep on tormenting me. I can’t think about anything new. I keep on thinking about the past. You’ve decided to escape from the world, hiding behind the mask of a child’s duty. Why have you chosen this? I can’t understand it. But I haven’t made that choice, and I won’t accept it ever. You can stay there to serve him, shut up in the prison of your widowhood. I’ll celebrate your birthday. I don’t give a damn about those old-fashioned customs, I don’t give a damn what your holy books say. I’ve chosen to live.
Lia is calling Emilio. When I hear her calling Emilio, it makes me feel a little funny. Emilio was the name of her husband and she loved him dearly. She says that’s why she decided to call her dog Emilio. She says that feeling her dog’s warm body makes her less lonely.
"How much longer before we eat?" she’s asking. I’m so involved in this discussion with you that it takes a while for me to answer her. "About another hour". She doesn’t complain, she just waits patiently. She knows that I’m especially haunted by memories today. But she won’t ask any questions. She’s waiting for me to talk to her one day about the demons that live inside me. But I know I’ll never be able to talk about them. I’ll never be able to share these demons with anyone.
I stir the chicken in the pot and think about mum. She never ate chicken. Have you ever tasted it? When he brought meat home, he would give a piece only to me. Do you remember, Giggi, how he would eat it in front of you, slowly, to make you jealous? You were only a girl, he would say.
"When your letter arrives, dad looks at me with such pitiful eyes. I don’t need words to understand what he wants. I know he wants to know what you’ve written in the letter. Poor thing, he can’t speak and saliva drools from the corner of his mouth. He wears a look that makes me cry. How can you be so cruel, little brother?"
At least one just thing this God of yours has done, I have to admit, when he paralysed half of his body. If it were up to me, I’d have made him die a bit at a time. Yes, I’m cruel, but what has he done to you, to mum and to me? He deserves his punishment. But why have you decided to share his punishment with him? How could you have forgiven him? Is it only children who have duties? Doesn’t a parent have duties as well? What duty has he honoured to deserve your serving him? He deserves to be in jail, he does.
I keep thinking that I wasn’t able to do anything for you and for mum. I wanted the pots of milk and the pieces of chicken. How could I not have realized that you were a person, too, that you might have some desires? When he sold you, why wasn’t I able to fight him? When he beat mum, why wasn’t I able to stop him? You’ve forgiven him, but I cannot.
While he was selling you I was busy thinking about going to university. You don’t know all the squalid details, where I went with him before your wedding. I felt the force of my youth coming alive inside me. I was happy to go with him. "I want a young girl for my son. It’s his first time, so it has to be a special girl."
Like father, like son. The same. The same dirty blood. A thousand rupees he’d paid. I didn’t even ask where the money had come from. It was the down-payment on your sale. How can I forgive him? I hope he suffers the death of the damned. You’ve forgiven him. I cannot forgive, neither him nor myself.
Sunil Deepak was born in Lucknow, India, in 1954. He took his degree in medicine at the University of New Delhi. He has lived in Bologna since 1988 and works for the Scientific Bureau of the Associazione Italiana Amici di Raoul Follereau (AIFO) and as a consultant for the World Health Organization. He is a member of the Osservatorio Italiano sulla Salute Globale (Italian Observatory on Global Health). He has written stories in Hindi and is a member of the editorial board of the online Indian magazine Nirantar (http://www.nirantar.org/ ). He has also written numerous scientific and medical articles in Italian and in English, which appear in both scientific and lay journals. He has a trilingual website (http://www.kalpana.it/ ) and runs several blogs, including one in Italian "Awargi" (http://www.kalpana.it/ita/blog/ ).