He was still a child, only eighteen years old. With a future laid out for him: before the year ended he would have to marry the woman his family had long ago chosen to be his wife. She was beautiful, as adolescents can be. She had an unripe body that needed affection and tenderness rather than marriage and pregnancy. But marriage and pregnancy were what was being asked of her, what was being forced on her. Affection and tenderness, if ever they arrived, would be free gifts, which she would have to kneel down to, hands pressed together palm to palm and fingers to fingers as though she were reciting a prayer, bowing her head and raising her eyes only to say her thanks as quietly and sweetly as possible, with modesty and humility.
She always wore the same clothes: her school uniform. She work up early, went into the garden and drew water from the well in a bucket; then she threw it over herself to wash, drying herself quickly in the first rays of the sun. She went back into the house wrapped in a towel, hung it up on a hook screwed into the wall and put on a white shirt and short blue skirt. Once she was dressed, she sat down at the wide food-laden kitchen table, drank some chai and ate a few idli, while her grandmother shouted, “At least eat a bit of rice and a few bananas”, but she always pretended not to hear her and ran off to get the coach that took her from the village to the city. From the sleepy calm of Chingavanam to the crazed frenzy of Kottayam. She ran over stones and dust, between trees and flowers, her bag full of exercise books and pens, sums and letters, information and thoughts. She smiled as she ran. She came back home happy to re-embrace her grandparents, parents, brothers and sisters, above all Thankam, born only four months ago. Her adorable, marvellous little sister, whom she took care of as if she were her own daughter, both because it was her duty and because she wanted to. She had even tried to breastfeed her one day, sitting in the middle of the flowering garden, her back leaned against a tree-trunk. But she was surprised, disappointed and sad to realise that her small breasts produced no liquid; they were impassive, dry and useless, arid like the soil before the monsoon. She awaited her monsoon, though she knew she would have to be patient. But time spent waiting had never been a problem for her: a flower has to be watered long and patiently so it will bloom without decay, she thought. She had taken Thankam from her breast, buttoned up her blouse, given her a tight hug and then gone back into the house to put her down in the wicker cradle her mother had lovingly woven a few days before giving birth. She had watched her silently, for hours, sitting next to her on the shady low steps of the patio. She absorbed her mother’s movements, her quick, precise gestures, so that she could make them her own and be able to repeat them one day. When she would give the first son (because it was absolutely certain that the first would be a boy) to her future husband.
The two families had reached a good agreement. Leaving nothing to chance or to last moment improvisation. They had decided and planned everything far ahead of time. Mary had just come into the world and she was already betrothed to Chacko, who was five years old. Who went around barefoot, clothed only in a longhi, climbing up trees to pick the fruit or creeping through weeds to hunt for snakes. Or else setting cats’ tails on fire to see how they ran over the meadows like a rocket. He was already the landlord of a small wooden bee-house he’d built with his own steady, able hands. The hands that he now wanted to put at the service of medicine, to cut and sew, operate on and heal the sick. Her future husband was a future surgeon, and she was proud of him. She was ready, prepared and adorned for him. Like Chacko, Mary was of a good Christian Communist family, well-off financially and of sterling morals. Which had set aside a dowry worthy of the name: not only rupees and gold, but also copper pots and pans, silk sheets, engraved wooden furniture and... . And a Portuguese-style colonial house with a great patio and an enormous well, where she would be able to take care of a host of festive, laughing children playing and chasing each other around the enormous garden full of plants, flowers and tropical fruit. A well-furnished house, always perfectly clean. Because her parents had already taken the furniture there, and she went every afternoon to clean it. Thinking about when she would wash the sheets and dust the wardrobes, her breasts perennially full of milk, waiting for her husband who, on his return from the hospital, would sit down to table with her and their children. And in front of the countless dishes full of rise and curry, casually crunching on a dosa, he would tell her down to the last detail about the most recent operation he had successfully performed, and she would have no problems with nausea or boredom as she listened to all those gruesome, detailed descriptions.
All of a sudden she broke into tears. Shy, silent tears lined her face, dissolving the kajal and shading her dark black, sad eyes, which she kept half-shut in a useless attempt to hold back the pain. It always happened to her when she thought of him, of what should have been and what was going to be instead. Because she was betrothed to the most handsome, proud, sincere and honest man in the village. So sincere and honest that he had told her he didn’t want her. They had met along the riverbank. He went there every afternoon, to fish and meditate. Dreaming that one day he would be able to buy for himself, not with his father’s money but only his own, a small wood cabin with a large veranda that overlooked the river. There on the veranda, he would hang a hammock and, chewing on a blade of grass, stretch out on it to fish and meditate. She knew that every afternoon he went there to sit on the riverbank. But she didn’t know that the very waters that ran into the ocean were soon to take him away. Every afternoon, after she had meticulously cleaned their love-nest, she hid behind a palm to watch him. One day a coconut fell from the tree right at her feet. To give strength to her body, exhausted more by the humidity than the heat, she picked up the fruit, broke it against a rock, looked at the whitish liquid inside and drew close to her fiancé. Without thinking. Because sharing doesn’t require thought. That was why, frightened, he jerked himself around, saw her and threw himself into the river. She stood stock still, watching him with the broken coconut in her hand. Feeling silly and childish, he swam towards her with vigorous strokes. His soaked shirt and trousers stuck to his body. For the first time she felt the meaning of eroticism, the desire that is born in the heart and wets the vagina, but she didn’t say a word to anyone about it, least of all to herself. He smiled at her. “Hi, Mary”, he said. She had never heard him pronounce her name, and it made her feel embarrassed and excited at the same time. “Hi, Chacko”, she answered, in the languid tones of an adolescent who all at once understands she is a woman. “I’m going away” he said to her. “Where will we go?” she asked, curious. “Where will I go,” he answered, turning his back to her and staring off into the horizon. She ran away, and he didn’t go after her. All of a sudden he felt lighter. While the whitish liquid dripped out of the coconut and was immediately absorbed by the ground. Leaving no trace.
Chacko knew that losing her meant losing everything. Refusing her, he would be refused by everyone. By his family, who were everything for him. Like a broken branch that falls off a tree and can no longer be part of it. Like a ripe fruit that comes off the branch, at the risk of its survival. For the first time, a disciple of St. Thomas had refused his destiny. He was drawing a line across what had been written for him, crumpling up the paper and throwing it into the sea. To start again from scratch, murdering the past, imagining a future. In the history of his forbears imagination did not exist, only rules and duties to be respected. Which he was dirtying by imposing his will against their tradition. Because from the beginning of time, in his world personal desire coincided with social tradition. And no one evaded a marriage arranged by families that had always shared ties of kinship. Chacko was the sheep that was insulting the flock by leaving it. Without knowing it, Chacko was a revolutionary. Chacko was the man who shook Mary off like a fly that settles on your shoulder. Chacko was the man who had denied Mary, forever undermining her self-esteem. Mary was the unwanted woman, the woman no one would ever want in the future. Mary was the woman whose breasts were forever impassive, dry and useless, arid like the earth before the monsoon. And for her no monsoon would arrive, ever. Mary was the woman who had been denied, and who decided to deny herself as a woman, trying to remain a girl forever. A girl who would never breastfeed a baby because she still needed to be breastfed. Having lost the milk she desired, she denied herself all other food. Until she died. Of malnutrition, while her grandmother in the kitchen cooked any and all dishes that might tempt her to eat: “Eat at least a bit of rice and a few bananas”, she said, no longer shouting, but begging. With a new anger, that was born of frustration and grew into rancour, masked behind veils of false sweetness. “Eat at least a bit of rice and a few bananas”, she said and smiled, swallowing her anger, frustration and rancour. While she threw the uneaten food in the rubbish bin. Because if it wasn’t for Mary, it wouldn’t be for anyone else. Mary no longer pretended not to hear her. She did not hear her, period. She heard nothing any more, not even herself. She didn’t even feel any pain.
The state School of Medicine had not accepted Chacko’s application: all the places were reserved by law for Hindus and Muslims. All except one, set aside for a Christian, but it wasn’t him. Despite his excellent scholastic record, he wasn’t poor enough to be accepted. The Christian that got accepted had to be very good at school, but also very poor. He was only very good at school. His father had given up all his lands to redistribute them to the day-labourers who worked them, but he had not fallen into disgrace. He was not very poor, but he wasn’t rich enough, either: he certainly couldn’t afford to pay the exorbitant fees required to send his son to a private school. For this reason, Chacko both loved and hated, respected and despised, his father. A man who had undermined the life of his own children in the name of a political ideal. And who no longer had any right to decide that life. Least of all with an arranged marriage. Chacko had decided to go away, abandoning Mary to her non-destiny, to create his own. He had decided to go to Italy, where the Pope was, a surrogate for father, family, tradition. A religious education that would allow him to feel he still was part of his own personal history. In Italy, then, there was an excellent State University of Medicine, which would certainly not refuse him because he was Christian, and neither poor nor rich. After three days of driving rain he had left his parents and his siblings, and had taken the boat. His parents and siblings had let him go, shaking their heads, for the first time as a gesture of denial, and not of custom. They hated him and they loved him, they despised him and they respected him, for what he had done. Incomprehensible, and for this reason hard to judge. Chacko took with him the same cardboard suitcase that in those very years emigrants from Puglia carried onto trains, together with cheese and wine, in their journey to Lombardy. He had no cheese or wine. Not even spices, only a blue scarf his mother had woven for him. “Because it will be cold, where you are going”. A scarf that a sailor on the ship, turning over Chacko’s belongings to search for money, silver or gold, had discovered and then wound around his head like a turban to make fun of him in front of all the other passengers. Not knowing that the Sikhs use turbans, whereas he was a simple Christian. A Christian who was neither rich nor poor, a useless in-between. And that was why he was leaving. The sea voyage that took him from Cochin to Naples had lasted eleven days. Eleven days for the crossing, without living or thinking. Eleven days of suspended reality. Days eaten and slept, like a vegetable waiting to be unloaded on the other side of the sea. In a different world, a world that was his alone. Naples and then Rome. See Naples and die. He was dead. Of disorientation: among people, streets, skies and seas he did not recognise. That he did not want to know. Naples seemed to him the parody of Trivandrum, a poor, chaotic city, horribly run-down, maddened by traffic, crazed by noise and suffocated by smog. He couldn’t wait to get away as soon as possible. He’d taken the first coach to Rome. Rome and the Vatican. The Vatican and the Pope. The Pope, the last link between himself and them, between Chacko and his family. The Pope, whom he saw from afar, surrounded by the crowd. He was the only black mark in an enormous expanse of white. He was different by race among equals by religion. He was the only one who could not understand what he was hearing. He was the stranger. Who had experienced Naples with eyes of fear, Rome with the desire to belong, and Milan with the mirage of hope.
Milan, and those horrible student lodgings. One sixteen-square-meter room with bath and kitchen. If you could call an exposed toilet a bathroom, or a camp-stove a kitchen. Chacko’s toilet had been the garden behind the house, which he watered and fertilised every day, and the kitchen was an enormous laboratory full of burners and surfaces where his mother and sisters, with a completely feminine alchemy, transformed simple raw foods into refined cooked dishes.
Chacko spent his days bent over books written in an unknown language, which he learned by sheer force of will. He never went out. Unless it was to go to university, attend lessons, take notes, go back to his digs, study in his room and then go out again. To take the exam. Always the same. The same professor, who when Chacko came into the room put his feet on the table and began examining him, clearly enjoying of the idea that he could fail him if he pleased. “Dirty black, what do you think you can be?”. A doctor, admired and respected by everyone. Even by you, you vulgar, dirty white idiot. At night Chacko would cry, lying on a mattress that had supported millions of other bodies perhaps as desperate as his own. And sobbing, he could hear the metal frame of the cot creaking like a single-winded orchestra that seemed accompanying the rhythm of his throaty noises. Sometimes during the day Chacko would stare at the shop windows, dreaming of going in and buying whatever he desired. He wanted the best for himself, while he was living the worst for anyone. Chacko passed that exam; in the end, the professor gave in, perhaps simply because he preferred not to see him rather than to have to see him again. Even a sadist can tire of his game Maybe in an instant of distraction, when his prey escapes his grip for once and for all. To celebrate, Chacko, went to the mountains with some of his fellow students, and he saw the snow. And he found love. A white woman, beautiful, with green eyes and black hair, who had taught him how to use skis and ski boots. Chacko decided she would become his wife. In the face of convention, of tradition. In spite of her, of himself, of them.
Gabriella Kuruvilla was born in Milan in 1969 of an Indian father and an Italian mother. She has a degree in architecture and is a professional journalist, writing for various newspapers and magazines, including "Il Corriere della Sera", "Max", "Anna", "Marie Claire" and "D di Repubblica". After working as an editor of a Milanese home furnishings monthly, which she still writes for on a free-lance basis, she decided to dedicate herself completely to fiction writing and painting. In May of 2001, under the penname of Viola Chandra, she published the novel Media chiara e noccioline (DeriveApprodi). In 2005 the anthology Pecore Nere, published by Laterza, included two of her short stories. She is now working on a novel about maternity and a series of short stories about immigration. Her art works are mainly done in sand and fabric, and have been exhibited both in Italy and abroad.