ppoli61

@ppoli611674629039 · 18 Aug 2022

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"Il respiro del fiume", capitolo 1

At four in the morning, the light is already sufficient in Benares to cross the city and reach one of the hundred ghats on the Ganges.

Wrapped in a faded sari, a thin figurine, with knotted hair, a long bouncing braid and bare feet, sneaks out of the house and runs through the alleys of the old city. She pays no attention to the cow droppings and the dirt that soils the streets, as she is used to on more serene days. She passes like the wind among the half-naked children, the lepers, the crippled beggars, the old men sitting on the sidewalk playing at the spittoon.

She does not even mind the dismal temple of the monkey god Hanuman, which is stained with dust as red as blood. She passes the dark shops of sacred objects, in the heart of the chowk, the dense network of alleys behind the ghats immersed in the pungent smell of rose incense and votive jasmine necklaces.
Panting, she queues up to the line of pilgrims descending towards the Manikarnika Ghat. On the last step, just above the water level, she pauses to catch her breath.

She looks around.

Majestic, surya is rising, and illuminates an immense, deserted space in the east. On the shore where she is, instead, there are seven kilometers of stairways, ramparts, temples and palaces of the maharaja. Along the sacred steps, the poorest people in the world perform ritual ablutions, pray, drink the infected water. From the funeral pyres, the smoke continues to rise, acid, dense.

In the holiest hour of the day, even the girl enters the river and plunges up to her waist. She sprinkles water on the palm of her hands, facing the sun, then lights a candle of camphor oil, places it on a leaf and entrusts it to the Ganges. All around, holy men in saffron-colored robes let their offerings slip into the river, symbolizing the light that disperses ignorance. An island of flames is caught in the current and floats towards the Indian Ocean. “Ganga mai ki jai! Praise be to Mother Ganga!”

The little girl also prays: “Mother Ganga accept my offer.”
 When all the prayers she knows are exhausted, it is day, the sun is burning and people seek shelter under the straw umbrellas. The sannyasis remain motionless, in ecstasy, in communication with the sun.

In the middle of the river, barges glide, loaded with tourists taking photographs of the holy men in prayer, of people washing themselves and of piles of wood with the dead burning outdoors.

The little girl retraces her steps, pulls away a faded curtain and enters the house. Coming from the bright and crowded ghat, her room appears even more bleak and dark.
Beyond a row of rags hanging to dry, Urda, the neighbor who helps her mother, apostrophizes her with a mouth full of betel, “ah, you’re here, you shouldn’t have left right now.” She is a thin woman, of indefinable age, with tousled hair, without an incisor. Her husband ripped it off with a fist, before spiteing her by making her a widow. From her hole, right between her lips, the red sauce of the paan flows.

The girl fearfully approaches the bed where her mother, Auda, lies in a pool of sweat on the dirty sheet. Her olive face is unrecognizable, her eyes, first large, dark and moist, appear like the empty sockets of a skull. Her breathing is a harsh gasp that tastes like vomit.
 “Urdabhai?”
 “Mmm …”
 “Why does my mother do this?”
 “Your mother is just trying to breathe.”

 “Urdabhai?”

 “Mmm …”

 “Is my mother dying?”
 The neighbor just sighs. She spits a jet of red saliva on the floor.

 “Urdabhai?”
 “Mmm …”
 “Will my mother get well?”
 “Do you think she can heal? It’s better if you stay with her now. “

 The little girl snuggles near the charpoi. With a small tentative hand, she barely touches her mother’s shoulder.
“Amma …”

 The sick woman opens eyelids that seem to have turned into paper, tries to move her head in the direction of her voice but she can only stare at the ceiling.
 “Han …?”
 “Do you hear me, amma?”

 “Urmilla …”
 “Amma …”
 “Urmilla, where are you?”
 “Here, I am here, amma. Do you see me?”
 “No, I can’t see you … There is no light, it’s night.”

 “No, amma, it’s not night, it’s morning! It’s five o’clock and I went to pray. “
 “You did the right thing. I can’t go there, I’m tired. And then, with this darkness. It’s so dark today. “
 “Amma! It is not true! It is not dark! It is not…”
 “You know, Urmilla, I saw your baba. He came to see me … “A cough interrupts her.
Urda approaches and wets her forehead with a cloth. “Poor soul, she is delirious.”

 Another fit of whooping cough leaves the patient breathless. She suddenly stiffens, she grinds her teeth, rolls her eyes and grabs her daughter’s sari. “Urmilla!”
 “Amma, please!”

 Panting, exhausted, her thin chest heaving in long, labored sighs, she is silent, struggling to breathe, then she speaks again and this time her words sound less frantic, more lucid. “Urmilla, life hasn’t been good for me, but you are a good daughter.”
She is silent again, she seems to doze off.

Maybe she doesn’t die. Oh, Shiva! Oh, Lord of the world! Don’t let her die! Don’t let my mom die!

 A few silent minutes pass, the patient’s breath becomes harsher every moment. Insistent flies buzz around the charpoi. Urda moves around the room, shuffling her feet. She moves an object, opens a piece of furniture, closes it, spits on the floor. From the street come the sounds of every morning: the voices of children, the calls of exasperated mothers, the cries of babies, the cries of hot channa vendors, grinders, tea bearers.

 Half an hour later, Auda’s lips move again: “You are so beautiful, Ahmed …”

 The little girl bends over her mother, terrified by her rigid body, by her rancid breath, by the rattle that has now become her breath. “Amma!”

 Auda’s mouth opens, her nose becomes sharp, hissing: “Ahmed …”

“Amma! Amma! “

“Yes, janum, yes, Ahmed, my soul …”


 ***


 The stretcher, woven with seven pieces of bamboo cane, is ready. The little girl spent the night building it, watching over her mother’s corpse. With Urda’s help, she washed and shaved Auda’s cold body, marked her forehead with sandalwood powder, anointed her hair with oil, braided flower necklaces and rubbed her teeth and lips with fragrant twigs. Finally, she dressed her in the most beautiful sari, the one that Auda used only for Diwhali.

 It is close to dawn now. Urda snores in a corner holding her youngest grandchildren in her arms, a skinny child, shaved, barely dressed in a belt and a bunch of anklets. With wide eyes, shiny with kajal, the little one searches the room in the dim light.

The little girl’s head hangs on her chest too. Her hands, however, still grip her mother’s foot. For hours she has massaged it. She knows all the folds, all the roughness, from the small hardening under the big toe, to the callous reinforcement of the heel, due to the habit of walking barefoot.

 The girl’s head falls forward and she stirs, jolting. She resumes massaging the corpse’s feet, panting, as if they were still sensitive.

 Urda opens first one eye, then the other, then she yawns. “Stop it now, child. In an hour she will be burned, what are your massages for? “
“All daughters massage their mothers’ feet.”
 “Yes, but of living mothers.”

 The grandson extends a hand to the dead woman on the bed. “Auda!” he calls her.
 “Auda is asleep, leave her alone”, his grandmother scolds him. The little one raises his head, makes saliva bubbles with pursed lips. From time to time he casts puzzled glances at the motionless body.
The old woman is agitated, impatient. “Come on, Urmilla, it’s almost time. We have to put her on the stretcher. “

 “Wait, Urda. Just a little more. “
 “Look, I have things to do! I can’t stay here all day! My grandchildren are hungry. “
 “Just five minutes, Urda.”
 “Okay, but hurry up. She starts to smell. “
 “It is not true! There is no smell, it’s just the flowers! “
Urmilla bends down to kiss her mother’s feet, then her hands, then her head. She dips her forefinger in the red powder and goes over the tilak on her forehead, where her lips have a little discolored it. She fits the jasmine necklaces better and still scatters daisies on the red cloth that wraps her body.
 “You have spared no expense,” Urda comments, mechanically crushing a louse on her grandson’s head.
“My mother had put away the money for her funeral. They were inside a box. “

 “It is fortunate that the mice did not eat them. But you did well to get the best things for your mother’s cremation. One lives like dogs, at least one dies with dignity! Only it would take a son. And if there is no male child, you should have a relative and if there is no relative … “
 “There is a relative, Urda.”
 “Forget it, you know how things are.”
 “No, I don’t know and I’ll go to him because I want to talk to him, but first I have to cremate my mother.”
 “It’s not a good idea.”
 “This is for me to decide, not you.”
 “Ah, sure! Of course! I was saying so, just to give you some advice. But you never listen to advice! But now you will do as I say. I’ll take you to the mission. “
 “I don’t want to go there. My mother wouldn’t approve. “

 “Well, my child, you will have to learn to adapt from now on. Life is what it is. Your mother lived on poetry, flowers, prayers. And what did she gain from it? Look at her now! She is dead! “
The grandson reaches out to Auda, emits little bubbles of satisfaction. “She is dead, she is dead!”
 “I told you she sleeps! Listen, my child, poems and prayers do not fill the belly, begging fills the belly, prostitution fills the belly, looking for stuff along the railway fills the belly! But Auda no. No! She couldn’t lower herself. Believe me, she was a dreamer, one with a head full of upper caste nonsense, Brahmanic nonsense. “

 The little girl screams: “Leave my mother alone!”
"All right, all right, don’t get angry, I was just talking to help you. After all, I loved you both. You are not a boy but you are still a good girl. Now, however, move, it’s late. “
Urda pushes the child away and with difficulty lifts the body. She drops it on the litter with a dull thud. Together, they tie Auda to the stretcher and begin anointing every part of her body, the shroud and the bamboo canes with ghee and camphor oil.

 “That’s it,” says Urda, “so the flames will immediately rise to the sky.”

 They drag the litter out. The pink light of dawn hurts the little girl’s eyes, who have cried and watched in the darkness all night.

Before hoisting the stretcher, the carter, who is waiting, wants to see the money. Urmilla opens her hand and shows a roll of rupees. The man nods and takes the load on board.
 “Well, child,” Urda begins, then stops. A shadow of emotion can be guessed in her voice. “Tell me, are you sure you can do it?” she finally asks.

 The little girl nods, then climbs onto the cart, next to her mother’s body wrapped in her red cloth. Urda greets, collects his nephew, then crosses the courtyard.

The carter hits the ox’s muzzle with his stick, the beast moves slowly, shaking its painted horns and garlanded neck at every step.
The little girl, with one hand on her mother’s chest, is sitting stiffly on the rickety cart that runs all along Madampura Road, up to Harishandra Ghat.

At the top of the ghat there is a concrete space intended for fires, with screens to protect people from the gusts of heat. The little girl asks the undertaker the price of wood and aromas, then she extracts her rupee roll from her breast, thinned after the carter’s payment.

 The man points two predatory eyes at her. “Females!”, he repeats spitting a jet of paan on the ground that almost hits the girl in the chest. “Females! Where will we end up! “
He grabs all the money and points to a pile of cheap wood.
 “It’s bad wood!” the little girl is indignant.

 “Listen to her, to the lady! With those few coins, won’t you expect a pile of sandalwood like the rich ?! “
The little girl digs her heels. “I gave you all the rupees I had; all the ones my mother had set aside for her funeral! My mother deserves the best, she was a brahmani! “

 “Yes, and I’m Rama!”
 Without listening to him, the little girl throws herself towards a pile of precious wood.

The undertaker tries to stop her. “Hey! What are you doing?!”
 “I want a piece of sandal to put in my mother’s mouth!”
 The girl carefully chooses a small piece of wood, removes the shroud from Auda’s face and forces her teeth clenched by rigor mortis. She puts the wood in the mouth and closes it again. “Here, amma, like this.”

 Auda looks like a wax statue. The little girl thinks that it is really the last time she sees the face of her mother and something stirs in her stomach. Her tears are burning pins that pierce her eyes. She struggles to hold them back.
 The gravedigger lifts the body and goes down to the river, immediately followed by a cow, ready to swallow the flowers that fall from the corpse. Auda is immersed in purifying water, greased with ghee and hoisted onto the pyre.

 The girl makes five turns around the pile, scatters water from a container which she then breaks, while the gravedigger waits impatiently and the people around her look bewildered.
On the concrete of the ghat are written the names of those who were cremated there. The girl avoids looking at them because there are just too many.

 The undertaker hands her a torch. “Where are we going to end up”, he repeats, “where are we going to end up if they now send the girls to the funeral and make them go around the pyres as if they were boys. Do you at least know what you have to do? “
 The girl nods.
 “And do you think you can do it alone?”
 The little girl confirms again, but she trembles a bit. She does her best to set fire to the four corners of the pyre. The greased wood immediately catches fire, the flames lick the shroud, then envelop it. The body lights up, crackles, arches, seems to sit up. The girl looks with wide eyes. She retreats to a corner, like a frightened animal, and she crouches on the concrete of the ghat.
She watches all the time while her mother burns.

They taught her that one should not cry for those who die, because death is part of life and those who have lived without guilt are reborn purer. Yet she has a hard lump in her throat, and tears are now overflowing. She sniffles, tastes salt and snot.

The gravedigger looks at her, twisting his mouth, shaking his head, mumbling insults against those who allow females to behave like males instead of staying at home and thinking about getting married. So those tears have to be pushed back just like a boy would. In order not to cry, the little girl tries to think about how her mother was when she was well, her sad smile, her grave eyes, her bare feet sliding indifferently on the mud of life. Auda doesn’t want her tears. Auda, in front of everything, put dignity.

However, now, Auda is down there, curling up and bursting on the pyre, in that stench of burnt bones and smoke, mixed with the strong and humid smell of the river. And she will no longer see her, she will no longer tell her what the other girls at the fountain said, she will no longer hear her hoarse voice saying that she should never be afraid.

She is afraid, however, and fear is a black hole in the belly, like when something you ate hurts. No, more, much more.

 A few hours later, armed with iron pliers, an attendant collects the charred bones in an earthen jar. He gestures for her to come closer.
She forces herself to get up, to move her knees numb from immobility. She approaches the smoking pyre trembling.

The man shows her where the skull is. She looks at it, scared, fascinated, with no more saliva in her mouth. That black, hot, shriveled thing is what remains of her beautiful mother’s face.
 “Will you hurry up? I have four more funerals this morning. “

 The bamboo awl is not heavy, but she has to hold it with both hands, as they tremble. She squeezes her knuckles around the wood until they turn white, until it hurts. She focuses, takes aim.

She hits.

It is a weak blow, the charred head barely moves, the awl slips to the side.

The little girl tries again, she hits harder, so much so that she injures her hands. This time the blackened head lurches, but nothing more.
 “He, Ram! Do you want to reduce it into meatballs ?! Do you want to make the mince? “

The little girl swallows tears of shame. “I’m sorry”, she apologizes, “I don’t …”
 “Give it here!” The man snatches the awl from her hand. With two sharp blows he smashes Auda’s skull and frees her soul.
Later, with the pot of ashes tight to her chest, the little girl goes down the last step of the ghat, to reach the boat that will take her to the center of the river, where she can scatter them in the water. Her eyes are dry now, and she holds her head high.

 She squeezes the jar tightly on her heart.


To find out what will happen to the brave and indomitable Urmilla, order the book here.