Mousumi

Torpignattara, Rome, 17 November 2023

If Mousumi had to find a metaphor to describe her existence, she would certainly have chosen that of a sparrow with wings stuck to its body.

Let's be clear, not that she was a sad woman but she felt that the happiness didn't belong to her.

After the arranged marriage she was forced to abandon her family in Comilla to come and live in Rome, following her husband Kamal.

And to think that she had just started going to university.

This will be one of her regrets.

She sometimes thought that, when someone asked her what studies she had done, it would have been better not to mention the university at all rather than to say that she had only attended it for a year. At least it wasn't the result of her choosing – if that's an excuse or moral relief.

Her husband was not an unpleasant person; let's say that theirs was a minimal, very concrete relationship. Unaffective.

Based on what she had to do at home and away from home.

Over the years he had hardened because they couldn't have children. Mousumi had also done tests to find out if she was sterile but the results were negative. Finished there.

Her husband hadn't done them. Never let a man be sterile!

It was God's will.

And in any case, it was more her fault, if it had to be found guilty.

At least this was the rumor in Bangladesh, among his family.

As time passed, Mousumi also seemed to have lost her ability to get emotional.

Or rather, all the different emotions she felt every day – different in color and intensity – were the empty space between the exact filing cabinet of her daily routine: the silences between a biriani and a toothache.

The rain still brought her pleasure. Since childhood.

When the monsoon season arrived, in her town, she spent the hours at the window of her house enchantedly observing the pouring rain. And if she happened to be on the street she didn't open her umbrella.

She loved the sky and the rain was the love it poured out on her. When she got drenched she felt connected to the sky.

The rain fell, she ascended.

Of course after marriage she could no longer play like she did when she was a child, or walk beside him without opening her umbrella.

“Do you want everyone to watch us? And then with wet clothes people can see the shapes of your body.”

He scolded her the first time. There wasn't a second one.

Even the rain became a spectacle to be enjoyed through a box. Silently.

The sparrow hops but does not fly.

“After marriage you will immediately become a woman!”

The mother told her the night before she got married.

“Don't think about the fact that you don't know him! I didn't know your father either and you saw how many years we were together and how many children!”

“Yes Ma, but in Italy I read that it doesn't work like that. First you get together and then, if you falls in love, you get married.”

“Eshhh! You're not Italian! And then you know how many get divorced over there! You know what we say: first you get married, then you have a whole life ahead of you to learn to love your spouse.”

Mousumi wasn't very convinced but what could she do?

The marriage made her an adult woman full of responsibilities. She will mean that instead of studying from books she would have studied at home:  the object of the study, that mysterious man with whom she would share everything from tomorrow. Yes, absolutely everything. But it was better not to think about this otherwise she would feel like vomiting.

Moreover, she read it on a sign made by the students of the Italian Language School where she went, in Torpignattara.

“If with marriage comes responsibilities, it is with the first child that everything changes.”

She was still in the first phase and perhaps she would remain there forever.

In fact, she avoided going to the many parties that colored the neighborhood because she didn't like being bombarded with morbid questions from her friends about the fact that she didn't have any children yet.

Even though, obviously, she envied her classmates at the Italian school who wrote with one hand and rocked the stroller with the other.

Kamal sometimes took her to eat at McDonald's and she remained with the  face towards the glass watching all the people walking in the street. How different Rome was from her city. She had never seen so many different colors chewing incomprehensible words.

She felt like she was looking at an aquarium.

She wasn't dazzlingly beautiful but she had a cute face. She liked herself.

After all, when she walked down the street she felt the male eyes of the fellow countrymen on her. They made her uncomfortable, they were often animalistic. But no burqa, she had insisted on this with her husband, even though it was very fashionable now among the bhabis* of the neighborhood. In fact, it seemed to her that they brought it here to Italy more than to Bangladesh.

It's not like you can agree to everything and in this Kamal was appreciable. Before imposing something on her, he asked what she thought about it. Most of the time she didn't change his mind but he was tolerant about this.

No Western clothes, though. This was the essential compromise.

And if it rains, open the umbrella!

For the study of the Italian language it was easier. He worked and had understood on his own the importance of not making her dependent – in case of emergencies – on anyone other than him. And then by now there were many women who attended these courses.

“But it wasn't like this before!”

Ruby, a friend, told her one day.

“When I arrived in Rome there were very few women who had permission to go to school. It took years for our men to change their mentality. An ignorant woman is a submissive woman. Now we are a little less so.”

Ruby exclaimed smiling.

It's a shame that word, submission, has always been linked to the concept of love. Independence and rebellion are dangerous. They're like oil spills on your wings. And to think that Bangladesh was born precisely from the rebellion. But never to the consolidated values of a community, of the family, of religion. We go to Hell.

Better to live with your own little domestic hell than to burn in the one described in the verses of the Koran.

Better to unplug your emotions and give smiles to your parents during daily video calls.

In the end, she was a lucky woman. They weren't doing very well in London anymore, it wasn't like it used to be. The golden age of migration. Now Bangladeshis arriving in London from Italy were greeted more with thorns than roses.

What an absurdity, racism within the same people, she thought.

Little Mousumi. A shadow that walks among hundreds of strangers who touch her without the slightest interest in her feelings, her little story. As if the raindrops didn't touch her, protected by an invisible shield. Everything around was wet and she was miraculously – and sadly – dry.

What were her famous responsibilities then?

Only those of looking after her husband like a grown up child?

Keep the house tidy? Cook his favorite dishes and eat after he's done? Knowing how to choose the tastiest mangoes and carrying five kilo bags of rice up three flights of stairs?

Even her friends who spent hours making themselves beautiful, dressed up as if at a Bollywood wedding with chandeliers in their ears and fake gold necklaces for parties where they did nothing but eat and take selfies.

Didn't they realize that the looks they attracted on the street weren't all one of wonder and admiration? If they don't even know your name and what the green and red colors of your sari symbolize, what pride is this?

She really didn't feel like being a beautiful putul* in the shop window due to the exotic curiosity of the neighborhood's inhabitants. Better then to go unnoticed. One of many. In fact, none of the many.

Now she remembered the little sparrow with its wings stuck to her body.

Perfectly dis-integrated in her exotic solitude.

And if someone asked what studies she had done, she would reply with a smile that she had finished college.

She hasn't had children yet but this is God's will.

That it's important to know how to speak Italian so I can tell the hospital that I don't want a male gynecologist.

That the veil is my choice, in fact I don't wear the burqa, even if in Comilla I only wore the orna on my head.

That if I could choose among my desires I would once again go up to the roof of the condominium and do pirouettes in the torrential rain.

That my husband is a good man after all, it didn't go that badly for me even if we never speak.

That I would like to sit with an unknown Italian lady on a park bench, one afternoon, and eat a nice ice cream with her.

That I'm tired of being a bundle of clichés in a salwar kamiz.

And that we are always smarter than what people think.

Perhaps the true meaning of my mother's words is that we have our whole lives ahead of us to learn to fall in love with ourselves.

Even if that love is the empty space between the boxes of good wife and good mother.

Or it's the matra, the horizontal line from which the beautiful graphemes of our language hang.

*Bhabi, sister-in-law but also affectionate nickname used among Bangladeshi friends.

*Putul, small traditional doll.

Italian version