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  For Olivia, and all women of courage

  Braid, v.

  To form (three or more strands) into a braid; to do up (the hair) by interweaving three or more strands

  There is great mystery, Simone, in the forest of your hair.

  REMY DE GOURMONT

  A free woman is precisely the opposite of a light woman.

  SIMONE DE BEAUVOIR

  Prologue

  The beginning of a story. A new story, each time.

  Coming to life, at my fingertips.

  First, the frame.

  A structure strong enough to support the whole.

  Silk or cotton for the city, or the setting, as required.

  Cotton is strong,

  Silk is finer, more discreet.

  I need a hammer and nails.

  I need, above all, to proceed slowly, gently.

  Next, the weaving.

  The part I like best.

  Before me, on the loom,

  Three nylon threads are stretched.

  Taking the strands from the skein,

  Three by three;

  Knotting them carefully, so they don’t break.

  And then repeat.

  Thousands of times over.

  I love these solitary hours, these hours when my hands dance.

  The strange ballet of my fingers.

  They tell a story of intertwining strands.

  This story is mine.

  But does not belong to me.

  Smita

  A village in Badlapur, Uttar Pradesh, India

  Smita wakes with a strange feeling. Urgent, gentle, new: butterflies in her stomach. Today is a day she will remember her whole life. Today, her daughter will go to school.

  School, where Smita has never set foot. Here in Badlapur, people like her don’t go to school. Smita is a Dalit. Of those whom Mahatma Gandhi called Harijan, the Children of God. “The oppressed.” Untouchable. Unworthy. A species apart, judged too impure to mix with others, rejected and separated, like the chaff from the wheat. Millions like Smita live outside the villages, outside society: on the margins of humanity.

  Every morning, the ritual is the same. Like a scratched record playing the same hellish music over and over again. Smita wakes in the hut that is her home, beside the fields cultivated by the Jatts. She washes her face and hands in the water fetched the day before from the well set aside for her people. No question of using the other well, the one for the higher castes, though it is nearer and easier to reach. People have died for less. Smita makes herself ready, does Lalita’s hair, kisses Nagarajan. Then she takes the rush basket that her mother carried before her. The very sight of it makes her retch. The hateful basket with its persistent, acrid, indelible smell, the thing she carries with her all day, her shameful burden. A punishment. A curse. For something she did in a past life. She must pay, atone for the sin. Because this life is no more important than the others that came before it, or the lives to come. It’s just one life among many, her mother would say. This is how life is—her life.

  This is her dharma, her duty, her place in the world. A task handed down from mother to daughter, for generations. Manual scavenger: a coy term that bears little relation to reality. There are other words to describe what Smita does for a living: she collects other people’s shit, removing it barehanded from the dry latrines, using only a stiff reed brush and a metal scoop, all day long. She was six years old—the same age Lalita is now—when her mother took her along for the first time. Watch, then you will do the same. Smita remembers the smell that assaulted her, sharp and violent as a swarm of wasps, an unbearable, bestial stench. She had vomited on the side of the road. You’ll get used to it, her mother said. She had lied. You never get used to it. Smita learned to hold her breath, to live without breathing. You must breathe freely, the village doctor told her, see how you’re coughing. You must eat. Smita lost her appetite long ago. She no longer remembers what it is to feel hungry. She eats little, the strict minimum, forcing it down in spite of herself every day.

  And yet the government promised toilets, right across the country. They have not come here. In Badlapur, as elsewhere, people defecate in the open. The ground is filthy, everywhere: the streams and rivers, the fields, polluted with tons of excrement. Sickness spreads like wildfire. The politicians know it: what people want, before reforms or social equality, are toilets. The right to defecate with dignity. In the villages, many women are forced to wait until nightfall, to go out into the fields, exposing themselves to the risk of attack. The most fortunate have a corner set aside in their yard, or at the back of their house: a simple hole in the ground, euphemistically described as a “dry latrine.” These are the latrines that the Dalit women come to empty every day, barehanded. Women like Smita.

  She begins her rounds at about seven o’clock in the morning. Smita takes her basket lined with ashes, her scoop, and her stiff reed brush. She has twenty houses to empty, every day, no time to lose. She walks along the side of the road, eyes lowered, her face hidden in her scarf. In some villages, Dalits are forced to wear crows’ feathers as a mark of their status. Elsewhere, they must walk barefoot. Everyone knows the story of the Dalit who was stoned merely for wearing sandals. Smita enters the houses by the door reserved for her kind, at the back. She mustn’t cross the path of the people living there, let alone speak to them. She is not only untouchable: she must be invisible, too. By way of a salary, she receives leftover food, sometimes old clothes tossed onto the floor for her to pick up. No touching, no looking. And sometimes a few rupees. Sometimes she gets nothing at all. One family of Jatts has given her nothing for months. Smita wanted to stop; she said so one night to Nagarajan. She wouldn’t go back there—they could clean their own shit. But Nagarajan had been afraid. If Smita stopped going there, they would be chased out: they have no piece of land to call their own. The Jatts would come and burn their hut. Smita knew what they were capable of. “We’ll cut off both your legs,” they had said to one of her kind. The man had been found in a nearby field, dismembered and burned with acid.

  Yes, Smita knew what the Jatts were capable of. And so she went back to the house the next day.

  But this morning is not like every other day. Smita has made a decision. The obvious choice, the only one possible: her daughter will go to school. She had trouble persuading Nagarajan. What would be the point? he said. She might learn how to read and write, but no one will give her work. You are born to empty latrines, and you do it until you die. It’s your heritage, a circle no one can break. Karma.

  Smita didn’t give in. She brought it up again the next day, the day after, and every day after that. She refused to take Lalita with her on her rounds: she would not show her how to clear toilets, she would not watch while her daughter vomited into the ditch, as her mother had watched before her. No, Smita could not do that. Lalita must go to school. In the face of her determination, Nagarajan had relented. He knew his wife; Smita had a will of iron. The small, dark-skinned Dalit woman he had married ten years ago was stronger than him, he knew that. And so he gave in. This is how it would be: he would go to the village school. He would speak to the Brahmin.

  Smita smiled secretly at her victory. She so wished her mother had felt able to fight for her; she so longed to have walked through the school gates and t
aken her place with the other children. To have learned to read and write. But it wasn’t possible. Smita’s father wasn’t like Nagarajan; he had been irascible, and violent. He beat his wife, like so many men here. He repeated it often enough: a woman is not her husband’s equal. She is his property, his slave. She must do his bidding. Her father would sooner have saved his cow than his wife.

  But Smita has been fortunate: Nagarajan has never beaten her, never insulted her. When Lalita was born, he even agreed to keep her. Not far away, girls are killed at birth. In villages in Rajasthan, newborn girls are buried alive in a box under the sand. The babies take a whole night to die.

  But not here. Smita gazes at Lalita, squatting on the beaten earth floor of their hut, combing her only doll’s hair. Truly, her daughter is beautiful. She has delicate features and hair down to her waist. Smita brushes it out and braids it every morning.

  My daughter will learn how to read and write, she tells herself, and she rejoices at the thought.

  Yes, today is a day she will remember all her life.

  Giulia

  Palermo, Sicily

  “Giulia!”

  Giulia struggled to open her eyes. Her mother’s voice called up the stairs.

  “Giulia! Scendi! Subito!”

  Giulia was tempted to bury her head under the pillow. She’d had too little sleep—another night spent reading. But she knew she must get up. When Mamma calls, you obey—especially if she is Sicilian.

  “Giulia!”

  Reluctantly, she got out of bed, dressed quickly, and went down to the kitchen, where her mother waited impatiently. Her sister Adela was already down and painting her toenails, with one foot up on the table. Giulia winced at the smell of the polish. Her mother poured her a cup of coffee.

  “Your father’s gone out already. You’ll be opening up this morning.”

  Giulia took the keys to the workshop and hurried out of the house.

  “You’ve had nothing to eat! Take something with you!”

  Ignoring her mother’s words, Giulia jumped onto her bike and pedaled away, hard. She felt more awake now, in the cool morning air. The sea breeze blew along the streets, stinging her face and eyes. Approaching the market, she smelled the tang of citrus fruit and olives. Giulia pedaled past the fishmonger’s stall with its display of freshly caught sardines and eels. She rode faster, mounted the pavements, left Piazza Ballaro behind, where the street vendors were already calling out to their clientele.

  She turned onto a dead-end lane off the Via Roma. Her father’s workshop was here, in an old cinema building he had bought two decades ago, the year Giulia was born. Back then, he had been operating out of smaller premises and needed to move somewhere bigger. The facade still bore the frames where film posters used to be displayed. The days were long gone when the Palermitani would jostle for tickets to see comedies starring Alberto Sordi, Vittorio Gassman, Nino Manfredi, Ugo Tognazzi, or Marcello Mastroianni. Most of the cinemas had closed down, just like this little neighborhood movie theater had done. The old projection room had been turned into an office, and windows had been cut into the auditorium walls to give the women enough light to work by. Papà had put them in himself. The place was like him, Giulia thought: rough-edged and warm. Pietro Lanfredi was liked and respected by his employees, despite his legendary rages. He was a loving father, but authoritarian, too, with high standards. He had brought up his daughters to respect discipline, given them his taste for hard work and a job well done.

  Giulia took the key and opened the door. Usually, her father was the first to arrive. He liked to greet his workers in person—that’s what a proper padrone does, he would say. Always a kind word for one of the women, a thoughtful gesture for another, a moment’s attention for everyone. But today was his day for making the rounds of the hair salons of Palermo and the surrounding villages. He wouldn’t be back before noon. This morning, Giulia was in charge.

  All was quiet in the workshop at this hour. Soon the place would be humming with voices, singing, scraps of conversation, but for now there were only Giulia’s footsteps, echoing in the silence. She walked to the workers’ changing room and stowed her things in the locker bearing her name. She took her smock and slipped it on, as she did every day, like a second skin. She gathered her hair, rolled it into a tight chignon, and pinned it with nimble fingers. Then she covered her head with a scarf—an essential precaution here. No stray strands could be allowed to mingle with the hair being treated at the workshop. Dressed and scarved, she was no longer the padrone’s daughter; she was a worker like any other, an employee of the House of Lanfredi. This was important to her—she had always refused special treatment of any kind.

  The main door creaked open, and a bright swarm swept into the empty space. In an instant, the workshop sprang to life and became the bustling place Giulia loved so much. In a hubbub of conversation, the women hurried to the changing room, donned their smocks and aprons, and reported to their stations, talking all the while. Giulia joined them. Agnese’s features were tired and drawn—her youngest was teething, she hadn’t slept all night. Federica was holding back her tears—her fiancé had left. Alda was indignant—again?! He’ll be back tomorrow, Paola reassured her. The women shared more than their work here. While their busy hands treated the hair, they talked about men and life and love, all day long. Here, everyone knew that Gina’s husband drank; that Alda’s son was caught in the tentacles of the mafia; that Alessia had had a short-lived affair with Rhina’s ex-husband; and that Rhina had never forgiven her.

  Giulia loved the company of these women. Some had known her since she was a child. She had almost been born here, at the workshop. Her mother liked to tell everyone how the contractions had caught her by surprise when she was busy sorting the skeins of hair in the main atelier. She had given up work now; her poor eyesight had forced her to step aside to make way for a new, sharper-eyed employee. Giulia had grown up surrounded by the hair waiting to be combed out, the strands ready to be washed, the orders prepared for dispatch. She remembered holidays and days off school spent among the women, watching them work. She loved to see their hands darting busily back and forth, like an army of ants. She watched them draw the hair through the cards—the big, square combs that remove the tangles—before washing it in the great vat on its trestle support, an ingenious solution assembled by her father, who didn’t like to see his employees straining their backs. Giulia smiled to see the bunches of hair hanging up in the windows to dry, like a series of bizarre trophies—the scalps in an old Western movie.

  Sometimes, it seemed to Giulia that time stood still here. Outside, everything went on as normal, but inside these walls she felt protected. It was a gentle, comforting feeling. The certainty of a strange kind of permanence.

  For more than a century now, her family had made its living from the cascatura, the old Sicilian custom of keeping hair after it has fallen out or been cut, in order to make hairpieces or wigs. The Lanfredi workshop was the last of its kind in Palermo. Ten expert workers disentangled, washed, and treated the skeins, which were dispatched to wig makers across Italy and the whole of Europe. On her sixteenth birthday, Giulia had decided to leave school and join her father in the workshop. Her teachers said she was a gifted student, especially her Italian teacher, who urged her to continue her education—she could have gone to university. But nothing would dissuade Giulia from her chosen path. Hair was more than a tradition for the Lanfredi; it was a passion, passed down from generation to generation. Oddly, Giulia’s sisters showed no interest whatsoever in the family business. She was the only Lanfredi daughter to take it up. Francesca had married young and didn’t go out to work: she had four children now. Adela, the youngest, was still at school and had set her sights on a career in fashion, or modeling. Anything other than joining the workshop.

  For special orders and unusual colors, Papà had a secret: a formula inherited from his father, and his grandfather before him, based on natural ingredients whose names were a closely guarded secre
t. This was the formula he had passed on to Giulia. Often, he would take her up to his attic laboratorio, as he called it. You could see the sea from there, and Monte Pellegrino on the other side. Dressed in a white coat that made him look like a Chemistry teacher, Pietro would boil up his mixture in huge pans. He knew how to bleach hair and dye it again so that the new color would hold fast when washed. Giulia studied the process for hours, attentive to his slightest movement. Her father watched the pans of hair like her mother watched the pasta on the stove. He stirred the hair with a wooden paddle, left it to stand, then stirred it again, tirelessly, over and over. He was patient and painstaking, and there was love and care in his handling of the hair. One day, he liked to say, this hair will be worn. It deserves the greatest respect. Sometimes, Giulia found herself daydreaming about the women who would wear the finished wigs. Sicilian men didn’t tend to wear hairpieces—they were too proud, too attached to their idea of virility.

  For unknown reasons, some hair resisted the Lanfredis’ secret formula. Most strands would be immersed in the pans and emerge milky white, ready to be dyed anew, but a few would retain their original color. These rebel hairs posed a very real problem: it was unthinkable for a client to find a rogue black or brown hair in a meticulously dyed skein of blond. The delicate task fell to Giulia, with her very sharp eyes: she would sort the hairs, one by one, and weed out the stubborn individualists. It was a merciless, meticulous witch hunt, pursued day after day.

  Paola’s voice interrupted her reverie.

  “Mia cara, you look tired. You’ve been up all night reading again.”

  Giulia didn’t bother to deny it. There was nothing you could hide from Paola. The old lady was the doyenne of the workforce. Everyone called her La Nonna. She had known Giulia’s father when he was a boy, and liked to tell everyone how she used to tie his shoelaces for him. From the vantage point of her seventy-five years, there was nothing she did not see. Her hands were worn, her skin was wrinkled like parchment, but her eyes were still piercingly sharp. Widowed at twenty-five, she had raised four children alone, refusing ever to remarry. When asked why, she would say she cherished her freedom: a married woman was accountable, she said. Do whatever you like, mia cara, she would tell Giulia, but above all, never marry. She often talked about her marriage, to a man chosen by her father. Her future husband’s family were lemon growers. La Nonna was made to work gathering the fruit, even on her wedding day. There was no rest in the countryside. She remembered the smell of lemons, forever on her husband’s hands and clothes. When he died of pneumonia only a few years later, leaving her alone with four children, she was forced to move to the town and look for work. That was when she met Giulia’s grandfather, who hired her for his workshop. Five decades had passed, and she was still employed there.