Glistening Whiteness: A marble quarry where the women too toil to earn a living

I spent the first twenty years of my life in small towns in India. And I thought that small towns in India were all the same. It didn't matter which language was spoken or which part of the country the small town was located in, nothing much changed. The dynamics of claustrophobia reigned.

Everyone knew everyone else. And everyone knew everyone else's business private and public. Such was the power of this omnipresent scrutiny that I swore to get out of small towns the moment I could. And I did.

But by a strange quirk of destiny, as a writer my writing now takes me again and again to small towns.

Sometimes it is research; sometimes it is part of the writing process and sometimes it is authorship. In the last six years I have travelled to Italy several times. I have been to most of the well visited parts of Italy as part of book tours, but this was the first time I was visiting true small town Italy Carrara.

Carrara is world famous for its marble. All of the finest Italian sculptors including Michelangelo came to Carrara to source their marble. Such is the quality of the marble here, the glistening whiteness that statuary acquires a whole new life when chiselled out of these white blocks. But Carrara marble is also much sought after the world over for surfaces in home and office. So very often our real estate advertisements throw the phrase 'real Italian marble' as a special perk to persuade the consumer into making that decision.

But as I am neither an architect nor a marble dealer, I was surprised to be invited to Carrara for a festival to foster a better understanding of India. Why me? Why not a politician or a diplomat? A journalist or a cultural expert who could give them a better overview of India?

Then I was taken up to the marble caves of Carrara. My guide told me about the rigours of the quarryman's life; his hardship and the constant danger he lived with. And then he told me about the quarryman's woman. Of mothers, wives, and daughters. Of lives and toil that was no less arduous than the quarryman's. If he with his mallet and chisel cut the marble, then she was the one who cooked and cleaned and then brought up the sand through mountain paths. It was she who made the special paste of sand and water to coat the cables that helped bring down the marble to the world. Without her the marble would remain a block where it was.

Everywhere in Carrara there are symbols of the quarryman's triumph. Statues of men holding marble slabs on their back. Testament to their grit and glory. But I didn't see a single statue of a woman carrying a basket of sand on her head. Neither did I see a testament to the waiting woman. Of that figure waiting for her husband, son or father to come home...

And suddenly I knew why I was invited to Carrara that is preparing for competition from India. A need to understand the Indian woman. The woman after all represents the constant of any country, any economy. If only Carrara would first look within, at its own women.