THE BEGINNING

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PENGUIN BOOKS

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Penguin Books is part of the Penguin Random House group of companies whose addresses can be found at global.penguinrandomhouse.com.

This translation first published in Penguin Books 2019

Introduction, selection and editorial material copyright © Jhumpa Lahiri, 2019

The copyright information on pages 485–490 constitutes an extension to this page

The moral right of the editor, authors and translators has been asserted

Painting: 2016 © Nathalie Du Pasquier
Cover design: Tom Etherington

ISBN: 978-0-141-98562-6

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The Mother

1 A military non-commissioned officer: From the district gendarmerie.

2 Senseless space: Devoid of sensory apparatus and therefore of sensitivity.

3 Peoples: The word ‘people’, ‘peoples’ is still used today in certain better areas of Lombardy to mean, more or less, ‘civilized progeny, ancestry of Roman origin, community of beings instructed in the Gospel and Roman teachings’. Sometimes ‘good people’ = ‘bona gens’. A reverse process to that for which the Romans and Pagans were called ‘gentiles’, which meant ‘idolatrous foreigners’, by the Hebrews and by Paul: in the somewhat drawling violence with which the word emerges from the throats of fellow countrymen in such a way as to induce a wealth of meanings and a visceral memory of centuries and events long past, and the trauma of a whole Ambrosian-Tridentine ‘civilization’: namely of a conversion, of a collective baptism during the years of Theodelinda, who founded churches and temples dedicated to John the Baptist (Monza, Florence), and of a gradual acquisition of the new language and ritual. The ‘fara’, a Lombard family or community established in a specific village or area, gradually become ‘gens’, ‘bona gens’.

4 [Historical]: A shutter: The house had ordinary folding shutters: and some shutters ‘à coulisse’.

5 Underground darkness: The house was built on a slope, where the land falls away: and the foot of the staircase was therefore below the level of the ground above it.

6 The strategists of the republic: South American Republic, 1916.

7 Recently, he had been to Modetia: Founded in 1695 below the last undulating moraines of Mount Serruchón, by several immigrants from Monza; who named the new city with the Latin name of the city they had left behind.