What is truly amazing about Manpreet Kaur is that she does not really know how special she is and why her story deserves to be told. Not to advertise herself, and she never wanted this thinking of herself as an ‘average’ girl. But because from today on, listening to her story, a little girl coming from a village in Punjab will know that this is possible.
Will know she has a chance. A chance to live her life in a different country the way any other girl do and still to be rooted into her heritage traditions. A chance to be, in Manpreet’s case, the first and only Indian origin girl to own and drive a taxi in Rome, Italy. At less than 30, while being married and having a little child, Brian.
This story starts by chance, while calling a cab in a sunny, cold, Rome morning: 5 minutes to reach, says the app, name of the driver Manpreet. And, as she said, the passenger is the only journalist in Italy able to understand she is Indian, Sikh, Punjabi and also how peculiar this is. People, she says, usually don’t think she is Indian. And, to be fair, she speaks not only a perfect Italian but also with a quite heavy Roman accent.
Italian-Punjabi at its best: friendly, talkative and smiling. A perfect example of how two cultures can beautifully blend together. “I was six when I arrived in Italy, and remember very little of my life in India. My father has been living in Italy since Eighties, working first in a stable and then owning a car washing facility”. And there she was, growing up in Rome with a quite open minded family.
She went to school, up to high school: “I’m in Italy since almost 25 years and I don’t have a single Indian friend except my relatives: there were no other Indian kids in school. They gave me a new name, Manuela, because nobody could possibly pronounce my name. My family gave me all the possible freedom, but I never took advantage of it. I’m still deeply Indian under this aspect: I do have a great respect for my parents and for their culture, I never even thought to do things that I knew or I believed would hurt them or make them angry”.
She was 23 when, after finishing school and working a couple of years as hairdresser, marriage came into the picture. “This is the only thing my parents were always adamant about: no way you date or marry an Italian guy, I was supposed to marry only a suitable Indian boy from our community. They raised me up with this as the only limit to my freedom of choice. But then, when they told me they were going to introduce me to a ‘suitable boy’ in India, a boy from a nearby village, I said: no way. I went to India ready to reject the proposal.
But then, what happend was totally unexpected: the boy arrived, I was peeping from another room, from a window. And the moment I saw him I said yes, I’ll marry him. Just like that. My family was like: are you sure? Why did you change your mind so soon? Don’t you want to see some other boy? Nobody is going to force you, you can choose. But I had already made my choice. I fell madly in love, and so did him. We got married in India two years later, with a traditional Punjabi wedding. He came to Italy and is now working with my parents in the car-washing place”.
And here comes something else Manpreet never realized, something not easy to swallow even for ‘enlightened’ western men: she earns much more than her husband and has a far better job. “He is totally cool with it. He supported me always, and so did my brother. Actually, while I was pregnant with Brian, my brother, who drives a taxi, and my father pushed me to start giving the exams to drive a taxi myself.
I was the one thinking no, maybe is not a job for girls, but then they insisted. And after I passed my exams, a licence was available for purchasing. I’ve got a car, started this job and now I just love it. It gives me freedom, and also the flexibility to come back when I need and being with my child”.
When Brian was born, they moved in a flat of their own, out of parent’s house. “This is when I learned cooking and, above all, cooking Indian recipes” she laughs. Manpreet relation with India is quite complex: “To summarize it, I feel too Indian to be completely Italian and, when I’m in India, too Italian to be Indian. I guess it happens to all those like me, children of immigrants born and raised up abroad: we are stuck in a kind of nowhere land, a land where we do not truly belong to a culture or the other”.
A Nowhere land, altough, where her Indian family is proud of her, her Italian friends are proud of her, and the few and obvious dissent voices coming from those who think a girl’s place is at home are just a distant background noise. A land where girls like Manpreet, confident and strong and brave, can take the best of two worlds and make a new world for themselves. And stories that deserve to be told.
