When I first arrived in Italy five years ago, it was immediately apparent that my walk was perhaps a bit too quick and noisy for the quiet piazzas of our small town. As time passed and I lost my sense of wonder, my feet also began to drag along for boring, predictable walks to the town centre where I had nowhere to go in particular. My steps adjusted to their new, relaxed stroll more in tune with the slow pace of my new home. Then, a couple of years later, like other new mothers I began pushing my stroller every morning, along the same cobbled lanes, chasing the fading sunshine to warm a little one, on those very short, winter days. The social pressure for a baby’s obligatory daily voyage into the outdoors — catching the air and light — was new to me, and frankly, a bit inconvenient.

I remember growing up mainly indoors. It was either the heat, the poor security situation, pollution, the lack of walkable roads or simply a combination of all that kept us kids (especially girls) locked into our houses in Karachi.

I now live in a small town in northern Italy, less than 15 kilometres from central Milan, but in every other way, far removed from it. It’s not a place for the young and restless. Those who want more from life graduate from high school looking forward to their next big step — getting out of here. What remains is a mix of those who will inherit local businesses, marry their childhood sweetheart and rely on an army of grandparents to mind the kids, or those who, like the town itself, find comfort in their known, unchanging reality.

As Italy grapples with an influx of migrants, people of a small town in the Lombardi region wonder what’s going on

My town thrives on convention and predictability. On a walk around the neighbourhood, well dressed and stylish Italians will be able to point out the school their grandmother attended, and the butcher she used that the family continues to go to. They know their neighbours since childhood and are likely to have married lovers who grew up in an adjoining street. Most families vacation in the same summer beach town and cruise down the same ski slopes every year. There is great comfort in knowing that everything will continue to fall into its own slot without any surprises and an entire year’s planning is done an entire year in advance.

Imagine the nervousness then when things around my townspeople began to change. Just within the last couple of years, two Chinese tailoring shops have opened up on my walk leading to the unchangeable town centre. In the centre itself, dark skinned, poorly dressed men and some women stand at street corners begging for money or selling children’s books or toys to passersby. They are more likely to be from Nigeria, Gambia, Ethiopia — migrants who have made it to Italy’s shore in extreme desperation. In the evenings, Pakistani and Bengali flower-sellers go from restaurant to restaurant — surprisingly they are free to enter and disturb the clients; imagine beggars walking into a restaurant in Karachi — interrupting the Italian dining experience. Hijab-clad women are now seen shopping at the local weekly fruit market, and groups of Middle-Eastern men stand suspiciously in corners, speaking in unknown tongues that invoke fear and danger. Towns people think they are most probably selling drugs.

The people of my town are left wondering: “what’s going on?”

This was also the caption on a photograph that appeared on one of my town’s group pages on Facebook. Usually, people share pictures of lost dogs, stolen bicycles and beautiful sunsets, but here was a poorly-taken photograph of a group of young men sitting on a ledge outside the main train station. “What’s going on?” the post said. All the men in the photograph were African, poorly dressed, looking weak and exhausted, and perhaps to some, a threat. The comments were vitriolic. People ranted about the face of their town changing, and their sisters feeling unsafe walking back from the station in the evenings. They recounted their own interactions with “such people” — one held a knife to an old lady’s neck for money, another yelled out profanities to a passing Italian driver. Words like “uncultured” and “aggressive” were used repeatedly.

Surely, this change is making many people uneasy. The influx of migrants is common discussion at gatherings, dinner tables, and even amongst mommies at playgroups. There is usually concern, bordering on political correctness, which readily turns into anger when the same people begin posting comments on social media. There is no doubt that the situation is complicated and it has changed many people.

My town, the last bastion of left politics in the Lombardy region, recently elected an anti-immigrant centre-right mayor to replace the centre-left local government. The political discourse by the right throughout the mayoral campaign was about “security”, “our families first”, “ghettoisation” and halting the inflow of migrants into the town. One acquaintance has declared himself a “racist, from now on” on public fora because of how he now feels about black people. Another acquaintance views the hijab-clad women now seen regularly at the fruit market to be challenging the culture of the city. A friend mocked that the best way of getting a job and a house in Italy now is to swim up the shore of Sicily and pretend to be an asylum seeker. The state even gives you money for three cigarettes a day, she said. And she is herself a migrant to Italy.

I’m worried about where this will lead because the tension is rising in all of Italy. In this year alone, over 95,000 people have arrived in the country by sea. These are people without jobs, without money, without many skills and in a country that has still not recovered from the economic crisis, is culturally insular and where the state is reaching levels of exasperation on how to deal with the growing number of arrivals. The migrants are desperate and either live in state-sponsored temporary housing, or lie homeless on the streets, near train stations, begging for money and dignity. They have introduced a whole new reality to small Italian towns and the sheer number is testing the country’s economic and cultural foundations.

I’m worried about where this will lead because the tension is rising in all of Italy. In this year alone, over 95,000 people have arrived in the country by sea. These are people without jobs, without money, without many skills and in a country that has still not recovered from the economic crisis, is culturally insular and where the state is reaching levels of exasperation on how to deal with the growing number of arrivals. The migrants are desperate and either live in state-sponsored temporary housing, or lie homeless on the streets, near train stations, begging for money and dignity.

It is disconcerting to have so many poor, unhappy people, far away from their homes and families, in a strange land where they know they are unwanted. I see despondent, defeated and exhausted faces of migrants who steal short naps under trees or on public benches and then abruptly get up and go back to selling books or toys to parents of happy children playing in the piazzas. They don’t belong to this town and to its sounds of laughter and joy.

All those five years ago, I landed at the Milan airport on a one-way ticket from Karachi, flying direct with PIA. The crew told me that every few years, the Italian government offers to ‘legalise’ those who are in the country without the proper paperwork. When that process took place, PIA had to increase its number of flights for some time because people were finally able to go back home with a visa allowing return to Italy. At the time, I knew only one Pakistani already living in the town I would then call home. He sold flowers by night and helped out with some work as a labourer during the day. On my previous visits, he had shown me pictures of his four children who he left behind with his wife in Rawalpindi. He hadn’t been back in five years. He was one of many young Pakistani men I have found in various countries who walk around with photographs of their children in their pockets — old pictures with folds on them, perhaps looking nothing like the children do now.

PIA now flies only once a week, on Fridays. Last Friday it took with it, the charred body of a broken-hearted young Pakistani man. ‘GF’ was a 33-year-old asylum seeker, living at a shelter home provided by a local NGO just a few kilometres from me, in another small town of northern Italy. On a mid-September Wednesday afternoon, he stood at a small parking spot on a roadside, between a grocery store and the post office, doused his body with petrol and set himself on fire. Passersby must have stopped and looked in absolute horror.

On late afternoons, a nondescript road in small town Italy only ever sees parents walking with their children to a neighbourhood park, or old people sitting on benches watching the same world go by every day, used to a predictable stillness in the air. And in the middle of all this mundaneness, was this incomprehensible display of despondency by a man succumbing to his insufferable pain. And perhaps the only person who could make some sense of this anguish was a 20-year-old Egyptian, himself an asylum seeker, who intervened and threw his jacket onto the burning man, putting out some of the flames.

Help arrived, as it does when emotional suffering becomes physically apparent. A helicopter took ‘GF’ to a hospital in Milan. During the night between Wednesday and Thursday, he passed away, unable perhaps to deal with the pain of the death of his child back in Pakistan, a few months earlier. This was grief compounded by separation from family, and the agony of having covered this difficult journey thus far, only to realise that there’s no way ahead and no way back.

The writer is a former television producer now living in Italy

Published in Dawn, EOS, October 22nd, 2017