We were at our favourite Persian restaurant. A young woman two tables away, not Persian herself, was telling her Persian father about her female friend in continental Europe.
The friend was Pakistani-origin. She had started dating a Latino man. The Pakistani friend’s mother, somehow, had a dream. In the dream, her daughter had lost her virginity.
The dream was the trigger.
The mother went into a spiral. The father, it was said, lost his job. The mother had a nervous breakdown. A trip back to the Muslim homeland was arranged. The daughter refused to board until she saw the return flight in her hand. Only then did she get on the plane. When she returned to the Muslim country, they told her she wasn’t going back to Europe.
We lost the rest of the story, and, over the rest of the meal, we thought about Sana Cheema.
What Sana Cheema Saw
Sana Cheema was a twenty-six-year-old Italian-Pakistani who had lived in Brescia since 2002. She wanted to marry a second-generation Italian-Pakistani man of her own choosing. Her father took her back to Gujrat, in Punjab, under the pretext of a visit.
She was strangled the day before her return flight to Italy. Her neck was broken. Her hyoid bone dislocated. Her father, her brother, and her uncle were charged. They had buried her quickly, without autopsy, and told relatives she had died of natural causes. The body had to be exhumed on a magistrate’s order after Italian media forced the case into daylight.
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