Acqua sporca

Dirty water

A fierce and ambitious debut set between Italy and Sri La nka, exploring themes such as migration, identity, colonialism, and the shifting perception of mental health across geographies and time.

After thirty years in Italy, Neela decides to return to Sri Lanka. It is not an easy decision, and it unsettles the fragile balance of her entire bourgeois family across two continents and, especially, the delicate bond with her grown-up daughter Ayesha. After years working as a caregiver in an Italian family and having opened her own beauty salon almost a life later, Neela feels that going back home is the only way to make sense of who she has become. And perhaps finally banish the demon (yakshaya) that constantly haunts her. Meanwhile, in Colombo, Neela’s sister Himali is raising her adopted daughter as the embodiment of a lost dream, alongside her husband, a former communist militant, now an illegal immigrant in Europe. Pavitra, instead, the youngest of the Balasinghe sisters, has never really recovered from the accident that crippled her at the dawn of her first love and now drifts through the shadows of an apartment lent by her sister, after a failed marriage. The exorcism once performed on her body to cast out her demons lighted her devotion towards every hue of divinity. Her daughter Hirunika doesn’t share her faith: a disillusioned young woman convinced she was born on the wrong side of the world, she cynically capitalizes her body, dreaming her cousin’s life in Europe. But in Milan, Ayesha is confronting her mother and above all the anxieties of a millennial adult, while struggling to build a career as a high-level photographer—pressured by the international art scene to exploit the Sri-Lankan history and lore of her family. These constant efforts erupt in an uneasiness echoing her mother’s, one that brings along anxiety, headaches, and depression—as if it were a Western version of the Balasinghe family’s illness… Spanning continents and generations, Acqua sporca is a powerful novel about uprooted identities, invisible legacies, and the subtle clash between tradition and modernity, poverty and social status. Between a country where survival often means compromise and another where myth and memory are still lenses to interpret reality.