The Centre(10)
“I’m so sorry.”
“I sent boob pics, you know.”
He went quiet for a moment.
“He didn’t say.”
We drove on, me trying to process the idea of this miraculous school, him looking out the window in fascination with the novelty of it all. And then I looked out the window too, and felt moved by a nostalgic haze. A part of me wanted to share, to point out Teen Talwar or the big qabristan I used to be afraid of, to say something as we passed by Bata or Ghani Sons, where we’d made our annual pilgrimage for school uniforms, or the hangouts in Zamzama I knew so well. But I didn’t say a word. I found that I didn’t want to give this man anything more of my beloved city when he’d taken something at its heart so secretively and easily.
“Are you still angry?” he asked.
“No, not angry. I just, I can’t believe it.” I pulled out my phone and googled The Centre, language school. Millions of random links for language schools came up. “Show me.”
“I told you. It’s highly exclusive. They have no online presence whatsoever. Not even emails. They only communicate over the phone.”
“I can’t believe you kept this from me.”
“Please, Anisa, don’t let this spoil our trip.”
I agreed that this wasn’t the time, and we decided to hit pause on discussing the Centre further. But with the matter left lingering, the distance that I’d already felt between us grew starker. And I think my parents sensed the distance too. They greeted Adam with politeness but also skepticism, confirming, I think, his worst fears.
I noticed that in Adam’s presence, Abba held himself a bit taller, and his voice deepened just a hint.
“So, Adam, what do your parents do?” he asked as soon as he felt it appropriate, which wasn’t long after “Hi, hello, how was your flight?”
“Umm, it’s just my mum. She works in catering.”
“All right, very good,” Abba said and patted him on the shoulder. “A self-made man.”
Adam smiled graciously in response and later told me that he thought my parents were very nice, but I could swear I saw his neck muscles tense when Abba said that.
Abba and I generally got along well, settling into a comfortable routine when together—going to the shops, kidding around, watching films in the evenings. Mostly preoccupied with work, he would take on a kind of mollycoddling and humorous demeanor toward us, his two daughters, which we sometimes prickled against but mostly rested in contentedly. And Abba’s love language was definitely presents, and this, too, we did not protest. His ceaseless generosity had found a new outlet in recent years in my sister’s beautiful child, a four-year-old who lived in Dubai. The boy, Isa, seemed to share Abba’s lifelong passion for the cosmos. The stars and planets and galaxies, I mean. When we were younger, the three of us—Abba, my sister, and I—would go up to the roof and stare through a telescope at the night sky. Seeing stars through Karachi smog sounds unlikely, but that’s what we did. If I remember correctly, a star through a telescope’s lens looks like a little dot of light rapidly dancing around and around a small circle of darkness. I imagined that Abba would be taking little Isa up there soon, little Isa, who yells, “Moon!” and jumps up and down every time he sees that glowing orb in the Dubai night sky.
As for Amma, well, Amma and I had a more intense relationship. There was a solidarity between us, a sense of shared struggle that we didn’t necessarily articulate but that was evident in the protectiveness we felt toward each other. At the same time, there was a certain tension, a layer of frost. When I would come home for the holidays, this tension would normally take a couple of days to reveal itself. At first, I would be coasting on a bout of nostalgia upon my return, poring over old photo albums and books, marveling at the luxurious spaciousness that only became apparent after spending so long in London’s cramped homes, and looking with awe at the furniture and paintings I’d grown up with, as if seeing them for the first time. I’m ashamed to say that many things that had previously gone unnoticed would take on a weird kind of “authenticity” for me—embroidered fabrics and clay pots, chaat masala and falsay—the once mundane was now the beautifully exotic. A part of me would cringe at my own delight, at this conversion to a diasporic gaze, but at the same time, I’d pack my suitcase full of these things: fabrics and ornaments, spices and keepsakes, trying to bring as much of it back with me as I could.
And so, for my first few days back, I would be joyful, appreciative, and attentive. And my mother, too, would extend herself toward me, showing me the coconut and moringa trees in the garden, the recently upholstered fabric on the sofas, a new amrood ki jelly that she discovered, and so on, and I would delight in it all. In turn, I would share my London friendship and work dramas, and we would analyze them together. Then, some time would pass. Only a little. Two or three days. And we would be sitting, for instance, at the small kitchen table to have tea, floating on a hope that neither of us dared name, a hope that the frost between us had evaporated just as quietly and mysteriously as it had settled in. But as we relaxed past those initial moments of reunion, there would come a point where, as we sat there with our teacups and she skimmed the milky film off the surface of her chai with a small silver teaspoon, revealing the scalding liquid underneath, I would feel the echoes, maybe in the flick of her wrist or from a certain tone in her voice, of a remembered sharpness, and I would brace myself for a shower of critique that descended so quickly and confusingly that it would be hard to know whether it was coming from her or from me. I suppose it was something we cocreated, but somehow, by the time she would, say, rest the teaspoon back on the saucer, we both knew that the secret hope had been foolish. I mourned this deeply, and I think she did too. Which is why, every time, we resurrected the secret hope.