The Centre(14)

“Is this Anisa Ellahi? We believe you’ve been referred to us to study German.”

“Oh my god, is this the Centre?” I asked. “I’ve been waiting for your call.”

“Before we proceed,” the voice cut me off. “I’m going to pass you on to our lawyers to make sure you understand the terms of our nondisclosure agreement. Are you happy with that?”

“Of course,” I replied and was transferred to a man who spoke to me at length in the most dry and legalistic language possible.

“Yep, yep, I understand,” I interjected periodically, pacing around my living room while prompting Billee to chase his little mouse thing. The gist of what the lawyer said was intellectual property blah-blah, privacy, secrecy, nondisclosure, the Centre not being held responsible, my own volition, strict agreement to their timetable, no phones, no communication with the outside world whatsoever, and so on. “Yes. Great. Sounds good. Adam already filled me in.”

Eventually, after receiving my “verbal consent,” the lawyer transferred me back to the earlier voice, who asked whether I was free for an interview later that week.

Yes, I said. Yes I was.

·

On the day of my interview, I stopped at Naima’s beforehand. Naima lived in a spacious two bedroom in Peckham that she shared with her friend Salma, a movement therapist who did intuitive massage and ran 5Rhythms dance courses. Both women often worked out of their living room, which they’d set up as a kind of yoga/dance studio and ceremonial space. The morning I arrived, I found Naima in the kitchen, cutting up apples for a large pot of porridge bubbling on the stove. She was preparing it for the four women asleep in her living room after the ceremony they’d done the night before.

“Can you believe it?” I said. “If what Adam says is true, then in less than two weeks, I’ll be able to read, like Freud, in the original.”

“Did Freud write in German?” she asked.

“I think so. But like, Goethe or whatever. Wouldn’t that be amazing?”

It’s not that I wasn’t conscious that both Adam and the lawyer had sworn me to secrecy, but Naima, well, telling Naima something was no different from telling it to myself in the bathroom mirror. Or telling Billee. To me, Naima was that ageless tree in the park into which you whispered your deepest secrets. And there was no safer space than her flat either. Partly because the ayahuasca ceremonies she ran weren’t, technically speaking, legal, and partly because she was Muslim, Naima was convinced that one way or the other, the government was listening in. She allowed no phones in her ceremonial spaces, only used Telegram, and hung around on social media sites in what she called “incognito mode.” And so, I spilled.

“They said we’re not allowed any laptops or phones or anything, not even books,” I said. “And we’re not allowed to speak to the other Learners—Learners, that’s what they call the students. Isn’t that weird? And there’s a strict diet. Meditation. 5 a.m. wake ups—”

“Oh god, sounds intense. Are you sure Adam hasn’t enlisted you into the military or something?”

“They said it’s to create a distraction-free space so we can fully absorb the new language.”

“Well, might be good for you to be device-free for a while. I do that in my retreats too.”

“And it’s fluency guaranteed. And not just textbook fluency. Adam spoke better Urdu than me. Like the kind of Urdu our grandmothers speak.”

“It’s like preservation when it’s like that, right? Preservation of cultures.”

“Well, yeah, except it wasn’t his culture,” I said.

“I just mean, with dying-out languages—it could be a way of preserving them. Pass the cinnamon.”

“Yeah, I guess,” I said, handing her the container. “But imagine if I had that in German. It could be like a key to a whole new universe.”

“I mean, it’s totally you, for sure,” she said. “But I still don’t get it. How does it work?’

“We’ll find out, I guess.”

“How much does it cost?”

“Two thousand.”

“Oof. Pricey. But worth it, sounds like? If it works.”

The course was actually, of course, twenty thousand, not two, but I didn’t know how to say this to Naima. I felt like the number would sound inconceivable to her, or that she’d look at me differently, somehow, if she knew. I’d like to think that my obfuscation was a gesture of empathy, but I don’t know, maybe it was a dickhead move. Maybe, through these small erasures, which we tell ourselves are “polite” or whatever, we’re covering up a vast network of structural inequality. Who knows. It’s just what came to me in the moment, and I felt my cheeks redden even as I said it. Two thousand.

When we’d first met at uni, Naima had told all our friends that her parents were retired schoolteachers. Then one day, in our third year, while we were smoking a joint in the park, she’d confessed to me that her father was in fact a taxi driver, her mother a seamstress. I was confused by the secrecy but, I guess, in an entitled way. Having come from a place where there was virtually no class mobility, I’d operated in a tiny bubble and never properly considered the emotional nuances of what it might feel like to be in her shoes. And so Naima’s shame came as a surprise. She’d been on her own journey with that since, though, and had become more open about her family background, although, I don’t know, maybe this still changed depending on which circles she was traveling through.