The Centre(2)

“Okay, yeah, it could be worse,” I said. “But what I do, it’s not real translation, is it? Like anyone could do it—”

“That’s definitely not true,” Naima said. “But if it feels like it’s not real translation then do real translation. Do short stories? Books?”

I shook my head. “I mean, one of the problems is that nobody reads in Urdu anymore.”

“That can’t be true,” she said. “You just need to plug into the scene. My uncle tells me Urdu poetry is huge in Pakistan.”

“Maybe I’m not good enough.”

“Please.”

“No, I’m serious. Maybe I’m just too disconnected. Every day my Urdu gets worse. And now it’s all mixed up with the Hindi. The other day I said shanti instead of khamoshi.”

“What about French then?”

“I mean, my French is mediocre. Not like French-person French.”

“Well, I think what the cards are trying to tell you is to be happy where you are, sweet child,” Naima said, stroking my head in a mock-patronizing way.

“You can’t just tell someone to ‘be happy,’ Naima. That’s not how it works. Happiness isn’t something you choose. It just … happens. It’s a hap, meaning, ‘chance.’ That’s Sara Ahmed.”

“Well, that’s the difference between us,” she said. “For me, happiness doesn’t just happen. It’s already there, just …” she made the motion of plucking a piece of fruit from the air, “reach out and take it, you know? But listen, I have to go. In the meantime, you need to work on this. Homework: gratitude journal.”

“You know I’m not gonna do that shit. Listen, stay awhile longer. Let’s make dessert.”

“Wish I could,” she said, gathering up her cards and tucking them away in a silken square of fabric. “But I have a client at five.”

“Tarot?”

“Tantra. He’s actually one of my faves. Thirty-one and never had an intimate relationship. Can you believe that? Really sweet guy. We’re moving slowly, carefully. It feels like I’m kind of putting him through an initiation.” She laughed. “As if I’m his gateway girlfriend or something.”

“What’s he like?”

“He’s sweet. He brings me flowers sometimes, and I make a meal, and then we practice intimacy. Sometimes we watch Netflix and things after. He books four-hour sessions, imagine.”

“That must be a lot of money he’s paying you.”

“I don’t charge him that much. It’s actually a cozy way to spend the day. I look forward to our sessions every week.”

Naima slipped her arms into her oversized fluffy olive-green coat and slung her backpack on.

“He’s lucky he has you to initiate him,” I said.

“Hope so. I have to be careful, though, that I’m his gateway girlfriend and not his replacement girlfriend, you know?”

“How do you do that?”

“I dunno. Just … intuition. Reading each moment and moving from there. Maybe, ultimately, I’ll have to stage a kind of break up. We’ll see.”

Naima’s tantric work baffled me. In that realm, the sexual realm, where all borders and boundaries become blurred, I didn’t understand how she maintained integrity. She would say, though, that the blurred boundaries were precisely the point, that it’s exactly in that place of orgasmic bliss or, sometimes, sheer terror where the stuff we normally keep repressed floats to the surface, ripe for transformation.

“You’d be surprised,” she’d once said, “how often they cry. That’s the release they’re really craving.”

After Naima left, I sat down with my books and laptop to do some translations, just for me. I wouldn’t do anything with these texts I worked on; it was more of a meditative exercise, in the same way that some people like to do puzzles or crosswords. When I really got into a translation, I would become so absorbed that I’d forget myself. It felt a bit like … disappearing. And it would often take rumbles from my belly or pangs from my bladder to remind me to return to the world.

Sometimes, when I was translating a text, it felt like I was writing the novel itself. Like I was Nabokov. Like I wrote Lolita. Lo-lee-ta. The tongue takes the same trip down the top of the mouth whether you trip over the syllables in Urdu or English. In fact, the tongue does an even more precise dance with the soft t in the Urdu. Lo-lee-ta.

That day, inspired by a piece in the New Yorker, I’d pulled out a copy of L’?tranger from my bookshelf, along with an English translation of the book. In the article, the writer—something Bloom—meticulously takes apart the very first line of the novel: “Aujourd’hui, maman est morte.” My English edition translates this to “Maman died today.”

Maman. It’s a tough one, isn’t it? What is the emotional resonance of that word in its context, and what in English comes closest? Bloom concludes that “Mother died today” is too clinical, too cold, and then ponders other options. Mother, my mother, Mom, even Mommy. Ultimately, he argues for retaining “Maman,” just as my edition does. Personally, I think I’d opt for “Mum died.” That feels like a more faithful rendition to me. But who knows. It was Bloom who was, after all, the published professional while I was just standing there, head in hands, staring at the dry patch.