The Centre(34)

A few months later, around the time I started working on Songbird, we arranged a Skype call and ended up speaking for nearly three hours. I introduced her to Billee and made a sandwich while we spoke, while she sipped from a mug of coffee and told me about the new cohort of Learners she was hosting. After that, we spoke on the phone nearly every night, and Shiba finally started sharing details about her personal life. I learned that she lived at the Centre full-time, in a studio flat in the staff quarters.

“Did I mention my dad owns the place?”

“I don’t think so,” I replied casually. She totally knew she hadn’t mentioned this before, but the tentativeness with which she shared made me feel that if I showed any excitement at being initiated into this new level of confidence, she might flee.

“He’s one of the founders.”

“Oh, so that’s how you got the gig,” I teased. “That makes me feel better about myself. Less inadequate.”

“You feel inadequate?”

“Of course! Here I am, working out of my living room, and you’re singlehandedly running a whole five-star, secret service, Men in Black operation out of a mansion in Sussex.”

She laughed. “You should never feel inadequate. I told you, remember? Perfect as you are.”

“Like I said, more perfection’s never a bad thing.”

Shiba shared that her father, who was based in Delhi, had founded the company many years ago with three friends from university. Her emotional investment in the Centre made more sense to me after learning about this personal connection. I was hungry for more details but knew that she’d share at her own pace. And I didn’t really mind Shiba’s reservedness. I saw it as part of her deep sensitivity, which I was captivated by. Shiba had a gentle, profound way of moving in the world, and through her gaze, everything became a kind of metaphor. For instance, once, while we were Skyping, I admired the thriving plants behind her, and she told me that every month, she’d pour her menstrual cups into a jug of water, and then at the end of the week, she would water her plants with that mixture.

“It’s the stem cells. That’s why these babies are so lush, you see. In fact,” she continued, “they say if you feed your stem cells to the fruit and veg you’re growing, the food will actually change composition, tailoring its nutrients especially for you. Isn’t that amazing?”

I didn’t know if this was true. I didn’t look into it. And, honestly, even if it were real, there probably wouldn’t have been many studies—such matters were not important, after all, in the masculine world of science. I do know, however, that menstrual blood is an important material in stem cell research. But the point is, everything Shiba said to me was true, in some sense beyond numbers and charts and the seen universe. Shiba felt to me like a channeler of truth. And I’m not just saying this because I was a little besotted. No, it’s the other way around. I was besotted because I saw the truth channeling. Shiba, you see, was a poem.

Oh my god. She was a poem? As soon as I say the words, I want to take them back. I sound like the sleazy male poets who compare their beloveds to the stars, the moon, the flame, the rosebud—men who place their women on such lofty and sacred pedestals that even normal bodily functions become an embarrassment, who, without ever asking, place beneath their women’s feet whole blankets into which they’ve woven their fragile and all-important dreams, forcing them to forever walk on eggshells. No, I’m not this way. I’m not interested in turning people into deities, fixing them into positions from which they’re unable to stray. I’m a woman myself. I’d had it all done to me. And so I hope my feelings for Shiba, even though they contained a kind of adoration, did not resemble the love with which men smother and contain women, pinning them down like butterflies on a board, with their names underneath in elegant calligraphy. We had one of those in our home in Karachi. Beautiful butterflies in a frame, wings spread, their man-made names etched underneath. I think I felt concern for those butterflies when I was younger, even though I knew they were essentially—gone. And yet, the shimmering blue of their wings is still so vivid in my mind that I can’t help but acknowledge the power of that beauty preserved.

It is hard to know how to love someone well.

I told Shiba that I, too, would try pouring my menstrual blood into the plants on my balcony.

“You know what they say?” she said. “They say that if all the women started giving their blood back to the land, there would be no more need for war.”

The months passed, and our relationship deepened. We even started exchanging gifts. On her birthday, I sent Shiba a truck art–inspired bag that I’d bought in Karachi. On mine, she sent me a book of essays by Audre Lorde. I loved it and told her afterward that I’d annotated it heavily, writing my comments in the margins.

“Send it back to me,” she said. “And then I’ll reread it and write in my comments and post it to you.”

And so I did, and we found ourselves conversing within the pages of the book. It was a beautiful experience. And I think there was something about this exchange that moved our relationship from the virtual back to the physical and finally led to our deciding to meet in person. It had been over two years since my time at the Centre. But finally, about six months after Songbird came out and a handful since Naima and Azeem got together, we decided it was time. Brighton, we thought, would be a good spot. Two weeks later, we met there, just by the station.