The Centre(54)

Some parts of my body were particularly difficult to digest: the bum that had been caressed by an anonymous hand at Funland when I was eight years old, the waist that had been encircled by a presumptuous arm. Then there were the breasts: the nipples that had been teasingly pinched by a cousin in the swimming pool, the chest that had to be concealed and covered up from prying eyes, the breasts—which, I have to say, are not even particularly large or unique—that had been leeringly gazed at enough times and from a young enough age that I’d started carrying them around guiltily and apologetically. Then there were the ears that had heard things they wished they hadn’t, a brain that made up stories that weren’t true. Some of these revelations would come up in waves and leave me reeling, and I would understand why the mind chooses to cut itself off from the body. But so often, joy and beauty were stuck in the same places as grief and shame, and one could not be accessed without the other. All the memories, the feelings and sensations that I had walked away from over the course of my life, were still there, intertwined in my physical body, and now I was untangling them. Sometimes, it felt like I was cutting up my own tongue with a knife and fork before consuming it with that same tongue.

I stayed in touch with Shiba throughout this process, telling her of my journey. We contemplated together what it truly meant to be in touch with the body—with the flesh and blood and muscle and tendon and fascia of it all—and with that other, more ephemeral substance that flowed through all things. The body, I started to see, was a memory keeper. It knew everything. It made me sad that I had lived at such a remove from this fountain of knowledge, that this communication with my own self had been so badly severed.

And there was something else, too, something I could only touch the edges of. When I felt my stomach, my womb, my breasts and sternum, I saw that they didn’t just hold my memories, they held the rage and pain and isolation, the joy and passion and lust, of the women before me. My body remembered my mother’s life experiences and my grandmother’s and her mother’s before her. I felt the violations and indiscretions, the reverence and longings, from unfathomable years back. When I caught these glimpses, I was filled with awe. And it started to feel like there was a way to return to the very first woman in my lineage who had experienced a certain kind of shame and to find comfort, strength, and reparation for her from the women who had come before. It’s hard to explain, really, but when people say the body remembers, the breadth of this memory, I suspect, is almost inconceivable.

“I’m starting to understand,” I told Shiba, “to see the infinite possibility that we hold.”

“I’m so glad.”

And in this way, a slow reconciliation took place between Shiba and me. We met again a few times, reaching a new depth in our relationship from the secrets slowly revealing themselves. Shiba had never let a friend into this part of her life before, and she wanted to show me more. Every year, she shared, her father and his partners would meet in person to further their research, and this time, the four of them were getting together at her house in Delhi.

“You should come with me,” she said. “You’d get more insight into the process and its potential.”

“To Delhi?”

“Yeah. I’d love it if you came. I can show you my hometown, and you’ll see firsthand where the Centre began, how it really works.”

I had never been to Delhi before and felt excited about the prospect of visiting Shiba’s home, of meeting these men, and understanding how they’d discovered this strange and wonderful process. I also felt, of course, that it was by going to Delhi that I could discover what had really happened to Anna and the other Storytellers, and by then, I trusted that Shiba would never let any harm come to me. Also, frankly, I was fascinated by the idea of visiting India, a country for which Pakistan has both great loathing and immense longing. It was where the films I subtitled were made, and the place where so many of my closest friends came from too. It was also, in fact, the place that my own ancestors had inhabited pre-partition.

And so I told her that yes, of course, I would love to go.





NINE


Shiba and I managed to get ourselves on the same flight to Delhi and met at Heathrow airport. Rolling our suitcases behind us, we browsed through the airport bookshop, tried the perfume samples, and bought some extra-large Toblerone bars before boarding the plane. On the flight, we picked the same film and hit pause and play on the little screens in front of us until they were perfectly synchronized. After that, we played Scrabble on a mini kit we’d bought from the bookshop, and then, we fell asleep. Shiba was, I decided, my favorite person to fly with.

When we woke up for mealtime, Shiba turned to me and said, “It’s always strange when a friend meets a parent, no? Like, you’re afraid they’ll see you differently after.”

“Nah, don’t worry. All parents are weird. I won’t hold yours against you.”

“I’ve never introduced anyone to this part of my life before,” she said. “It’s only ever been me and the uncles.”

I felt like there was an unarticulated hope behind Shiba’s words, that perhaps she wanted me to be more involved with the Centre at some point, maybe even help her run it. Or maybe that’s just what I wanted. I imagined us living side by side, me doing my translations in a studio overlooking the beautiful garden, watching the strange processes taking place below, understanding them more deeply every day and thereby understanding myself more fully as well—and helping Shiba, playing cohost to aristocrats and diplomats, scholars and scientists who would come to this secret place we ran together. Don’t get me wrong, I was still a bit wary, not entirely taken in, but I can’t deny that a part of me was captivated.