The Centre(6)
“You wouldn’t like them,” he said. “Truth is, if you’d known me back then, you wouldn’t have even spoken to me.”
He told me stories then of shoplifting and alcohol and cigarettes before he’d even reached double digits. And I thought of my own childhood, back in Karachi: my inhaler, my flat chest and braces, reading Sweet Valley High books in my bedroom and watching Urdu dramas with my grandmother in the evenings, living a life that Adam would have found painfully uncool.
“You’re the one who wouldn’t have spoken to me,” I said, and he shook his head in the way he did when he felt that there were things about him that I could never understand.
I also introduced Adam to my friends, who seemed generally approving. Naima, though, was skeptical.
“You don’t seem that into him,” she said over the phone the day after I’d invited him to a friend’s gathering.
She also said that the iceberg he claimed would melt never fully would. And although I could see what she meant, I figured that what she saw as a lack of passion could be a good thing. It felt nice to not be swept off my feet—to remain clearheaded and even-emotioned. I didn’t mind that Adam and I had some distance between us, that we could have our separate lives but still also a space we shared. And so we settled into a kind of cozy coupledom, and within three months, Adam had moved into my flat. We took turns cooking for each other. He did most of the cleaning and house repair stuff, and I did admin, like bills and groceries. In the evenings, we would often watch Netflix cuddled up on the sofa together. And during the day, I did my subtitles, working from home, while he did his work, usually from one of his offices. Adam really was fluent in several languages. He was low-key though; the Italian place he worked for didn’t know he spoke Russian, and his colleagues at the Japanese aeronautical engineering place genuinely assumed Japanese was his second mother tongue. I valued his discretion, saw it not as secrecy but modesty. And when I overheard him on his video calls speaking foreign tongues with absolute mastery, I couldn’t help but look at him with admiration. The funny thing was, though, when I tried to teach him Urdu, nothing would stick.
“I don’t get it,” I said. “How is it possible that you know nearly a dozen languages fluently, but in Urdu you can’t even remember “My name is …” or “How are you?”
“I don’t know, sweetheart,” he said. “Maybe it’s some kind of mental block. Anyway, I don’t learn like that. I can only absorb through intense study.”
I reasoned that maybe learning these languages had taken Adam more work than I’d previously imagined. He was, I’d discovered, incredibly hardworking. And the truth is, Adam’s success sometimes made me feel inadequate. I was embarrassed of my own job, which felt so sporadic and solitary, when I saw him working long hours and traveling and staying out late to have drinks with colleagues. I would feel like I had wasted all my opportunity and privilege, whereas Adam, who had come from quite difficult circumstances, had done so well in life. In fact, I would sometimes think that it was precisely those difficult circumstances that gave him the drive to come so far, and that maybe I had been too coddled. Then I would berate myself for indulging in this weird “poor little rich girl” stuff. I pushed these toxic, spiraling thoughts to the side as much as I could.
“If it’s important to you,” Adam said, “I can learn Urdu. It’s not a problem, you know.”
“No, it’s fine,” I said. “It just surprises me. Mera naam Adam hai. Easy.”
“Mera naam Adam hai,” he repeated resolvedly, but forgot again the next day.
·
After a couple more months of living together, Adam and I welcomed a little kitten into our lives. We named him Billee. Uff, there are no words to describe Billee’s kittenhood. Tail chasings and lap nestlings, teeny tiny paws and the sweetest pounces. Then, a shockingly fast transition into a calmer and more independent, much larger but equally cute, cathood. It was a step, a big step, for us to get Billee together. We settled into each other more and started to speak of the future, of hopes and dreams that involved children. And yet, it was all said in a somewhat abstract way. I went along with it, enjoying these discussions the way I would a daydream. It was only when he seriously brought up marriage that I found myself stopping short, unable to give him a clear response. He mentioned it casually after breakfast one morning while putting the dishes away. He was telling me his best friend had just gotten engaged.
“Do you think one day you and I should, you know?”
I just laughed awkwardly and saw his back tense in response. Then, after he left for work, I reactivated my long-dormant Tinder account.
“Don’t you think that might be a bad sign?” Naima asked sarcastically when I told her what I’d done.
“Maybe I’m just one of those cold-feet types,” I said.
“I think your instinct’s telling you something.”
“I should probably just say yes.”
There was no reason to say no. It was just my overthinking mind, I feared, that was, as usual, ruining everything. I had spent nearly a year in relative contentment with this man. Now, it was only a matter of taking the next step.
It was just that, sometimes, when I woke up in the middle of the night to go to the toilet and came back to see him huddled up on his side of the bed, my heart would sink a little.