The Centre(71)

“I thought you of all people would understand. Anisa, I have to own my life completely. If there’s any hope for transformation, that’s where it lies. Don’t you get it? Even if the seat is covered with blood, if it’s being left to me, I’ll be able to … clean it,” she said. “Only cowards run away. I’m strong enough for this.”

“No, Shiba. I don’t think that’s true. I think, sometimes, it’s the cowards who don’t run.”

“I don’t want to be mean, Anisa, but none of this is actually your business.”

“Okay. Fine. I’m sorry.”

“Look, we’re flying back in two days—I want to spend that time in peace. I don’t want to hear any more about this. And I really don’t want you hanging out with my dad for god’s sake. Frankly, it’s a really weird way to treat someone who’s showing you hospitality.”

“I wasn’t … it wasn’t like that. I just—”

“Can you go to your own room now? Why are you even in my bed?”

And so I stumbled across the hallway and into the guest room. I took a seat in front of the hand-carved dressing table and looked into the rectangular mirror. Kajal was running down my face. It had formed clumps in my inner eye and collected in the crevices beneath my lower lashes. The halter top that I had been admiring myself in earlier was now sticky and uncomfortable. It looked too shiny against my skin, and the armpits were stained with sweat, the fabric crumpled. Also, one of my earrings had fallen off. I squinted at my reflection. Through the glaze of tears and kajal, I could see my mother in there, looking back at me. Was she … ashamed? I couldn’t quite tell. I looked harder and saw my grandmother there, too, and her mother also. With the palm of my hand, I swiped across my eyes and forehead, spreading the kajal more. Then I swiped across my lips, smearing a lipstick-kajal combination around the bottom half of my face. I turned the two side mirrors inward so I could see my head from all angles. My hair was messy, but it looked too prettily disheveled, so I stuck a hand in and pulled out some tufts at random to create a more monstrous effect. Satisfied, I continued to examine my reflection.

One of my favorite writers is Adrienne Rich. Her writing is ferocious, like a blade cutting into your intestines. I once read in a tribute to Rich that another writer, Elizabeth Hardwick, had said of her, “She deliberately made herself ugly and wrote those extreme and ridiculous poems.” Who would say such a thing, I had thought at the time, how very mean. But now, I thought of those words again.

“She deliberately made herself ugly; she deliberately made herself ugly …” I repeated the words over and over to myself while looking at my monstrous face, and I felt a snarl come to my lips. I leaned into it, baring my teeth, and let out a hiss. I imagined Adrienne in the mirror, snarl-smiling back, telling me that actually, from a certain angle, Hardwick’s comment was a compliment, that to make yourself deliberately ugly in a world demanding beauty was a goddamn feat. Alongside her and me in the mirror, I then saw Seema, Nabila, Sara, Saba … Naima, Kavita, Khwaja, Arifa … Warner, Dickinson, Mingus, Ahmed … all of the faces of those who had, throughout my life, been quietly beckoning me to the place where appearance was irrelevant, where, to see the truth of the thing, ugliness needed to be welcomed in unreservedly. I was being filled up with something in that moment and tears were streaming down my face to accommodate it. I stared and snarled like this for god knows how long before finally crawling into bed and falling asleep.

I woke up the next morning hungover and exhausted. Shiba wasn’t at the breakfast table, so I asked Kumar for some coffee and then knocked on her bedroom door. I found her in bed, watching Florence and the Machine music videos on her laptop.

“Can I come in?”

“Yeah, okay.”

“Can you turn it down a bit?” I asked as I sat beside her. Florence, on the screen in front of her, was levitating in a purple robe.

“It’s fine, I can hear you.”

“Listen, I’m sorry. I was being … overemotional last night.”

She looked at me carefully before replying. “I couldn’t stop thinking about what you said.”

“It’s not my place. Like you said, I’m your guest. I overstepped.”

“You need to understand. This is my family. I live with the repercussions of everything that happens under this roof, whether I like it or not. People can’t be coming in and tearing things apart.”

“That’s not what I was trying to do. I’m sorry, Shiba. I think I just wanted to make sure, this work, is it really what you want?”

Tears gathered in the corners of Shiba’s eyes. “I thought you would have trusted me enough by now to understand that I know what I’m doing.”

“Talk to me then. Tell me—”

She looked away. “Last night, I saw a side of you that I didn’t know existed.”

“I wasn’t trying to hurt you,” I said, and reached for her hand. She pulled it away.

“Listen,” she snapped, “let’s just forget this happened, okay? I don’t want it to spoil the rest of our trip.”

“Shiba—”

“I’ll get dressed and see you downstairs later, okay?”

“Okay.”

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