The Centre by Ayesha Manazir Siddiqi
To Ammi and Abbu, to whom I owe everything
（and, let’s be honest, to Billee too）
No one sleeps in this room without
the dream of a common language.
—ADRIENNE RICH
·
Do we, after thousands of years,
really wish for inclusion, on these terms,
in a world planned by others?
—CARLA LONZI （TRANSLATED BY VERONICA NEWMAN）
ONE
It all began with Adam.
Doesn’t it always?
We met at a literary translation studies conference at Senate House, and it was through him that I first learned of the Centre.
Or … no, wait. Actually, pause. Rewind.
I should probably start with why I was at the conference in the first place. You see, a kind of listlessness had been brewing in me for some time, the kind that threatened to tip over into despair, leaving me just sitting there, solitary and stuck, forever, in the middle of my living room. When my best friend, Naima, came over one afternoon, I told her of these feelings. In response, she laid out some tarot cards on my bedspread.
Now, I didn’t really believe in this tarot stuff, but I did have faith in the intuition of my friend. Also, I reasoned, she must have some skill in that kind of thing if she’d managed to forge a whole profession around it. After we’d finished uni, Naima had gone on to do a master’s in psychology. Then, with her characteristic skill for keeping her finger firmly on the pulse of the times, she transitioned into a kind of modern-day witch, doing tarot readings, tantra, reiki, and holding monthly ayahuasca circles for women of color from her living room.
Naima scrutinized the cards before proclaiming, “You are searching for the reasons for your discontent outside yourself, when the discontent itself is the reason for the discontent.”
“Huh?”
She pointed to a card at the top of her spread, of a man holding his head in his hands, staring at a dry patch in an otherwise green field.
“You are terrorized by feelings of inadequacy, but this is nothing more than a psychological defect.”
“Naima, you can’t tell your clients things like that—that they’re psychologically defective.”
She pulled out the small booklet that came with the cards from her little orange backpack and started to rifle through it. “I don’t say it like that to real clients. With you, I tell you things how they are, or at least exactly how the cards say.”
“So is there redemption for me in this spread, or shall I just kill myself now?”
“It’s all in your hands, babe. Our fate isn’t written in stone. You need to take it like a warning card.”
We were sitting on my bed, cradling plates of karela cashew stir-fry, a dish that sounded better than it tasted because I’d used pre-sliced frozen karela from Tesco. I took a bite while she examined the cards. I looked again at the image on the topmost card.
“But it’s good, no? That he’s tending to his dry patch.”
She turned her scrutinizing gaze from the cards onto me. “He’s not tending to it though. He’s obsessing over it for no reason. If he turned around and looked at the fertile bit, it would expand. That would be the better strategy.”
“Fine. Tell me then. What do the cards say I should do?”
Naima looked at the booklet again, “Hmm … let me see … do not cover up your discontent with a happy face. Clearly no fear of that happening.”
“Very funny.”
“Blah blah, irrational thoughts, things like that … you need to be more careful about the people you surround yourself with—”
“Oh, don’t worry, that’s becoming increasingly clear as we speak.”
“You’re not taking this seriously.”
“I am. Go on. Save me from my fate. What if we just did … like this … ploop.” I exchanged the topmost card for a more pleasant one of a woman bathing naked with cherubs in a stream.
“You know that’s not how it works.”
Naima and I had met when we were eighteen, when I’d first moved to England for my undergrad. At the time, I was convinced that it was places like England and America that people came to make their dreams come true. Now, nearly two decades on, my bubble had long since burst. And there I was, living by myself, making mediocre karela cashew stir-fry, cranking the heating up high and still freezing, and pretending to make a living by writing subtitles for Bollywood films. That job, I told Naima, seemed linked to my general discontent.
“I don’t see why you’re not happy with what you do,” she said. “I’d love to sit around watching films all day.”
“I don’t really watch them like that though. It’s tedious. Pause play pause play.”
“It could be worse,” she said. “Imagine if you had to do subtitles for like, black-and-white Russian films. You’d probably go all depressed. Consider yourself lucky. We had a blast watching that Shuddh Desi Wedding or whatever, didn’t we?”
In a sense, Naima was right. The Bollywood of today was nothing like the Bollywood I’d grown up with, with Shahrukh Khan chasing Kajol around mustard fields, or Salman Khan being attacked by his love interest’s “protective” brothers with baseball bats. In today’s Bollywood, women had desire, homosexuality wasn’t just a punch line, and children weren’t solely the property of their parents. Many of the tropes remained, of course, but there had been definite progress. And honestly, sometimes these films felt like a corrective to the ones I’d imbibed as a child. Maybe that’s why I held on to this thread so determinedly in the face of so many others breaking, to allow for a continuity, to prevent my mind from becoming frozen in the memory of a certain time. It was the same with my Urdu. In spite of operating almost solely in English now, I’d resolutely held on to the language, sometimes doing translations just for fun and taking weekly classes, during which my teacher and I would read novels and poetry together.
“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.”