“Simon your tantra client? I should go.”
“No, no. It’s fine. Stay. Say hello at least.”
Simon was a shy-seeming, skinny guy in a worn Beatles T-shirt, jeans, and New Balance sneakers. He had curly, unkempt hair, and he’d brought along a box of chocolates, which Naima accepted with delight. He wore a bracelet made of wooden beads around his wrist and carried a backpack. They gave each other a prolonged embrace before he even noticed me.
“Oh, hi.”
“Simon, this is Anisa, my best friend. Anisa, this is Simon.”
We shook hands.
“Hi, Simon, I’ve heard about you.”
As soon as I said it, I wondered whether this was a betrayal of Naima’s doctor-patient confidentiality or whatever, but he seemed unfazed.
“Nice to meet you, Anisa. I’ve never met any of Naima’s friends before.”
“Anisa, you should stay for a bit. We were going to start with a manifestation session. What do you think, Simon, would you be cool with that? She’s powerful, this one. She’ll add to the potency of the spell.”
“Yeah, sure, of course. That would be great.”
Simon looked at Naima with a kind of enraptured gaze that made me nervous for him. I wondered whether she should be allowing him to bring her chocolate and things.
“What do you say? You want to do some manifesting?” Naima asked me.
I resisted the urge to roll my eyes. “Manifesting? I don’t know.”
“Come on, it’ll be fun. Anisa was just telling me, Simon, that she’s confused about her breakup, and she’s going on this language course … um, I mean some kind of course thing … or, not a course, just a thing. Come, Anisa, it’ll be good for you. You can really hone your intentions, you know?”
“I don’t know if I believe in that kind of thing,” I said apologetically.
“Oh, don’t worry about that,” Naima said. “It works whether you believe it or not.”
And so I agreed to stay for their manifestation exercise. I wondered how it would have worked if I hadn’t been there, whether they would have done it, I don’t know, naked or something. Naima’s whole tantra thing was kind of obscure to me, but I suspected my curiosity was a bit voyeuristic, so I didn’t ask too many questions. Naima lit a candle, burned some sage, and retrieved three bowls. She filled one with water and then plopped in a single pound coin. She explained that we would speak in turns of the life we wished for while pouring the water and coin from one bowl into the other. She asked me to begin, handing me the full bowl.
“Okay … hmm … I want to become …”
“No, no, say it in the present tense.”
“The present tense?”
“Yeah, as if you already are.”
“Oh. Okay. I am a translator of great works of literature.”
I poured into Naima’s bowl.
“You are a translator of great works of literature,” she repeated. “And me, I have moved into a house with a garden, and I’m holding large retreats for women of color there. Twenty at a time.”
“You’d be great at that,” Simon said. “Okay, my turn? I … well … I just want to be open to the moment, I think.”
“Say it in the present.”
“I am open to the moment.” He sighed and seemed to relax. “I am in the moment.”
I found my own breath deepening in response.
“Your turn,” he said to me.
“I have found a love, true and everlasting.”
“I have too,” Naima said next. “And we make each other laugh.”
“Same,” Simon said, glancing at Naima. He poured the water into my bowl.
I closed my eyes and spoke again. “I have a massive bathtub, one of those ones that stand alone in the middle of the bathroom.”
This made Naima laugh. “I didn’t know you wanted that.”
“Always have. And … a fireplace, and I take walks in the park every day,” I continued. “Oh, and the park is right next door to my house.”
“Mmmm. That sounds cozy,” Naima said as I poured into her bowl. “I’ll come stay with you. Okay, me. I … oh, I start a podcast on tapping into body wisdom. That one’s long overdue.”
Simon went next.
“I finish my master’s, with distinction.”
“You’ll definitely get a distinction,” Naima said. “Anisa, you go.”
“Okay. I …” I closed my eyes again. “I have … a child. She’s got sweet brown eyes and a tinkling laugh, and she’s, hmm … she’s holding my hand now. The whole of her tiny palm is wrapped around my finger as we walk through the park, the one near my house.”
I opened my eyes.
“Inshallah,” Naima said.
I didn’t often express my wish for children anymore, not as I had when I was in my twenties or even early thirties. It felt like an increasingly tenuous dream, and I think a part of me was afraid to even imagine it, like the pain of not having a child would be all the greater if I let my desire for one be known. But during our circle, I had the feeling that if I didn’t even dare to see it, how would it ever have a chance of being? I was somewhat tearful as I imagined this tiny palm around my finger, and I saw that Naima looked emotional too.
“I just saw it, right now, in my head. So I said it.”
“That’s how it works. You have to see it for it to be.”
I poured into Naima’s bowl. She closed her eyes and took a long breath. Something in the air had gradually shifted during our session, and it felt like we were really dropping into our hearts’ desires now instead of playacting.
“I … I connect to my own legacy of communication with the unseen realms,” she said. “Instead of taking from other people’s cultures, I find the channel that my own people have used to commune with the divine.”
“I love that, Naima.”
“Our people had a way to connect. My manifestation is that I remember it.”
“Ameen.”
“Ameen.”
The manifestation session, I started to feel, wasn’t very different from prayer. And prayer, I think, can be a bit like translation. There’s a kind of cosmic geometry to it. It’s about getting the right words in the right order, and if those words are precise enough, they hit their equivalent in the other realm and the thing that is wished for comes into being. And like any art, prayer is a craft that needs polishing, understanding, practice, and skill. I was frequently skeptical of Naima’s ways, but suddenly it felt right, sitting there with her, painting our futures together, allowing for the limits of our imaginations to open, to envision possibilities we hadn’t previously considered, to describe to ourselves and one another what it was that we wanted.
We continued this way, drawing in deeper and deeper detail a picture of our lives, until, by the time we were done, it felt as if it were already so, and I walked out of Naima’s flat with the lightness of a hope already fulfilled. As I headed to the station, I tried to hold the prayers I’d made close to my chest. I imagined them wrapped up delicately, in cotton wool, and I made an additional one then, as I descended the station stairs, that all Naima’s prayers be fulfilled, and that the healing she offered to others come back to her tenfold.