“Do you like it here?” I asked.
He shrugged in the characteristic way people answer that question. “It’s work, mostly. You?”
I returned his shrug, “Yeah, it’s okay. Same.”
About fifteen minutes in, I asked him how far we were from the Centre.
“Maybe half an hour more,” he said.
“It’s quite remote, huh?”
“Middle of nowhere.”
“It’s very pretty,” I said, looking at the lush green on either side of us. “In London, there’s only traffic and smoke.”
“Yes.”
“So … you work for the Centre then?”
“I run my own taxi service. I work for myself. But they hire me to do this. Pick up, drop off. What language are you learning?’
“German.”
“Okay, I see. Good luck.”
“Thanks.”
“How much does it cost, this course?”
“Uh … I’m not sure,” I lied. “My company’s paying.”
“They all say that,” he replied, his eyes narrowing on me through the rearview mirror. “You know, when I first started working for them, the people I dropped off wouldn’t even tell me what they did there. Some said yoga, others said business management. I thought maybe it was an all-purpose school. But then one day, I was dropping off a man. Gora. And he started asking me about Hindi, just in a by-the-way style. This man, the only thing he knew how to say going in was “kabhi khushi kabhi gham.” Nothing else. Coming out, he understands everything. Really, everything.”
“I’ve heard that happens.”
“Maybe he was just a genius, I don’t know. I reminded him, ‘Hello, sir, when I dropped you off, you couldn’t say two words. How did this happen?’ He started looking here and there and saying, ‘No, no, it was someone else you dropped off.’ But trust me, sister, it was the same man. I remembered him well.”
“Maybe he was a genius, like you said,” I suggested, conscious of my vow of secrecy.
“I don’t know, but after that I started asking everyone I dropped off, ‘What language are you learning?’ That’s how I confirmed that they teach languages there. Then, one day I thought, why not ask them directly? I was thinking maybe my daughter could go. She refuses to speak one word of our language, that girl. Or maybe my wife, for her English. She complains sometimes about how they treat her. It could help. So I went to reception and I asked the woman at the desk, ‘What is this course? Can you tell me what you charge?’ And you know what she said?”
“What?”
“She looked at me like this,” he said, tilting his chin up in the air so that he was gazing down at me through the rearview mirror. “Just like this. And she said, ‘Invite only.’”
“Oh.”
“Snob.”
“Yeah. That’s not nice.”
“This is what they do. They keep you down in this country any way they can. ‘Invite only,’” he repeated. “What does that mean? I felt so ashamed when she said it. She does the wrong thing, and I’m the one who feels ashamed. When I came home, I was totally quiet. My wife noticed and started pestering me, ‘What’s wrong? What’s wrong?’ So I told her. You know what she did? She started laughing! ‘Nakcharhi!’ she said. ‘Snob.’ Then we both laughed together, and I didn’t feel ashamed anymore.”
“I’m sorry that happened to you. That’s really … not nice,” I said, squirming in my seat as if I were the one who had done this to him, as if I were the one who had raised my chin and said, “Invite only.”
“It’s always like that,” he continued. “But never mind. Maybe one day my son will go there. He’s top of his class already. Only fourteen. He says he wants to go to the best university. Oxford Shoxford. And the way he talks, he sounds like one of them. To him, nobody will dare to say, ‘Invite only.’”
“Inshallah.”
“Inshallah.”
We drove on, the area around us becoming more and more remote until we were surrounded by nothing but rolling fields and a couple of grazing horses. We turned onto a long, narrow lane that led to a metal gate, which we were buzzed through. Then we went down a winding driveway, which ended in front of a gleaming building of glass and steel, slate and wood, curved at the edges and two or three stories high.
“Best of luck,” the driver said, and drove away.
I approached the large reflective glass door, which mirrored back to me a softened version of myself. I leaned in closer, fixed my hair, and wiped away my smudged eyeliner before searching for a buzzer. I found none, but moments later, the door slid silently open of its own accord, revealing a room, pine floored and sleekly furnished, just as minimalist and modern as the outside. In front of me, a man stood behind a gleaming ivory desk. A large window occupied almost the whole wall behind him, and through it I saw a luscious garden, layer upon layer of different shades of green. I turned around and saw that the reflective glass door I had just walked through was in fact one-way, now offering a clear view of the driveway. I felt mildly embarrassed that this man had seen me fix my hair and makeup. I approached him and introduced myself. He greeted me politely and asked how my journey had been.
“Great, thank you,” I said and gestured toward the garden behind him. “This is just … wow.”
He smiled and turned around to look, “Magnifique, isn’t it?”
“Yes.”
“Now,” he said. “You’ll have to leave all prohibited items here before we move forward. Would you mind opening your bags?”
I unzipped my suitcase, and he confiscated my laptop, a bar of dark chocolate, and my Eimear McBride novel. From my backpack, he took my phone, a small spiral-bound notebook and pen, and a single clementine.
“Sorry,” he said, holding the clementine. “We ask all Learners to stick to the prescribed diet. You can eat it now, if you want.”
“I’m okay,” I said.
He placed it, along with the rest of my things, in a shallow plastic box and ushered me through the sliding door behind him. It opened onto the green courtyard I’d seen through the glass.
As soon as I stepped through the door, it was as if I’d entered a whole other ecosystem. The air smelled musky and damp, and a light mist hovered around us, making it seem like every tree was connected to every blade of grass through a fine watery web. All kinds of foliage twisted throughout the garden, with vibrant flowers adorning the landscape in variegated patterns. Many of the trees held fruit: pears and apples, mulberries and peaches, and I noticed, in disbelief, roses and orchids sitting softly together in beds of moss. Just beside them were specimens that looked positively monstrous: sharp and jagged spokes of rusty purple and tangled webs of swampy green. These were bounded by chicken wire, with warning notices declaring them poisonous.
The man had lowered his voice to a whisper after we’d stepped through the door. He told me that my supervisor would meet me here to give me a tour and that she would be the only person I’d communicate with during the rest of my stay. Then he made a little zipping motion over his lips, gave me a theatrical bow, and turned back to the front of the building, the door sliding closed behind him.