“I never thought of it like that,” she remarked. “It’s true, everyone here does speak similarly, don’t they? Maybe it’s the nature of the clientele. It would make sense that international diplomats or elite linguists would strive for that, what did you call it? Unplaceability. Or, I don’t know, maybe it just happens when you’re exposed to many different tongues.”
“How about you, then? Why hasn’t it happened to you?”
“I think I consciously resist it. It’s a way of holding on to myself.”
I understood completely, and she could see that I did. There was something about Shiba and me that just resonated at the same frequency. No translation required. Or at least, very little. I found myself thinking of her often, trying to piece together the story of her life from the fragments she offered beneath the willow tree.
One day, we began to reminisce about the food back home, and I told her of my grandmother’s shahi tukray. I was surprised to hear that she’d never tried the dish and described to her the smell of the milk and khoya warming on the stove with the ghee and illaichi, sugar and saffron. There was a strange intensity to that moment, like the very tree that curtained us was listening in, our words floating up into its canopy and back down its branches before being absorbed by its roots. Then, the next evening, after dinner of karahi gosht and naan, we were served shahi tukray for dessert. My heart expanded with gratitude for Shiba when the dish was placed in front of me. It was the first time I’d had shahi tukray in England, and it was just as rich and milky and fragrant as my nani’s had been.
But, other than my time with Shiba, my experience at the Centre was tedious. Peter droned on and on, and boredom descended on me like a fog. Sometimes, as he spoke, images would form in my head: a young boy squirming at a school desk, a family sitting quietly around a dinner table, a man driving down an endless highway. By day four or five, it started feeling like his voice was following me everywhere I went. While I ate or showered, meditated or dressed, his monologue continued. Then, I noticed that my dreams were becoming increasingly disturbing.
I dreamed, for instance, of a couple—my parents?—fighting by the kitchen sink. A blue-and-white porcelain teacup falls to the floor and shatters. My mother picks up a shard. She presses it into the skin of her nearly translucent forearm and draws a drop of blood. My teeth clamp together, and my forehead tightens as I watch helplessly from the dining table. The blood emerges like a bubble, then turns into a tear, dripping down her forearm. It lands in the kitchen sink. Everything is washed away, as if it never happened. Father walks away.
My sense upon waking was that this scene was an unearthed memory, repressed until then. But I couldn’t be sure. The two people in the dream, they didn’t look like my parents, but somehow felt like them. I told Shiba about the nightmares.
“How bad are they?” she asked.
“They wake me up in the middle of the night sometimes … and I hear him all the time. Peter. He’s always in my head.”
“Well, that’s kind of the point. By restricting your input to just his voice, he remains in your psyche.”
“And the nightmares?”
“Well, maybe that’s just things emerging that haven’t had the space and silence to come up before. Does that make sense?”
“Maybe.”
“Just keep working. And trust.”
The only person other than Shiba who I had contact with while at the Centre was the cleaner, who would come into my room every morning to hoover and again in the evening to empty the bins. She was an elderly woman, easily in her seventies, and looked Eastern European, with wispy gray hair that she tied back in a bun. She usually dressed in many layers of heavy skirts and tops, and tiny golden hoops hung from her earlobes. “Hello,” I would say to her when she came in, but she would just nod at the ground, reinforcing the no-contact rule. Then, after she’d finished, I’d say, “Thank you,” and again without looking at me, she’d murmur something like “Pojalusta.” Three or four days in, bored out of my mind, I started to say pojalusta to her instead of hello and thank you, and she’d laugh softly to herself. I felt like we had a bit of a connection, this sweet grandma and I, although, under those conditions, I suppose such things are easy to invent.
Over the coming days, my dreams worsened, each one more anxiety inducing and frightening than the last. I dreamed of buildings collapsing on top of me, of car crashes and snowstorms. And even in my waking life, I carried these images close. Drinking tea one afternoon, I remembered, viscerally, the shattered porcelain teacup, the shard slicing skin, the teardrop of blood circling the sink drain. My forehead tightened, and my jaw clenched as if I were reliving the moment.
What had once been boredom began to transform into a kind of desperation. By day six or so, I was determined to leave. The strength of my feelings took me by surprise. After all, my situation wasn’t dire. We had nice rooms and great food, and were required to do nothing more than sit in our booths, meditate, and chill. Such a situation, I thought, should have felt like a luxury retreat. But I longed for news from the outside world. I imagined my work piling up and my friends trying to get in touch. I’d posted on Twitter that I’d be away and set up an automatic email response, told close friends and family I was attending a conference in a remote location with no phone signal. But still, what if there was an emergency? I couldn’t remember a single time in my adult life when I’d gone two days, let alone six, without checking my email. Another four sounded unbearable. Also, the truth is, life without distractions felt terrifying, as if the silence might give way to something beneath, as if there was this big secret pulsating below the earth, above the sky, within the trees, and if we went too quiet, we would hear it, and things would never be the same. I decided to speak to Shiba.
I found her outside the Process Centre, whispering to a staff member who was balancing a stack of green towels in his arms. I registered my name on the screen and stood next to it until I caught her eye. She nodded at me, and we made our way to the nearest speaking area. I found myself welling up.
“I’ve had enough,” I said. “You said when I arrived that we could leave at any time. Well, I want to go.”
“But Anisa, that would be such a waste. You know there’s no refund, right?”
“I don’t care. I want to go,” I exclaimed. Tears began to fall from my face onto the exposed root by my feet, where they were instantly absorbed. “It’s unbearable here. I don’t understand one word that man is saying. I’m having nightmares all the time. And I want to check my email.”
“Listen,” she said. “It’s perfectly normal to feel this way, especially around the halfway mark. It happens to most Learners. But I promise you, it will get better. Look, if you still feel the same way in a day or two, come find me. But you’ll see. It’ll all be worth it. When it finally happens, you won’t believe it.”
And then, Shiba gave me a hug. The physical contact melted my resolve but not my underlying angst, and so, marginally convinced, I sniffingly went back to my room and curled up on the bed, covering myself with the duvet. Soon, I heard the gong ring, instructing us to return to our language booths, but I couldn’t do it. Instead, I just lay there, beneath the duvet, crying. I felt silly for reacting this way, but I missed home so much. I missed my own bed. I missed my books. I missed my kitchen. I missed the stove on which I cooked the recipes my Choti Khala texted me. I missed the Tesco and the Boots and the Holland & Barrett, the fruit and veg wala by the station who sold guava and mango in the summertime, squash and turnip in the winter. I missed my phone. I missed little Billee and my friends and my laptop and Pret and even the tube and the smog and chaos of the city. I missed Adam’s cuddles. And the cuddles of the man before him. And I missed the home I’d had before I moved to England—my parents and my sister and the sunshine. I missed my childhood, when I was still at school and didn’t have to decide anything for myself.