And so it was via this somewhat stumbling tracking of my vague desires that I ended up, later that week, at the translation studies conference where I was to meet Adam. Senate House is one of those old, imposing buildings that I used to be so impressed by when I first came to this country. I still remember the white phallic columns that ushered me into the UCL main campus, where I’d done my undergrad. They stood there as if announcing, “You are part of a great and noble history now.” I even remember the dean telling us with great solemnity during orientation how well we were setting ourselves up for success just by being there, welcoming us into a future so bright and white and very well trodden. The glow of this prospect of anything-can-happen warmed me for a little bit in this freezing cold country, but not for very long. Soon, I realized that the seemingly gracious welcomes weren’t that different from, for instance, the warden in my residence hall saying to me, “I know people like you like to keep the windows shut, but leave it open sometimes because it can get moldy.” “People like you.” Did she really say that? And “moldy”？ I’m pretty sure it was something like that … my point is, although they can seem so different—the gracious welcomes and the hostile otherings—the effect is the same when they land in the body. Both translate to the same thing. Both are saying, “Don’t forget your place.” Both are saying, “You are lucky to be here.” Still, I settled in and made good friends. It was at UCL that I met Naima, who was redoing her first year, having secretly transferred from medicine to English lit, a move her parents didn’t find out about until graduation day.
And now, years later, there I was again. Just around the corner from UCL. Senate House, Seminar Room 402, on another cold January day. I walked into the warmth of the lecture hall, found a seat, and took off my coat, hat, and gloves. The panel was on translation versus adaptation, and a woman was speaking at the podium about performing Shakespeare in Portuguese.
I did not, at first, notice the white boy sitting in front of me, scribbling into his leather-bound notebook. It was only after the woman’s talk, when he picked up his phone to make a call in what sounded like fluent Mandarin, that I glanced in his direction, trying to place him. The two Chinese students sitting in front of him also turned around to look as he spoke, and they exchanged appreciative nods with him. It’s always been like that, I thought, so much gratitude and admiration when a white person speaks a non-white language and only contempt and indignation for non-white people who don’t speak English. The double standards of language learning. Why, I wondered, didn’t they talk about that on this panel? I couldn’t deny, though, that I, too, was intrigued, especially when, a few moments after his first phone call, he made another, speaking this time in what appeared to be effortless Italian. I glanced at him again. Was his skin actually more bronze than ivory, his hair more brunette than blond? He was Mediterranean, I decided. He’d probably been to one of those fancy international schools where they teach you lots of languages. I was in the middle of concocting his life story in this way when he made his next phone call in what sounded like Russian. When he finished, I couldn’t hold myself back any longer. I tapped him on the shoulder.
“Excuse me. Hi. I’m sorry. Was that Russian you were speaking?”
“It was,” he replied in a British accent before continuing in Russian, asking me a question.
“Oh, I don’t speak Russian. It’s just … it sounds like you speak a lot of languages.”
He laughed. “A few.”
“I think I’ve heard about four already. And you sound kind of fluent in them all.”
“I get by,” he said.
“How many can you speak?”
He shrugged. “I don’t really keep count. A few.”
I was suspicious.
“Do you speak this language?” I asked in French.
“Who doesn’t?” he replied in French but with a better accent.
I hesitated for a moment before switching to Urdu. “And this one?”
“Hindi?” he asked.
“Urdu.”
“No, not that one, but give me, like, two weeks.”
“Yeah right.”
“Try me.”
“Seriously, how many languages total?”
“Ten or eleven maybe?”
“Ten or eleven?!”
“Fluently,” he said.
“No you don’t.”
He nodded. “Native-speaker fluently.”
A new speaker took the podium. A slide projected behind him titled something like, “Bridging Worlds: Interpreting the Customs of Latin America.”
“But how?” I asked, lowering my voice.
“I mean … I could tell you, but I’d have to kill you,” he whispered back.
“Deal.”
“I mean … I could kill you, but I’d have to take you out for dinner first.”
Adam was not actually as smooth as his opening line suggested. When I took him up on his offer, he became shy and flustered about where we should go.
“You decide,” he said. I suggested the South Bank.
“Sounds great.”
A week later, we met near the Royal Festival Hall. Adam was wearing jeans and a nice black sweater under a brown woolen coat. We exchanged a confused greeting somewhere between a handshake and a hug. The man didn’t necessarily incite excitement in me but something more like curiosity, along with a kind of comfort, his shyness putting me at ease. At first, he asked lots of questions and only half listened to my responses, as if already thinking of the next thing to ask. I found this initial awkwardness endearing, and after a while, our conversation smoothened. I asked him again about the languages, and he said he’d learned them off Rosetta Stone. I assumed then that he was some sort of savant, remembering languages the way some people remember strings of numbers. We went to the BFI café for a drink and then walked along the river, chatting. Adam told me he’d grown up in East London, where he’d been raised by a single mum. He hadn’t done very well in school or university, he said, but then, in his twenties, he’d discovered his way with languages, and ever since, it sounded like he’d been thriving. He worked freelance, moving between gigs for a Japanese aeronautical engineering company, a Farsi news agency, and an Italian research institute. He had the luxury, he shared, of picking and choosing his jobs, traveling the world.
“It’s been quite the journey,” he said.
“I can imagine.”
So, I had never dated an English guy before. The truth is, I found most to be cliquey and unrelatable. They seemed to lack a certain warmth, holding themselves at a distance, even from themselves. But maybe that’s not quite right; maybe I hadn’t experienced their warmth because English men are careful who they show hospitality to. I don’t know, but either way, Adam seemed different. He was interested in other cultures, open-minded, and not excessively reliant on alcohol to let go of his reserve.
It wasn’t, however, like being with a desi man. There were fewer things that were just tacitly understood between us, taken for granted. I could tell, for instance, despite his extreme attempts at diplomacy, that his imagination of where I came from was skewed. His reaction when I said I was from Pakistan spoke volumes—this vigorous “I’m so totally cool with that” kind of nod. And then he asked me whether I’d ever been pressured to wear a headscarf. When I responded by calling his question bizarre, he turned red and sputtered endless apologies. I thought of asking him in return whether he’d ever been pressured to divide and conquer, then realized that might imply that I thought the hijab was negative, and I got so caught up in this response loop in my own head that I just let it go. In other circumstances, his question would have ended the date right there, but I liked Adam. He was cute and earnest, grounded and sensible. And he was compassionate. Like, while we were sitting on a sofa in the BFI, just chatting about this and that, I mentioned, for some reason, my PhD. Long story short, I’d started a PhD in critical theory some years ago but left the program within a year and a half. I brought up the whole thing as an aside, emphasizing how little it all meant with a roll of the eye and a flick of the wrist, but he stopped me there, as if sensing the gravity I’d tried to conceal with flippancy. He asked me more and more questions until I found myself telling him, tearfully, of a careless supervisor, my disappointment in myself, and my frustration with academia in general. And he listened, like, really listened, with no judgment and total sympathy. He was immediately on my side in a way that I, more often than not, fail to be for my own self, and he drew out feelings from me that had lain untouched for years. I felt then like this man had the capacity to hold parts of me that I didn’t like to hold myself, and to this day, I’ve not met anyone who’s been able to hold me that way. He told me some months later that this capacity was one of the gifts that struggle can bring.