Anyway, there I was, diving into the Russian literary translation scene, which turned out to be easier to plug into than the German. The Russian speakers seemed kinder and more welcoming, to have more appreciation for others learning their language. Of course, doors also opened more easily because my status had risen from the work I’d done with Songbird. Within the month, I’d found my next book, Work in Progress.
Work in Progress is set in a future in which all books are digital, and writers are able to change their novels even after publication, in post-edits. The protagonist of the novel is a writer who can’t stop tinkering with her book, even after it’s published. Determined to make it the best novel ever written, she constantly amends characters, settings, time and plot lines. She becomes so obsessed with this tinkering that her readers find, even while they’re in the middle of reading the book, words moving around in front of their very eyes. Soon, all this writer does is amend her novel, barely leaving her house. Sometimes she falls into despair, feeling like she’s making it worse, and other times she’s euphoric, convinced she’s recreating Michelangelo’s David. People become so fascinated with her obsessive editing that the text is turned into a museum exhibit, the pages projected onto the walls of a famous gallery, where visitors watch the words move around, day and night. Whole new characters enter the novel, change shape, then leave. Scenes in new countries are added; timelines shift; the protagonist’s fate is dire one day, heroic the next. The work becomes a public spectacle. Then, one day, the people in the gallery notice that the words haven’t moved for nearly a day. Someone is sent to check in on the writer, and she’s found dead on her kitchen floor, clutching her writing device, a look of intense concentration on her face.
It was a strange story, both gruesome and funny, bleak and somehow hopeful. It also contained stories within stories, the writer’s own novel and its shifting trajectories embedded into the larger work. It spoke to me deeply, and its complex structure seemed like it would be fun to translate. And so, for the next few months, I inhabited this book, marveling at the skills I’d acquired and grateful to not have the time to think about anything else. And then, it was done. Like Songbird, it was well received, and like Songbird, this pleased me for a while but left me with a kind of emptiness afterward.
Then, with nothing to distract me, my buried curiosity resurfaced. I hadn’t spoken to Shiba since my return but found myself constantly thinking of her. Also, the stress was literally erupting across my body in the form of acne and rashes. And my dreams had turned ominous. I woke up terrified from one in which Billee’s paws fell off when he tried jumping from the kitchen counter, and I couldn’t reattach them. In another, I was back at the Centre in front of that keypad. I punched in the code: 9989. Back in the hallway, dark and still. I entered the common room, the linen cupboard, and finally, pushed against the large pair of silver double doors. And then … nothing. I awoke, drenched in sweat.
I tried to ward off my anxiety by tapping into Anna’s presence, which always left me feeling more secure and content. Anna allowed me to access a level of safety within which I could examine my life from a distance, and I found myself re-evaluating everything. Including my home. My flat, you see, was a cocoon, a nest. Rose-colored linen bedsheets, a beautiful wooden desk. Salt lamps and hanging plants, ladder-style shelves crammed with beloved books. Islamic calligraphy and Aurat March posters on the walls, good food, clothes I liked wearing, candles and keepsakes. I had collected, over my life, artifacts of love and pleasure and made my home into a place where I could work peacefully and live with ease. However, after returning from the Centre, although I still valued this cocooning, I was also struck by its emptiness. Suddenly, this space, as lovely as it was, felt like a bubble, not really attached to anything, anyone, or anywhere. And I began to wonder, Was this a haven or a hideaway?
“Maman est morte.” That was more or less how I started, right? The book by Camus? Well, maybe that sentence contained the kernel of the issue. Maybe it felt to me, on some level, like my maman was morte. Maybe that process by which the child assimilates the mother—using substitutes like thumb-sucking and stuffed-toy cuddling—well, maybe that hadn’t fully happened for me. Maybe I’d never properly let go of the hem of my maman’s kameez and run into the playground, the wind in my curls. No, I was always looking back, to see if she was watching, and collecting stories to tell her afterward. My maman. Who always seemed to be looking the other way. I can’t fully trace back a how or when to my incessant and unfulfilled longing for her, and may never be able to, but all I knew was that there had always been a part of me, deep in my belly, that felt frosty and vacant. But I’d not consciously processed it until Anna brought my attention back to my free-floating umbilical cord, severed too suddenly and in need of reattachment. Several processes, I felt, had been left incomplete. For instance, instead of emerging from the birth canal, I had been yanked out via C-section, into the shocking cold and light. Also, instead of experiencing a gradual transition into independence, something in me had panicked, perhaps when my little sister was born, and my maman and I had unlinked hands too abruptly when she reached out to hold the new one.
And maybe I was meant to stay in Pakistan, not be transplanted into this harsh and windy place. We’re meant to die where we are born, surely? When I first flew to England, my skin became scaly and dry, my tummy uncomfortable, and my bladder confused. It took forever for my body to adjust. Someone told me then—I can’t remember who, probably Naima—that although our bodies travel by plane, the soul still makes its way on foot.
“Your soul,” she said—I’d been in England for maybe six months at the time—“your soul still has months, if not years, of travel ahead. It’s probably only reached Afghanistan or Iran by now.”
I think I treated my move to England as an opportunity to leave everything behind, the gawky teenager I had been, the needy child, the grieving migrant. I packed it all into the empty suitcase I’d tucked away in the back of my cupboard till it grew dusty and forgotten. That person, who grew up in the chaos of Karachi, who had little knowledge of how to express unpleasant feelings, I’d been ashamed of her. Her innocence, her cluelessness, her vulnerability and fear. I’d wanted to start anew.
But it turned out I wasn’t interested in settling into my new home either, if I’d ever even had the choice. After all, why would I want to make a home here, on this land in whose name the blood of my ancestors had been, and continues to be, shed? By then, I had spent at least as many years in England as I had in Pakistan, and there was a chance I would stay forever, that mine would be the first body in my lineage to be buried on this land. There would be nobody from my ancestry to receive me when I went underground. The thought turned me to ice. But repatriation, return, didn’t feel like a possibility either. I wondered, after that much severing, these many processes left incomplete, was any stitching back together even possible? Ah, this is all banal immigrant cliché, isn’t it? But the only way I saw past this was to wade through all of it, including the bits I would have previously dismissed as banal, as “boring.” I was grateful, truly, that at least the questions were coming up, buoyed by Anna’s support, even if I didn’t have any answers.