TWO
Hamid, the driver, was waiting for us outside the airport. He beamed when he saw Adam. They wrestled over his suitcase for a bit, but in the end, Adam kept it, and Hamid rolled mine toward the car while we followed behind. As Hamid loaded the boot, Adam stopped and looked around, wide-eyed and sweaty. I saw him take it all in: the couples sitting outside McDonald’s, the crows pecking on the fries thrown their way, the drivers and the guards and the travelers weaving between cars, hauling suitcases and cartons in and out. The porters and trolleys. The blue, blue sky and the air so warm and humid that even in September it felt a few degrees closer to water than the air we’d left behind. I tried to look through his eyes, to understand what he was seeing, and I found myself feeling a strange mixture of pride and embarrassment.
“Wow,” he said before climbing into the air-conditioned car. “Just … wow.”
“Now?” I asked, the moment we got into the car, forcing him to tear his gaze from the window.
“What? No,” he said. “I told you. I can only talk about this somewhere private.”
He gestured with his eyes toward Hamid.
“Huh? He doesn’t understand.”
“Are you sure?”
Oh god, I thought. Where to start explaining my country to this man?
I just rolled my eyes and said, “Yes. I’m sure.”
“Okay,” he said, lowering his voice. “So, first of all, I’m not allowed to tell anyone—well, only one person—my whole life. That’s the rule. So, if I tell you, it’s a big deal. Do you understand?”
“Do you work for the government, Adam? ’Cause if it’s something like that, I don’t know if I want to know—”
“No, nothing like that. It’s just …” he lowered his voice to a whisper now, “it’s a language school. A super elite, super secret language school. It’s called the Centre.”
“Huh?”
“Anisa,” he said, “this is serious. There’s massive penalties if you tell. Like, millions of pounds. Do you understand?”
“I won’t say anything. Just tell.”
“Well, when I said I was in Berlin, I wasn’t. I was actually at the Centre. I went to learn Urdu. To, well, I guess to impress your parents.”
“And this language school gives you what? An earpiece?” I examined the sides of his head.
“No, I can actually speak it. And understand it. I can’t explain how it works. It’s kind of like … you just sponge it in.” He made a motion with his hands of squeezing sponges over his head while he sucked in air through his mouth. “Like that. There’s no other way to describe it.”
“And at this school, you become completely fluent?”
“Completely fluent. In ten days.”
“And you can only tell one person?”
“That’s right. You can recommend them. Just one your whole life. And once you choose someone to recommend, well, if they pass the Centre’s tests and things, they can go, too, and learn as many languages as they can afford.”
“How much is it?” I asked.
“Twenty.”
“Twenty what?”
“Thousand.”
“Twenty grand? How do you even have twenty grand?”
I hadn’t meant this in a patronizing way, but he looked stung by the question.
“I make back ten times that within a year. The returns are high when it’s your trade.”
“That is … wow.”
“Yeah.”
“And why the secrecy?”
“It’s probably an intellectual property thing. Also to maintain exclusivity I imagine.”
“What’s it like there?”
“Honestly, kind of like a monastery. You wake up at five every morning, and you’re not allowed to talk to each other. Not even eye contact. And you have to give up your phone and everything. No contact with the outside world.”
“But you texted me loads from Berlin.”
“That was Brian.”
“What?”
“Brian’s the one who recommended me for the Centre. We take care of each other’s socials when either of us goes.”
Brian was Adam’s boss and mentor. He came from a similar class background to Adam and had essentially taken him under his wing when Adam joined his company as an intern after finishing uni. I’d met him once, at Adam’s birthday party in our flat. They’d spent much of the party in a corner together, just laughing and joking and sort of making fun of the whole affair. The fierce solidarity between them that night made me realize there were parts of Adam that were inaccessible to me, certain languages he spoke that I would never know.
“Brian was the one texting me? Adam, that’s really weird.”
“I’m so sorry.”
“I sent boob pics, you know.”
He went quiet for a moment.
“He didn’t say.”
We drove on, me trying to process the idea of this miraculous school, him looking out the window in fascination with the novelty of it all. And then I looked out the window too, and felt moved by a nostalgic haze. A part of me wanted to share, to point out Teen Talwar or the big qabristan I used to be afraid of, to say something as we passed by Bata or Ghani Sons, where we’d made our annual pilgrimage for school uniforms, or the hangouts in Zamzama I knew so well. But I didn’t say a word. I found that I didn’t want to give this man anything more of my beloved city when he’d taken something at its heart so secretively and easily.
“Are you still angry?” he asked.
“No, not angry. I just, I can’t believe it.” I pulled out my phone and googled The Centre, language school. Millions of random links for language schools came up. “Show me.”
“I told you. It’s highly exclusive. They have no online presence whatsoever. Not even emails. They only communicate over the phone.”
“I can’t believe you kept this from me.”
“Please, Anisa, don’t let this spoil our trip.”
I agreed that this wasn’t the time, and we decided to hit pause on discussing the Centre further. But with the matter left lingering, the distance that I’d already felt between us grew starker. And I think my parents sensed the distance too. They greeted Adam with politeness but also skepticism, confirming, I think, his worst fears.
I noticed that in Adam’s presence, Abba held himself a bit taller, and his voice deepened just a hint.
“So, Adam, what do your parents do?” he asked as soon as he felt it appropriate, which wasn’t long after “Hi, hello, how was your flight?”
“Umm, it’s just my mum. She works in catering.”
“All right, very good,” Abba said and patted him on the shoulder. “A self-made man.”
Adam smiled graciously in response and later told me that he thought my parents were very nice, but I could swear I saw his neck muscles tense when Abba said that.
Abba and I generally got along well, settling into a comfortable routine when together—going to the shops, kidding around, watching films in the evenings. Mostly preoccupied with work, he would take on a kind of mollycoddling and humorous demeanor toward us, his two daughters, which we sometimes prickled against but mostly rested in contentedly. And Abba’s love language was definitely presents, and this, too, we did not protest. His ceaseless generosity had found a new outlet in recent years in my sister’s beautiful child, a four-year-old who lived in Dubai. The boy, Isa, seemed to share Abba’s lifelong passion for the cosmos. The stars and planets and galaxies, I mean. When we were younger, the three of us—Abba, my sister, and I—would go up to the roof and stare through a telescope at the night sky. Seeing stars through Karachi smog sounds unlikely, but that’s what we did. If I remember correctly, a star through a telescope’s lens looks like a little dot of light rapidly dancing around and around a small circle of darkness. I imagined that Abba would be taking little Isa up there soon, little Isa, who yells, “Moon!” and jumps up and down every time he sees that glowing orb in the Dubai night sky.