yearning for greatness

and getting really close to it

Fiction, 2023

I have no knack for languages. At one point, I could speak English, Hindi, Arabic and French. Now, I only have one and a half of them. This is to say, if there was a magic wand in sight—or a genie that defies physics—my only wish would be to learn languages instantly. Partly to read and converse with whomever I want, but partly to conduct a self-experiment on what an insular Tower of Babel parable would look like—would I suddenly lose my ability to speak to, and understand, myself? This paragraph contains two ideas central to Ayesha Manazir Siddiqi’s The Centre: 1) lazy efforts for laborious skills, and 2) a self-destructive desire to satisfy one’s curiosity.

Meet Anisa. She’s a Pakistani translator of Bollywood films living in London. Her apartment is drab, her friends are non-existent, and her money is dwindling. One day, she meets Adam, a white man who can seamlessly transition between Russian, Hindi, and Italian with complete fluency. Anisa, who has spent years struggling through languages, is stunned. Her shock is misplaced as adoration and a boring, sex-less relationship ensues. After some time living together, Anisa invites him to Karachi, to meet her family. On the plane to Karachi, Adam gives her a present: he is now fluent in Urdu, much to the rage of Anisa, who doesn’t understand how this is possible, and thinks it’s a tactless method of attempting to get closer to her parents. The former is fair, the latter is mean. Their time in Karachi is tense until Adam finally tells her how he learnt Urdu within a week: a hyper-secretive, super-secluded centre in the countryside of England that offers a variety of languages for the pocket-change price of twenty thousand pounds.

Back in London, Anisa breaks up with Adam, reconfigures her goal of becoming a translator of “great works” and takes a trip to the Centre. What follows is a twisted view into what translation can be: a consumption of culture and history. The last 2/3rds of the novel feels like pushing yourself to wake up from a nightmare only to find your reality equally strange, warped by the visions you’ve seen.

Song - The Fool on the Hill

Film - Crimes of the Future