The Centre

by Ayesha Manazir Siddiqi

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.

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.

And sometimes, it felt like I was smearing a thin layer of vanilla over my life to make it more palatable for him.

A part of me would cringe at my own delight, at this conversion to a diasporic gaze, but at the same time, I’d pack my suitcase full of these things: fabrics and ornaments, spices and keepsakes, trying to bring as much of it back with me as I could.

Did he not see, I wondered, that nobody else around him was being treated like a king? Did he not connect his whiteness to the special treatment he was receiving?

I did not want to be accountable for a potentially bad decision. I did not want to be accountable, period.

only used Telegram,

BADDDD timing for this fucking reference. yikes.

“It’s like preservation when it’s like that, right? Preservation of cultures.” “Well, yeah, except it wasn’t his culture,”

And prayer, I think, can be a bit like translation. There’s a kind of cosmic geometry to it. It’s about getting the right words in the right order, and if those words are precise enough, they hit their equivalent in the other realm and the thing that is wished for comes into being.

“We get used to expecting good things to happen only after pain. It doesn’t have to be that way.”

“Classic BDSM,” Naima said when I shared these thoughts with her. “They want you to tell them what bad boys they’ve been.” “Naima.” “I’m serious. Did you see their faces when you said that thing about translation as colonialism? They were practically salivating. You’re basically a dominatrix now.”

But it’s always the friends in the end, isn’t it, who remain to pick up the pieces when the men have gone, leaving destruction in their wake? Still, only the romantic partner is taken seriously. Friends and family will not gather, ever, to celebrate my partnership with Naima—there will be no anniversaries or acknowledgments, no congratulatory cards, no celebratory ceremonies. And yet, it is this slow burning love of female friendship that actually keeps the world turning.

But all these traits—style, hygiene, the ability to care for oneself and one’s home—are, in a man, considered exceptional, almost miraculous, whereas in women, they are the bare minimum. I wasn’t impressed.

If he wasn’t intelligent, it meant he was unpretentious and down to earth; if he didn’t make money, it signified that he wasn’t a slave to capitalism; if he was younger, he was of a more enlightened age. Naima hadn’t “manifested” Azeem, she’d manufactured him. She’d created an image in her head and found someone to project it on, someone who, a bit of a blank, a bit of a people pleaser, happily accommodated her fantasies.

It could be that any brilliant woman who settles down with a less-brilliant man dulls herself to compensate and console.

All patriotism, in the end, is patriarchal and deadly.

In the West, they keep it all at a distance. The old, the poor, the dead—outsourced, deported and dismissed, hospitalized and imprisoned, or else bombed via remote control.

“And you don’t feel weird about being, I don’t know, chopped up, cooked in a frying pan?” “No weirder than being burned to ashes in an even bigger oven at the morgue,” Shiba retorted. “Or being wrapped up in fabric and left underground,” Arjun added.