The Centre

by Ayesha Manazir Siddiqi

The truth is, whenever I saw a beautiful painting, or read a great novel, I felt joy, of course, but something in me would also seethe. Jealousy is an ugly thing. Even ambition, particularly in a woman, can be undesirable. But this other feeling—this feeling of a life not fully lived—that was worse, practically unbearable. I felt constantly thwarted, and I didn’t even know by what.

I maintain the importance of following one’s curiosity. One’s desire. It is the only way.

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.

What Adam was witnessing were the remnants of a culture where once he was, by law, obeyed and pacified. That kind of “hospitality” was in fact a legacy of his people’s wrongdoing. Or maybe it went further back still; maybe it was this “hospitality” that gave colonizers the impression that they were welcome in the first place, to claim a land and people not their own. The truth is, even if Adam hadn’t spoken a word of Urdu, he could have had any door he wanted opened for him in Karachi.

The manifestation session, I started to feel, wasn’t very different from prayer. 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. And like any art, prayer is a craft that needs polishing, understanding, practice, and skill.

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

“Sometimes the body struggles to accept a gift. It becomes so used to the striving that it doesn’t know what to do when the wish is fulfilled.”

Then I started to notice the amount of books and TV shows that centered the media industry—propaganda, I decided. Since they controlled the stories we consumed, they chose to focus on glamorizing their own industry, these so-called “tastemakers.”

I felt for my sisters and brothers struggling with an everyday Islamophobia that was even more deeply rooted, pervasive, and hostile than that in England, and also, even more state sanctioned, positively encouraged, and therefore deadly. Again, not that Pakistan is kind to its minorities … but this comparison game leaves me talking in circles. All patriotism, in the end, is patriarchal and deadly.

“Anything is possible, my dear. If you can conceive of it, it’s possible. It’s those of us who can imagine beyond the boundaries who make things happen.”

to make yourself deliberately ugly in a world demanding beauty was a goddamn feat.