This inventive debut is about a disillusioned literary translator from Karachi, Pakistan, living in London. Anisa Ellahi has failed to carve a lucrative career for herself and has settled for subtitling Bollywood movies while living off her parents’ allowance.
She starts dating Adam, an Englishman with an enviable career in translation. In an attempt to stitch both halves of her life together, Anisa takes him along to meet her parents in Pakistan. What makes the protagonist’s voice engaging is how insightful she is about her privilege and immigrant guilt. While in Karachi, she finds herself collecting embroidered fabric and clay pots – a behaviour she dubs as her diasporic gaze, “the once mundane was now beautifully exotic”.
During this trip, Anisa discovers that the secret behind Adam’s linguistic prowess is a top-secret school called the Centre, where for an exorbitant price any language can be learned in 10 days. Anisa’s experience at the Centre is surreal, she finds it to be a secluded retreat with a strictly regimented schedule which forbids all social contact during the 10-day learning period.
After leaving the Centre, Anisa finally finds her footing in the literary world by publishing her book to critical acclaim, but is unable to enjoy it due to impostor syndrome and an inability to shake off her experience at the Centre. She decides to investigate the peculiarities she noticed at the facility by befriending the Centre’s manager, Shiba, who takes her on a trip to her home in Delhi to meet the founders of the facility.
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This third act is where the plot begins to come apart at the seams. For a manager of a highly confidential facility, Shiba comes across as gullible and indiscreet. After a few rushed developments, Anisa unravels the secrets of the Centre, which leaves her reeling and grappling with a moral dilemma. The mystery of the plot is revealed prematurely which makes for a lacklustre climax.
The high points of this novel are when Anisa navigates her complex relationship with her motherland, Karachi, and her home, England. The Centre informs the current social discourse by offering wry, shrewd insights into colonialism, appropriation and classism, resonant of Elaine Hsieh Chou’s Disorientation and RF Kuang’s Yellowface.
