How to Fight Islamist Terror from the Missionary Position (16 page)

Then he pushed his chair back so suddenly that it almost fell over and he went out. We could see him light up a Marlboro outside.

I avoided looking at Lena. I knew she was confused. I could sense her sadness. For the second time I saw her mask slip, her fear show. But then she tried to pull herself together and started conversing with all of us, almost her usual charming, smiling self. Was I the only one who sensed the fine lines of worry and loss that fractured her poise and control? You had to be very observant to notice how suddenly her green eyes would flicker—with something of the palpitation of a caged bird—towards the window outside which Ravi stood, his back to us, smoking. Why don’t you get up and go to him, I felt like saying to her. Don’t you hear it? The murk of the café was repeating it in a persistent whisper all round us, in a whisper that seemed to wither, hollowly, like sand falling in a glass: her name, her name, in his silent voice.

But I knew I couldn’t say it; I knew she would refuse to understand me if I did. That was a dialect for times long gone. She would never run out, grab him by the collar and kiss him. I looked at her again. The doll’s smile had come back, stapled to her face.

Ravi returned only when it was time for us to leave for the theater.

A few words return to me here; words uttered by Ravi around that time, I am certain, though I cannot recall the context. Did he drop in at my office, or were we talking in one of the canteens? Was he lounging about, in my room or his, skimming quickly through a book? Or was he rolling a cigarette with Karim Bhai in the kitchen?

I do not remember, but the words I recall: “Did I tell you when I decided not to play the piano professionally? Somehow my dad had fewer objections to Western classical music—it was compatible with a scientific career in his mind, if only because of Einstein—than to my becoming a journalist or studying art. But one day I knew it was not for me. That was when my third piano teacher told me I had perfect pitch. I knew then that I had no future in music. Perfection condemns you to glorious mediocrity. It is in the gap between your imperfections, honestly faced, and your desire for something beyond perfection that you can achieve genius. Perfect pitch, perfect life, perfect love—these are dead ends.”

I will leave the rest of it out. It is not just families that are happy in the same way but sad in entirely different ways. So are individuals.

But I will mention just one more thing. This must have taken place in the first week of December, or maybe a bit earlier or later. It was the week in which Ravi finally submitted his PhD thesis. He told me one morning that he’d a dream which finally made him “understand.”

Understand what? He did not elaborate.

He claimed he had never dreamed in Denmark before, that the moment he came to Denmark, he stopped having the few dreams that he used to have. You just don’t remember them, I told him.

No, he replied, seriously, yaar; I don’t think I have dreamed a single dream in Denmark before this one. Not even a nightmare. I suspect they have ordered dreams away in this country.

Ravi wrote down the dream, with some poetic license, as a short story. It was one of the stories he shared with me. A week or two later, he posted it on an open-access online site. He had never done so with any of his creative writing before, and he hasn’t done so since, as far as I can see. Ravi was a book person. Online publishing did not mean much to him. If you Google him, this is the only open-access story or poem by him that you will be able to find. I think he wanted someone in particular to read it. Though sometimes I wonder.

He called the story “A State of Niceness”; it was narrated in the third person. The version that I have copied here is taken from that online edition.

But it was difficult to locate when I wanted to find it for inclusion in this account. I got a number of hits when I Googled “A State of Niceness.” I had always considered it a brilliant title for a story set in Denmark. But, obviously, Ravi and I were not the only people to think so.

So much for originality!

I hit upon another story—published in print in several places but not accessible online—with exactly the same title. By a strange coincidence, this story is also by an Indian writer—a chap called Khair—who had lived in Denmark some years ago. I could not find a copy of Khair’s story. I do not know if it shares anything with Ravi’s story of the same title. Anyway, it is Ravi’s story that concerns us, and that is the story I have copied in the next chapter.

A STATE OF NICENESS

The wipers made a slight sucking noise that Ravi felt at the back of his head. Maybe they made the noise only in his head. Surely that was the case: how could he possibly hear the sound of wipers brushing away the relentless autumn drizzle in a car that was hermetically sealed against the outside? It is something he never got used to: these sealed cars; windows up, always. No draft except the smooth artificial airflow of the air conditioner. Just warm enough. A smell like that in a room closed for too long, like a prison room, the smell of staleness deodorized to a nicety. But it persisted. Ravi smelled it in all such cars, Fords, Mercedes, Chryslers, cars so different from those, even when imported, that he had driven, windows down, wind ruffling his hair, in India.

A wall covered with Virginia creeper flashed past; it was blood red now. Autumn had entered the short phase, a few weeks between drizzle and barrenness, when an explosion of colors redeems the death to follow. But he was insulated against even that.

The car smelled of a stuffy niceness. Or did it? He could see his parents-in-law, both schoolteachers, both extremely nice people, sitting up front. His father-in-law, reasonable, sane, grizzled blond hair now gone a steely grey, was driving. His mother-in-law, reasonable, sane, blond hair still kept blond with the help of various lotions and dyes, was leafing through a sales catalogue. They obviously could not smell the stale niceness that pervaded the car. Ravi wished he could lower the windows or get out for a quick breath. But it was drizzling outside, and cold. It would be strange if he lowered the window. It wouldn’t sound nice if he said he wanted to get out and breathe. Shout. He had been conscripted into niceness by his decision to stay in this country, his decision to marry here two years ago.

He closed his eyes and imagined his wife cycling to meet them. She was returning from her singing classes: she now taught singing in an adult education university, while she continued with her post-doc. Her parents, still living in the village near Aalborg where she had grown up, were passing through the city and had invited them out for dinner. Dinner at six. Sharp. That was another of the things Ravi had to get used to.

In his mind, he could see her cycling, wearing her smart brown raincoat, focused—as always—on what she was doing, busy, busy, busy. Her golden blonde hair was tied into a neat orderly bun. She had been less focused once, she had claimed, but then that period, if it ever existed, was before Ravi had met her. She was not doing a PhD in musicology then, let alone a post-doc; she had even had a breakdown of some mysterious sort. Ravi could not imagine her breaking down now: she was always so much in control. He wished he had known her then. Then, when she had spent a couple of years dabbling in the humanities, a relationship to time and degrees that Ravi, coming from a country where careers were aborted by a single lost month, would have failed to understand if he himself had not come from what his Maoist friends in India liked to call the filthy rich.

But even then, at the time when she was dabbling in the humanities, Ravi already had a career as a journalist in India. After an initial hesitation, which had lasted for almost two years, he had quit his job, spent a year in USA and then moved to this country to do a PhD in history. He had started off, like any other immigrant in West Europe, by earning extra money doing odd jobs, mostly menial work that could be performed by those who did not speak the language. His PhD had progressed slowly. He had finally finished it, though, and was now teaching in a high school. He felt he had drifted into something to which he was largely superfluous. This controlled world, the universe of his married life, this orderly state of niceness all around him, his own inability to be rude.

They must have
SMS
-ed or synchronized their watches. They had just parked the car and walked to the entrance of the restaurant when Lena, his wife of the past two years, cycled up and joined them. The restaurant was in a dour, late-nineteenth-century building, grey and solid. It looked more like an office building than a restaurant. But it was, Ravi knew, an expensive place, the sort of place frequented only by those who were in the know.

Past the flanking columns of the door, engraved into half-pillars, there was suddenly a darkly red-carpeted, sumptuous world. There were rows of coats, overcoats and jackets. A low, diffuse light burned overhead. To the right was the door to the hall of the restaurant, up three small steps. It exuded warmth.

Ravi could not follow his in-laws and Lena through the door into the restaurant because he was the last one in the row, and when he hung up his jacket, first Lena’s jacket and then her mother’s coat fell off the hooks on which they had been precariously and hurriedly placed. By the time Ravi had hung the jacket and the coat back on the pegs, Lena and her parents had entered the restaurant and disappeared in its artificial candle-lit gloaming.

Inside, at the reception counter, Ravi was stopped by a very Scandinavian-looking waiter—tall, broad, blond, even teeth cared for by state-subsidized dentistry from kindergarten onwards—who looked at him with some surprise. When Ravi’s eyes got used to the gloom and began to register the other guests (almost all the tables appeared to be occupied), he could understand the surprise in the waiter’s eyes: Ravi was perhaps the only dark person in the hall. I am meeting friends here, Ravi told the waiter and walked in. The waiter did not look convinced and might have intercepted Ravi, but at that moment some elderly ladies congesting a table beckoned for attention. The waiter moved in their direction with a dubious glance at Ravi.

Ravi was in a hall of wooden paneling and rich dark furniture. There were plain white tablecloths, thin elegant candle-stands, maroon or dark-green curtains. Everything was subdued and affluent, with the affluence of those who do not have to demonstrate their wealth or taste. It did not appear to be a particularly large hall to Ravi, but even then he could not spot Lena or her parents. They seemed to have disappeared, swallowed into this Aladdin’s cave of taste. They fitted into its careful order so well that Ravi could not discover them anywhere.

Walking about in the murky light, Ravi felt odd. He felt he stood out: was it due to his consciousness of the difference of his skin or the difference of his activity in this place? He was the only person who appeared to be looking, and people who look around always seem a trifle lost. All the others were firmly ensconced in their places; they looked like they belonged there and when they moved they had a definite goal: the restroom, the door, the counter. The waiters moved about with just as much assurance and certainty. Ravi wavered in their midst, talking a half-step in one direction and a step in another, looking.

Then suddenly he caught sight of Lena. He knew she was not allowing herself to look for him; he knew that the orderly rules of this place required such control from her and, as always, she was going to exercise full control. The room appeared to have changed. It had opened up. It was more cavernous and much larger than it had appeared at first. For the first time Ravi realized that he could not tell where the hall ended. It stretched in front of him, rows and rows of polished tables, ironed tablecloths, people pouring wine, consuming dishes, conversing in low tones, politely.

There was something like a huge bowl further up, with ramps leading up to it from four directions. The bowl appeared at least a story high. He realized, with no sense of shock, that it was a salad bowl, with other small bowls ranged around it: great cornucopias full of fruit and salad. He had glimpsed Lena walking calmly towards it, along one of the ramps, heading for one of the platforms from which people helped themselves to the salad.

He needed to get out of the shadows of the section where he was standing. He needed to catch her attention, though she was not looking around for him. She did not look around too much for him anymore. He suspected that her love for him, which she claimed was more than anything she had ever felt for anyone else, had its own place in her orderly life; one only looks around for things that have been misplaced.

Ravi realized that the section where he stood was a raised platform. The stairs were some way off. He could not reach them without losing sight of Lena. So he braced himself and, knowing it would draw eyes to him, jumped down from the platform to a lower level, a hop of three feet or less. All the diners around him turned and looked, precisely but briefly, perhaps even more briefly when they realized what he was, as if that explained his lack of etiquette, his jump.

But the jolt of the jump and the eyes turning to him had momentarily disoriented Ravi, and when he looked up, he could not spot Lena again. He stopped a passing waiter to enquire, but the waiter gave him a blank look and moved on.

Ravi was reminded of the lack that had crept into his relationship over the weeks. Or perhaps it had always been there; he had just become more sensitive to it in recent weeks. He missed the ordinariness of jerky gestures, the generosity of disorder: their relationship had always been too smooth, too fluent for him; things had fallen into place too easily.

This craving for clumsy, vulnerable things: the potted flower in the wrong corner, the striped curtain with a tear, the blackened pot simmering in the kitchen, the novel on the sofa, the crumbs of toast on the table, the voice raised in indecorous and joyous greeting, a spontaneous unpremeditated gesture. How easily Lena could have extended these to him, how steadfastly she refused to do so. Not out of cruelty or lack of love but because she took the normality of order and control for granted. She had grown up in a nice world. She had not had to constantly gather up fragments of the ordinary, the daily, in newly broken settings.