How to Fight Islamist Terror from the Missionary Position (17 page)

He felt it was like that with almost all of them, despite their concern, despite the niceness. And it was buttressed by a belief that, after all, they lived in the best of worlds—and any of his losses were amply compensated. The losses had to be acknowledged at times, but only at a hidden personal level, never as a matter of the world, a flaw that increasingly appeared structural to him, a way of life. What difference could even his rich childhood make to this structural flaw in the world? Never here, never with Lena, he feared, would there ever be a public acknowledgment of the right of loss, pain, disorder to be and to be freely expressed. It was also simply taken for granted that coming from where he did, being what he was—westernized, professional, irreligious—it was natural for him to seek to be here. And, as such, he felt, it was always him seeking (and often not finding); it was always he who had to move around, make space, look, ask, hold.

Tired of asking and looking around in a place that seemed without end to him, Ravi gravitated back towards the section near the entrance, the exit. He stood next to a table lined with national newspapers, with editorials worrying about the state of the world and making polite noises of criticism about the treatment of refugees in the country, and tabloids full of lurid scandals and crimes, the latter often pointing a vague finger of accusation at immigrants. He did not necessarily disagree with all the newspapers and they did not always agree with each other, but Ravi found their assurance, whether it was about Nigeria or Denmark or USA, difficult to stomach. It was this commonality of tone that made all the news sound like a repeat of what Ravi had read for weeks, months, years. But just as he could not walk away from the restaurant—it would have been rude of him, surely—he could not resist reading such headlines day after day. They were in different ways (mostly well-meaning, mostly nice) so oblivious of him, and yet he had to keep looking at them, for them, these printed words he knew by heart even before they were printed each night.

He stood there browsing through the newspapers for five minutes or so. It was then that he noticed a corridor leading to a quiet and empty section.

The corridor had surprisingly cheap wooden paneling. The section it led to was empty, and unlike the rest of the restaurant, it had chairs piled up on the tables. The chairs and tables were of the spindly kind used in cafés. This section was probably used during earlier hours to serve customers who wanted a coffee and cake rather than a meal. Ravi walked into it listlessly, noticing the chairs and round wooden tables, the empty beer counter, the pattern on the floor.

He was looking at the floor when he almost bumped into someone. It was a waiter, not a local this time, but someone from the Middle East or Turkey. Can I help you, sir? the man said in English. A surprising feeling of gratitude flooded Ravi. He noticed that the man did not wear the uniform of waiters. He was probably a cleaner from the kitchens below, sent up to fetch the tray of dirtied utensils that he was carrying. Ravi explained his search to the man.

Have you looked in the reserved sections? asked the man. Seeing the look of incomprehension on Ravi’s face, the man pointed to the cheap wooden paneling along one side of the corridor: there are rooms behind those panels. They are usually used by special guests. Your family might have been placed there.

Ravi slid one of the panels open, and was met with garish light. The room inside contrasted with the main hall of the restaurant through which he had been walking until now. The main hall was dimly lit; the guests were dressed in conservative greys, blue and black, the tables arranged at a polite distance from each other all over the floor. Pearls and silver hung from the ears or around their necks and sometimes glinted decorously in the candlelight. But this hidden room was like a wedding shamiana in a small town in India or Pakistan. It was garishly lit: the men talking confidently, the women speaking in low tones or keeping quiet. Some of them wore gold. There was a buffet table in the middle of the room, piled with dishes, and the chairs were ranged along the four walls.

This section was more disorderly than the other parts of the restaurant, but it was an abashed sort of disorder: as if a housewife had received unannounced guests and had done what she could to tidy up in a jiffy. As if order was the state that was being aimed at, and the bits and pieces, the napkin or crawling child on the floor, were inherently a failure.

Ravi realized with a shock that almost all the people sitting in the room, the women dressed in gorgeous colors, were South Asians: Indian, Pakistani, Bangladeshi, Sri Lankan. The women mostly sat on the chairs along the walls, holding plates of food in their hands or laps, sometimes feeding a child. The men, more conservatively dressed, stood conversing desultorily in groups all over this secret room in the paneling. They were attired like aspiring businessmen or government functionaries on a rare trip abroad. Some of the groups were mixed, but mostly the men stood together.

A thickset middle-aged man spotted Ravi and sauntered over to him. “You live here?” the man asked in a heavy Haryanvi or Punjabi accent. Ravi nodded in affirmation. The man’s slightly florid features lit up with a smile and a smirk of recognition: South Asian to South Asian, Indian to Indian, man to man. So, where are the fun spots of this famous city? he asked again, with a wink. You know, he repeated, the fun places.

It took Ravi more than a couple of seconds to understand the question. Slowly the words sank in, reinforced by the sly look in the man’s eyes. It was not really a leer. Ravi stared at him for another second. Then he did something incredibly rude: he turned on his heels and started to walk towards the exit.

NOVEMBER, NOVEMBER, NOVEMBER

The uncertain summer, rain-riven one week and sun-drenched the other, had hiccupped into a fluctuating warm and cold autumn that year. This was a relief, as there were autumn days when the annual darkness was held at bay. November really started in December, at least for Ravi. But it lasted, as Ravi’s favorite Danish poet had prophesied, much beyond December.

I have looked at some of what I have written until now and I am surprised by the fact that it is my relationship with Ms. Marx that comes across as passionate, in an immediate sexual sense, while Ravi’s glass-brimming affair with Lena, if one were to disbelieve Ravi’s words, might strike you as restrained and cold. Perhaps that is so because I cannot really say much about Lena and Ravi. It is true that when Ravi spoke of his feelings, which was not as often as you might assume, or when—and this was quite often—he spoke of Lena, I had no doubt that his metaphor of the full glass was valid. Occasionally, when I saw them together, I would feel convinced too, but not always. There were moments when I resented Lena on Ravi’s behalf—because he seemed so incapable of resenting her—and wondered whether she shared the passion that Ravi felt. Or was she simply flattered by the flamboyance of his love for her? Ms. Marx had planted the germ of a doubt in my mind. Sometimes I felt that whatever Ravi saw in her was just a reflection of his own fire, and what Lena was capable of was not passion but niceness.

Ravi must have had his doubts too, as his dream-story suggested to me. But his faith in Lena’s love was never shaken. Looking back, I see this as something he had in common with Karim Bhai. Perhaps that is why they took to each other across such obvious differences of background, character and habit. There is obviously a very thin line dividing faithfulness from fanaticism—and I wonder if, in a world of easily exchangeable commodities, we can even see that line anymore. I know I could not in the case of Karim Bhai. Perhaps Ravi could. Perhaps Ravi thought he could. Perhaps that is why he never grew suspicious of Karim, on his own, not until I talked to him.

But there might have been something misleading about the way I narrated my relationship with Ms. Marx too; particularly, I fear, the kitchen scene. There are too many Hollywood films in which you see pans flying and plates smashed as the hero and the heroine bounce from one kitchen wall to another and finally end up enmeshed on the floor. I would be misleading you, reader, if I implied that this was the standard procedure between Ms. Marx and me.

Remember, Ms. Marx had a seven-year-old son. Even if we had been the sort that wished to bounce from kitchen shelf to kitchen floor, oblivious of either the danger from knives and jagged pieces or the expense of broken china, the presence of a young boy in the house would have precluded that option.

After we started seeing each other regularly—“became a couple,” in common parlance—Ms. Marx had no objection to me sleeping over and, late in the night, engaging in what Ravi once described as the pre-conjugal act. This was to be done carefully, of course, with a towel spread under us, for the easy elimination of evidence. But the first night we did so, just when the towel needed to be straightened, Ms. Marx’s son knocked on the door. It was eleven. We were under the impression that he had been asleep for close to an hour; Ms. Marx had worked hard on getting him to fall asleep, despite an obvious reluctance on his part, most of that evening.

Hvad er det nu, asked Ms. Marx, struggling to get back into her nightdress and keep irritation out of her tone.

He had had a nightmare, he claimed in a small voice.

Ms. Marx had to spend another half hour putting him to bed. When she got back, she was willing to roll out the towel again, but I dreaded another knock. I could not get rid of the image of a young boy pretending to sleep in his room, trying to avoid hearing those telltale sounds that, no matter how careful we tried to be, he could not avoid hearing in a small place, sounds that would be more disturbing to him because he could not really understand them. The pragmatic attitude that so many Danes, including Ms. Marx, have to these matters was not something I shared to such an extent. After that, we confined our love-making to periods when Ms. Marx’s son was staying with his father.

And yes, in case the image of a kitchen of bouncing pans and cascading plates still arises in your mind, let me add one further clarification: the towel stayed in place.

If Ms. Marx was disappointed in me as a Muslim, she tried not to show it. This was always a source of hilarity to Ravi, who urged various disguises of Muslimness on me for, in his words, the sake of good form.

Ravi could be very explicit in his curiosity and comments at times, though never without humor; in this too, he differed from Lena.

For instance, the evening he brought up circumcision. We had finished our dinner and were lingering in the kitchen. Karim Bhai and Ravi were smoking. I don’t think Ravi had smoked that day—he did not really like smoking—and so he had to light up before going to bed, simply to keep protesting against the Danish establishment’s anti-smoking policies on the behalf of women and the working classes.

The nicotine must have sparked some neurological circuit of needling in his labyrinthine mind, for he paused between puffs and said, “Sometimes I feel I should have introduced Ms. Marx to Karim Bhai here; he would have been less disappointing.”

Karim Bhai looked alarmed, not following the conversation but gathering that it had to do with women. I ignored Ravi. I was watching TV.

He continued, “You know, Karim Bhai, I suspect the bastard here is not even circumcised!”

This was sheer nonsense of the sort that Ravi was capable of spouting occasionally, but Karim Bhai trafficked only in sense. He looked at me, perturbed.

“Oh no, no, no,” he replied to Ravi. “All Muslims are circumcised. It is written in the Hadith.”

“I betcha this Paki turncoat ain’t!” Ravi maintained, not realizing that Karim was taking his needling seriously.

Karim Bhai turned to me for confirmation.

I gave up. I knew this would go on unless I set Karim’s mind at rest. Ravi would turn his idea into various other avenues of jocularity, unaware of the truck of Islam careening out of control in Karim’s mind. It was then that for the first time, fleetingly, I noticed a slight trace of bitterness—of disappointment, perhaps—in Ravi, which sometimes made him needle his friends. The reason was not difficult to guess. It was his brimming glass of Lena.

“Of course I am circumcised, bastard,” I replied.

“You mean, the proper way, when the barber seats five-year-old Munna on a stool, razor glinting, and says look look look a silver bird in the sky…” Ravi did not want his joke to deflate so soon.

“Know what, bastard,” I told him, “you are worse than the RSS: everyone goes to hospitals now. No one is circumcised like that anymore.”

Karim Bhai was smiling. I think he was so relieved to be assured of my Muslimness that he overcame his shyness about physical matters. “Not true,” he said to me, “I was taken to a barber, you know, silver bird and all…”

He went pink to the roots of his beard.

Let me try and be fair to Lena. I know my vision of her is clouded by the pain that I thought I detected on Ravi’s face, the hollowness in his heart that he struggled to hide and almost succeeded, those weeks when his hands were hummingbirds hovering over the flower of his mobile. To be fair, Lena is the only Dane I have known—apart from the Clauses who were always consciously “Asian” with us—who was infallibly courteous. This has to be put on record, I think.

Even Ms. Marx can be quite brusque, in a typically Danish way. I recall, when I first moved here, I had found the Danes an incredibly rude people. So had my ex-wife. I still find them rather rude. But I think I understand it a bit better now. It is not just the “unholy alliance of capitalist pragmatism and subterranean Protestantism,” as Ravi used to put it. It has to do with the myth of honesty that structures Danish society.

Look at it this way. Your Danish friend Mr. Xyzsen asks you to do something for him and, without telling him, you go out of your way to oblige. Mr. Xyzsen is happy but he does not feel obliged; he assumes that you did what you did because you too wanted to do it at that moment. Otherwise, surely, you would have refused. So when you ask Mr. Xyzsen to do something for you, he declines—because he is too busy or simply not in the mood. He is just being honest with you, because he assumes that you were being honest with him in the past. But, of course, courtesy is basically a matter of dishonesty—you hide your own inconvenience in order to be courteous and, sometimes, kind.