How to Fight Islamist Terror from the Missionary Position (2 page)

“But you, Karim Bhai? Don’t you live here too?”

“Yes, yes, I do,” said Karim Bhai. “I live in the third room.” He gestured at the living room.

We could now see that clothes hung in the living room, ready on hangers. There was no bed in it. But there was a large sagging resin-covered sofa on which were piled sheets and pillows. Evidently, unlike us, Karim Bhai came from those sections of the working class that are accustomed to sleeping regularly on sofas.

And accustomed he was, as we were later to find out. He had been sleeping on the sofa for years now, ever since he rented out the bedrooms for the first time. This was soon after he had bought the flat, from a bankruptcy sale, and restored it with his own hands. That he rented out the rooms for money was something he did not hide from us. That he needed the money was also something he was not ashamed to confess. But the purpose for which he needed the money remained, alas, a secret to us until the last moments of the crisis that broke over our heads and so exercised the Danish media and politicians for a few weeks.

At that moment, I recall, Ravi asked him about the previous incumbents.

“Oh, they just left a week ago,” said Karim Bhai evasively.

“Some of their things are still here; they will collect them some day.”

Given Ravi’s aunty-like probing, it was soon revealed, over cups of Darjeeling tea that Karim Bhai brewed for us in the kitchen, that the previous renters had been a family of refugees from ex-Yugoslavia: the parents were old Tito-supporters and die-hard atheists, despite being Muslims; the daughter, at eighteen, had discovered Islam through Karim Bhai and the local mosque. When she wanted to marry a young Muslim man from Somalia, whom she had met at the same mosque, the parents threw a tantrum. More, hinted Karim Bhai disapprovingly, because of the man’s intense faith than because of his color. The girl married her lover and moved in with him. The parents moved out soon afterwards. The things that lay about in Karim’s flat were mostly the girl’s. She had promised to collect them.

This story gave Ravi cause for pause. He looked at me thoughtfully, sipping tea from the flowery china cup that had probably been bought in Bazar Vest or carted back from India, for no Danish supermarket could have stocked such a gaudy non-European brand. I knew what he was thinking. But I was not going to help him out. This was his idea. Let the bastard sweat it out.

Then Ravi made up his mind and decided to grab the bull by the horns.

“You see, Karim Bhai,” he began hesitantly, “we like your place, and the rent you have quoted suits us. But you see, you are like an older brother, and we would not like to cause you pain. We are, how shall I put it, single men, and you know that single men sometimes like to be visited by women and open a bottle of wine for inspiration. Our own Ghalib wrote, and that was probably when he was no longer so young, jo haathon mein jumbish nahin…”

Karim Bhai ignored the bit about women and Ghalib. He never liked to say anything about women, if he could help it, as we discovered later. But he answered Ravi’s question.

He replied: “What you do in your rooms is between you and Allah. But not a drop in my room, if you call me your brother. In my room, I pray.”

That is how we came to rent Karim Bhai’s flat.

POSTURES OF PRAYER

Karim Bhai folded up his prayer mat and put it in the corner where it always stood. Ravi observed with interest. Within a week of having moved into Karim’s flat, Ravi had convinced him of his desire to learn the Muslim prayer. It was a desire he had revealed to me months ago, only to be rebuffed by my laughter and the news that I had not said the prayer for almost two decades. Even in the days when I accompanied my father to Eid prayers, twice a year, I did my genuflections by adhering to the precedence set by those around me. When the person to the left bowed, so did I. When the person to the right stood up, so did I. For years I admired the people praying around me for their ability to remember the intricate and shifting maneuvers of the Islamic prayer, in its many combinations and forms. Then, at the age of sixteen or seventeen, following a bet with an older cousin, I discovered that my admiration was at least a bit misplaced. The cousin had suggested that most people did the Eid prayers by copying their neighbors. Try it out, he said; do the wrong thing just a second before, and you will see. I did. I saw. Half the row to my left and at least three people to my right copied my deliberate mistake before they corrected themselves.

So, apart from the incongruity of tall, elegant, clean-shaven, all-rules-barred Ravi, as twice-born a Hindu as any Brahmin, doing his best to be a meticulous impure Muslim—he had confessed that the only Muslims he really knew as a child were (out-house) servants of the family—I was simply unable to provide him with the necessary guidance. Karim Bhai was not so religiously challenged. He performed the pre-prayer wazu as the sort of art that it was meant to be in deserts with little water; he knew his surahs inside out; he did not need to sneak a glance to the left or the right before going into sijda or standing up. That he agreed to supervise Ravi surprised me, but then I understood: as a religious Muslim, he could not refuse such a request. It was enjoined on all Muslims to preach the final and unalloyed word of God. To convert a non-Muslim to Islam is to be shown the secret side door to paradise. How could Karim Bhai have refused Ravi?

Teaching time, he now announced to Ravi.

Clear out, shameless degenerate, Ravi said to me. He did not want me around because he claimed that my smirk disturbed his concentration. I continued reading the Proust (in translation) that I was re-reading, as an antidote to teaching literature in the English Department of Århus University.

Karim Bhai was a good trainer. He put Ravi through his paces. He was calm, determined and precise. As the Muslim prayers come with different combinations of verses and postures, I knew that Ravi had a long education ahead of him. And a painful one, for some of the postures are remarkably hard to maintain for more than a few seconds.

Later that evening, on our way to Under Masken, almost the only bar in town that allowed one to smoke in peace, Ravi groaned. “Now I understand why you fucking mullahs came over and colonized us. It was not the gunpowder and the cannons. It was the namaaz. While we were sitting around on our backsides, jingling bells at our gods, you were working out five times a day. The namaaz is the gym of Islam; that’s why they hate it so much in the West. It is too much competition for their fucking health businesses.”

Ravi was never as reverent about my religion when he was with me as he was with Karim Bhai.

It was a Thursday evening, and Under Masken was already crowded when we got there. We still had half an hour to kill before our double dates arrived. We managed to get a corner table under the usual assortment of masks and trinkets. A huge aquarium lined the wall behind us.

Ravi lit a cigarette. I had smoked occasionally, at parties or on nights out, but Ravi had started smoking just a couple of years back, when smoking was banned in public places in Denmark. He claimed the ban was proof of the sexist and anti–working-class turn of Denmark in recent years, for it was mostly women and working-class men who still smoked. He decided to oppose it by smoking at least one cigarette per day and so far he had steadfastly adhered to his sole, silent, smoking protest against the ruling powers of Denmark.

He offered me a cigarette from his packet of Marlboro. I declined. A rare smoker, I did not feel that the cigarette fog in the pub required any further contribution from me.

The women who entered, within a minute of each other, did not look very different from their photos on the dating site. That was a relief. They also appeared to be able to identify us easily, though of course any two South Asians in any bar in Århus could not be too difficult to locate. Introductions over, drinks fetched (by Ravi, the generous), our conversation hesitated and hiccupped like an antique car; then it rolled down the kind of incline that I had become familiar with over the past few months of internet dating in Denmark.

The initial weeks had been a surprise, though I’d been forewarned by Ravi, who had been religiously dating on the internet, and elsewhere, since his arrival in Denmark. Between us, he liked to point out, we had experience of dating in five countries: India, Pakistan (though Ravi had reservations about the existence of real dating in that country), England, the USA, and Switzerland. Switzerland and the USA, where he had spent various periods as student or journalist, were Ravi’s contribution to the list, as was India. But Denmark, Ravi claimed, was different. It was perhaps the only country left in the Western Hemisphere where 80 percent of all women were afraid of dating a colored man and all but one percent of the rest would only date colored men if they had a chance. A bit like England in the 1950s; this progressive country is a few decades behind the rest in some areas, Ravi insisted.

At first inclined to dismiss this as predictable rhetoric from Ravi, over the past few months I’d had to concede that it did contain a kernel of truth. Now, in the music-filled smoky atmosphere of Under Masken, my conversation with my date—a tall, floridly beautiful platinum blonde, who made a striking contrast to Ravi’s smaller, thinner date, a woman with a hard mouth and spiky brown hair—proceeded down familiar avenues. Ravi’s date, after establishing her credentials with Ravi by criticizing the Danish People’s Party and its anti-immigrant politics, had proceeded, a bit surprisingly, to launch into a detailed analysis of last night’s handball semi-final between Denmark and Spain, which Denmark had won after trailing in the first quarter. I knew Ravi must be squirming in the depths of his casually clad soul, as he had no interest whatsoever in any ball game: Ravi was of the opinion that the West’s fascination with ball games, sadly being communicated to the rest, was susceptible to Freudian analysis, and not necessarily from the angle of the Oedipus complex. When my platinum blonde, after mentioning her love of Tolkien, which was perhaps evoked by the fact, glaringly mentioned in my dating profile, that I “loved, read and taught (but did not write) literature,” proceeded to tell me how she never dated Danish men, who were always so incredibly boring, I knocked Ravi’s knee three times with my knee. This was one of our established signals. There was a pause. Then he tapped back three times. He had agreed.

Two minutes later, I excused myself, went to the dingy little poster-ridden toilet on the other side of the bar and called Ravi on his mobile. He answered with alacrity. I mumbled a 1960s Bombay film song into the receiver. He replied gobbledygook in Hindi, with a few suitably intonated English words—especially “hospital?,” “hospital!” “hospital”—thrown in. When I returned from the toilet, Ravi had bad news for me: our cousin had called. Another cousin had been hit by a car. Oh no, I said. We had to meet both the cousins at a hospital where the first cousin was rushing the second cousin.

Our dates looked suitably concerned. They were nice Danish girls with nice Danish hearts. We looked suitably disappointed. We knew from experience that the fact that Ravi and I did not resemble each other in any way would not be noticeable to them; it seldom is to most people in Denmark.

“Families,” said Ravi, the dramatist, unable to resist the temptation to improvise, “that’s what happens when you have large, extended families.”

The girls nodded in sympathy: they read the newspapers and knew all about immigrants with their large families, all of them cramped into little Denmark. Some other time, I am sure, I said, pulling Ravi away before he over-improvised.

We did not have to disguise the haste with which we left.

A few streets away, we dived into the kind of pub that smart young Danish women never enter. Very few of these have been left standing, but there is one at the corner of Christiansgade and Frederiksvej. Dirty and uninviting from the outside; dark, forbidding and smelly inside. Four middle-aged men on stools at the bar turned around to watch us enter. One man revolved all the way around under his initial impetus and had to try again. Two of them kept staring at us, for this was also the kind of pub that colored men did not enter.

I fetched two Tuborgs—only ordinary Danish beers were on offer—from the counter and joined Ravi at a corner table. It was a dark corner. The two men staring at us from the counter went back to contemplating the mysteries of what was definitely their tenth or twelfth glass of beer.

“No more,” I said to Ravi, “I am not going on one of these dates ever again.”

“So soon, bastard,” drawled Ravi, “you give up so bloody soon. How many have you dated: three, four, five? Look at me, I am on number seventy-nine: I am getting there. Any day now I will strike gold: the one girl out of a hundred in Århus who doesn’t date only white men or only colored men. That will be history! Tales will be told of us in the annals of this city. People will rank us with Frederick Douglass and Martin Luther King. Don’t throw up your spade, bastard; keep digging.

“Actually,” he added, “I was not averse to playing some ball games with Miss Spiky Hair, but the urgency of your weak-kneed knocks made me abandon the idea. What is it that repelled you, O Worshipper of Shallow Beauty, about Miss Monroe in extra size? I thought she was just up your alley and was quite convinced, until you knocked, that you would be up her alley tonight, incurring the sleepless, unspoken wrath of good old Karim Bhai.”

“She only dates colored men,” I replied.

“Good for her! All the more reason to do your duty: I have never understood what you have against that nineteen percent of the female population here. She likes colored men: good. You are colored: good. So go ahead, bastard, prove to her that you are a fucking man.”

“Don’t be more facetious than usual, Ravi.”

“You know, you bloody wog, you are going the way of all these bloody niggers. There was a time when they came to Europe, flaunted the invisible chains of slavery in the face of white women, hyped up natural rhythm and the animal in man, and merrily spiked the entire lot before white men could even clear their throats to object. White women dangled from their proverbially big dicks, desperate for redemption. Now my nigger friends get all intellectual and sensitive, point out uninteresting facts like the normality of their dicks, and lose white women to, horror of horrors, limpid white men. And it is the same with us wogs: there was a time when we floated around on our magic carpets of mysticism, bestowing our largesse with typical Oriental abundance. Sri Aurobindo had his share of Mas, Nehru netted Edwina, Bapu had a surfeit of admiring blonde Bais, Behns… Then comes our generation, claiming to be rational, doing engineering, computers and medicine; medicine, good lord! Shit, man, what’s wrong with us? Why can’t we use the few fucking advantages history has left us with?”