How to Fight Islamist Terror from the Missionary Position (20 page)

Ravi and I did not want to talk about it. I thought we had done the right thing, but it still felt wrong. Ravi was more affected than me. He murmured about how it all had started resembling the Black Plague years of European history, when the inability to find a reason for sickness and suffering had led to the widespread burning of Jews and strangers. Except that the invisible epidemic this time is capitalism, he grumbled, complicated by the fact that Europeans are accustomed to simply enjoying its advantages. Ravi had never shared my mistrust of Karim’s narrow religiosity. Perhaps, also, this was one break too many for him. He had cared deeply for Karim; he had loved Lena from the depths of his ironic soul.

But the flat still glared at us. The note on the fridge, listing in Karim’s neat handwriting all the things that had to be bought; the small TV in the kitchen; the coffee machine, which was there only for our use; the half-open door to Karim’s room, where his fraying sofa lay empty, sagging, shrouded with his pillows and blankets; the veiled bookrack; the suddenly silent phone in the lobby, the beads on the kitchen table. The flat accused us.

We decided to move out. I don’t think we even discussed it. We just started packing. Ravi had already booked his ticket to India: he was leaving in less than a month. He decided to leave his furniture—including the expensive bar—behind. If Karim does not want it, he can throw it out, he said.

We packed the rest of our things. Ravi gave most of his books away to the Clauses and Pernille; he packed them in two boxes and went up to Pernille’s flat with them. The next day we rented a storage unit and stored what had to be saved, mostly my furniture, threw out some things and, packing stuff for a week or so, moved into Cabinn.

I had left a curt note for Karim on the kitchen table, telling him that he could adjust this month’s rent against our deposit and keep whatever was left over. I had told him to call us on our mobiles if he had questions or differences. He never called.

When Ms. Marx discovered our relapse into Ravi’s old gypsy status, she invited us to sleep over at her place the next night.

Ravi got the spare room. I was finally forced to overcome my resistance to sharing her bed when her son was home; the only other option was a sagging sofa in her sitting room.

Yes, you have guessed right: I am still seeing Ms. Marx. I am fond of her son and have even fetched him from school once or twice. That is why I have not named her in this account. I think we are reasonably happy with our half glasses of love. Or I am, in any case. Sometimes I detect a look in her eyes that makes me feel that she is still hoping for something a bit more, and she knows that it cannot be between us. Sometimes I feel her straining against that knowledge.

I don’t. I like to hold her in bed; I find the tiny white—they are not blonde—hairs on her arms very sexy; I like the way her thighs, which she considers too thick, swell and fall into trim knees, the way, when she combs her dyed hair, her biceps—which she considers too muscular—jump; I love the dimple she gets when she laughs—which is not often, for she is a serious, busy woman—and I love the slight sag in her belly, left over from childbearing, that she is always trying but unable to get rid of. I love the way she straddles me when we make love, but refuses to let me look at her. I even love her preference for the missionary position.

I am grateful for all this and a hundred other small things. But I am also grateful for the knowledge that she can go on without me and I can continue without her; that, in due course, if required, we might both find our glasses more or less half-full with love for someone else. I will remember her, in that case, as I remember my MFA-girlfriend or my ex-wife, neither more nor less.

That makes me wonder about Ravi, while I sit here typing my version of those days. And about Lena, whom I have glimpsed only occasionally on the campus, smiling, controlled and poised… if Ravi was right about the green depths that hid in her. No, do not misunderstand me: people as accomplished and beautiful as Ravi and Lena always go on too. Of course they will have other relationships. What choice do they have in that matter? I have no doubt of their perseverance. But will a half glass ever suffice for them? A predictable Eng Lit line comes back to me: After such knowledge, what forgiveness?

How Ravi would have scoffed at this quotation. “Fuck, yaar,” I hear him laugh. “You Eng Lit types crack me up!”

But let me heed my MFA-girlfriend’s advice, this once, and avoid digressions at such a crucial juncture of my account. Let us return to the infamous Islamist Axe Plot.

Like most plots, its tail was twisted, but such twists inevitably become evident only in the end. We slept late the next morning at Ms. Marx’s place; by the time we woke up, around nine, she had already dropped her son off at school and picked up fresh bread from a bakery. We had a leisurely breakfast. Ms. Marx and I were teaching later that day; we drove off together. Ravi stayed back. I noticed that he had stopped fiddling with his mobile.

When we returned that evening, I realized that Karim’s arrest had distracted Ravi—permanently, I hoped, and said as much to Ms. Marx—from the mantra of his mobile. I don’t think he could ever forget Lena, but now he had something else to think about too. He had spent most of the day calling up people who knew us—and Karim. He had even tried to get in touch with Ali, but Ali had not been available. He had called Ajsa, but she was too busy with her own domestic tragedy to have visited Karim in detention. Only Great Claus, it appeared, had visited Karim, who had asked for—and received—his prayer beads in his cell. It appeared that Great Claus and some other people who knew Karim had also spoken to the police.

“It’s all a misunderstanding, Great Claus told me,” Ravi said to us that evening. “Great Claus says it will become clear soon enough.”

I smiled, disbelievingly. I did not want to contradict Ravi, if Great Claus’s naïveté made him feel better. Instead, I asked him how Karim had taken to Great Claus’s visit; after all, he had avoided the two Clauses ever since they disclosed their homosexuality.

“What do you expect!” Ravi laughed, and I must say it was good to see him laugh again. “Great Claus could not help chuckling over it on the phone. Karim Bhai was touched, he said, but he basically asked Great Claus about his family, his daughters, his job, everything one could possibly think of except Little Claus. As if Great Claus was still living with his family.”

Ravi chuckled.

I did not find it funny. I wondered how someone of Ravi’s acute intelligence could not draw the obvious inference about Karim’s guilt from such, to all eyes, clear proofs of prejudice and narrowness.

POSTSCRIPT TO A PLOT

The very next day, we read in the papers that Karim Bhai had been released. Ms. Marx woke us up with the news before she drove her son to school that morning. She had glanced at the paper, as she always did, while making breakfast for her son. She was as surprised as I was.

I could not possibly drive off without telling you, she said, as we scrambled, bleary-eyed, for the front pages.

Even Ravi could not have been hoping for something so dramatic. Not satisfied with Ms. Marx’s daily
Politiken
, he ran off in his pajamas, pulling on a thin jacket and a pair of boots without bothering to put his socks on, and returned in ten minutes—he must have run fast—with all the newspapers and tabloids that he could buy from a neighboring bakery. “Bastard,” he cried out, when he saw me again. “What did I say!” He was shivering from the cold, but did not notice it.

Karim had not just been released on bail. It was more dramatic than that. All charges against him had been dropped. There was a photo of him—his back, actually—in one of the tabloids, trying to enter unobtrusively the building in which we had shared a flat with him for a year.

The rest you probably know. Karim Bhai was released after three days in detention; a week later, the police announced that he was not implicated in the “Islamist Axe Plot.” The tabloids reported it with barely concealed suspicion. A politician from the Danish People’s Party ranted about how weak Danish legislation was, how it allowed terrorists to walk away scot-free. Anti-Muslim online sites such as
Uriahposten
foamed in cyberspace.

But the facts were clear: They had nothing to do with Al Qaeda; they had to do with a Danish woman. Karim had met her in Cairo. She was twenty-three years older than him. They had gotten married.

Seven or eight years ago, when she took early pension, his wife had asked for a divorce. Nothing was wrong between them. I hesitate to say that they were in love, for I wonder whether that much-sullied term holds the same meaning for everyone. But it appears that whatever they had shared in Cairo was still intact.

But Karim’s wife had gotten older; perhaps she had another fear at the back of her mind, and wished to release Karim from a burden that she suspected was about to fall on her shoulders. In any case, she felt too old to continue to be in a relationship with a much younger man, a man with other expectations and needs than her. That is what she told him and their mutual friends. She wanted to retire to the countryside, while Karim—she knew—not only needed to be in a city for his work but also, like most colored immigrants in Denmark, felt comfortable only in urban settings.

Karim had differed but he had accepted her decision. They had divorced within a year. He had stayed in touch with her, visiting her regularly as, over the next year or two, it became obvious that she was succumbing to Alzheimer’s. When she could not continue to live on her own, Karim Bhai admitted her to the best care he could afford. He went beyond what was freely available under the fraying Danish health-care system, which was being merrily liberalized by successive governments.

Over the years, she had drifted into her own world. Karim Bhai still visited her regularly. In periods when she recovered some lucidity, she would call him, and he would take a day or two off and check into a motel next to her. Those were the phone calls that had increased our suspicion of Karim. Her lucid periods never lasted for more than a day or two. That is when he used to disappear, mysteriously. That is why he would come back looking morose and tired—what Ravi and I, in our final moments of suspicion, read as anger or bitterness. That is why he needed to rent out his flat, work the extra hours.

Of course, the tabloids did not report it in such detail. We heard most of it from the Clauses. As I wrote earlier, we had moved out of the flat—storing most of our stuff in Boxit—the day after we informed on Karim Bhai. We stayed a few days with different friends: three nights at Ms. Marx’s, a couple of nights at the Clauses, whose newly conjoined bliss had been dented but not destroyed by the controversy around Karim, a few more nights in other places. Then I found another flat to rent. Ravi had only a few days left in Denmark. He decided to spend them traveling around; when he stayed over in my flat, he slept on a mattress on the floor. We never went back to Karim Bhai’s place. It seemed pointless.

But we spoke to common friends and we read the tabloids and papers. The Clauses, in particular, kept Ravi posted.

The papers reported the facts that common friends verified. But the reported facts were stained by incomprehension and suspicion. How could the Danish media really comprehend a man like Karim when we, Ravi and I, had failed to do so? The tabloids sneered subtly at his older-by-more-than-twenty-years wife, insinuating that he must have married her to get into Denmark. But I thought otherwise. I recalled Karim Bhai explaining to Ravi just some months back: “The Prophet, peace be upon him, had only one wife: she was about twenty years older than him. He remained faithful to her and he did not marry again until after she died, peace be upon her.”

Why is it that Karim never mentioned to us that he still called on and took care of his ex-wife? It turned out that Great Claus and Pernille had known of her but they were also aware of Karim’s strong reluctance to talk about it. So had some other people, but then they did not move in our circles.

Karim had never mentioned staying in touch with his ex-wife—let alone her illness—within our hearing. He had never told anyone who did not already know that he took care of her. He had not even mentioned her existence. Why?

I can give so many answers. Was he embarrassed by her illness, her condition? Or did he feel that silence was owed to the last shreds of dignity to which she still clung in moments of clarity? Did he feel that, being a good Muslim by his own lights, he could not—as my parents would put it—let his left hand know the good that his right hand did? Or was it because—being so narrowly religious—he felt that he was doing something reprehensible and un-Islamic: visiting and spending days alone with a woman who was no longer his wife?

There are other answers too.

But no, they are not answers. They are guesses. Who am I to answer for Karim Bhai? Who are you to demand answers from him?

Lena did not come to see Ravi off at Århus station. I doubt she texted him either.

Yesterday, as I was preparing the manuscript of this book for submission, I received, for the first time since his departure almost a month ago, an email from Ravi. He wrote with no reference to the past. He was in Mumbai. (No, he was in “Bombay,” as he actually wrote.) He had refused to move in with his parents; he was working for an NGO and writing as a freelancer. Ravi wrote that he was thinking of going back to journalism in India and uncertain whether he would even return to Denmark to defend his PhD thesis. Despite this old spark of Ravi’s fire, it was a subdued email. I heard a voice in it that I could hardly recognize, a resolute but chastened voice, the voice of someone willing to wait for things to happen.

Perhaps that is why I want to add this postscript. I wish to end my account of the infamous Islamic Axe Plot with one of my dreams. My MFA-girlfriend of yore probably had injunctions against ending a factual account with something as unreal as a dream. But a dream it has to be, I feel, for it was a strange dream, which returned me to the beginning of my story. And, more strangely, despite his flippancy and his skepticism, his claim that he never but once dreamed in Denmark, when I think of Ravi, I think of a dreamer. Someone who dreamed so deeply that he could not allow himself to recall his own dreams in the lurid light of ordinary day.