by Tabish Khair
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?”
Ravi had raised his voice during this harangue, and one of the starers at the counter turned to frown at us. Ravi frowned back.
Medicine was Ravi’s weak point. He hated the field with a vengeance. He claimed it had to do with his dad, a legendary Mumbai surgeon, and the final fight that the two of them had when Ravi quit medical college in the third year and started doing a degree in the humanities. The university gold medal he got for his master’s in history had been scorned by his father. His subsequent diploma in journalism had not helped either. Or his aspiration to write a novel. Since then, they had only communicated through Ravi’s mother, though recently relations had thawed slightly. Ravi’s decision—after an abandoned career as a staff reporter and no evidence of a published novel—to do a PhD abroad (though still in history, which is what he was doing in Århus), had been more acceptable to his father.
I knew that the volume of his harangue would increase if he got started on medicine, as would his pugilistic tendency to take any objecting middle-aged man as a stand-in for his father. I steered him gently out of the pub, all four customers at the counter staring at us, and into the streets. They were probably safe now: there was a good chance our ex-dates had gone home.
When we returned to the flat that night, well after midnight, there was a note from Karim on the kitchen table. “Salaam- alai-kum. Night shift today; will be back for breakfast,” it said. Karim Bhai was very conscientious. He seldom left the flat without leaving a note for us. He kept a list of “supplies to be bought” hanging from a magnet on the fridge, and diligently crossed items out or added them in his neat handwriting. If he expected something similar from us, he bravely kept his disappointment from showing.
The next morning, I woke up expecting a call from my parents in Karachi. It was Saturday; they called every Saturday morning. I was waiting for the chirr of the phone while taking out cartons of milk and juice from the fridge and toasting bread. The coffee machine gurgled. Ravi was traversing the lobby, wrapped in a towel on his way out of the shower, and he picked up the phone when it rang. I expected him to hand it to me, but he continued talking into the receiver.
It soon became obvious that the caller was not one of my parents. It was someone doing tabligh: trying to preach the virtues of the Quran. Perhaps it was someone known to Karim. Perhaps he thought Ravi was Karim. I had heard of these phonic proselytizers, but never experienced one—and I wondered, for the person evidently spoke Urdu, if the call was not from India or Pakistan. In any case, the number was a secret one; it did not show on our phone.
Talking about the Quran was not an issue for Ravi, but the secrecy of the number perturbed the democratic Indian in him. Between questions and answers about the Quran, of which he probably knew as much as the anonymous proselytizer, Ravi kept querying him about his identity and the need to use a number that did not show.
I signaled to Ravi to cut the connection; I am expecting a call, I mouthed at him. He ignored me and continued to discuss some fine point of Quranic exegesis.
I wrenched the receiver away from him. He would have resisted but for the fact that he was still clad in a precariously knotted towel, which had to be kept in place with one hand.
“Hello, hello,” said the voice on the other end. Then it continued in chaste Urdu, “As the Quran Sharif says in its infinite wisdom…”
“Excuse me,” I said, in chaste Urdu too, “the connection is extremely bad. I cannot hear you very well.”
There was a bit of beeping. The guy evidently had a team working on the technology. Volume and audibility increased.
“Is it better now?” the anonymous proselytizer asked.
“Hello, hello,” I replied. “I cannot hear you…”
“Just a second, janaab. Don’t put down the phone.”
“Hello,” I said, “hello, hello, hello…” I put the receiver down.
The phone rang again in two seconds.
I put it down once more with a string of strangulated hellos. Ravi came out of his room, buttoning his jeans, bare-chested.
He shook his head.
“You, my friend, are the reason why the infidels are winning,” he said.
After a slow breakfast, he diligently practiced the postures of prayer that Karim Bhai was teaching him. He ignored my comment about it being symbolic compensation for the disappointments of last night.
When we finally left for the university library around noon, Karim Bhai had not returned despite his note of the previous evening.
RETROSPECTIVE MYSTERIES
By three in the afternoon, Ravi had abandoned the library building, ambitiously shaped to resemble a book from the outside, though the resemblance was more imaginary than architectural, and SMS-ed a rendezvous with one of his “plain” girlfriends. Ravi was a restless researcher: this did not show in his work or erudition, which was sustained by a consciously camouflaged ability to read and absorb faster than anyone else I have known. He must have been obnoxious as a school student. I would have hated going to the same class as him, for I came to my education through diligence and perseverance. Ravi tried to make light of this difference on the occasions I brought it up, pointing out the fact that while I was being taught English, Urdu and a faint smattering of French by my Jesuits in Karachi, he was being taught English, Hindi and French by his Jesuits, as well as Sanskrit, Latin, Gesrman and the piano by a succession of private tutors employed by his parents.
But it was true. Facts, fiction, languages did not flock to me, without significant effort on my part. They did to Ravi. They were like the “plain” women he dated—some of whom were plain only by the standards of a man who had grown up among Bollywood starlets. But flock to him they did, despite what Ravi called his “absolute honesty”: the fact that he made no promise of fidelity, that he actually promised infidelity and impermanence. I am a postmodern lover, he would clarify; you, bastard, are still stuck knee-deep in modernity.
When I returned to the flat that evening, there were sounds coming from Ravi’s room. The rhythm of love-making, communicated by the creaking of his bed, which soon swelled to an unrestrained crescendo of ecstasy in a male and a female voice. I was becoming familiar with these noises, and wondered what Karim Bhai thought of them. There was no sign of Karim Bhai, but I assumed he had called or met Ravi earlier on. I shut myself up in my room with one of the last volumes of my Proust.
An hour later, Ravi knocked on my door, opened it and did a fair imitation of a siren blowing. All clear, bastard, he announced. Let’s get a pizza.
Over the pizza, he asked me if Karim Bhai had come back and left again during his moments of ecstasy.
“But I thought you had heard from him,” I said.
“No. There was no sign of him.” We were somewha
t worried.
“Should we call and ask?” wondered Ravi. We had exchanged mobile numbers on moving in. But we decided not to call; it appeared a bit excessive, given the phlegmaticism with which Karim mostly treated events and things.
This was our first month in the flat, and Karim had always appeared to be such a careful, methodical man: we could not help worrying. We were about to call him when, at about nine that night, we heard his cab pull up. Karim Bhai came in and went into his room. He usually kept the door of his room slightly open, even at night, but tonight he closed it firmly. Next morning, he remained reticent about his disappearance, and we saw no cause to press him for information.
In later months, we would get used to such sudden disappearances by Karim Bhai. We would not pay it much attention, perhaps even attributing it to the kind of carnal needs that we indulged in, Ravi with far greater abundance than me, and that Karim Bhai appeared to be so unaffected by. Perhaps, I remember thinking, he needs a day or a night out with some prostitute. It made sense to me: I could not imagine a man to whom sex did not matter.
Later on, when the controversy broke over us, we started pondering more about these mysterious disappearances of Karim Bhai. They came to be colored the shade of suspicion that was being cast on all of us by the Danish tabloids. But that was still almost a year off; I should stick to the forgotten injunctions of my girlfriend of yore and keep that story for later. Too much movement back and forth in time, I almost remember her quoting her MFA professor, loses more readers than it gains.
