How to Fight Islamist Terror from the Missionary Position

by Tabish Khair

  As Karim had been on a night shift and was expected to return any moment, and as we were going to have breakfast in the kitchen, I asked her to join us. She did, though just for a coffee. When I introduced her to Ravi, she looked unsurprised—both by his looks, which seldom went unnoticed, and by his presence.

  “It is good to meet both of you,” she said. “Karim Bhai was so happy when you rented the rooms after Babo and Mama vacated in such a huff. He was uncertain he would be able to rent out the rooms again, at least not both of them. You know how Danes are.”

  It was then that we understood who she was. She was not Danish. She was the young Bosnian woman whose elopement with a religious Somali man had cost Karim Bhai his previous tenants. She introduced herself as Ajsa and kept out of our conversation, absentmindedly sipping from the mug that I had handed her. I could now see that she had a smart veil wrapped around her blonde hair. It was there for propriety, not to keep out the cold.

  She spoke a bit more when Karim Bhai came in and joined us for breakfast. It was mostly about her husband. Much of it was too cryptic for me to follow, but I could sense that she was worried about the Somali. His name, I gathered, was Ibrahim. I remember that towards the end of the conversation, she said:

  “You know how Ibrahim feels about the cartoons. You know how he is.”

  At this, Karim Bhai said to her, glancing surreptitiously at us, “Perhaps we can talk about it some other time. I will call on both of you.”

  I knew he could not take Ajsa to his room: his understanding of his religion prohibited him from being alone in a room with her, and for all I knew, she shared those values too. She was a young woman who had discovered Islam as a reaction to both her parents and the place that history had confined her to: a place where her Nordic looks would probably efface her more easily than if she had been dark-haired and dark-eyed. But it was also obvious that they wanted to talk about matters without Ravi or me overhearing.

  Until the events that put things in perspective, whenever Ajsa came to call on Karim Bhai, I sensed the same hesitation and secrecy. I mentioned this to the police officer later on. He smiled grimly and nodded.

  GREAT CLAUS AND LITTLE CLAUS

  There is a poem by Henrik Nordbrandt, the only Danish poet Ravi, whose conversations were otherwise peppered with quotations from Hindi, English, French, German and, especially, carefully enunciated Urdu poems, ever quoted in my hearing. It lists the months of the Danish year as being thirteen: “januar, februar, marts, april, maj, juni, juli, august, september, oktober, november, november, november.”

  November had lasted, with a short break in February, well into March now, extending the Danish year by another two dark, blowsy, wet, cold months. Though the snow had melted, once in a while the air still filled with white flakes, making me feel as if I was trapped inside one of those paperweights that, in the heat of Karachi, had once looked so tempting. You know, the ones with white fluff swimming in the water: you shake them and it snows all over the plastic Alps or some pretty European cut-out village inside the glass.

  Perhaps it was the weather that kept us indoors more often than not during the daytime. In Ravi’s case, it might also have been the PhD thesis or, what was more likely, the novel that he was working on. He preferred writing at home. I would go out more often, as I had to teach and attend the usual interminable departmental meetings, where we pretended to be democratic even as all significant decisions were increasingly made way above us. But on days when there was no teaching, I would loiter in the flat too, reading, instead of following my usual routine and going to the library. Very soon, we learned to place the other residents of the building.

  Divided by a winding central staircase, with frail-looking wooden railings, the building rose to five stories. It was a pre-war construction. On both sides of the staircase, past the narrow-latticed landing, there were two-bedroom flats exactly like Karim Bhai’s. Most of them were occupied by young couples intending to have a baby and then move out. One couple had a baby of six months. They spent their weekends looking at houses in the suburbs. Ravi was curious about what they would do with their weekends once they actually bought their suburban house. A couple of the flats were rented by university students: two men in one and three women in the other. Only the top two flats contained anyone even as old as Karim Bhai.

  The top two flats had been converted into one spacious flat by the family that lived there and, according to Karim, had lived there for almost two decades. The father, Claus, was a doctor, and the mother, Pernille, was a secretary at the university. Both were in their early fifties. Their twin daughters had moved out just a year ago when they started attending university.

  Though Karim Bhai knew everyone who lived in the flats by name—we later realized that many of them booked his taxi in the black—he visited and was visited by only Claus and Pernille. This might have been due to their age. Karim Bhai found it easier to talk to people who were a decade older than him than to people who were a decade younger. But there were other factors too.

  Pernille and particularly Claus took a sort of fraternal interest in Karim Bhai and, by extension, us. Claus had seen us moving our furniture and cartons up on the very first day and had offered to help. When we had declined, he had dropped in the next evening with Pernille and greeted us with a resonant salaam-alai-kum. He had followed this up with a heavily accented “sob kuch teek-taak, na?,” his small grey eyes twinkling impishly. It turned out that he had spent a number of months in Pakistan, working for various NGOs, mostly “Læger Uden Grænser,” Doctors Without Borders. Claus was a large, bearded man beside whom the shrunken, skinny Pernille looked even smaller.

  It soon became clear to us that Claus was used to dropping in for a chat every third day or so. With Karim Bhai, and now us, he assumed a persona that was consciously pruned of Danish constraint. Pernille was a more rare and reserved visitor. Usually Claus would drop in with his friend, also a doctor, whose name was Hans. Hans was a slightly smaller version of Claus, and Ravi soon dubbed him Little Claus. Bearded, broad and only a couple of inches under Great Claus’s six feet, the friends could have passed for lumberjacks. Or surgeons, Ravi corrected me. Surgeons look like lumberjacks, he added.

  Little Claus had also spent time in Pakistan. Actually, it turned out that, from the time the two met in the third year of their medical studies at Copenhagen, Great and Little Claus had gone on regular NGO trips to various parts of Asia and Africa, taking some months off every couple of years or so. It is our idea of a vacation, they had explained modestly. Pernille, whose interest in the world was less pronounced and whose career was tied to daily working hours, had mostly stayed home with the kids on these occasions. Perhaps she had resented it but realized too late; perhaps, like other people of her generation and class, she would have liked living in a suburban house instead of a double-flat that fitted Claus’s peripatetic lifestyle. But these doubts came to me only much later.

  There was a soft knock. It was a Thursday afternoon. I was in my room; Ravi was banging away at his laptop in the kitchen; Karim was out on one of his shifts.

  One of the two Clauses, I said to Ravi. They were the only people who knocked instead of ringing the bell.

  “Great Claus, Elementary Watson,” Ravi commented. “Great Claus has a little knock; Little Claus has a great knock.” Both the Clauses were there, with a cake.

  “Sob kuch teek-taak, na?” said Great Claus. It had become his standard greeting with us. Having realized that Ravi was a Hindu and I was a ham-eating, wine-drinking Muslim, he had reserved his resonant “salaam-alai-kum” for Karim.

  “Where is Karim?” he said now. “We have a cake for him, made personally by moi with strictly halal ingredients.”

  “It is Claus’s birthday,” Little Claus explained.

  They were disappointed when they heard that Karim was out. Then Great Claus cheered up. Wait a sec, he said and ran upstairs. He was back in a minute with a bottle of champagne and four glasses.

 
“We can keep the cake for Karim and celebrate with something less Islamic,” he announced, pouring the bubbly into glasses in the kitchen.

  “Shouldn’t you be celebrating with your family?” I said.

  “I will; I will; I am a bleddy good familiefar,” replied Great Claus with just a hint of bitterness.

  We toasted him.

  “Skål!” said Little Claus, lastly, “to our twentieth, Claus, min ven!”

  Great Claus looked visibly touched. There were tears in his eyes. Perhaps that’s why he needed to explain the toast to us.

  “You see,” he said, “this is the twentieth birthday that I have celebrated with Hans here or in Pakistan or in Kenya…”

  Little Claus looked pensive.

  “I have celebrated more birthdays with you, min ven, than I have with anyone else,” added Great Claus, laying his slightly bigger hand on Little Claus’s paw.

  Hold nu op, retorted Little Claus with gruff affection. Then both of them looked embarrassed and switched the topic to the political situation in Libya.

  The phone rang a few minutes after the two Clauses had left, carrying the bottle and glasses back with them. I picked it up. It was a woman’s voice, asking for Karim. It sounded very Danish. I replied that Karim was not back yet from his shift.

  The woman repeated her question, as if she had not heard me. Can I… can I speak to Karim, she said in Danish.

  As my Danish is far from perfect and Ravi speaks the language with flourish, I handed the receiver to him. He repeated what I had said in an accent that, I was convinced, would have been easy to follow even for a Dane living in some remote fishing village off the coasts of Jutland.

  But I could hear that the woman did not understand.

  “I want to speak to Karim,” she almost sobbed.

  Then, as Ravi started to repeat his answer, she disconnected the line.

  Once, the two Clauses knocked on a Friday evening, just before Karim’s Quranic session was to begin. Usually Karim turned people away during these sessions, unless they were part of his discussion group. But he let the Clauses in. It indicated to me how close he felt to these two bearded men who had spent most of their vacations treating poor people in remote villages of Asia and Africa.

  But when Great Claus wanted to hold the Quran—in Arabic, Urdu and English—that Karim passed around and referred to, Karim apologetically pulled it away. “It is a holy book, Claus, if I may,” he said in Danish. “You should be clean before you can hold it.”

  It was then that I realized, for the first time, that Karim had never let me or Ravi touch his Quran either. Ravi because he was, despite his interest in the religion, not a Muslim and me because, in Karim Bhai’s eyes, I had sullied myself with alcohol, non-halal food and probably—he was right in suspecting—I did not perform the ritual stinja cleansing every time I pissed.

  That night the two Clauses joined Ravi and me on our regular Friday night out in town. We did not have a date that Friday. We had just decided to meet some friends from the university in a café. Little Claus and Great Claus spent much of the time huddled together, talking. I overheard them discussing Great Claus’s family. At one point, Great Claus sounded irritated, and Little Claus left the table to get himself another drink from the bar.

  Great Claus followed him with his beer. He put a reassuring bear-arm around Little Claus’s shoulders at the bar. The two friends stood there talking for half an hour. When we decided to move to another café, the Clauses said they would be heading home soon and stayed back.

  My last sight of them that night was of two large men, both bearded, bent over their beers at the bar, conversing with a quiet intensity that is rare to observe in these parts.

  LILACS OUT OF THE DEAD LAND

  It had been a cold March, but April showed promise. Branches let out shoots, though still curled into themselves, chary of the chill; the sky brightened and appeared to expand a bit with the light; one could even hear birds twittering. Ravi ploughed into his PhD thesis, which was long due now, having finally abandoned the third novel that he had started since the days he quit medical studies. He had a literary reputation in India and UK: he had been anthologized by Pankaj Mishra and mentioned as “a name to watch” by Salman Rushdie, an unusual combination, almost a decade ago, and a year back he had contributed to a special number of Granta. For more than a decade, he had been rumored to be the next Vikram Seth, perhaps even the next Arundhati Roy, gender permitting. Unfortunately, he had never managed to finish a novel or a full collection of any sort. His reputation would wax and wane with a brilliant story here, a cutting essay there.

  It had been a cold March, but April showed promise. Branches let out shoots, though still curled into themselves, chary of the chill; the sky brightened and appeared to expand a bit with the light; one could even hear birds twittering. Ravi ploughed into his PhD thesis, which was long due now, having finally abandoned the third novel that he had started since the days he quit medical studies. He had a literary reputation in India and UK: he had been anthologized by Pankaj Mishra and mentioned as “a name to watch” by Salman Rushdie, an unusual combination, almost a decade ago, and a year back he had contributed to a special number of Granta. For more than a decade, he had been rumored to be the next Vikram Seth, perhaps even the next Arundhati Roy, gender permitting. Unfortunately, he had never managed to finish a novel or a full collection of any sort. His reputation would wax and wane with a brilliant story here, a cutting essay there.

  Still, it was an international literary reputation, if only in select circles, and I never understood why my department did not invite him for readings or talks. I had offered to set one up for him, but Ravi did not want the invitation to proceed from me. My colleagues, whenever I mentioned him, made appreciative noises; they did not send him an invitation.

  Ravi had his explanation: “Almost all the tenured Brits and Yankees in English departments in Denmark, who are basically there because they are Americans and Brits, and all the Danes, who are there because they are Danes, which makes better sense to me, love multicultural literature, bastard. You know they do. We know they do. It reminds them of their great-grandparents in the colonies. Of course, they love Rushdie and Naipaul. Naipaul, Kureishi, Rushdie: why, these guys are so Indian they even speak with an English accent! That’s why people like us should write novels, yaar; imagine your colleagues wriggling in their desire to be open and their subterranean terror of us pilfering their bread-and-butter tongue, and that too in our consciously roti-and-ghee accent.”

  Ravi never understood why I did not write creatively. For him, literature was an art. He often forgot that for a middle-class family like mine, it was primarily a profession. I taught English literature because I had not been good enough to get into any major medical or engineering college and my parents, university lecturers themselves (though in physics and sociology), could not afford to buy me an education. I was good enough for the less competitive humanities. I could earn a scholarship to England.

  Ravi was too privileged, and education came too easily to him; he could not imagine educating himself for merely a profession. He had once told me that his father still invested in shares and bank certificates—“for tax reasons, you know, bastard”—in his name, so that he had a couple of millions waiting for him, no matter what happened. That he did not draw on them was part of his protest against his parents. But he knew the millions were there, stashed away, gathering interest or appreciating, and he was honest enough to concede that he did not feel the need to slog for a salary.

  Ravi was driven by ideals that he scoffed at in public. He was driven by dreams he was openly skeptical of. He hacked his own pathways, sometimes—I felt—at the risk of slicing off a part of himself. His PhD thesis was taking longer than it should have simply because he was no longer overly interested in it. Once he had worked an idea out in his mind, Ravi seldom saw the need to continue to write it down.

  He had started working on the history of fascism and Nazism in Den
mark. He could be acerbic about it: “They tell you the moment you set foot here that they managed to smuggle all the Jews out of Denmark when the Nazis wanted to round them up. They forget to mention that it was a German officer who leaked the Nazis’ plans to the Danish resistance, which was largely communist and outlawed by the Danish government. They forget to tell you that the only people, apart from the poor fucking Germans, to form a full SS regiment were the good blue-eyed Danes!”

  But the thesis, like most PhDs, had changed direction over the years. Now it was a more theoretical study in which, Ravi claimed, he was tracing the links between fascism and North European notions of order. “Fascism,” he would declaim over a few drinks, “is above all the ideology of order.”

  “Exclusive order, you mean?” I had once queried.

  “There is no such thing, bastard,” he had replied. “You either have order or you have shades of disorder. All order is essentially exclusive; it does not have degrees, like disorder. You can have order only by eliminating. Elimination is its essence. All order has genocide hidden in its belly. Give it nine months and it will give birth, under clement conditions of course, to a holocaust.”

  It was difficult to tell with Ravi’s theories. The ones that he proffered seriously could be the ones he held lightly, or vice versa. But the promise of spring in April was to test one of Ravi’s most commonly espoused theories, about plain women. Was Ravi’s theory falsifiable? Would it have satisfied Popper?

  Because it was to be falsified soon. This is how it happened.