by Tabish Khair
In any case, Karim would listen carefully to Ravi’s conversation, and Ravi, in his turn, would offer his opinions in uncharacteristically modulated and less acerbic terms. For instance, he would not dismiss the existence of God but simply mention the fact that it did not mesh with the evidence of human suffering. At which Karim would shake his head and gently disagree, trotting out all the arguments that the believing have used for centuries to avoid being faced with their loneliness in the universe.
The debate would continue, gently, in the kitchen. I would retire to my room to read or take a nap. I did not really know who was trying to convert whom, and I did not care. I had given up on God a long time back; if God had existed, I am sure he would have reciprocated in kind.
We were on our way to a party thrown by one of Ravi’s PhD colleagues. I knew the person only vaguely, but he had invited me and Ravi had insisted on me coming along: his argument was that he would feel more comfortable going there with Lena and me, than with Lena alone. Both of them were remarkably careful about their relationship in public: revealing it fully only in contexts where, they felt, it would not be devalued into something else, something more mundane, something like the usual academic affair between two attractive PhD students.
We met Lena for a drink in a café in town, before heading for the party. She was wearing a one-shoulder turquoise chiffon evening dress that brought out her intensely green eyes, her golden hair tied into one of those intricate knots that are again coming back into vogue. When I had seen them together the first time, I had been struck by how similar they were despite their differences. This time, I was struck by how different they were despite their similarities. Ravi was consciously unguarded, in behavior, opinion and dress; his speech was full of gaps and curlicues; his shirt was never too ironed, his hair always a bit awry. Lena was controlled and guarded: every bit of dress and hair in place, every word and gesture so carefully enunciated or performed that she seemed to be on stage all the time. It needed someone with Ravi’s casual and unassuming confidence to fall in love with her, as he claimed to have fallen in love: the full glass and not the usual half glasses that we usually subsist on. Many other men would have found her frightening and cold, for Lena was a woman who had either become her own mask or never let that mask down in public. Perhaps, I thought, she did for Ravi. Perhaps that was what knitted them together, for at that point there was no doubt in my mind that this was not just a casual spring fling for either of them.
After Ravi had stopped to buy a good bottle of wine and some Belgian beers—he never trusted the alcohol served in Danish parties—we headed for his colleague’s flat. It was a one-bedroom affair, with a large sitting-room-cum-kitchen. The kitchen had been arranged to resemble a bar from one side, with a half wall that had bar stools ranged against it. It was the kind of flat one would expect a bachelor to have.
And it was already crowded. Many of Ravi’s colleagues were there and another dozen people or so, half of whom I knew or recognized from the university. All the chairs, stools and sofas were occupied; some people were ensconced on the bed in the bedroom. The kitchen tables were lined with bottles, glasses and bowls of chips; two pizzas were in the oven and the chili con carne and rice almost ready. There wasn’t going to be anything fancier: the decades when parties thrown by bachelors had to be redeemed from the shadow of Oedipal heterosexuality by offerings of a dozen intricate cuisines were over. Blokishness reigned in Denmark and heterosexual men were again free to be, in Ravi-speak, the uncouth pigs they naturally were.
But this blokishness did not encompass a carte blanche to smoke in the flat: Cancer was bigger than either Mars or Venus. There was a balcony attached to the bedroom. It was small and could contain only four or five people, standing, at a time. That was where smokers had to go to light up. It was seldom crowded, though: most of the people in the party were professional academics in their thirties and forties and their habits, like their books, accorded with the times.
Ravi headed for the balcony after a quick round of hellos, as he was offered a “bong” by someone he knew who spoke with an Australian accent. Bong, I assumed, was a kind of hash, something Ravi indulged in at parties. Lena fell in with people she knew, listening with the sort of expression of delighted interest that she brought into any conversation and that, undoubtedly, made many men feel more intelligent than they were. It was a talent she was not even fully aware of. Perhaps she saw it as courtesy or kindness.
An hour later, when the rice and the chili con carne had been ladled out and I was trying my best to balance my plate on my knees, sip from my glass, which was jostling for space with seven other glasses of different shapes on a small side table, and converse with migrating acquaintances, Ravi wended his way out of the bedroom, dodging a dozen pair of hands busy expressing ideas or conveying food.
“There he is,” he said on catching sight of me, “I told you he is around…”
Behind him there walked a woman in her thirties, almost straw-blonde (though I later discovered that she dyed her hair), a bit short by Danish standards, but with the kind of rounded hips and slightly fleshy calves that I always notice. I knew her. This was the woman I had mentioned to Ravi, the one he called (behind her back, I am sure) Ms. Linen Marx.
I knew why Ravi had dragged her to my section of the party. I had more trouble understanding why Ms. Marx—let us call her that, for there are reasons (which will be revealed in due linear course, as my MFA-girlfriend would have insisted) to keep her name under cover—had allowed Ravi to drag her to me. She had not only shown no interest in me in the past, she had actually conveyed active disinterest on the one occasion when I had tried to break the ice. It had been done politely; it had struck me as genuine disinterest. She had not been bad to me: I was just not the kind of man she found interesting. How had Ravi managed to drag her through this crowd of coagulating con carne and conversations to my corner? I could only attribute it to the fact that women in general, married or not, interested or not, could seldom resist following Ravi around.
Not only did Ms. Marx follow Ravi to my corner, she showed no inclination to leave even after Ravi spotted Lena and abandoned us for her, with (or did I imagine it?) an almost imperceptible wink at me. I offered my seat to Ms. Marx. This woke some ghost of a non-blokish past in the man sitting next to me and he made a bit of space. Ms. Marx, to my surprise, wriggled in between the two of us, her wine glass held at a careful length in rounded bare arms (she was wearing a sleeveless dress of the sort that left most of the back bare too) which I tried not to look at. The blokes around me were not aware of either her arms, which rippled with the soft muscles of regular gym workouts, or her back. That, I have always felt, is the problem with being a bloke. It makes you ignore or vulgarize some of the best things in life.
I wondered whether Ravi considered Ms. Marx plain. I thought that she probably fell within the range of that demarcation for him, though in its higher reaches. It was a definition I would never have applied to Ms. Marx, even though I would not attain the glass-spilling exuberance of Ravi’s love for Lena either. In any case, Ms. Marx—unlike Lena—was not the kind of woman who caught any man’s eye; just as, to be honest, I am by no means the kind of man who turns every woman’s head, at least for a second, as Ravi does. I believe people like Ms. Marx and me receive only half glasses of love and admiration and, at least in my case, that is sufficient.
I was not sure if it was sufficient in Ms. Marx’s case, though. I knew she was divorced, with a child she shared with her ex (with whom she was, as is said, “very good friends”), and I have always suspected that divorced parents who stay good friends tend to have separated not because of any incompatibility but because they yearned for more than half-filled glasses in their lives.
Not only did Ms. Marx join me, she spent most of the party with me. Towards midnight, when the beer momentarily washes away the inhibitions of Danes, she asked me if I wanted to go out for a walk. The moon was almost full and it was surprisingly clear. Provi
dence had rigged things in my favor for a change.
We kissed, more formally than passionately, on our way back to the flat.
Had I been less interested in Ms. Marx, I suppose I would have suspected Ravi’s hand in her sudden interest in me. Or perhaps not, for it is difficult to imagine how any man can get a woman interested in another man. In any case, I had little time or inclination for suspicion. I saw Ms. Marx twice that week. Her interest in me grew every day; she wanted to know everything about me. Sometimes, she asked the same question again, in a slightly modified form, as if she did not believe my first version or wanted to hear it all over again.
The next week, on our third date, I was invited into her row-house flat for a nightcap. Her son, she said, was out on a camping trip with his father for the weekend, exploring some Jutland heath. Consequently, we spent the night at her place, exploring each other.
Next morning, we had a lazy breakfast. I rustled up an omelette, Indian-style, which usually impresses European women used to omelettes that are either flaccid and tasteless or stuffed with too many things to go for breakfast. She asked me how my parents had met; I told her they had been colleagues in the same university. Different departments, but same university. She lifted an eyebrow in surprise.
“They met at a political demonstration at their university. It turned out that a cousin of my father’s was a friend of my mother’s brother. I think that made it easier for them to keep seeing each other. A year later they got their parents to arrange a wedding for them.”
Ms. Marx laughed in disbelief. “Why are you making this up?” she said.
I assured her that I was not making it up.
She left her chair and came over to me. She put her arms around my neck and squeezed affectionately. Her hair fell over my eyes.
“Remember, I am a historian: I expect consistency in historical accounts,” she said. She pulled my chair back from the table—Ms. Marx was pretty strong for her size—and sat in my lap, straddling me. She smelled of orange yogurt. I kissed her. She tasted of orange yogurt too. We ended up making love on the kitchen floor.
It was close to noon when I returned to Karim’s flat. I planned to take a leisurely shower and relax for the rest of the day, savoring the moments of last night and that morning: the slow friction of our flesh, the instant when I entered her, her soft grainy moistness, the smell of her sex, her lips all over me, kissing, sucking, the unhurried rhythm of sex between people who are old enough to know what they are about. I wanted to lie in bed and recall her breasts, which were small and surprisingly girl-like, her arms, which were fleshy and slightly muscular, her hips, her hair, her legs… I was not madly in love with her, but I did not have to be madly, or even eccentrically, in love. Sane attraction was what I wanted. It was enough.
I knew Karim Bhai would be on a day shift and I expected Ravi to be gone: he seldom spent the weekend in the flat anymore. Early on Saturday morning, if they had not already met on Friday night, as soon as he returned from his morning jog, Ravi would grab a toast, slurp some coffee and pedal off to Lena’s flat, armed with aftershave and bike clips.
But when I walked into the flat, Ravi was still there, writing on his laptop.
“Bastard,” he shouted to me from the kitchen, when I was still in the lobby, “you kept me waiting!”
I asked him why he had waited for me. We did not have any plans for the weekend.
Ravi laughed. Then he said, hazarding a guess, “Actually, I was wondering what you are going to tell Ms. Marx about your dad now.”
It was then that the suspicion dawned on me.
“What have you been telling her about my parents, bastard?” I asked him.
“Just, as they say in America, like, the truth, pal.”
“Like the truth?”
“Well, we all know how it is with you fucking fundus in Pak: veiled mother, bearded father, married at the age of fifteen, son divided between his halal mentality and the desire to make it in the pork-eating West, unwilling to acknowledge his religious background in public and unable to relinquish it in private, etcetera, etcetera.”
I was flabbergasted.
“You didn’t tell her all that, Ravi!” I exclaimed.
“Not at once, of course. I did it over days, weeks. For the sake of our friendship, sentimental music! I sacrificed hours of pleasure with Lena. Ms. Marx was kind of primed by the time I sprung her on you at the party, bastard, but I still had to keep selling you… Bits and pieces you know, yaar. You are damned good at queering your own pitch. You were so bloody intent on committing sexual harakiri by making your parents sound like her parents; I had to administer narrative antidotes all the time. I think she is convinced that you make up stories about your parents because you are too embarrassed or afraid to acknowledge your incipient provincial fundamentalism in these, ah, cosmopolitan circles. It appeals to both the Linen and the Marx in her.”
I was so shocked I think I had to sit down. Used though I was to Ravi’s chutzpah, this was still unexpected. When I recovered, I looked him in the eye and said, “Dammit, bastard, you know I am going to explain all this to her at the first opportunity, and she will drop me.”
“Don’t be too sure of that, O Unimaginative Teacher of Eng Lit,” he replied, unplugging his laptop, probably on his way to Lena’s now. “You see, it works like this. You buy a product because it is packaged as bing. What you get is bang. But, mostly, you discover that you quite like bang. That is how capitalism works, bastard: it promises you bing and gives you bang. There is a chance, Sir Adjunkt, that Ms. Marx likes you for bang now. Violins! Play on, if music be the tandoori of love…” With that he left, whistling “Il n’a jamais, jamais connu de loi…”
Ravi was not entirely wrong. When I disclosed Ravi’s prank to Ms. Marx—I put it in the light of a practical joke played by him and she never conceded that it might have influenced her to start dating me—a shadow of irritation crossed her face. Two small vertical creases appeared between her eyebrows; I now know that they are a sign of anger. But then she laughed. And she agreed to see me again.
For the first time in my years in Denmark, I heard the sounds of domestic strife as I walked up the stairs that night. The evidence I had seen all around me—even the statistics of a nearly 50 percent divorce rate, which, Ravi perversely claimed, was slightly less disturbing than the statistics of a one percent divorce rate in India. But I had never heard the sounds of domestic strife. Not in Denmark.
The sounds came from the twin-flat of Great Claus and Pernille. First, a torrent of high-pitched Danish words (which I did not understand) from Pernille. Then a great booming “nej, nej, nej, jeg har sagt nej”—no, no, no, I have said no—from Claus, which was rudimentary and loud enough for me to understand. Then china or glass being smashed on the floor, a language that needs no interpretation across cultures. The slamming of a door. And then that loudest of noises: silence.
THE PRINCIPAL CLAUS
Ravi had spent the 1st of May trying to find a single public event or protest in the city that was, in his words, worthy of the occasion. It was an annual ritual with him. As usual, he had failed.
But this year, he took the disappointment quite well. He did not talk about how Denmark was the only modern country that never had and never would have a revolution, or try to explain why this peculiar quirk of Danish history could be traced to the mid-nineteenth century founding of the Tivoli Entertainment Park, for the distraction of the people, in Copenhagen. He even ignored the usual rhetoric put forth by the usual Danish politicians calling for the abolishment of Labor Day and its replacement by the Queen’s Birthday as a “truly Danish event.”
I had noticed this in recent weeks: his love for Lena had made him less critical, or at least more forgiving. It made me overcome the irritation that I felt at times at Ravi’s tolerance of Karim Bhai’s more Islamic habits. Ravi, despite all his cracks, was someone who put people first. In those days, not uninfluenced by a lecture I had written on Swift, I saw in Ravi the
shade of that caustic Irish writer who, in response to his critics, had claimed he did not hate humankind—because, unlike his critics, he was never surprised by human failings. Perhaps I was wrong in that too. Perhaps Ravi expected more from humankind than Swift. I am certain he expected more from Lena.
One morning, late in May, Karim Bhai turned to us over breakfast, with his dark-edged baby-eyes, and said, “Will both of you be here on Saturday afternoon next week? Ajsa wants to drop in and pick up her things.”
Ajsa still had a few boxes and books stored away in the flat. It looked like she had finally found space for them in the place she shared with Ibrahim.
Ravi was going to be away for the weekend with Lena. He said so.
“Are you working on Saturday, Karim Bhai?” he asked.
“No, actually, I am not,” replied Karim.
“Then you won’t need us,” said Ravi. “She just has some odds and ends. You will manage between the two of you.”
Ravi, despite his interest in Karim’s faith, could be surprisingly blind at times to its intensity and rigidity. I knew by now that Karim Bhai wanted one of us around because he would not allow himself to be alone in a flat with a woman he was not married to and who was not related to him by blood.
I agreed to stay and help them move Ajsa’s stuff. Karim looked relieved. His chastity was no longer under threat by the dangerous and decadent sex, I supposed.
Ajsa was thinner than I remembered her. The crow’s feet around her eyes, the slightly cavernous look on her face, accentuated her surprising leanness. Was it because the weather had removed some extra layers of clothes from her, from all of us? Or had she lost weight over the past few weeks?
Ibrahim did not come with her. He is out with Ali, she said, and shook her head. It was tightly wrapped in a black-and-white Palestinian scarf, her blonde hair almost invisible. Karim nodded, as if he understood. Later, I thought about that nod. I mentioned it to the police. The officer nodded too, as he jotted it down.
