by Tabish Khair
“That is so stupid, Ravi! You should talk to Karim. He listens to you,” I told Ravi, though even to me this advice sounded hollow. I felt angrier at Karim than I could convey to Ravi, for I suspected Karim of double standards regarding his relations to women.
“I did, bastard. You know what he did? He fetched his Quran and read out a surah to me. I can still recall the words almost verbatim. It went a bit like this: ‘If two men among you commit a lewd act, punish them both. If they repent and mend their ways, let them be. God is forgiving and merciful.’ End of discussion. He refuses to say anything more, or just stalks off. So, bastard, keep off all main and subordinate Clauses in his company for the next few weeks, parse your phrases, will you, Teach?”
But Karim Bhai was not home when we got back. He had been called away once again: he had left a note in his careful handwriting, telling us that he would not be back for a couple of nights.
Karim looked so tired and worn out when he returned that we decided to wait a bit before confronting him about his homophobia. Also, by then Ravi was less concerned with Karim’s reaction, and more bemused by what he called “our failure to read the signs.”
“How did we fail to spot it, bastard?” Ravi said to me at least twice that day. “It was so bloody obvious!”
“Are you teaching today?” asked Ravi, as he gathered up a few odds and ends on his way out of the flat on a Tuesday morning. From the way he was dressed, the subdued but clear hint of expensive aftershave that he exuded, and the careful disorder of his long hair, I could tell that he was on his way to the neighborhood of Lena.
“Yes,” I replied. “Wuthering Heights.”
“Ah.” Ravi paused in his gathering of odds and ends. He could not ignore this opportunity to comment on literature; he seldom did. I often wondered what perverse impulse had driven him to do a doctorate in history rather than literature, except, of course, when he commented on what he called “Eng Lit types.” The impulse always clarified itself then: The only time his voice dripped more sarcasm was when he commented on surgeons.
“Bet you a hundred you are going to give the standard poco take on Heathcliff, and your colleagues and most of your students are going to file it away as a quaint little notion, something that justifies your presence as multicultural artifact number one, though they won’t say or even quite allow themselves to think so,” he continued.
“What is the standard poco take, Ravi?” I asked him, though I already knew the answer.
“You know: Heathcliff as lascar; Heathcliff as a blackie, etc…” He held up a finger to preempt my response. “Yes, yes, I know what the text says, and sure I buy that reading. It is just, kind of, so obvious. Only whities could have missed it for close to two centuries. You know, bastard, most whities wouldn’t notice a wart on the top of their nose if it happened to be black, which inevitably creates darkies who can spot a black hair on a polar bear at the distance of five kilometers. But the point of Heathcliff and Wuthering Heights is not really all that. Never underestimate a gal like Eternal Emily…”
“Enlighten us, O Great Critic,” I responded, as he probably expected me to. Not that Ravi needed any encouragement from me.
“See, the problem in that novel is the problem of love: how, if it is really love, it is destined to fail in our world. This is not due to machination or enmity or other such humdrum matters, as in the weaker plays of your Billy Great Shakes. This is in the nature of love, which exceeds and challenges the order of our world. Hence, the only time it can come close to realization is in the wild, not in society. Finally, Heathcliff and Cathy haunt the sublime heath, while the rest of us go for walks in beautiful parks…”
Looking back and recalling this conversation, I realize that I should have suspected what was to come. But we are always wiser in retrospect.
As we could not possibly invite the Clauses to our flat without seriously inconveniencing our host and possibly the Clauses, we decided to ask Great and Little Claus to join us for an evening out in town. Ms. Marx was supposed to come too, but her babysitter absconded at the last moment and she had to cancel.
We met in a German “biergaarten,” a place of much wood and heavy beer mugs. The Clauses were already there when we arrived. Great Claus had regained his bounce: his booming “sob kuch teek-taak, na?” had people at other tables turning around and looking at us when we entered. Ravi replied in Hindi, which of course Claus did not understand but pretended to.
Lena joined us but left early: she always had a busy schedule. However, even in that short while, she managed to fascinate the Clauses: her poise and beauty were of the sort that obviously left an impact even on gay men. Great Claus had already met her, but this was the first time Little Claus was meeting her, and he did not hide his admiration. After she left, Little Claus remarked, partly as a compliment to Ravi, that Lena was his notion of a really beautiful woman.
Ravi thought about it. Then he said, “Have you seen Waheeda Rehman, Claus? Say, in one of those Guru Dutt films? Now that was a woman who could manage to seem beautiful without being either showy or cold. That is difficult. I have never met a woman like that in real life.”
Once again, I recount this little episode with the dubious benefit of hindsight.
There were three identical envelopes in the mailbox early that October. They were addressed in the same handwriting. I gave the one addressed to Karim to him, and went into Ravi’s room to hand him his envelope. The third one bore my name. There were other letters, and a couple of journals for Ravi and me. We took the lot to the kitchen table. Karim Bhai was already there. He had opened his envelope and was now ripping it into vehement shreds. He was very intent on it. We watched him, a bit surprised. He threw the pieces in the garbage bin under the sink and left the flat on his way to work.
Ravi looked at me and said: “Claus?” He was right.
We had all received invitations from the two Clauses and Pernille: they had planned an early Christmas lunch—in November. The lunch was their attempt to broadcast their new status, and the fact that it was acceptable to everyone concerned.
It was obviously not acceptable to Karim.
Jul—Christmas—starts sometime around mid-November in Denmark, when the shops and streets get decked out for the season and a trace of frenzy can be detected in the activities of shoppers. That is also when the first julefrokosts—Christmas lunches, which are often actually dinners—are organized. All offices and institutes have at least one, and then there are those thrown by friends and family members, some of which have had the same patterns and participants for decades. When I first moved to Denmark, where places like Pakistan are considered traditional, I was surprised by how many traditions structured, sometimes rigidly, the lifestyle of the Danish middle classes. The Pakistani middle classes have nothing comparable, and neither—it seems to me—do the English middle classes.
Even people like the Clauses, who in many ways were as alternative as one could be in Denmark, participated in traditions like that of the annual julefrokost. And this year, they participated even earlier than usual. Their julefrokost was fixed for a Friday in early November. At first, I thought that it was due to their impatience to demonstrate their new status. I realized later that there were other factors: Great and Little Claus had taken three months off from their jobs and were going to work for an NGO in Kenya around mid-November. Pernille was to visit them with the girls for Christmas. Hence, the early julefrokost.
Ravi had been trying his best to make Karim attend the julefrokost. Karim had refused adamantly. I doubt that he would have gone anyway: consumption at julefrokosts can be tallied more in liters than in grams. But Ravi thought Karim’s refusal had to do simply with his homophobia. That Thursday, as we had dinner together, Ravi even tried one of his maverick subterfuges: he suggested to Karim that the Clauses were not really gay; they were just pretending to be so in order to ease matters between Great Claus and his family.
For a moment, I thought Ravi’s gambit would work. Karim
took it seriously. He paused plying the mutton (halal) biryani Ravi had cooked splendidly in a bid to mellow Karim, and dangled his spoon in thought. Karim took everything more or less seriously. But then he shook his head and his beard.
“No, Ravi Bhai,” he replied. “It is not what they are but what they have told me that matters. Only Allah can see into the hearts of men; we have to go by their words. They did not have to tell me anything. But now that I know what they claim to be, I have to do what my Allah wants me to…”
“How the hell do you know what Allah wants you to do?” I could not help blurting out, though Ravi tried to hush me. That objection had been bottled up in me all the months we had known Karim; it had to come out some day.
“It is all in the Quran,” Karim replied, suddenly on Muslim-automatic, at least to my mind. It’s the kind of non-argument that frustrates me: a stubbornness that denies all evidence to the contrary, entire histories of not just textual exegesis but even Quranic commentaries. I could not let it drop.
“You know, Karim Bhai, that the Quran is written in a dialect no one has spoken for centuries or fully understands; that it contains unclear and even contradictory injunctions. How can anyone know exactly what that book means, even if it is the word of Allah?”
Karim looked at me steadily.
“That is where we differ,” he said.
“Not just there,” I added. “You probably believe in hell too…”
“Yes, I do. Don’t you?” I think my antagonism had made Karim take more adamant a stand on his faith than he usually did.
“If I had to choose, I might believe in heaven. The heaven we make in our minds, through our knowledge of what is right and wrong. But hell, Karim Bhai? Like in burning flames, like in being punished for your sins and wickedness…” I scoffed.
Karim Bhai ignored me. He turned to Ravi, probably expecting him to be more sympathetic, and said, “I am the first person in my family to get a postgraduate degree. I did not study in the kind of schools and colleges you went to; my education has not taken me too far, but it has brought me here. I have not seen as much of the world as you have. But I have seen the good suffer and the righteous forsaken. I have seen selfishness and wickedness triumph in this world. Surely there must be hell and heaven, Ravi Bhai, for otherwise wickedness triumphs for eternity too. The poor and weak in this world lose forever… Surely there has to be a hell along with a heaven!”
“Perhaps we bear our own hell and heaven, Karim Bhai,” Ravi rejoined kindly.
“Is that enough? Is it enough for the victims?” Karim asked. Even I thought that it was a question born of curiosity, not argumentation.
“Believe me, Karim Bhai,” said Ravi, “it is worse.” Then he left the table, dumping the biryani left in his plate in the garbage bin and putting his glass and plate in the dishwasher, as he always did. It was abrupt, even for Ravi. I thought he was just closing the discussion, preempting an argument between Karim and me. I have thought about it since, and now I feel that he had other, personal, reasons. Perhaps Karim Bhai was right: each heaven comes conjoined with a hell. Including the heaven of full glasses of love…
By the evening of the julefrokost thrown by the Clauses, we had given up on recruiting Karim. Ms. Marx was out too. She did not know the Clauses and you do not turn up with uninvited guests in Denmark, not even at a party thrown by two liberated gay men and an understanding ex-wife. Lena had met them a couple of times—and, as Little Claus had joined her band of admirers, she had been sent a separate invitation too. I had expected her to come, but just as we were leaving, Ravi informed me—I ought to have guessed from the slightly inferior aftershave he had splashed on—that Lena would not be able to make it. This did not surprise me. She always had a full calendar and I knew that she was practicing for a gig with her jazz band.
Little Claus had a large suburban house off Virupvej, not very far from Hjortshøj. It had obviously been a farmhouse in the past; fields stretched out behind it. What struck me first about the house was the playground appended to a side plot: a sandbox with a tree house, a large swing, and a slide next to it. For a moment I thought that Little Claus, like Great Claus, had fathered and reared a family before exiting the closet. But Ravi, whose internal aunts were already remarkably well-informed, corrected me. The playground had been constructed for Great Claus’s daughters, about fifteen years ago, when Little Claus purchased the property. By then, the Clauses had already been lovers. It sounded romantic and sad, the way Ravi put it: this act of generosity by a lover towards the children who were the reason why his love might never be publicly acknowledged, and who were, after all, also the children of his rival.
Inside, the house was the opposite of Pernille and Great Claus’s flat. The furniture was old, unmatched and ramshackle; the paintings of no major value. I wondered if Great Claus would find it comfortable moving to such surroundings. From town to the countryside; from yuppie style to farmhouse comfort. But that evening he appeared to be happier than I had ever seen him, and completely at home.
Have I written that Lena was a trained opera artiste and that she was the lead singer in a jazz band? If I have, perhaps I need to define those two facts a bit further. Lena had taken lessons in opera singing: she came from a musical family and her father had started sending her to these lessons from the age of five. But at the age of twenty or so, it had become evident to all that she did not have a future in opera. She had tone and balance and near- perfect pitch; she learned everything perfectly. But she lacked volume, both in person—she was delicately built—and in her voice.
It must have been then that she switched over to becoming a student of music. She still continued to take singing lessons and sometimes she gave singing lessons to kids. She also sang in that jazz band I have mentioned: they were booked to perform in public only four or five times every year, but they met and practiced for a few hours every week.
Though Ravi had been to a couple of her performances, I had not managed to attend any. The previous fixtures had coincided with exams or a date with Ms. Marx, or something like that. I knew that her jazz band was scheduled to perform in a café in Kolding late that November—I forget the exact date or day, though I think it was a Saturday—and so I drove over with Ms. Marx.
It was a nondescript café off the pedestrian street, slightly more than half-full, and I had expected to find Ravi there. We had actually planned to surprise Ravi and Lena by turning up. Lena was surprised and delighted to see us. But there was no sign of Ravi.
We found a corner table and ordered a bottle of white wine and some peanuts. When Lena joined us at the table during one of the breaks, I asked her if Ravi would be making an appearance later in the evening. She looked just a bit confused. “He might,” she said.
But the night wore on, the number of guests diminished, the jazz and early pop numbers got repeated, and Ravi did not turn up. Lena’s band was not bad: like Lena, all the band members were obviously hard workers. The music they created could not be faulted. Whether it was Billie Holiday, Anita Baker or Diana Krall, everything was rendered with precision and poise. But it lacked—though Ms. Marx thought I was being too demanding (Ravi-esque, she said, actually)—that extra element which could have made it memorable. The sound was clear, the lines sharp, but in its very perfection there was something missing—as if the souls of the compositions were trapped and stunted in the perfect bodies of their rendition.
We left a bit before ten, when the café started filling up again. Lena’s band was to play until midnight. Kolding is an hour’s drive from Århus and Ms. Marx dropped me at Karim’s flat just before eleven.
Karim had gone to bed—his door was almost closed—but Ravi was in the kitchen, working on revising his thesis. He had printed out what he hoped was the final version. It was this that had kept him from Kolding: he was reorganizing a central chapter in which he argued that the only way to understand the monstrosity of Nazism was to look at the “normal” concepts of law and order that framed even non-N
azi discourses in the mid-war period. He spoke about it for a few minutes before asking me what I thought of Lena’s singing.
“It was good,” I offered. “Very poised.”
“Everything she does is poised and good,” rejoined Ravi. At that moment, I heard this as a drop splashing off that full glass of love that Ravi had been bearing in his heart, though now I wonder why I did not consider it a sardonic statement.
“Yes,” I continued, feeling called upon to say something more, “one could hear her opera training. It is a pity she has given up opera.”
Ravi was shutting down his laptop now. He paused in the act and looked at me.
“I don’t know,” he said. “Do you recall those lines by Harrison where he talks about why he dislikes opera? He puts his finger on what is the soul of opera, and it is that soul which frightens him. One cannot be an opera singer unless one is undaunted by that frightful soul of opera, the non-rational excess at its core; one has to be willing to let go and face the freefall.”
Then, because he could see from my expression that I had no recollection of the lines, if I had ever read them, Ravi quoted the stanza from memory:
“What I hated in those soprano ranges
was uplift beyond all reason and control
and in a world where you say nothing changes
it seemed a sort of prick-tease of the soul.”
He picked up his laptop and went into his room, leaving me wondering.
Karim Bhai was a meticulous person. He liked keeping things in place. His room was the most orderly of all the rooms in our flat; Ravi’s was the most disorderly. But Ravi, I had noticed, had specific oases of order in his desert of disorder. The clothes in his wardrobe were always in a mess, jumbled up, and pulled out to be ironed—or half-ironed—only when required, but his toothbrush and shaving things had to stand exactly in the corner or on the shelf where he put them. His papers were always in a mess, but his books were carefully arranged—not alphabetically but by the year of birth of the author, so that his shelves gave you a fair idea of the history of publishing.
