How to Fight Islamist Terror from the Missionary Position

by Tabish Khair

  He closed his eyes and imagined his wife cycling to meet them. She was returning from her singing classes: she now taught singing in an adult education university, while she continued with her post-doc. Her parents, still living in the village near Aalborg where she had grown up, were passing through the city and had invited them out for dinner. Dinner at six. Sharp. That was another of the things Ravi had to get used to.

  In his mind, he could see her cycling, wearing her smart brown raincoat, focused—as always—on what she was doing, busy, busy, busy. Her golden blonde hair was tied into a neat orderly bun. She had been less focused once, she had claimed, but then that period, if it ever existed, was before Ravi had met her. She was not doing a PhD in musicology then, let alone a post-doc; she had even had a breakdown of some mysterious sort. Ravi could not imagine her breaking down now: she was always so much in control. He wished he had known her then. Then, when she had spent a couple of years dabbling in the humanities, a relationship to time and degrees that Ravi, coming from a country where careers were aborted by a single lost month, would have failed to understand if he himself had not come from what his Maoist friends in India liked to call the filthy rich.

  But even then, at the time when she was dabbling in the humanities, Ravi already had a career as a journalist in India. After an initial hesitation, which had lasted for almost two years, he had quit his job, spent a year in USA and then moved to this country to do a PhD in history. He had started off, like any other immigrant in West Europe, by earning extra money doing odd jobs, mostly menial work that could be performed by those who did not speak the language. His PhD had progressed slowly. He had finally finished it, though, and was now teaching in a high school. He felt he had drifted into something to which he was largely superfluous. This controlled world, the universe of his married life, this orderly state of niceness all around him, his own inability to be rude.

  They must have SMS-ed or synchronized their watches. They had just parked the car and walked to the entrance of the restaurant when Lena, his wife of the past two years, cycled up and joined them. The restaurant was in a dour, late-nineteenth-century building, grey and solid. It looked more like an office building than a restaurant. But it was, Ravi knew, an expensive place, the sort of place frequented only by those who were in the know.

  Past the flanking columns of the door, engraved into half-pillars, there was suddenly a darkly red-carpeted, sumptuous world. There were rows of coats, overcoats and jackets. A low, diffuse light burned overhead. To the right was the door to the hall of the restaurant, up three small steps. It exuded warmth.

  Ravi could not follow his in-laws and Lena through the door into the restaurant because he was the last one in the row, and when he hung up his jacket, first Lena’s jacket and then her mother’s coat fell off the hooks on which they had been precariously and hurriedly placed. By the time Ravi had hung the jacket and the coat back on the pegs, Lena and her parents had entered the restaurant and disappeared in its artificial candle-lit gloaming.

  Inside, at the reception counter, Ravi was stopped by a very Scandinavian-looking waiter—tall, broad, blond, even teeth cared for by state-subsidized dentistry from kindergarten onwards—who looked at him with some surprise. When Ravi’s eyes got used to the gloom and began to register the other guests (almost all the tables appeared to be occupied), he could understand the surprise in the waiter’s eyes: Ravi was perhaps the only dark person in the hall. I am meeting friends here, Ravi told the waiter and walked in. The waiter did not look convinced and might have intercepted Ravi, but at that moment some elderly ladies congesting a table beckoned for attention. The waiter moved in their direction with a dubious glance at Ravi.

  Ravi was in a hall of wooden paneling and rich dark furniture. There were plain white tablecloths, thin elegant candle-stands, maroon or dark-green curtains. Everything was subdued and affluent, with the affluence of those who do not have to demonstrate their wealth or taste. It did not appear to be a particularly large hall to Ravi, but even then he could not spot Lena or her parents. They seemed to have disappeared, swallowed into this Aladdin’s cave of taste. They fitted into its careful order so well that Ravi could not discover them anywhere.

  Walking about in the murky light, Ravi felt odd. He felt he stood out: was it due to his consciousness of the difference of his skin or the difference of his activity in this place? He was the only person who appeared to be looking, and people who look around always seem a trifle lost. All the others were firmly ensconced in their places; they looked like they belonged there and when they moved they had a definite goal: the restroom, the door, the counter. The waiters moved about with just as much assurance and certainty. Ravi wavered in their midst, talking a half-step in one direction and a step in another, looking.

  Then suddenly he caught sight of Lena. He knew she was not allowing herself to look for him; he knew that the orderly rules of this place required such control from her and, as always, she was going to exercise full control. The room appeared to have changed. It had opened up. It was more cavernous and much larger than it had appeared at first. For the first time Ravi realized that he could not tell where the hall ended. It stretched in front of him, rows and rows of polished tables, ironed tablecloths, people pouring wine, consuming dishes, conversing in low tones, politely.

  There was something like a huge bowl further up, with ramps leading up to it from four directions. The bowl appeared at least a story high. He realized, with no sense of shock, that it was a salad bowl, with other small bowls ranged around it: great cornucopias full of fruit and salad. He had glimpsed Lena walking calmly towards it, along one of the ramps, heading for one of the platforms from which people helped themselves to the salad.

  He needed to get out of the shadows of the section where he was standing. He needed to catch her attention, though she was not looking around for him. She did not look around too much for him anymore. He suspected that her love for him, which she claimed was more than anything she had ever felt for anyone else, had its own place in her orderly life; one only looks around for things that have been misplaced.

  Ravi realized that the section where he stood was a raised platform. The stairs were some way off. He could not reach them without losing sight of Lena. So he braced himself and, knowing it would draw eyes to him, jumped down from the platform to a lower level, a hop of three feet or less. All the diners around him turned and looked, precisely but briefly, perhaps even more briefly when they realized what he was, as if that explained his lack of etiquette, his jump.

  But the jolt of the jump and the eyes turning to him had momentarily disoriented Ravi, and when he looked up, he could not spot Lena again. He stopped a passing waiter to enquire, but the waiter gave him a blank look and moved on.

  Ravi was reminded of the lack that had crept into his relationship over the weeks. Or perhaps it had always been there; he had just become more sensitive to it in recent weeks. He missed the ordinariness of jerky gestures, the generosity of disorder: their relationship had always been too smooth, too fluent for him; things had fallen into place too easily.

  This craving for clumsy, vulnerable things: the potted flower in the wrong corner, the striped curtain with a tear, the blackened pot simmering in the kitchen, the novel on the sofa, the crumbs of toast on the table, the voice raised in indecorous and joyous greeting, a spontaneous unpremeditated gesture. How easily Lena could have extended these to him, how steadfastly she refused to do so. Not out of cruelty or lack of love but because she took the normality of order and control for granted. She had grown up in a nice world. She had not had to constantly gather up fragments of the ordinary, the daily, in newly broken settings.

  He felt it was like that with almost all of them, despite their concern, despite the niceness. And it was buttressed by a belief that, after all, they lived in the best of worlds—and any of his losses were amply compensated. The losses had to be acknowledged at times, but only at a hidden personal level, never as a matter of the world
, a flaw that increasingly appeared structural to him, a way of life. What difference could even his rich childhood make to this structural flaw in the world? Never here, never with Lena, he feared, would there ever be a public acknowledgment of the right of loss, pain, disorder to be and to be freely expressed. It was also simply taken for granted that coming from where he did, being what he was—westernized, professional, irreligious—it was natural for him to seek to be here. And, as such, he felt, it was always him seeking (and often not finding); it was always he who had to move around, make space, look, ask, hold.

  Tired of asking and looking around in a place that seemed without end to him, Ravi gravitated back towards the section near the entrance, the exit. He stood next to a table lined with national newspapers, with editorials worrying about the state of the world and making polite noises of criticism about the treatment of refugees in the country, and tabloids full of lurid scandals and crimes, the latter often pointing a vague finger of accusation at immigrants. He did not necessarily disagree with all the newspapers and they did not always agree with each other, but Ravi found their assurance, whether it was about Nigeria or Denmark or USA, difficult to stomach. It was this commonality of tone that made all the news sound like a repeat of what Ravi had read for weeks, months, years. But just as he could not walk away from the restaurant—it would have been rude of him, surely—he could not resist reading such headlines day after day. They were in different ways (mostly well-meaning, mostly nice) so oblivious of him, and yet he had to keep looking at them, for them, these printed words he knew by heart even before they were printed each night.

  He stood there browsing through the newspapers for five minutes or so. It was then that he noticed a corridor leading to a quiet and empty section.

  The corridor had surprisingly cheap wooden paneling. The section it led to was empty, and unlike the rest of the restaurant, it had chairs piled up on the tables. The chairs and tables were of the spindly kind used in cafés. This section was probably used during earlier hours to serve customers who wanted a coffee and cake rather than a meal. Ravi walked into it listlessly, noticing the chairs and round wooden tables, the empty beer counter, the pattern on the floor.

  He was looking at the floor when he almost bumped into someone. It was a waiter, not a local this time, but someone from the Middle East or Turkey. Can I help you, sir? the man said in English. A surprising feeling of gratitude flooded Ravi. He noticed that the man did not wear the uniform of waiters. He was probably a cleaner from the kitchens below, sent up to fetch the tray of dirtied utensils that he was carrying. Ravi explained his search to the man.

  Have you looked in the reserved sections? asked the man. Seeing the look of incomprehension on Ravi’s face, the man pointed to the cheap wooden paneling along one side of the corridor: there are rooms behind those panels. They are usually used by special guests. Your family might have been placed there.

  Ravi slid one of the panels open, and was met with garish light. The room inside contrasted with the main hall of the restaurant through which he had been walking until now. The main hall was dimly lit; the guests were dressed in conservative greys, blue and black, the tables arranged at a polite distance from each other all over the floor. Pearls and silver hung from the ears or around their necks and sometimes glinted decorously in the candlelight. But this hidden room was like a wedding shamiana in a small town in India or Pakistan. It was garishly lit: the men talking confidently, the women speaking in low tones or keeping quiet. Some of them wore gold. There was a buffet table in the middle of the room, piled with dishes, and the chairs were ranged along the four walls.

  This section was more disorderly than the other parts of the restaurant, but it was an abashed sort of disorder: as if a housewife had received unannounced guests and had done what she could to tidy up in a jiffy. As if order was the state that was being aimed at, and the bits and pieces, the napkin or crawling child on the floor, were inherently a failure.

  Ravi realized with a shock that almost all the people sitting in the room, the women dressed in gorgeous colors, were South Asians: Indian, Pakistani, Bangladeshi, Sri Lankan. The women mostly sat on the chairs along the walls, holding plates of food in their hands or laps, sometimes feeding a child. The men, more conservatively dressed, stood conversing desultorily in groups all over this secret room in the paneling. They were attired like aspiring businessmen or government functionaries on a rare trip abroad. Some of the groups were mixed, but mostly the men stood together.

  A thickset middle-aged man spotted Ravi and sauntered over to him. “You live here?” the man asked in a heavy Haryanvi or Punjabi accent. Ravi nodded in affirmation. The man’s slightly florid features lit up with a smile and a smirk of recognition: South Asian to South Asian, Indian to Indian, man to man. So, where are the fun spots of this famous city? he asked again, with a wink. You know, he repeated, the fun places.

  It took Ravi more than a couple of seconds to understand the question. Slowly the words sank in, reinforced by the sly look in the man’s eyes. It was not really a leer. Ravi stared at him for another second. Then he did something incredibly rude: he turned on his heels and started to walk towards the exit.

  NOVEMBER, NOVEMBER, NOVEMBER

  The uncertain summer, rain-riven one week and sun-drenched the other, had hiccupped into a fluctuating warm and cold autumn that year. This was a relief, as there were autumn days when the annual darkness was held at bay. November really started in December, at least for Ravi. But it lasted, as Ravi’s favorite Danish poet had prophesied, much beyond December.

  I have looked at some of what I have written until now and I am surprised by the fact that it is my relationship with Ms. Marx that comes across as passionate, in an immediate sexual sense, while Ravi’s glass-brimming affair with Lena, if one were to disbelieve Ravi’s words, might strike you as restrained and cold. Perhaps that is so because I cannot really say much about Lena and Ravi. It is true that when Ravi spoke of his feelings, which was not as often as you might assume, or when—and this was quite often—he spoke of Lena, I had no doubt that his metaphor of the full glass was valid. Occasionally, when I saw them together, I would feel convinced too, but not always. There were moments when I resented Lena on Ravi’s behalf—because he seemed so incapable of resenting her—and wondered whether she shared the passion that Ravi felt. Or was she simply flattered by the flamboyance of his love for her? Ms. Marx had planted the germ of a doubt in my mind. Sometimes I felt that whatever Ravi saw in her was just a reflection of his own fire, and what Lena was capable of was not passion but niceness.

  Ravi must have had his doubts too, as his dream-story suggested to me. But his faith in Lena’s love was never shaken. Looking back, I see this as something he had in common with Karim Bhai. Perhaps that is why they took to each other across such obvious differences of background, character and habit. There is obviously a very thin line dividing faithfulness from fanaticism—and I wonder if, in a world of easily exchangeable commodities, we can even see that line anymore. I know I could not in the case of Karim Bhai. Perhaps Ravi could. Perhaps Ravi thought he could. Perhaps that is why he never grew suspicious of Karim, on his own, not until I talked to him.

  But there might have been something misleading about the way I narrated my relationship with Ms. Marx too; particularly, I fear, the kitchen scene. There are too many Hollywood films in which you see pans flying and plates smashed as the hero and the heroine bounce from one kitchen wall to another and finally end up enmeshed on the floor. I would be misleading you, reader, if I implied that this was the standard procedure between Ms. Marx and me.

  Remember, Ms. Marx had a seven-year-old son. Even if we had been the sort that wished to bounce from kitchen shelf to kitchen floor, oblivious of either the danger from knives and jagged pieces or the expense of broken china, the presence of a young boy in the house would have precluded that option.

  After we started seeing each other regularly—“became a couple,” in common parlance�
��Ms. Marx had no objection to me sleeping over and, late in the night, engaging in what Ravi once described as the pre-conjugal act. This was to be done carefully, of course, with a towel spread under us, for the easy elimination of evidence. But the first night we did so, just when the towel needed to be straightened, Ms. Marx’s son knocked on the door. It was eleven. We were under the impression that he had been asleep for close to an hour; Ms. Marx had worked hard on getting him to fall asleep, despite an obvious reluctance on his part, most of that evening.

  Hvad er det nu, asked Ms. Marx, struggling to get back into her nightdress and keep irritation out of her tone.

  He had had a nightmare, he claimed in a small voice.

  Ms. Marx had to spend another half hour putting him to bed. When she got back, she was willing to roll out the towel again, but I dreaded another knock. I could not get rid of the image of a young boy pretending to sleep in his room, trying to avoid hearing those telltale sounds that, no matter how careful we tried to be, he could not avoid hearing in a small place, sounds that would be more disturbing to him because he could not really understand them. The pragmatic attitude that so many Danes, including Ms. Marx, have to these matters was not something I shared to such an extent. After that, we confined our love-making to periods when Ms. Marx’s son was staying with his father.

  And yes, in case the image of a kitchen of bouncing pans and cascading plates still arises in your mind, let me add one further clarification: the towel stayed in place.

  If Ms. Marx was disappointed in me as a Muslim, she tried not to show it. This was always a source of hilarity to Ravi, who urged various disguises of Muslimness on me for, in his words, the sake of good form.