by Tabish Khair
Ravi could be very explicit in his curiosity and comments at times, though never without humor; in this too, he differed from Lena.
For instance, the evening he brought up circumcision. We had finished our dinner and were lingering in the kitchen. Karim Bhai and Ravi were smoking. I don’t think Ravi had smoked that day—he did not really like smoking—and so he had to light up before going to bed, simply to keep protesting against the Danish establishment’s anti-smoking policies on the behalf of women and the working classes.
The nicotine must have sparked some neurological circuit of needling in his labyrinthine mind, for he paused between puffs and said, “Sometimes I feel I should have introduced Ms. Marx to Karim Bhai here; he would have been less disappointing.”
Karim Bhai looked alarmed, not following the conversation but gathering that it had to do with women. I ignored Ravi. I was watching TV.
He continued, “You know, Karim Bhai, I suspect the bastard here is not even circumcised!”
This was sheer nonsense of the sort that Ravi was capable of spouting occasionally, but Karim Bhai trafficked only in sense. He looked at me, perturbed.
“Oh no, no, no,” he replied to Ravi. “All Muslims are circumcised. It is written in the Hadith.”
“I betcha this Paki turncoat ain’t!” Ravi maintained, not realizing that Karim was taking his needling seriously.
Karim Bhai turned to me for confirmation.
I gave up. I knew this would go on unless I set Karim’s mind at rest. Ravi would turn his idea into various other avenues of jocularity, unaware of the truck of Islam careening out of control in Karim’s mind. It was then that for the first time, fleetingly, I noticed a slight trace of bitterness—of disappointment, perhaps—in Ravi, which sometimes made him needle his friends. The reason was not difficult to guess. It was his brimming glass of Lena.
“Of course I am circumcised, bastard,” I replied.
“You mean, the proper way, when the barber seats five-year-old Munna on a stool, razor glinting, and says look look look a silver bird in the sky…” Ravi did not want his joke to deflate so soon.
“Know what, bastard,” I told him, “you are worse than the RSS: everyone goes to hospitals now. No one is circumcised like that anymore.”
Karim Bhai was smiling. I think he was so relieved to be assured of my Muslimness that he overcame his shyness about physical matters. “Not true,” he said to me, “I was taken to a barber, you know, silver bird and all…”
He went pink to the roots of his beard.
Let me try and be fair to Lena. I know my vision of her is clouded by the pain that I thought I detected on Ravi’s face, the hollowness in his heart that he struggled to hide and almost succeeded, those weeks when his hands were hummingbirds hovering over the flower of his mobile. To be fair, Lena is the only Dane I have known—apart from the Clauses who were always consciously “Asian” with us—who was infallibly courteous. This has to be put on record, I think.
Even Ms. Marx can be quite brusque, in a typically Danish way. I recall, when I first moved here, I had found the Danes an incredibly rude people. So had my ex-wife. I still find them rather rude. But I think I understand it a bit better now. It is not just the “unholy alliance of capitalist pragmatism and subterranean Protestantism,” as Ravi used to put it. It has to do with the myth of honesty that structures Danish society.
Look at it this way. Your Danish friend Mr. Xyzsen asks you to do something for him and, without telling him, you go out of your way to oblige. Mr. Xyzsen is happy but he does not feel obliged; he assumes that you did what you did because you too wanted to do it at that moment. Otherwise, surely, you would have refused. So when you ask Mr. Xyzsen to do something for you, he declines—because he is too busy or simply not in the mood. He is just being honest with you, because he assumes that you were being honest with him in the past. But, of course, courtesy is basically a matter of dishonesty—you hide your own inconvenience in order to be courteous and, sometimes, kind.
Lena, though, as I wrote, was always courteous and kind in company. Was she kind to Ravi? It is irrelevant; I don’t think he ever wanted kindness from her.
One night, late in that long multi-month November, as I lay on my back on the striped towel that we favored for the elimination of evidence, and Ms. Marx maneuvered marvelously atop me—her son was with his dad—the topic of Ravi and Lena came up. That is how I found out. Ms. Marx had a practical attitude to sex; she was capable of discussing anything from Norman Davies to the latest feud over the disposal of garbage among the residents of her housing co-operative until minutes before orgasm. So was I, to be honest.
That night, as she pinned the fundamentalist in me to a striped towel on her bed, she said, “You do know that your friend and Lena are not together anymore.”
My state of sensation was obviously more advanced than hers at that stage; her remark did not register.
“Um, um,” I think I replied. “Keep going, keep going…” She stopped.
That caught my attention.
“Your friend and Lena have broken up,” she said.
“Bullshit,” I replied, though actually I was not altogether surprised.
“Didn’t you know?” she asked me, showing signs of moving back into gear.
“How do you know?” I countered.
“When did you last see them together? And in any case, everyone at the university knows it is over…”
She was right, as I realized when I asked around the next day. I still do not understand why I had not noticed, though I can understand Ravi’s reluctance to mention it to me. After all, I was the only person to whom he had spoken of the depth of his passion for Lena.
To my credit, I did not ask Ravi about the break-up until, a couple of days later, he told me himself.
I can still recall that afternoon. It was the last time I saw Lena and Ravi walk together. Ravi had finally told me about their separation, though I had realized after my night with Ms. Marx that I had been rather blind not to notice the way Ravi kept looking at his mobile and checking his computer.
The break-up had been his decision: Lena had not demurred, he told me with a short laugh. She had accepted it with the kind of grace, equanimity and poise that she brought to everything in her life. I had felt like shaking her, he said.
But then that day, we bumped into Lena on campus. She was so collected and polite that both of us felt we had no choice but to walk with her to her flat.
To be honest, Ravi was just as collected, even perhaps a bit debonair, as if all those moments of frantically grabbing his mobile had never taken place.
The sky was overcast, almost dark, though it could not have been much past four. With the first snow yet to fall, winter was just a watery waste. Lena and Ravi did not say anything of significance to each other. They said very little of significance to me either. Instead, they kept up a fragile shiny prattle that at times I hated both of them for. If ever there was a couple painfully in love and determined not to show it, it was them. Or is it that I had been too influenced by Ravi’s perspective on the matter?
When we reached the building, Lena said goodbye to us. She looked fleetingly at Ravi, and Ravi, who had been observing her a moment earlier, drinking her in with his eyes, managed to look away at that precise instant. As if each had coordinated his or her gestures in such a way as to avoid, with perfect timing, the other’s moment of weakness. Then we stopped on the pavement and Lena walked on to her building. She walked straight, steps as measured as always. She opened the heavy door of the building. The door was blue, its paint peeling, wood warped and scratched: it made a contrast to Lena’s youth and immaculateness. Just before going in, she half-turned. She did not wave.
It was only then that Ravi started walking away.
I had expected Ravi to do a repeat of what he used to do after his earlier break-ups: hit the bar, do ironic renditions of Mumbai film classics—Bombay, he would insist, as he refused to use the word “Mumbai,” attributi
ng it to what he called Sena bullying—and have to be lugged to bed. But no, he hardly drank in the days left to him, not more than a glass or a couple of beers; he preoccupied himself with clearing out his office and other such practical matters. He read a lot and even wrote a bit. He called up old friends all over the globe and had bright, witty conversations with them. He still looked at his mobile too often, but that was the only slip. And once in a while, though always abruptly, he would say something about Lena.
“Words, words, words; she is so good with words!”
“So are you, Ravi.”
“Not in the same way, bastard. I do not trust words. No Indian does. Words leave me famished; I eye them with suspicion. Language is, first of all, a weapon. Man became the deadliest of all species when he invented language. If dinosaurs had survived until then, wordy Homo sapiens would have had them for breakfast! I could give up all words for one significant gesture: the breaking of bread, the offering of a glass of water to a stranger, the sitting down to eat around a cloth, the washing of feet.
“She is one of those people who gets frozen into poise. They become a mirror of themselves, echoes. That is why all she can do is echo me: if I want to live with her, that is what she wants too; if I want to separate, she is willing to accept that too for our sake. She can never do something that is frayed, awry, unexpected. And the pity, bastard, is that she has it in herself—have you looked into those green eyes? I have never seen eyes that color. There is a forest, a lush wilderness trapped in her eyes forever, petrified. She is a prisoner of herself.”
“So are you, Ravi,” I told him.
“What do you mean?” he retorted, genuinely nonplussed.
“You are trapped in yourself too, or perhaps you could learn to live with her cold poise, for you still do not have any doubts about her love.”
He looked at me and blinked. “No,” he said, “that is one thing I have no doubts about.”
I had read Ravi’s story, “A State of Niceness,” but I still did not fully understand. I asked him just once. It did not seem kind to ask him again. It was not just the suffering in his eyes that prevented me; it was his need to hide the suffering. But I did ask him once.
“I do not understand,” I said to him.
“Understand what?” he replied. “Shakespeare? Proust? Derrida? Ask, ignorant mortal, and thou shalt be answered!”
“You and Lena. If you love her, you know the full-glass version that you gave me, and she loves you, why all this?”
“Because it is the full-glass version,” he replied after a moment’s hesitation. “You see, my friend, behind any full glass there stretches a vast desert—you have no business quaffing that glass unless you have the courage to go mad in the desert if necessary.”
“Beyond me, Ravi,” I answered, choosing not to understand him. “But tell me this: whose fault then?”
Ravi laughed.
“You Eng Lit types, you never manage to escape your fucking Milton, do you?”
Then he asked me whether I had seen the film version of Fiddler on the Roof. I had not.
“You should,” said Ravi. “It is a great musical. You see, it starts with this traditional Jewish family in a small Russian village, just before the Russian revolution. The patriarch—played brilliantly by the Israeli actor Topol—has a number of daughters, all of whom break his ideas of what is right as they grow up and marry. One of them even falls for a communist revolutionary, a man from outside the community. There is a scene where this young communist, recently arrived in the village, has an argument with one of Topol’s friends. Topol, who always tries to dialogue even when he disagrees, listens to the young communist’s argument and pronounces, a patriarch to his very bones, ‘You are right.’ Then Topol’s friend makes his counter argument and that convinces Topol. ‘You are right,’ he tells his friend too. Another man standing in the group intervenes. ‘He is right, and he is right,’ says this third man, ‘but they cannot both be right.’ Topol thinks about it, looks at the third man and says: ‘You are also right.’”
“So?” I asked.
“So, my Miltonic friend,” replied Ravi, turning away so as to close the discussion, “you are also right.”
I wanted to retort that I could not possibly be right as I had not taken any stand. But it was obvious that Ravi had no wish to talk about the matter anymore.
Just once did I falter in my determination to let Ravi bear his loss—or whatever it was—in his own way. This was on an evening when he had loitered about the flat, cooked something superfluous in the kitchen, gone out, come back and finally ensconced himself on my bed, distracting me from the questions that I was framing for forthcoming exams, and proceeded to turn his mobile over and over again in his hands, as if telling the beads that Karim carried around. I was a bit irritated. I said to him, “Go on, yaar. Why don’t you just fucking ring her up?”
“No point,” he replied after a pause; a pause so long that I had gone back to setting questions, assuming that Ravi had chosen to ignore my outburst.
“Why? Are you afraid she’ll refuse to see you again?”
Ravi smiled a slow, pensive smile. He looked at his mobile.
“It is five forty. Wednesday,” he said. “You know, this is about the time she returns from her weekly singing lesson. I don’t even need to close my eyes to imagine the world in which she does those things. She walks up the stairs. She stops at her door. She turns the key and goes in, but not before straightening the doormat. She hangs up her coat; she goes into the bathroom to gargle with Listerine. She always gargles with Listerine after singing lessons. I imagine her do these things; I imagine the sounds and smells of her world. No, I don’t imagine her; I feel her in my bones, in my flesh. If she were to do anything differently, I would sense it. I would know. So, now, imagine that I call her. Do you know what will happen, bastard?”
“If I were her, Ravi, I would tell you to go to hell.”
“If only she would, yaar. If only she would. But no, she won’t. She will hear me out; she’ll agree to what I suggest. Farewell, last drink together, let’s give it another try. She’ll agree to any of it in the same even tone. There will be no jarring note from her: not even a go fuck yourself, Ravi!”
What could I have said to that? I returned to framing my questions. Ravi meditated a bit longer on his mobile, turning it around and around. Then he picked up a book of literary criticism and was soon chuckling over it—“This chap makes such a virtue of stating the obvious,” he remarked. But he kept the mobile within reach.
THE ISLAMIST AXE PLOT
Then, of course, it happened and I, for one, forgot all about Lena for the next few days. Ravi did not. He could not. But even he soon had other things to worry about. When we had weathered the storm, Ravi did not talk about Lena again to me and probably, given where he is now, to anyone else.
What happened? Well, you can guess. It was front-page news in Denmark. It was reported elsewhere too. But we hardly paid it any attention the morning when it was reported.
Karim Bhai had already left for work. A copy of Jyllands Posten—despite all our efforts, Karim Bhai continued to subscribe to this rather provincial paper because he claimed, with some justification, that other national dailies only wrote about Copenhagen—was still lying on the doormat. Karim had obviously left too early to read the paper.
I picked it up and took it to the kitchen. The coffee machine set off its usual infernal racket, which woke up Ravi. He walked in, his sleeping robe loosely tied, rubbing his eyes.
“If this blasted machine did not belong to Karim Bhai,” he said, “I would love to use it for target practice.”
I still hadn’t read the newspaper, which lay on the kitchen table. Ravi sat down and picked it up. Despite his love for cooking, Ravi almost never made breakfast. Actually, though he was not aware of it, he expected coffee to be made and handed to him. I think it was one of those remnants of his past as the only child of rich and famous parents. I wondered what Lena use
d to make of it. I suspected Danish women would dislike something like that, though I never pointed it out to Ravi: he was a man who strove so much to be what he thought he should be, a man who pushed himself so much, that I thought he was entitled to some habits of relic comfort.
When I handed Ravi his mug of coffee, he was engrossed in the paper. I went to the oven to put in some buns. “Have you read the paper?” he asked.
When I replied in the negative, he laughed and tossed it to me.
“You should read it,” he said. “Your brethren have been bothering the blondes again.”
On the front page, there was a news item about a Somali man who had assaulted one of the Danish artists who had drawn the controversial Mohammad cartoons a few years back. There was some speculation about the man being part of an Al Qaeda “cell.”
This, as we pieced it together, is how it really happened.
It was a few days before Christmas, one of those miserable November days that stretch into February. The little snow on the ground was muddy and sad-looking. A few teenage girls suffered icicle legs in thin stockings for the sake of fashion or boyfriend, but people mostly went about wrapped in jackets and overcoats that had already been beaten out of shape by the winter. The sky had dropped by a few meters, and the clouds reflected the muddy, grimy whiteness of the snow on the ground.
Early morning on a Saturday like this, a Somali man went into a supermarket. It had just opened. The girl at the counter described him as dressed in a weather-beaten overcoat, with layers of woolens underneath. It made him look big and intimidating, though actually he was rather an emaciated, nervous-looking man. He was wearing thick mittens too, and had wrapped his head in a long muffler. He looked distracted, the girl said. He bought a garden axe and a kitchen knife. Later, in another interview, the girl corrected herself and said that he looked “very intense.”
From the supermarket, the Somali man walked some blocks to the house of Bent Hansen, retired cartoonist. He stopped once on the way, and sat down on a bench. He was observed by joggers and an old lady retrieving the doings of her poodle: he was trying to sharpen the axe and the knife by rubbing them against each other. It had frightened the old lady away: she had not managed to scoop all her poodle’s doings into one of those small plastic bags that she always carried around. It was the first time she had ever broken a law, she told the press at every opportunity.
