by Tabish Khair
How Ravi would have scoffed at this quotation. “Fuck, yaar,” I hear him laugh. “You Eng Lit types crack me up!”
But let me heed my MFA-girlfriend’s advice, this once, and avoid digressions at such a crucial juncture of my account. Let us return to the infamous Islamist Axe Plot.
Like most plots, its tail was twisted, but such twists inevitably become evident only in the end. We slept late the next morning at Ms. Marx’s place; by the time we woke up, around nine, she had already dropped her son off at school and picked up fresh bread from a bakery. We had a leisurely breakfast. Ms. Marx and I were teaching later that day; we drove off together. Ravi stayed back. I noticed that he had stopped fiddling with his mobile.
When we returned that evening, I realized that Karim’s arrest had distracted Ravi—permanently, I hoped, and said as much to Ms. Marx—from the mantra of his mobile. I don’t think he could ever forget Lena, but now he had something else to think about too. He had spent most of the day calling up people who knew us—and Karim. He had even tried to get in touch with Ali, but Ali had not been available. He had called Ajsa, but she was too busy with her own domestic tragedy to have visited Karim in detention. Only Great Claus, it appeared, had visited Karim, who had asked for—and received—his prayer beads in his cell. It appeared that Great Claus and some other people who knew Karim had also spoken to the police.
“It’s all a misunderstanding, Great Claus told me,” Ravi said to us that evening. “Great Claus says it will become clear soon enough.”
I smiled, disbelievingly. I did not want to contradict Ravi, if Great Claus’s naïveté made him feel better. Instead, I asked him how Karim had taken to Great Claus’s visit; after all, he had avoided the two Clauses ever since they disclosed their homosexuality.
“What do you expect!” Ravi laughed, and I must say it was good to see him laugh again. “Great Claus could not help chuckling over it on the phone. Karim Bhai was touched, he said, but he basically asked Great Claus about his family, his daughters, his job, everything one could possibly think of except Little Claus. As if Great Claus was still living with his family.”
Ravi chuckled.
I did not find it funny. I wondered how someone of Ravi’s acute intelligence could not draw the obvious inference about Karim’s guilt from such, to all eyes, clear proofs of prejudice and narrowness.
POSTSCRIPT TO A PLOT
The very next day, we read in the papers that Karim Bhai had been released. Ms. Marx woke us up with the news before she drove her son to school that morning. She had glanced at the paper, as she always did, while making breakfast for her son. She was as surprised as I was.
I could not possibly drive off without telling you, she said, as we scrambled, bleary-eyed, for the front pages.
Even Ravi could not have been hoping for something so dramatic. Not satisfied with Ms. Marx’s daily Politiken, he ran off in his pajamas, pulling on a thin jacket and a pair of boots without bothering to put his socks on, and returned in ten minutes—he must have run fast—with all the newspapers and tabloids that he could buy from a neighboring bakery. “Bastard,” he cried out, when he saw me again. “What did I say!” He was shivering from the cold, but did not notice it.
Karim had not just been released on bail. It was more dramatic than that. All charges against him had been dropped. There was a photo of him—his back, actually—in one of the tabloids, trying to enter unobtrusively the building in which we had shared a flat with him for a year.
The rest you probably know. Karim Bhai was released after three days in detention; a week later, the police announced that he was not implicated in the “Islamist Axe Plot.” The tabloids reported it with barely concealed suspicion. A politician from the Danish People’s Party ranted about how weak Danish legislation was, how it allowed terrorists to walk away scot-free. Anti-Muslim online sites such as Uriahposten foamed in cyberspace.
But the facts were clear: They had nothing to do with Al Qaeda; they had to do with a Danish woman. Karim had met her in Cairo. She was twenty-three years older than him. They had gotten married.
Seven or eight years ago, when she took early pension, his wife had asked for a divorce. Nothing was wrong between them. I hesitate to say that they were in love, for I wonder whether that much-sullied term holds the same meaning for everyone. But it appears that whatever they had shared in Cairo was still intact.
But Karim’s wife had gotten older; perhaps she had another fear at the back of her mind, and wished to release Karim from a burden that she suspected was about to fall on her shoulders. In any case, she felt too old to continue to be in a relationship with a much younger man, a man with other expectations and needs than her. That is what she told him and their mutual friends. She wanted to retire to the countryside, while Karim—she knew—not only needed to be in a city for his work but also, like most colored immigrants in Denmark, felt comfortable only in urban settings.
Karim had differed but he had accepted her decision. They had divorced within a year. He had stayed in touch with her, visiting her regularly as, over the next year or two, it became obvious that she was succumbing to Alzheimer’s. When she could not continue to live on her own, Karim Bhai admitted her to the best care he could afford. He went beyond what was freely available under the fraying Danish health-care system, which was being merrily liberalized by successive governments.
Over the years, she had drifted into her own world. Karim Bhai still visited her regularly. In periods when she recovered some lucidity, she would call him, and he would take a day or two off and check into a motel next to her. Those were the phone calls that had increased our suspicion of Karim. Her lucid periods never lasted for more than a day or two. That is when he used to disappear, mysteriously. That is why he would come back looking morose and tired—what Ravi and I, in our final moments of suspicion, read as anger or bitterness. That is why he needed to rent out his flat, work the extra hours.
Of course, the tabloids did not report it in such detail. We heard most of it from the Clauses. As I wrote earlier, we had moved out of the flat—storing most of our stuff in Boxit—the day after we informed on Karim Bhai. We stayed a few days with different friends: three nights at Ms. Marx’s, a couple of nights at the Clauses, whose newly conjoined bliss had been dented but not destroyed by the controversy around Karim, a few more nights in other places. Then I found another flat to rent. Ravi had only a few days left in Denmark. He decided to spend them traveling around; when he stayed over in my flat, he slept on a mattress on the floor. We never went back to Karim Bhai’s place. It seemed pointless.
But we spoke to common friends and we read the tabloids and papers. The Clauses, in particular, kept Ravi posted.
The papers reported the facts that common friends verified. But the reported facts were stained by incomprehension and suspicion. How could the Danish media really comprehend a man like Karim when we, Ravi and I, had failed to do so? The tabloids sneered subtly at his older-by-more-than-twenty-years wife, insinuating that he must have married her to get into Denmark. But I thought otherwise. I recalled Karim Bhai explaining to Ravi just some months back: “The Prophet, peace be upon him, had only one wife: she was about twenty years older than him. He remained faithful to her and he did not marry again until after she died, peace be upon her.”
Why is it that Karim never mentioned to us that he still called on and took care of his ex-wife? It turned out that Great Claus and Pernille had known of her but they were also aware of Karim’s strong reluctance to talk about it. So had some other people, but then they did not move in our circles.
Karim had never mentioned staying in touch with his ex-wife—let alone her illness—within our hearing. He had never told anyone who did not already know that he took care of her. He had not even mentioned her existence. Why?
I can give so many answers. Was he embarrassed by her illness, her condition? Or did he feel that silence was owed to the last shreds of dignity to which she still clung in moments of clar
ity? Did he feel that, being a good Muslim by his own lights, he could not—as my parents would put it—let his left hand know the good that his right hand did? Or was it because—being so narrowly religious—he felt that he was doing something reprehensible and un-Islamic: visiting and spending days alone with a woman who was no longer his wife?
There are other answers too.
But no, they are not answers. They are guesses. Who am I to answer for Karim Bhai? Who are you to demand answers from him?
Lena did not come to see Ravi off at Århus station. I doubt she texted him either.
Yesterday, as I was preparing the manuscript of this book for submission, I received, for the first time since his departure almost a month ago, an email from Ravi. He wrote with no reference to the past. He was in Mumbai. (No, he was in “Bombay,” as he actually wrote.) He had refused to move in with his parents; he was working for an NGO and writing as a freelancer. Ravi wrote that he was thinking of going back to journalism in India and uncertain whether he would even return to Denmark to defend his PhD thesis. Despite this old spark of Ravi’s fire, it was a subdued email. I heard a voice in it that I could hardly recognize, a resolute but chastened voice, the voice of someone willing to wait for things to happen.
Perhaps that is why I want to add this postscript. I wish to end my account of the infamous Islamic Axe Plot with one of my dreams. My MFA-girlfriend of yore probably had injunctions against ending a factual account with something as unreal as a dream. But a dream it has to be, I feel, for it was a strange dream, which returned me to the beginning of my story. And, more strangely, despite his flippancy and his skepticism, his claim that he never but once dreamed in Denmark, when I think of Ravi, I think of a dreamer. Someone who dreamed so deeply that he could not allow himself to recall his own dreams in the lurid light of ordinary day.
Unlike Ravi, I dream often and incoherently. I sometimes remember the shards and pieces of my dreams beyond those seconds of fleeting lucidity that divide sleep from wakefulness but dissolve in the glare of day. This dream too slipped from my memory, and returned only yesterday—triggered perhaps by Ravi’s email or by a glimpse of Karim. I need to talk about both.
I had the dream the night Ravi left; I’d accompanied him to Copenhagen. We had friends there, and it seemed a good idea to hit the town in order to see him off. As Ravi’s flight to Amsterdam left at six in the morning, we had less than three hours of sleep after our evening out with friends. Around four we took a taxi to the airport; we were too bleary-eyed to take the tube or the bus, as we had originally intended. We left as quietly as we could, for we did not want to wake up the hung-over friends at whose place we had slept. We did not say much in the taxi either, or at the airport. After checking in, Ravi gripped me by the elbow and took the escalator into the security clearance sections of Kastrup.
I hung around, walking about the orderly, compact airport, and then buying myself an elaborate and slow breakfast. Around nine, I caught a train back to Copenhagen’s central station and from there, a little later, to Århus. It was a bit after three when I reached Århus. It was a Sunday; the town was largely deserted. A bit of snow had fallen. The parked cars and cycles looked like they had been dusted with talcum powder. I walked down the pedestrian street, stopping to have a shawarma sandwich and a coke at a small Turkish eatery; a bitter wind was blowing from the sea, chilly with the ice of the North. I felt the kind of exhaustion, exacerbated by lack of rest and drinking the night before, which demands but does not permit sleep.
The early winter night had fallen, darkening the streets, when I finally reached the small, freshly painted two-room university apartment I had rented at the campus after moving out of Karim’s flat. I tried to read a book but could not concentrate. I opened a bottle of red wine but had little desire to drink. Around eight, without warning, sleep descended on me in a swarm of tiredness, with the sensation of a flock of crow-like birds, of a dark cloud falling from the sky, and I just managed to reach the bed before falling asleep. I do not recall the night. And when I woke up, a bit too early next morning, the dream too had misted in my memory. It came back only yesterday, with Ravi’s email and a disturbing glimpse of Karim: two living ghosts who continue to haunt me, it seems. I think I saw Karim Bhai’s taxi yesterday. I was returning from Ms. Marx’s place; her son is with her this week and I always feel odd sleeping over when he is home, though she has no objection to it. It was not too late, perhaps a bit after ten at night. The roads were crowded with young people—improbably dressed, especially the women in their stockings and tights, despite the cold—and I wanted to escape the forced clockwork bonhomie. Ravi and his desperation to live without being lost in habit was on my mind. I walked briskly to a taxi stand and spotted what I thought was Karim’s cab parked there. I dodged into another street. Urbanity provides us with so many ways to avoid people. Isn’t that what distinguishes it from traditional rural life, where the onus, perhaps because it was difficult and rare, was more on greeting people?
I walked half a kilometer to another stand, wondering why I had avoided Karim. Was I ashamed of facing him again? Perhaps. But I think it was more than that. I was ashamed of facing him and not being able to apologize fully. I felt we had done him an injury by preferring our suspicions—and I was more responsible for this than Ravi—to the daily evidence that he had provided of courtesy and decency within the limits of his humanity. But it wasn’t even that: not apology, which was neither demanded nor required, but honest conversation was impossible now.
How could I talk to him—I more than Ravi—again? It is, after all, Karim’s kind of religion that is used by fundamentalists of a different sort to condone the murder of innocent passers-by, the incitement of young men and women to commit acts whose brutal consequences they are hardly aware of at times. It is his kind of literal reading of the Quran that is used by Islamists to justify beheadings or the veiling of women, and, strangely, by those who hate Islam to dismiss an entire and complex tradition. It is the same Towhid—so precious to Karim—that jihadists use to espouse an intolerance so extreme, an order so narrow that only someone like Ravi, with his insistence on the anti-universalism of fascism, could distinguish it from fascism. How could I have spoken with a clean heart to Karim Bhai? Too much stood between him and me, and there was no Ravi—with his mocking belief in all that is best in us—to bridge the chasm now.
Guilt, you say? No, guilt is too glib a word, too simple—the sort of answer demanded of, and sometimes given by, novelists. Ravi might have felt some guilt for giving in to what, I suspect, he finally considered my fears for my own safety rather than his own opinion of Karim Bhai. But guilt is not what I felt, or not mainly. After all, I had not turned Karim over for interrogation by the Pakistani or Indian police, or sent him to Abu Ghraib! All I had condemned him to was relentless questioning, over cups of coffee perhaps, by orderly Danish investigators, no matter how prejudiced—questioning that, I am sure, would have come his way in any case, given his name and location. Think of the “Norway attacks” last year and the confidence of Danish journalists in attributing them to Islamists: what kind of people do you think would have been picked up for questioning if it had not been discovered that the perpetrator was a light-eyed, light-skinned Norwegian? No, guilt is not the word.
What I felt was the impossibility of conversation, as if I would have to shout across a Niagara of noise to Karim Bhai and what would come across, if anything, would not be the words I meant or the words he uttered but a sort of crude pantomime. It was not that we did not wish to talk. But the Niagara of suspicion and prejudice and brashness cascading around us made honest conversation impossible between the two of us.
No wonder I took advantage of the many avenues of urbanity to shirk facing Karim. And perhaps it was this conscious decision to avoid Karim which returned from my unconscious that dream I had the night Ravi left for India.
I was in Mumbai airport in my dream. I had just landed there with Ravi. Mumbai airport was a mishmash of e
very airport in the world that I had ever traversed: Karachi, Islamabad, Lahore, Copenhagen, Stansted, Heathrow, Paris, Munich, Moscow, Billund and half a dozen others. This was inevitable. I had never been to Mumbai: my only trip to India had been via Delhi. But despite the mishmash and its ever-changing chameleon features, I knew this airport to be Mumbai.
Ravi had a smart little backpack: he always traveled light. I was bowed down with bulky hand baggage and dragging a huge suitcase whose wheels squeaked at regular intervals. Consequently, Ravi often left me behind and then had to wait for me to catch up.
We were heading out of the arrivals section of the airport. A small boy went past us, dragging a striped towel, and—with the sudden critical lucidity of dreams—I recognized the boy as walking out of my favorite comic strip, Peanuts, though he also seemed familiar in some other vague manner. He made me notice something in my dream. It appeared that everyone else, like the boy, was heading the other way; and when Ravi stopped, I asked him if we were going in the right direction. He nodded and we kept walking, the suitcase emitting piercing squeaks which almost woke me up.
Ravi was right. We came within sight of the exit. There were the usual armed policemen next to it. There was the usual crowd outside, and noise spilling like sunshine. People were jostling each other, eager for passengers to come out; there were taxi drivers, relatives with children, acolytes carrying garlands waiting for some godman, politician, cricketer or film star, and dozens of people holding name placards, some held high on sticks. It could have been Delhi or Karachi, but I knew it was Mumbai.
