How to Fight Islamist Terror from the Missionary Position

WHEN AUTUMN LEAVES START TO FALL

One of my cousins was getting married in Lahore that August. August is not the best time for marriages in Lahore, but then the seasons have very little to do with weddings in the professional classes of Pakistan and, if Ravi is to be believed, India any longer. There was a time when there used to be marriage seasons, which varied a bit from community to community, region to region. Now, with jobs and education scattering the supposedly privileged all over the globe, weddings are usually crammed into the summer and winter vacations across the subcontinent.

Ravi had been talking about going to Pakistan with me, but that was until a few months ago. I knew he had no desire to leave the vicinity of Lena now. I made a quick one-week trip—sandwiched between the interminable sham-exams that cut into all vacations in Danish universities—and returned to find Ravi waiting for me at the airport.

I was touched. Ravi hated receiving or seeing people off at airports or railway stations. But no, Ravi was there primarily because he had news for me.

“Karim Bhai is in a foul mood: don’t even mention Great Claus to him. He is liable to blow a fuse if you do!”

On the way back by bus—the airport is half an hour out of town—Ravi filled me in. It had to do, at least in his account, with Ravi’s advice to Claus. Claus had followed the advice. He had told Pernille the truth. Pernille had been relieved; Karim Bhai had been scandalized.

“The closet,” Ravi expanded. “Claus hath taken a mighty leap into the roaring Chandrabhaga!”

There had been no woman involved. It was more convoluted—or simpler—than that. Years ago, after he had fathered two daughters, Great Claus had discovered that he was gay. For years now, he had had a steady lover: Little Claus. There was nothing to be done about it. Great Claus felt he had to maintain the pretence of being a solid “familiefar”—family father—as long as his girls were too young and at home. But when they moved out, he could no longer keep on playing the part. He wanted to move out and become what he considered himself to be.

Pernille, Ravi said, had taken this revelation very well. She had even gone out eating with both the Clauses, and had helped Great Claus move most of his stuff into Little Claus’s suburban house. The daughters too had been, if anything, jubilant about this turn of events. “You see, bastard,” said Ravi to me, as the excessively green and even Danish countryside started giving way to a bit less green but as even Danish urbanity, “having an affair with a woman is kind of tacky and underhand. But who, with his heart in his left breast, can deny a man his true individuality! I wonder why good Old Claus hesitated in coming clean: the guy obviously does not understand contemporary Western civilization.”

It looked like Karim Bhai did not understand it either. When Claus came to tell him, with both Little Claus and Pernille in tow, Karim Bhai looked shocked. “His face drained of color, yaar,” recounted Ravi, who was there, all his aunts in tow. “I thought he would faint. Then he got up, walked to his room and closed the door.”

“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-Nazi 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.

Compared to the books Ravi had in his soon-to-be-vacated office at the university and the room, Karim had very few. Not more than twenty or so, stacked in precise order in a cane bookrack at the back of his room. Like everything precious in the room, the bookrack was also kept covered, so that one could not read the titles of the books. I recall noticing this only during the last Friday Quran session that I attended in the flat.

No, “attended” is not the word. As usual, I had no intention of attending inane discussions about religious matters, culled mostly from a book written in an obscure Arabic dialect no one spoke any longer. Some of the subjects that exercised the intellects of Karim’s gathering—like clothing or food restrictions—were so much out of tune with my experience and life that I wondered what made Ravi go back to Karim’s Friday sessions time and again. At first, I thought it was due to idle curiosity. Then I assumed he continued to attend them out of courtesy to Karim and his guests, all of whom—with the exception of Ali—got along with Ravi and felt flattered by his interest. But finally I had to concede that Ravi derived more intellectual sustenance from the conversations than I could, perhaps because—not having grown up in a Muslim environment—he found some of the ideas and sentiments fresh or thought-provoking. I also suspected that Ravi was willfully blind to what I had increasingly come to see as the fascist face of Islamism. He hated that suggestion, and with good cause, for in the West, Islam itself is considered fascist or prone to fascism. Ravi objected to that. He argued that Islamism, because it considered Islam universally valid for all human beings, could not be fascist, because fascism was an ideology of ethnic, racist or nationalist exclusiveness.

He might have been right, intellectually. But what Ravi forgot was that Islam, like any other religion or even an atheistic ideology like communism, could be put to fascist uses, and that many Islamic fundamentalists—with their mobs and chanting, their whips and executions, their insistence on absolute obedience—behaved very much like fascists.

I recall the discussion that Friday had to do with an example of what I still consider fascism in an Islamist mask. But, of course, I was not part of the discussion. I was waiting in the kitchen for Ravi to finish. We were supposed to meet Lena and some other friends later in the evening: we had tickets to a jazzed-up version, its operatic airs replaced by pop songs, of Lucia di Lammermoor, which was playing at a local theater. By then it had started becoming clear to me that things were not going well between Lena and Ravi any longer—not because they had fallen out of love but because, in different ways, they were still too much in love. I think the two of them were trying to do what they could to make it work, and the theater outing was part of that endeavor.

As I waited for Ravi to finish, I heard the conversation take a nasty turn in Karim’s room. It also took a political turn, which was unusual. In the past, Karim had firmly stepped in and stoppered the genie of politics from being released. But that Friday Karim was distracted—he had been called away on his mysterious trips too often in recent weeks and had been working a lot as well—or simply unwilling to interfere. I must add that the second interpretation came to me later, when I spoke to the police about this particular Friday discussion.

Do you remember that in April last year a fundamentalist Christian preacher in USA had “tried,” condemned and burned a copy of the Quran, after a year of infantile posturing back and forth? The news had been covered with surprising restraint by the international media but somehow it had reached fundamentalist Islamic preachers in Afghanistan, who had then led a mob attack on some UN workers, resulting in a number of shocking execution-like deaths. I am sure you will recall that unnecessary tragedy, as good an example as any of how the worst draw sustenance from the equally bad across their over-dramatized chasms.

What you might not recall is that in November a small postscript—almost unreported by the media—had been added to this tragedy. A Pakistani man—a Christian—in a place near Lahore had been (wrongly) considered a relative of the American preacher. Their names, transcribed inaccurately into Urdu, seemed alike. He had been accused of having provided the American preacher with a copy of the Quran to desecrate. A mob had collected, a mullah had pronounced a verdict, and the poor man had been dragged to a field and beheaded. It was, in my book, another example of the kind of Islamist fascism that held much of Pakistan in thrall, largely because liberal Muslims were too busy defending the complexities of Islam from unfair and at times racist Western charges of fascism to be able to face the actual and glaring fact of fascism in Muslim societies.

Strangely, in April, not one of the Friday discussion groups that Ravi attended had brought up the controversy for discussion. Or I would have remembered. Even bin Laden’s dramatic death in May had not been discussed, as far as I could recall, and the “Norway attacks” in July been mentioned only in passing. Why? Well, perhaps because Ali had not attended them, or perhaps because Karim had been more in control. (The other explanation—subterfuge—came to me much later, in the light of other events.) But this Friday in November, the beheading of the Pakistani Christian was mentioned by Ali, who had come over with three other men.

Was Ibrahim there on that occasion? Later, the Danish police officer asked me that question too.

I am not sure. There were four Somali-looking men, but I did not stay in the room long enough to properly observe them. The police officer seemed dubious and shook his head in disappointment when I said so, but it was the truth. Ibrahim might have been there; or perhaps he was not there. I do recall—and I told the officer so—that Ajsa was not in the room. She seldom attended these Friday discussions.

Let me give you a clearer picture of the setting. There was Karim’s sofa-cum-bed in the middle. Usually, Karim would be seated on it, but this Friday he was too restless—he kept going into the kitchen to fetch snacks or brew fresh tea—and as such he had relinquished the sofa to Ali and his cronies. Facing the sofa in a half-circle were six or seven men—I don’t think there was a single woman that evening—on chairs, mostly folding ones. A table with Indian snacks and tea was set in the middle. It also held Karim’s copy of the Quran, wrapped in clean cotton, placed on a wooden pedestal with inlaid silver patterns. Next to the Quran rested Karim’s necklace of beads.

How did the argument escalate? I am not sure; I was reading in the kitchen, not really paying attention to the babble. Suddenly, though, I heard shouting—Karim was in the kitchen brewing more tea—and rushed to the room, followed by Karim. Ali and Ravi were close to hitting each other. Ali always appeared close to hitting someone or the other, even the words he uttered were expelled with a blast, showering his interlocutors with spittle. But it was unusual to find Ravi worked up to that extent; he usually managed to cut people with a comment or a regal gesture. I later realized it had to do with the phase that Ravi’s relationship with Lena had entered, leaving him more vulnerable than I had ever seen him, than—I am sure—he had ever been.

I stepped in and parted the two. Ali left immediately, followed by two of his cronies, shouting. I remember his parting words:

“Anyone who insults the Prophet, peace be upon him, should be killed. It is every Muslim’s duty!”

(The police officer looked very pleased when I reported these words to him.)

Karim apologized to Ravi, but I had had enough and pulled Ravi out of the flat. We were early for our theater appointment—we had agreed to meet the others for a drink in a café—but Ravi did not resist. I asked him what had caused the outburst. What follows is his account.

“The evening was shaping up as these evenings usually do,” said Ravi, as we walked into town. We crossed an election billboard featuring Pia Kjærsgaard and her smile, which, Ravi had claimed in the past, reminded him of a well-fed cat being nice to a juicy mouse. Behind her was emblazoned the legend: Der er en grænse. “There is a limit.” “There is a border.” I think both Ravi and I grimaced at the same time.

Ravi continued: “But then Ali and his cronies referred to this Pakistani Christian who was beheaded. I think Ali was trying to justify the act and also wish it away. You know, bastard, how you bloody mullahs behave when something really bad is done by your fellow Muslims: you look around desperately for the CIA or Mossad or someone else with an agenda to blame it on, and of course half the time those blasted motherfuckers are involved in any case. But then something like this happens, and no amount of Quranic exegesis can dig up a CIA plot. So Ali, poor bugger, had no choice but to defend the crime. I was lost in my own thoughts and did not pay him too much attention, but then he started talking about how all Christians were in the pay of the West and how the West was xenophobic and anti-Islamist. One of the other men objected and said that he did not think that all Danes were xenophobic.”

We paused to allow a sleek, well-groomed white cat to cross the pavement. It did not slink past. It was well-fed and unafraid.

“This is the kind of cat,” said Ravi, “that would give me a taste for mishi kanka.” Then he returned to his account: “I tried to give the matter a half-ironic turn and said something like, ‘I agree: Danes are not xenophobic. It is worse than that. Danes worship the heathen idols of comfort and convenience. Anything, any idea, or person that reduces their comfort or convenience has to be shunned or exorcized. They mostly do not dislike strangers from far places; they simply find them uncomfortable and inconvenient.’ Ali, of course, is incapable of understanding anything like that, and very soon he was shouting about those stupid Danish artists who had made cartoons of your prophet and calling for their death, and for some reason I got provoked… That’s it, let’s forget about Ali. He is a fool and a rabble-rouser.”

“He is a bloody fascist,” I could not help muttering.

“No,” Ravi replied. “He is just a fool and a rabble-rouser. But let’s hasten, good sir, to the café yonder, where we shall say good night till it be morrow.” Then, in keeping with the sudden quasi-Shakespearean turn of his language, he quoted: “Shall we their fond pageant see? Lord, what fools these mortals be!”

At that time, I thought he was still referring to Ali and his ilk. Now, I am certain I was wrong. He was not thinking of Ali anymore. I doubt that he could think of anything other than what was actually troubling him: a glass full of love.

The glass leaked, for the first time, that evening. I had noticed the ripples on its surface in recent weeks, but I had never expected it to leak. Or maybe it did not leak; maybe it brimmed over.

We were in the café, about six of us, including Lena. We were talking of this and that, the usual small talk on such occasions. Lena was the very epitome of poise and grace, so much in control of her speech and gestures that it sometimes appeared as if she were reading out her lines. I think she always made a special effort in Ravi’s presence, tried to be even more perfect than she usually was. I am sure she realized that it was the wrong way to go with Ravi, but she was either too uncompromising or order and poise were too deeply ingrained in her for her to express love in any other way. I think that is what must have set it off.

Ravi turned to her suddenly and said, with his usual abruptness in jumping from one topic to another, “Didn’t you take riding lessons, Lena?”

If Lena was surprised by the sudden change of topic, she did not show it. She seldom showed real surprise; if it showed on her fine porcelain face, it was because she knew it was expected and proper.

“Oh yes, as a kid,” she replied. “For seven or eight years. I was pretty good too. My mother insisted on it: she loves horses. I never really did and I stopped as soon as I could. I have not ridden since then.”

“But you still know all about bridle and snaffle…”

For a micro-second, she looked mystified. “Y-yes, I think I do,” she almost stammered.

“See,” Ravi turned and smiled brilliantly at me, “lots of snaffle and curb, but very little horse.”

Then he pushed his chair back so suddenly that it almost fell over and he went out. We could see him light up a Marlboro outside.

I avoided looking at Lena. I knew she was confused. I could sense her sadness. For the second time I saw her mask slip, her fear show. But then she tried to pull herself together and started conversing with all of us, almost her usual charming, smiling self. Was I the only one who sensed the fine lines of worry and loss that fractured her poise and control? You had to be very observant to notice how suddenly her green eyes would flicker—with something of the palpitation of a caged bird—towards the window outside which Ravi stood, his back to us, smoking. Why don’t you get up and go to him, I felt like saying to her. Don’t you hear it? The murk of the café was repeating it in a persistent whisper all round us, in a whisper that seemed to wither, hollowly, like sand falling in a glass: her name, her name, in his silent voice.

But I knew I couldn’t say it; I knew she would refuse to understand me if I did. That was a dialect for times long gone. She would never run out, grab him by the collar and kiss him. I looked at her again. The doll’s smile had come back, stapled to her face.

Ravi returned only when it was time for us to leave for the theater.

A few words return to me here; words uttered by Ravi around that time, I am certain, though I cannot recall the context. Did he drop in at my office, or were we talking in one of the canteens? Was he lounging about, in my room or his, skimming quickly through a book? Or was he rolling a cigarette with Karim Bhai in the kitchen?

I do not remember, but the words I recall: “Did I tell you when I decided not to play the piano professionally? Somehow my dad had fewer objections to Western classical music—it was compatible with a scientific career in his mind, if only because of Einstein—than to my becoming a journalist or studying art. But one day I knew it was not for me. That was when my third piano teacher told me I had perfect pitch. I knew then that I had no future in music. Perfection condemns you to glorious mediocrity. It is in the gap between your imperfections, honestly faced, and your desire for something beyond perfection that you can achieve genius. Perfect pitch, perfect life, perfect love—these are dead ends.”

I will leave the rest of it out. It is not just families that are happy in the same way but sad in entirely different ways. So are individuals.

But I will mention just one more thing. This must have taken place in the first week of December, or maybe a bit earlier or later. It was the week in which Ravi finally submitted his PhD thesis. He told me one morning that he’d a dream which finally made him “understand.”

Understand what? He did not elaborate.

He claimed he had never dreamed in Denmark before, that the moment he came to Denmark, he stopped having the few dreams that he used to have. You just don’t remember them, I told him.

No, he replied, seriously, yaar; I don’t think I have dreamed a single dream in Denmark before this one. Not even a nightmare. I suspect they have ordered dreams away in this country.

Ravi wrote down the dream, with some poetic license, as a short story. It was one of the stories he shared with me. A week or two later, he posted it on an open-access online site. He had never done so with any of his creative writing before, and he hasn’t done so since, as far as I can see. Ravi was a book person. Online publishing did not mean much to him. If you Google him, this is the only open-access story or poem by him that you will be able to find. I think he wanted someone in particular to read it. Though sometimes I wonder.

He called the story “A State of Niceness”; it was narrated in the third person. The version that I have copied here is taken from that online edition.

But it was difficult to locate when I wanted to find it for inclusion in this account. I got a number of hits when I Googled “A State of Niceness.” I had always considered it a brilliant title for a story set in Denmark. But, obviously, Ravi and I were not the only people to think so.

So much for originality!

I hit upon another story—published in print in several places but not accessible online—with exactly the same title. By a strange coincidence, this story is also by an Indian writer—a chap called Khair—who had lived in Denmark some years ago. I could not find a copy of Khair’s story. I do not know if it shares anything with Ravi’s story of the same title. Anyway, it is Ravi’s story that concerns us, and that is the story I have copied in the next chapter.