How to Fight Islamist Terror from the Missionary Position

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.

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,” attributing 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.