How to Fight Islamist Terror from the Missionary Position

A GLASS FULL OF LOVE

It was one of those Sundays when all three of us were home. When relaxing in the flat, Karim went about in a long embroidered kurta and white pajamas (stiffly ironed): he sat there in this home wear, the door of his room wide open, trying to surf news channels on an old desktop that stood (covered with plastic when not in use) in a corner of his room. Ravi wore his casually expensive shorts and emblazoned T-shirt, and I was fully dressed, in jeans and a shirt: Ravi had once noted that this was what proved my professional middle-class status, that only members of the upper classes and the lower or lower middle-classes in the subcontinent wore casual or Indian clothes in company.

Karim came out of his room. He looked disgusted.

“I should buy a new computer. This one is so slow,” he said to us. We were in the kitchen, watching BBC on a small TV that Karim had installed atop the fridge. He had a slightly bigger plasma TV on a wall of his room.

“Why don’t you, Karim Bhai? They are quite cheap now and you must be minting millions with all the extra shifts you do,” Ravi replied lightly.

Karim Bhai took the suggestion seriously. He did not always get light banter.

“Oh, I am not making that much money, you know,” he said. “And I have expenses…”

He always claimed he had “expenses” but never elaborated on the nature of these.

“You can use my laptop, Karim Bhai.” Mine was plugged in on the kitchen table and it was much faster than Karim’s antique machine. We were used to such situations by now: Karim would get fed up with his slow desktop, one of us would offer him one of our faster laptops, he would refuse, as was proper; the offer would have to be repeated; he would accept with formal thanks, and spend about an hour surfing for news, mostly from India and various Muslim nations.

Those days with Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, all on the boil, he was particularly interested in the news. So were we—it was one of the sources of Ravi’s frustration with Danish universities that our students seemed unaware of what was happening. But there was an obvious difference in our interest in the events of what I preferred to call the Jasmine Revolution and Ravi, with greater skepticism, termed the Twitter Twister. Ravi and I had opinions; we were members of democratic chat groups, we signed Avaaz petitions, our Facebooks were cluttered with radical quotations. But Karim Bhai simply went to the news pages, in English, Urdu and Arabic, read them so closely that his beard touched the keyboard; he never commented on anything. If he said something, it was usually very general: “It is better today,” or “It is a bit worse, I think.”

“It is better today in Cairo,” he said, after browsing for half an hour. He brought out his pouch and started rolling himself a cigarette.

By then Ravi had taken a shower and was dressed in a selection of his best jeans, shirt and pullover. It meant he was going out to see a woman. Ravi refused to go for walks on Sundays, claiming that a Sunday walk in the woods or the parks was a deeply religious act in Denmark. His argument ran like this: Protestants had started substituting God with Nature a long time back; there is nothing more religious than a Protestant going for a walk on a Sunday; it is the Protestant version of Sunday church-going. If Ravi had to do something religious, he said, he would do it consciously and openly; he would (and sometimes did) go to church on Sundays.

As Ravi had resolutely refused to say anything about Lena after returning from London, I was curious about his sartorial efforts that Sunday, more so because he had totally stopped going out with or being visited by any of his “plain” girlfriends. But I knew better than to quiz Ravi. Despite his seeming loquacity, he could be very tight-lipped on some matters.

“You seem to follow Cairo a lot, Karim Bhai,” I responded.

“I was there, you know. Didn’t I tell you?”

“Lucky you, Karim Bhai. I wish I could go there for a long vacation,” shouted Ravi from his room. The trace of some expensive aftershave wafted from his room. Ravi had been planning to go to Cairo for years.

“No, Ravi Bhai,” Karim corrected him, “I wasn’t there as a tourist. I studied there. I did my BA in Islamic jurisprudence and Arabic from Cairo.”

Ravi entered the kitchen, shirt still unbuttoned. He was intrigued.

“Cairo, Karim Bhai?” he asked. “I did not know Indian students went to Egypt to study.”

“Some do. There are a few scholarships, mostly for poor Muslim students,” Karim explained apologetically.

Ravi looked enlightened. He turned to me and said, almost forgetting that Karim was in the room: “See, bastard, and people like us only know of scholarships to the West! Wish I had known: I could have converted and gone to Cairo!”

“It is not that different from Delhi,” said Karim Bhai dismissively. “But, you see, I have friends there, so I get a bit worried…”

“Girlfriends too, I daresay, Karim Bhai,” Ravi teased him, as he sometimes did.

Karim Bhai blushed.

“Oh no,” he said, “we got married.” I almost spilled my coffee.

“I did not know you were married, Karim Bhai,” Ravi blurted in surprise.

“Oh, didn’t I mention it before? It was such a long time back. Thirty years ago, almost…”

“And, Karim Bhai…”

“Yes,” Karim Bhai interrupted, ruminating, “twenty-six years ago…”

“But Karim Bhai,” Ravi could not restrain himself, the aunties in him were clamoring for gossip. “What happened? We have never even seen a photo of…”

“I do not take or keep photos, Ravi Bhai. You know that it is against my religion,” Karim explained. And it was true, though I doubt that either Ravi or I had noticed it before: the flat was shorn of even a single representation of a human being, animal or bird. Karim did not even seem to have a photo album in his room.

Karim Bhai was talking again: “What happened, Ravi Bhai? Who knows?” He looked at me, and at that moment we thought we understood what might have happened. “Who knows what happens to us in this world and why?” he continued ruefully.

“Only Allah-tala knows.” Then he quoted from the Quran: “Allah has knowledge of all things.”

I had once said to Ravi: if you dislike this place so much, why did you apply for a PhD here?

“I applied to Stockholm, Copenhagen and Oslo too,” he had replied. “They gave me a full scholarship here.”

“But why Scandinavia, Ravi?”

“What choice did I have, bastard? Every Tom, Dick and Hari from India goes to USA, UK, Australia or Canada for a PhD these days. Look at what it does to them! Look at yourself, yaar. And I thought, well, I had enough German, might as well pick up another language through it and see what happens to civilization when it freezes.”

I am certain Ravi was not joking when he exclaimed that he would have converted and gone to Egypt.

I recall that Sunday for two other unusual happenings. Both of them involved women and Karim Bhai, which was unusual in itself. Isn’t that one of the twists of life? You spend weeks in the flat of a man who seems to have no relations with women, who does not even allow himself to sit alone in a room with a woman, and the day he reveals that he had once been married is also the day when he has intimate meetings with two other women? Oh, I am exaggerating: the intimacy was only of the emotional sort.

But there is no doubt that, whatever the causes, both women came to Karim Bhai in an obviously emotional state.

Ravi disappeared on his bicycle soon after our Cairo conversation, hunting out both his cycle lamps and his cycle clips, which indicated his intention to stay out until night and his desire to reach his destination in a high state of sartorial elegance. He wore his favorite leather jacket and his patent gloves too. I think I was still digesting the notion of Karim Bhai once being married when the doorbell rang.

Ajsa walked in with her Somali husband, Ibrahim, and Ali, who, I had been told, was inseparable from Ibrahim. They offered only a perfunctory nod to me—my door was open and I was revising a lecture at my small study table—and walked into Karim Bhai’s room. Karim Bhai closed the door of his room behind them. This was unusual, as you know; he seldom closed his door completely. But I did not mind. I had never liked Ali, with his saliva-spraying religious virulence, and I had never met Ibrahim. In fact, I still think this was the only time I saw him: such a fleeting glimpse that when I came across his photo in the papers much later, I did not recognize the man.

For the next hour or so, I heard their voices rise and hush in argument: the high tones came from Ali and, once or twice, Ajsa. They were speaking Danish—the only language all of them really shared—and all I could gather was that they were talking about Islam and insults to Islam at least once in a while. Of course, I might have imagined this later on; at that moment, annotating my lecture on Gulliver’s Travels, I did not really pay them too much attention.

Perhaps I really noticed that they had been arguing when Ali stalked out and, banging both the doors shut, left the flat.

Ibrahim followed him less than a minute later, leaving the door to Karim Bhai’s room ajar. But this, of course, was not sufficient for Karim Bhai. I heard him come to my door. He scratch-knocked on it and then put his head in, beard first. “Would you like to join Ajsa and me for a cup of tea?” he asked.

I had almost finished revising my lecture and, in any case, I was curious about the argument. I joined Karim and Ajsa in his room. She was sitting on the sofa. It looked like she had been crying. There were two plastic folding chairs—Karim Bhai kept six piled in a corner for his Quran sessions—next to the sofa. I took one of them. Karim Bhai bustled around, brewing tea. He was in such a rush or so agitated that he brewed it the Danish way and brought it in on a tray, with a pot of sugar and a carton of cold milk from the fridge.

Ajsa did not say much. Mostly they talked of the weather. When she got up to leave, Karim did something unusual. He put a hand on her shoulder. I wondered how many brownie points this gesture cost him in his paradise. She was a bit taller than him, so he had to look up at her. “Don’t worry,” he told her, squeezing her shoulder gingerly, “I will take care of it. I will talk to Ibrahim soon.”

The second female visitor Karim received that Sunday was just as unexpected. She had been there before, of course, but never so abruptly, and in such mental disarray.

I had agreed to cook dinner. Karim Bhai ate around Danish time, and we had gotten used to it too. It was a bit after six in the evening.

My cooking is not as elaborate as Ravi’s or as practiced, if limited, as Karim Bhai’s. I usually slice onions, tomatoes and whatever else might be within slicing distance, fry it with chicken or minced meat or, in Denmark, salmon, add salt according to taste as they say, and finally plop in a bottle of Uncle Ben’s jalfrezi or some such ready-made mix of spices. It goes with rice, seldom Basmati, or pasta.

I had just plunked in Uncle Ben’s korma mix when the bell rang. Karim, who was puttering around tidying up the flat, both TVs showing the same Danish news, went to open the door. There were muttered exchanges in Danish. I assumed it was some neighbor or a Jehovah’s Witness. But in a few seconds, Karim re-entered the kitchen with Pernille, Great Claus’s wife from upstairs.

“Perhaps Pernille can eat with us,” he said to me.

Pernille declined, but we insisted; she looked tired—the Eng Lit description, in Ravi-speak, would have been “haggard and woebegone”—and did not need much persuasion. Karim Bhai bustled about in the kitchen, relieving me of the chore of cooking the rice. Karim Bhai cooked only seven or eight dishes—halal restrictions curtailed his scope—but he cooked them well and always in a pressure cooker. I didn’t, dreading its whistle and the hint of a coming explosion. The rice, thanks to the intervention of Karim and his pressure cooker, was ready much quicker than it would have been if I had cooked it.

After the table had been laid and the rice and curry placed in the middle, we plied Pernille with the fare. She pecked at the food, only perking up once to compliment the cooking. It was sheer politeness.

“Where is Claus Bhai?” asked Karim Bhai finally, perhaps just to break the awkward silence.

“I wish I knew,” replied Pernille, with some asperity. “I thought he might be here. That’s why I knocked…”

Claus did drop in regularly—the only Dane I ever met who did not require an appointment at least a week in advance—and sometimes he and Little Claus joined us for dinner or lunch. But we had not seen him that day.

“He must be working,” suggested Karim Bhai.

“If only…” said Pernille. But then, with characteristic reserve, she changed the subject.

Later, after she had left, Karim Bhai looked at me and shook his head.

“Things are not going well between them,” he said to me.

I was not sure: Pernille sounded like a woman who had unconsciously or consciously compromised on her career for the sake of her children, and the children had inevitably flown the coop.

“No, no,” replied Karim Bhai, “I have known them for many many years. Things have not been good between them for a long time.”

“Why, Karim Bhai?” I could not help asking.

Karim hesitated. I knew he avoided anything that resembled gossip. Then he said in a low monotone: “Pernille thinks that Claus is having, that Claus is… (He lowered his voice a bit further, so much that I had to crane forward to follow him)… seeing another, you know, another woman.”

He blushed. It had cost him effort to mention the possibility. And he hastened to add: “But, of course, he is not. Claus is a decent man. It is just that, here, you know here… (He waved his short arms around to indicate all of Denmark and perhaps all of Europe)… here everyone has such suspicions, everyone is always afraid. I keep telling her that it is not true, and she keeps saying that she will never forgive Claus if, after all these years, he leaves her for another woman.”

I did not see Ravi that night or the next morning. He must have slept over somewhere else. But he walked into my office on Monday afternoon and said, in lieu of a greeting: “I ran into some of your Eng Lit First World types in the psycho canteen. I think I will avoid the place in the future: it is infested by Eng Lit types.”

“Why, what did they do to you?” I asked, not really interested. I knew it was just a prelude to banter for Ravi.

“Do? Eng Lit First World types never do anything. That is why they are Eng Lit First World types. You see, bastard, I was having this gloriously political conversation with some guys from the French and Spanish departments, when in walk a group of Eng Lit types. They know some of us, so they join us; I continue lambasting Mubarak and the Egyptian army and the Twitter Twister. Then in steps one of your Eng Lit types with his two cents of political observation and quotes Yeats. Can you guess what he quotes?”

“No.”

“Oh, c’mon, yaar, give it a try. It is what you Eng Lit types quote habitually when you need to talk pol-eee-ticks. I have had it quoted at me at least fifteen times, and always by Eng Lit types. I’ll give you a hint: ‘passionate intensity.’”

“The best lack all conviction, the worst are full of passionate intensity.”

“Bullseye, O Eng Lit type!” exclaimed Ravi in his best theatrical mode.

“How nightmarish,” I rejoined mockingly.

“That’s an understatement. I observed that, personally, I prefer even shorter poems. I quoted Campbell: ‘You praise the firm restraint with which they write./ I am there with you, of course:/ They use the snaffle and the curb all right,/ But where’s the bloody horse.’ You know what he said?”

“That it is a minor poem?”

“Exactly. Your perception is to be maha-commended, Eng Lit type. It proves that you are Eng Lit (Third World Category) type, so that while you too waste your life worrying about the exact shades of the two-tone shoes worn by Billy Great Shakes, you manage to notice, unlike your First World colleagues, the mud and horse shit on Shakespeare’s shoes too. You are right; your colleague, or whoever it was, looked surprised. But it is a minor poem, he said mincingly. I looked him in the eye and pronounced: it is not the missing poem that concerns me; it is the fucking missing horse.”

Then he added, as if it was an afterthought, though I realized that this was what he had come to my office to say: “Reminds me: don’t you think it is time you met Lena?”

It was then I was certain that this was different. Ravi had never offered to introduce me to any of his girlfriends in the past and that too with such brusque tentativeness.

Ravi later told me that he had finally confessed to Lena how he felt about her two days after he returned from his trip to London and Amsterdam. That trip was not just the culmination of his beard experiment; it was also his attempt to avoid making that confession to Lena. He had tried to push her away. He thought he had succeeded. But the day after he returned, he met her for coffee—knowing Ravi, it was probably a conscious testing of his will—and, as he put it, he “fell in love with her all over again, yaar.”

The very next day he had asked her to join him for lunch at the Milano pizzeria. I was surprised. Milano pizzeria was a tacky place frequented only by students.

“You mean you confessed your blooming love to her under the plaster statue of that woman, what is it, Athena-taking-to-purdah or spider-woman-entangled-in-her-own-web, hanging from the wall?” I mocked.

“The very place, bastard. But not under that statue. I said it next to the smaller one of Laurel and Hardy, by the window.” He laughed.

This is how it seems to have happened. I am putting it together now, from the various bits and pieces that Ravi revealed, sometimes unintentionally, over the next few weeks.

They had ordered the usual lunch pizza, which you get for thirty crowns, a free Coke or Fanta thrown in. Lena, being vegetarian, had gone for a margherita. Ravi, as he almost always did, had ordered a pepperoni. Lena took a Coke; Ravi a Fanta.

When I try to imagine the occasion, in my mind Milano pizzeria is not crowded. There are only four students at a far table. Not that Lena or Ravi would have noticed, I suspect. Outside, a bit of sunshine falls on the parked cars. Inside, the large TV screen up on the wall shows an MTV song, all gyrating hips and jerking boobs, being safely “radical” in the only way permitted in the West these days. Ravi and Lena do not watch the flashing images, their cascade of empty signs. They have eyes only for each other.

“She looked at me with those green eyes, and I knew what I had to say. The words might sound corny to you, bastard, but at that moment, they were the only words I could have uttered.”

Ravi’s glass of Fanta was half-full. He looked at it.

He said to Lena, “You know, one goes through life and is grateful for the love one gets and gives. It is never exactly what one has dreamed of or what one is capable of. The glass is never more than half-full. But even that is a gift; so many people do not get even that. I have been lucky in my relationships; I have had my glasses filled to half again and again, and sometimes perhaps even a bit more. I have never expected anything more.”

I imagine Ravi smiling ironically and philosophically here. Lena was looking intently into his eyes. There was an expression of surprise on her face, almost. Ravi had continued: “But when I saw you at Unibar that night, I realized for the first time that, at least for me, the glass can be full. That it can brim over. It was frightening, this knowledge. I tried to push it away. But I could not. I know now that I do not care what you feel; I am grateful to discover that, yes, our glasses can fill to the brim. That it is possible. Just that knowledge is enough, and I wanted to thank you for it.”

What had Lena said to him in reply? He didn’t tell me then. He simply told me that they were together now and that he wanted me to meet her. We agreed to meet at a seminar reception that evening, which he would be attending with Lena. But later on, I think he told me what she had said on that occasion. This was many weeks later, when matters had taken a difficult turn for all of us, and not just because of Karim Bhai.

I remember Ravi telling me then, weeks later, in a reminiscent mood, “Do you know, yaar, what Lena said when I confessed my feelings to her? She told me that she had never felt this way about a man before, that the moment she walked into Unibar, she knew she had a crush on me, that cycling back later that night, she almost hit the curb a few times because all she could think of was… you know… me.”

But by then Ravi, with his usual inability to leave matters unexamined, had started picking at vestiges of his own memory of the moment and peeling away, layer by layer, the meanings, intended or not, of a casual word like “crush.” I will have to come to that part of my story too, but in between there lies a glorious summer of love.

It was the usual kind of post-seminar reception. The bare university room, with wide windows on one side, had been arranged with tables and chairs, wooden, utilitarian, minimalist, with subdued colors, the kind of furniture that I now instantly associate with Scandinavia. The tables bore large and light aluminum trays holding open sandwiches: there were bowls of chips and bottles of soft drinks and wine. There were plastic cups and paper plates.

Ravi was late. When he walked in with Lena, I was struck by what a striking pair they made. Of course, they did not walk in as a couple; in the eyes of the assemblage, they were just PhD students coming to a reception together. But a couple is what they were: the broader beauty of Ravi’s Bollywood looks somehow matching the narrow perfection of Lena’s Nordic features; his jet-black hair set off by her cascading dark golden locks; his light-brown eyes complementing her surprisingly green ones. They did not stay together for long, as both of them knew different people in the room, and both of them came from classes where one circulates democratically.

But even when they were at opposite ends of the room, there seemed a current between them. I recognized it: there was a time when my ex and I, in the earliest weeks of our relationship, had felt something similar, much weaker but similar, about each other. This was before time had interfered, with its slow erosion of the cliffs of certainty, its full storms and hollow caves. But never had I shared something exactly like this with my ex or any woman I had been in love with. I would have been envious if I did not love Ravi like the brother I never had.

Ravi and Lena moved in tandem, even when they were in different groups. They had ears for each other while they were holding a conversation—easy, attentive, graceful—with other people. Even their backs had eyes for each other.

They were both highly polished in their social skills: people who were born naturally elegant and had honed their elegance to perfection. Ravi, in his own couldn’t-care-less way, with his clothes just a bit but stylishly awry, his long hair ruffled and loosely curling; Lena in her closely coiffured and dressed, highly reserved manner, everything always in place.

I remember thinking: they will probably stay elegant, in different ways; Ravi with quicksilver ebullience, effusively, Lena with icy calm, on the deck of any sinking Titanic.

They circulated and conversed with ease, plastic glasses of wine poised, sparkling. With my prior knowledge, it was difficult to understand how the company around us failed to see what I saw. Even though Lena and Ravi were excellent conversationalists, with a dozen languages between them, it was obvious to me that their conversation assumed a special sparkle only when they were in the same circle.

For me, though, infected surely by Ravi’s enthusiasm and sense of wonderment at what had happened between them, it was like a miracle gone unremarked: as if someone was walking on water while people went about their barbecue parties all over the beach, poking sausage and salting steak on their grills, and guzzling down beer.