How to Fight Islamist Terror from the Missionary Position

THE SUN ALSO RISES

Ravi snuggled comfortably into the Native American blanket that he often used for a shawl indoors.

“You see, bastard,” he said, “you as a bloody Mussalman from the Land of the fucking Pure have only two options in the lands of Unbelievers if you want to intrigue a damsel in distrust. Either you talk about how you, at the age of fourteen, broke into your piggy bank and stole money from your traditional dad’s wallet to go whoring, or you talk about how you grew up praying five and a half times a day and admiring the mujahideen until, O Heart, O Torn and Riven Heart, as recently as a year ago you began to lose your faith—but, alas, not your confusion or anger. Give ’em either of the two narratives, and they’ll beat yuh to the draw when it comes to dropping yer respective panties. But lookit yerself! Look at yourself, you sad unpackaged commodity! You talk about your schooling, which is like their schooling; you talk about your parents, who are like their parents; you talk about your life, which is like their life. They look at you and expect something else. You look like you are something else. And then you go ahead and disappoint them. And you, a fucking scholar of literature who should know better! Shame on you!”

“What about you, Ravi? How come you have been getting away with having more of their lives than they do themselves?”

“Not any more, bastard: I am a one-woman man now. It’s only Lena for me. Never thought I would be like that, damn it, but I have no desire even to look at another woman.”

“Still,” I insisted, “let’s consider your checkered career until you saw the, ahem, golden light.”

“Ah well, it is different with me, Ignorant Human,” he replied, sipping his coffee. “You see, I’m not just a wyrd buggah; I am a Hindoo from Inja. I can dance to the tune of a hundred instruments on the thousand arms of my million gods, half of them hermaphrodite. Moreover, thanks to you fundamentalist bastards, I am Prester John these days.”

“Prester John?”

“Don’t tell me you ain’t never heard of Emperor Prester John, you half-injun?”

I had come across the name in books, but could not recall the connection.

Ravi continued in his oratorical mode, which had increased in scope and vibrancy ever since he dropped all his “plain” girlfriends for Lena: “You have missed something. See, this is the twelfth century, if I remember correctly. Ok? Twelfth century. Europeans are frightened of the Saracens. Suddenly, good news: it appears that on the other side of the Islamic threat there is a powerful Christian emperor, Prester John, just waiting to join forces with European crusaders. Hallelujah! For centuries, he is there, on the other side of every Islamic threat, real or imagined, about to come to the rescue of Christendom. Only, poor Prester John never existed.”

“So?” I did not get the connection.

“So, over the centuries, a large number of Europeans have needed this mythical Prester John. Sometimes, when they get really desperate, they even Prester John a Muslim people, as they did with the Arabs when Lawrence of Arabia was waging his jihad against the Ottomans. Lately, behold, O Fanatical Believer, ancient Hindoo Inja is the new Prester John: the great non-Muslim ally on the other side of the crescent! We are in, old boy; they actually smile at Indian passports at Customs sometimes. The first time it happened to me, a few months after 9/11, I almost fainted with the shock. Our chances to lay la lasses increased triple-fold after 9/11. Provided we do not tie a turban around our heads, as some silly Sikhs still do, and get them all confused because they have seen cartoons depicting your Mohammad in a turban.”

The history lesson about Prester John that Ravi had poured into my ears emanated mostly from his desire to fix me up with a girlfriend. He had always wanted to do that, ever since I got divorced. Most of it was concern for me—he suspected that I still missed my ex-wife. He was probably right: my divorce had been a difficult decision. I had still been partly in love with my wife, but I could no longer ignore the fact that, while she wanted children immediately, I had no desire to become a father.

The fact that we had tried naturally for a couple of years had been easy for me to overlook. But when she started insisting on us going to the clinic—there was nothing “wrong” with either of us, as the doctors told us, but she did not want to wait any longer—it made me face up to my own reluctance. I could no longer ignore it. Neither could I ignore my deep dislike of the clinic: it seemed to me, and still does, that we were forcing nature, when nature actually had not given us any real ground to use force against it. My wife had disagreed.

That morning with the plastic container and the patrol car had made up my mind, but my wife had not been able to accept the decision. I did not blame her: after all, it is the woman who bears a child, carries it around for nine months, suffers changes in her own body. And when we finally got divorced, I was saddened. My wife too, I am sure, but she felt that my refusal to return to the clinic was an indication of my lack of love for her. I wasn’t convinced of that; she was. It made it easier for her to leave.

Ravi knew all this; Ravi and I seldom had secrets from each other—or, given the aunts in Ravi, at least I didn’t have secrets from him. He must have felt that I needed a girlfriend. The sporadic dating I did was not enough, as he told me, and he never understood why I was so careful about entering another relationship.

“What are you waiting for, you Paki?” he asked me. “A houri from fucking paradise?”

I thought that his concern about my love life would diminish after he had hooked up with Lena. But now that he had himself found someone whom he obviously saw as a “houri from fucking paradise,” he grew even more concerned. He wanted to fix me with a partner. There was always a romantic in Ravi, buried under a few tons of skepticism and irony: I am sure he liked to imagine us together, as paired couples, going for trips and walks and treks in the glorious Danish summer that was now around the corner.

“I don’t believe in houris or paradise,” I replied.

“Well,” he mused, “don’t be so bloody sure of it: I thought so too until I met Lena. But anyway, what’s wrong? Why is it you have not found any pretty pige, merry mademoiselle or fine fräulein yet? What is so fucking wrong with all these lovely young ladies you have dated and dropped?”

“Nothing, Ravi. They were all lovely young ladies. They were just not my type.”

“You mean there is no one in this fucking country who has ever moved your fancy? You know you are one picky Paki, pardner!”

“You know that’s not what I mean.”

“What is it that you mean, then?”

“Have I told you this joke about the man who was looking for a perfect girlfriend?”

“Don’t switch the topic, bastard!”

“Listen. Ok? There is this man. He never dates a girl more than once. He goes on a date and never calls up that girl again. His doting mother is worried. She wants to be upgraded to granny. Go on, son, she urges him, find me a daughter-in-law soon. I will, I will, mom, the son replies, I am just waiting for my perfect woman. One evening he returns from a date and announces that he has found his perfect woman and that, actually, he is going to see her again the next night. Hallelujah, exclaims the mom. The next night she lights candles and stays up. The son is back early, looking morose. What’s wrong, son, says mummy, seeing her promotion to granny receding, I thought you had found your perfect woman. I did, mom, replies the son, but you see, she is looking for her perfect man.”

“So, who is this perfect woman of yours who rejected you, you poor Paki?”

“No perfect woman, Ravi; like houries, they do not exist… but of course, one meets women one likes who are obviously not interested.”

“Nah!” he replied, shaking his head. “There are ways out of such dilemmas, mostly.”

“For you, perhaps…”

“For everyone. Now you name me one woman you like, even vaguely, and who you think is not interested.”

I named one of his colleagues in the history department, a recently divorced mother of one.

“Ms. Linen Marx!” exclaimed Ravi. “Never dreamed you fancied Miss Linen Marx!”

Ravi always called her Miss Linen Marx because she wore only cotton and linen garments and was, according to Ravi, the only Danish academic under fifty who had actually read Karl Marx.

He mulled over my revelation.

“I see,” he hummed and hawed, “I see… Yes, bastard, that might be a hard nut to crack.”

There, I retorted.

“For you, bastard. Because you see, O Eng Lit Type, thou typically dost not usest thine imagination…”

But he let the matter rest after that. Or so I thought.

Great Claus had not forgotten his promise to thank us with a “pucca mughlai dinner” for the night he had spent in Ravi’s room. That month, he finally found a weekend evening—I think it was a Sunday—when Karim was not working and Ravi and I were free.

It was uncommon to find Ravi free in the evenings now. He was usually with Lena. Sometimes, when they went out in a group, I would join them. But, by and large, our evenings out were getting to be rare. Not that I minded: he was so obviously in love; both of them were. And I was trying to complete an academic study: a book on the impact of English Romanticism on Urdu literature in the nineteenth century. With tenure not in sight, I knew that I would have to start applying for jobs soon—and I needed a second scholarly book to stand a chance anywhere outside Denmark.

But that Sunday evening, all three of us were free and, as arranged, we knocked on Claus and Pernille’s door at six o’clock sharp. We were carrying a bouquet and a box of chocolates between us. As Karim was going to be there, we could obviously not have brought a bottle or two of wine. Claus insisted on cooking halal and not serving alcohol in the presence of Karim: it was not the first time Claus and Pernille had hosted a dinner for him. I am certain Karim would not have eaten with people who took such matters lightly.

We had been to Claus and Pernille’s flat before, but only for a drink or a coffee. This was the first time we were able to lounge around and look at the flat. It was a tastefully furnished place, with sleek metal and glass furniture and a large shiny kitchen that drew sincere praise even from Ravi. There were batik hangings on the walls and expensive reproductions of paintings. Even I could identify one of the limited-edition reproductions—the large-skulled and bloat-bellied man in a watery setting was unmistakable—as a painting by Michael Kvium. Ravi, who knew more about Danish art than I did, located other names—including an original canvas by Martin Bigum, whom I had not heard of.

Pernille and Claus had the kind of flat one associates with younger yuppie types, singles or willfully childless couples: immaculate, full of modern shiny furniture and expensive art objects. It seemed discrepant: they were people who had reared two children and, in their dress and appearance, looked like typical parents in their fifties. It was not the first time I wondered at the difference between what we seem to be and what we are to ourselves. Or is this too something that I think of now, penning down this account with all the advantages of hindsight?

Though Claus made an effort to be hearty (and he had cooked up a tropical storm of north Indian dishes from a cookbook by Madhur Jaffrey), the dinner was less than cheerful. Their twin daughters made an appearance, but just at the dining table. They had always struck me as among those surprising kids that Danish families produce: the ones who do not seem to feel any need to rebel against their parents or their values. Denmark, Ravi and I agreed on this, is particularly good at this—and though Ravi considered it a frighteningly conservative aspect of the country, I was not so sure. It is rare today to find parents and children sharing a space not riven with tensions and silences. Surely there must be something to admire in that.

But the dinner was shot through with tension. Much of it was aimed at Claus. The daughters hardly spoke to him over the table, and Pernille’s remarks to him were sometimes laced with acid. Claus’s usual repertoire of jokes—always well-meaning but seldom hilarious—fractured on the stone of his family’s refusal to be humored and Karim’s lack of interest in punch lines.

“Why doesn’t the West eat with its fingers?” asked Claus, serving the Mughlai Murgh. He answered the question in the next breath: “Because its hands are not clean.” His daughters and wife did not even look up from their plates; Karim managed a feeble smile only in order to emulate our effort.

Even Ravi, with the elegant magnanimity that enabled him to turn other people’s embarrassment into jokes aimed at himself, could not always save the situation. We left early.

Going down the stairs, Karim Bhai, who knew more about our neighbors than he appeared to, commented on the matter.

“I don’t understand Claus,” he remarked, “I do not understand why he is behaving like this.”

I was surprised. It had appeared to me that poor Claus had been at the receiving end all evening, and that he had treated his family with much consideration despite the provocations. Karim Bhai obviously knew more, but he was not the type of person who would gossip. And Ravi, who might have drawn the information out of him on some earlier occasion, was too happily lost in Lena now to have much time for the inquisitive aunts in himself.

We still had a lot to discover, and not least about Karim Bhai.

Why does this memory come back to me, almost entirely, exactly in this part of my attempt to recollect and understand what really happened to all of us?

I think I have already said that I almost never attended Karim Bhai’s Quran sessions on Fridays. But sometimes I waited for Ravi to finish with them, and once or twice—when we had appointments elsewhere—even went in to fetch him. This must have been one of those times. I am not absolutely certain, but I remember Karim Bhai—he always sat in the left corner of his sagging sofa—and a crowd of serious young faces around him. And I can, at this moment, distinctly recall what he was saying, as I waited for Ravi to get up and leave with me.

“The Prophet, peace be upon him,” said Karim Bhai, with that irritating glaze in his dark-edged eyes that fellow-Muslims often get when speaking of the founder of the religion, “had only one wife for years: 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. In fact, for a long time, she was among the very few who believed in his message. You can say that she believed in the message of Allah before the Holy Prophet did himself, for when the Holy Prophet heard the message for the first time, he thought he was hearing voices. She was the person who convinced him that it was a genuine revelation.”

“Women have a lot to answer for,” I whispered to Ravi in the lobby, who frowned and hushed me. No matter how flippant Ravi was about matters that concerned me, including the religion I was born into, he was always a very polite listener in the case of Karim Bhai.

Karim Bhai was just as polite while listening to Ravi. With me, he showed some signs of impatience, subdued, betrayed only by the eyes flicking to the TV screen or the hands picking up a newspaper while I was talking critically about matters like the Islamization of Pakistan. But with Ravi, Karim would make an effort, focus on his words with his possibly kohled eyes, his forehead wrinkling sometimes in a bid to follow Ravi’s somersaulting conversation.

What was he listening for in Ravi’s case? Those barbs about Western hubris that, though they came from a different source, soothed the Islamist in Karim? Or was he interested in Ravi as a person who could be converted to Karim’s cause, whatever that was? Or, and this polar opposite was possible too, was he observing Ravi as one would observe an alien from outer space?

Or was it something simpler: Karim’s respect for someone who was from another culture, or class?

In any case, Karim would listen carefully to Ravi’s conversation, and Ravi, in his turn, would offer his opinions in uncharacteristically modulated and less acerbic terms. For instance, he would not dismiss the existence of God but simply mention the fact that it did not mesh with the evidence of human suffering. At which Karim would shake his head and gently disagree, trotting out all the arguments that the believing have used for centuries to avoid being faced with their loneliness in the universe.

The debate would continue, gently, in the kitchen. I would retire to my room to read or take a nap. I did not really know who was trying to convert whom, and I did not care. I had given up on God a long time back; if God had existed, I am sure he would have reciprocated in kind.

We were on our way to a party thrown by one of Ravi’s PhD colleagues. I knew the person only vaguely, but he had invited me and Ravi had insisted on me coming along: his argument was that he would feel more comfortable going there with Lena and me, than with Lena alone. Both of them were remarkably careful about their relationship in public: revealing it fully only in contexts where, they felt, it would not be devalued into something else, something more mundane, something like the usual academic affair between two attractive PhD students.

We met Lena for a drink in a café in town, before heading for the party. She was wearing a one-shoulder turquoise chiffon evening dress that brought out her intensely green eyes, her golden hair tied into one of those intricate knots that are again coming back into vogue. When I had seen them together the first time, I had been struck by how similar they were despite their differences. This time, I was struck by how different they were despite their similarities. Ravi was consciously unguarded, in behavior, opinion and dress; his speech was full of gaps and curlicues; his shirt was never too ironed, his hair always a bit awry. Lena was controlled and guarded: every bit of dress and hair in place, every word and gesture so carefully enunciated or performed that she seemed to be on stage all the time. It needed someone with Ravi’s casual and unassuming confidence to fall in love with her, as he claimed to have fallen in love: the full glass and not the usual half glasses that we usually subsist on. Many other men would have found her frightening and cold, for Lena was a woman who had either become her own mask or never let that mask down in public. Perhaps, I thought, she did for Ravi. Perhaps that was what knitted them together, for at that point there was no doubt in my mind that this was not just a casual spring fling for either of them.

After Ravi had stopped to buy a good bottle of wine and some Belgian beers—he never trusted the alcohol served in Danish parties—we headed for his colleague’s flat. It was a one-bedroom affair, with a large sitting-room-cum-kitchen. The kitchen had been arranged to resemble a bar from one side, with a half wall that had bar stools ranged against it. It was the kind of flat one would expect a bachelor to have.

And it was already crowded. Many of Ravi’s colleagues were there and another dozen people or so, half of whom I knew or recognized from the university. All the chairs, stools and sofas were occupied; some people were ensconced on the bed in the bedroom. The kitchen tables were lined with bottles, glasses and bowls of chips; two pizzas were in the oven and the chili con carne and rice almost ready. There wasn’t going to be anything fancier: the decades when parties thrown by bachelors had to be redeemed from the shadow of Oedipal heterosexuality by offerings of a dozen intricate cuisines were over. Blokishness reigned in Denmark and heterosexual men were again free to be, in Ravi-speak, the uncouth pigs they naturally were.

But this blokishness did not encompass a carte blanche to smoke in the flat: Cancer was bigger than either Mars or Venus. There was a balcony attached to the bedroom. It was small and could contain only four or five people, standing, at a time. That was where smokers had to go to light up. It was seldom crowded, though: most of the people in the party were professional academics in their thirties and forties and their habits, like their books, accorded with the times.

Ravi headed for the balcony after a quick round of hellos, as he was offered a “bong” by someone he knew who spoke with an Australian accent. Bong, I assumed, was a kind of hash, something Ravi indulged in at parties. Lena fell in with people she knew, listening with the sort of expression of delighted interest that she brought into any conversation and that, undoubtedly, made many men feel more intelligent than they were. It was a talent she was not even fully aware of. Perhaps she saw it as courtesy or kindness.

An hour later, when the rice and the chili con carne had been ladled out and I was trying my best to balance my plate on my knees, sip from my glass, which was jostling for space with seven other glasses of different shapes on a small side table, and converse with migrating acquaintances, Ravi wended his way out of the bedroom, dodging a dozen pair of hands busy expressing ideas or conveying food.

“There he is,” he said on catching sight of me, “I told you he is around…”

Behind him there walked a woman in her thirties, almost straw-blonde (though I later discovered that she dyed her hair), a bit short by Danish standards, but with the kind of rounded hips and slightly fleshy calves that I always notice. I knew her. This was the woman I had mentioned to Ravi, the one he called (behind her back, I am sure) Ms. Linen Marx.

I knew why Ravi had dragged her to my section of the party. I had more trouble understanding why Ms. Marx—let us call her that, for there are reasons (which will be revealed in due linear course, as my MFA-girlfriend would have insisted) to keep her name under cover—had allowed Ravi to drag her to me. She had not only shown no interest in me in the past, she had actually conveyed active disinterest on the one occasion when I had tried to break the ice. It had been done politely; it had struck me as genuine disinterest. She had not been bad to me: I was just not the kind of man she found interesting. How had Ravi managed to drag her through this crowd of coagulating con carne and conversations to my corner? I could only attribute it to the fact that women in general, married or not, interested or not, could seldom resist following Ravi around.

Not only did Ms. Marx follow Ravi to my corner, she showed no inclination to leave even after Ravi spotted Lena and abandoned us for her, with (or did I imagine it?) an almost imperceptible wink at me. I offered my seat to Ms. Marx. This woke some ghost of a non-blokish past in the man sitting next to me and he made a bit of space. Ms. Marx, to my surprise, wriggled in between the two of us, her wine glass held at a careful length in rounded bare arms (she was wearing a sleeveless dress of the sort that left most of the back bare too) which I tried not to look at. The blokes around me were not aware of either her arms, which rippled with the soft muscles of regular gym workouts, or her back. That, I have always felt, is the problem with being a bloke. It makes you ignore or vulgarize some of the best things in life.

I wondered whether Ravi considered Ms. Marx plain. I thought that she probably fell within the range of that demarcation for him, though in its higher reaches. It was a definition I would never have applied to Ms. Marx, even though I would not attain the glass-spilling exuberance of Ravi’s love for Lena either. In any case, Ms. Marx—unlike Lena—was not the kind of woman who caught any man’s eye; just as, to be honest, I am by no means the kind of man who turns every woman’s head, at least for a second, as Ravi does. I believe people like Ms. Marx and me receive only half glasses of love and admiration and, at least in my case, that is sufficient.

I was not sure if it was sufficient in Ms. Marx’s case, though. I knew she was divorced, with a child she shared with her ex (with whom she was, as is said, “very good friends”), and I have always suspected that divorced parents who stay good friends tend to have separated not because of any incompatibility but because they yearned for more than half-filled glasses in their lives.

Not only did Ms. Marx join me, she spent most of the party with me. Towards midnight, when the beer momentarily washes away the inhibitions of Danes, she asked me if I wanted to go out for a walk. The moon was almost full and it was surprisingly clear. Providence had rigged things in my favor for a change.

We kissed, more formally than passionately, on our way back to the flat.

Had I been less interested in Ms. Marx, I suppose I would have suspected Ravi’s hand in her sudden interest in me. Or perhaps not, for it is difficult to imagine how any man can get a woman interested in another man. In any case, I had little time or inclination for suspicion. I saw Ms. Marx twice that week. Her interest in me grew every day; she wanted to know everything about me. Sometimes, she asked the same question again, in a slightly modified form, as if she did not believe my first version or wanted to hear it all over again.

The next week, on our third date, I was invited into her row-house flat for a nightcap. Her son, she said, was out on a camping trip with his father for the weekend, exploring some Jutland heath. Consequently, we spent the night at her place, exploring each other.

Next morning, we had a lazy breakfast. I rustled up an omelette, Indian-style, which usually impresses European women used to omelettes that are either flaccid and tasteless or stuffed with too many things to go for breakfast. She asked me how my parents had met; I told her they had been colleagues in the same university. Different departments, but same university. She lifted an eyebrow in surprise.

“They met at a political demonstration at their university. It turned out that a cousin of my father’s was a friend of my mother’s brother. I think that made it easier for them to keep seeing each other. A year later they got their parents to arrange a wedding for them.”

Ms. Marx laughed in disbelief. “Why are you making this up?” she said.

I assured her that I was not making it up.

She left her chair and came over to me. She put her arms around my neck and squeezed affectionately. Her hair fell over my eyes.

“Remember, I am a historian: I expect consistency in historical accounts,” she said. She pulled my chair back from the table—Ms. Marx was pretty strong for her size—and sat in my lap, straddling me. She smelled of orange yogurt. I kissed her. She tasted of orange yogurt too. We ended up making love on the kitchen floor.

It was close to noon when I returned to Karim’s flat. I planned to take a leisurely shower and relax for the rest of the day, savoring the moments of last night and that morning: the slow friction of our flesh, the instant when I entered her, her soft grainy moistness, the smell of her sex, her lips all over me, kissing, sucking, the unhurried rhythm of sex between people who are old enough to know what they are about. I wanted to lie in bed and recall her breasts, which were small and surprisingly girl-like, her arms, which were fleshy and slightly muscular, her hips, her hair, her legs… I was not madly in love with her, but I did not have to be madly, or even eccentrically, in love. Sane attraction was what I wanted. It was enough.

I knew Karim Bhai would be on a day shift and I expected Ravi to be gone: he seldom spent the weekend in the flat anymore. Early on Saturday morning, if they had not already met on Friday night, as soon as he returned from his morning jog, Ravi would grab a toast, slurp some coffee and pedal off to Lena’s flat, armed with aftershave and bike clips.

But when I walked into the flat, Ravi was still there, writing on his laptop.

“Bastard,” he shouted to me from the kitchen, when I was still in the lobby, “you kept me waiting!”

I asked him why he had waited for me. We did not have any plans for the weekend.

Ravi laughed. Then he said, hazarding a guess, “Actually, I was wondering what you are going to tell Ms. Marx about your dad now.”

It was then that the suspicion dawned on me.

“What have you been telling her about my parents, bastard?” I asked him.

“Just, as they say in America, like, the truth, pal.”

“Like the truth?”

“Well, we all know how it is with you fucking fundus in Pak: veiled mother, bearded father, married at the age of fifteen, son divided between his halal mentality and the desire to make it in the pork-eating West, unwilling to acknowledge his religious background in public and unable to relinquish it in private, etcetera, etcetera.”

I was flabbergasted.

“You didn’t tell her all that, Ravi!” I exclaimed.

“Not at once, of course. I did it over days, weeks. For the sake of our friendship, sentimental music! I sacrificed hours of pleasure with Lena. Ms. Marx was kind of primed by the time I sprung her on you at the party, bastard, but I still had to keep selling you… Bits and pieces you know, yaar. You are damned good at queering your own pitch. You were so bloody intent on committing sexual harakiri by making your parents sound like her parents; I had to administer narrative antidotes all the time. I think she is convinced that you make up stories about your parents because you are too embarrassed or afraid to acknowledge your incipient provincial fundamentalism in these, ah, cosmopolitan circles. It appeals to both the Linen and the Marx in her.”

I was so shocked I think I had to sit down. Used though I was to Ravi’s chutzpah, this was still unexpected. When I recovered, I looked him in the eye and said, “Dammit, bastard, you know I am going to explain all this to her at the first opportunity, and she will drop me.”

“Don’t be too sure of that, O Unimaginative Teacher of Eng Lit,” he replied, unplugging his laptop, probably on his way to Lena’s now. “You see, it works like this. You buy a product because it is packaged as bing. What you get is bang. But, mostly, you discover that you quite like bang. That is how capitalism works, bastard: it promises you bing and gives you bang. There is a chance, Sir Adjunkt, that Ms. Marx likes you for bang now. Violins! Play on, if music be the tandoori of love…” With that he left, whistling “Il n’a jamais, jamais connu de loi…”

Ravi was not entirely wrong. When I disclosed Ravi’s prank to Ms. Marx—I put it in the light of a practical joke played by him and she never conceded that it might have influenced her to start dating me—a shadow of irritation crossed her face. Two small vertical creases appeared between her eyebrows; I now know that they are a sign of anger. But then she laughed. And she agreed to see me again.

For the first time in my years in Denmark, I heard the sounds of domestic strife as I walked up the stairs that night. The evidence I had seen all around me—even the statistics of a nearly 50 percent divorce rate, which, Ravi perversely claimed, was slightly less disturbing than the statistics of a one percent divorce rate in India. But I had never heard the sounds of domestic strife. Not in Denmark.

The sounds came from the twin-flat of Great Claus and Pernille. First, a torrent of high-pitched Danish words (which I did not understand) from Pernille. Then a great booming “nej, nej, nej, jeg har sagt nej”—no, no, no, I have said no—from Claus, which was rudimentary and loud enough for me to understand. Then china or glass being smashed on the floor, a language that needs no interpretation across cultures. The slamming of a door. And then that loudest of noises: silence.