Tabish Khair - How to Fight Islamist Terror from the Missionary Position

But the thesis, like most PhDs, had changed direction over the years. Now it was a more theoretical study in which, Ravi claimed, he was tracing the links between fascism and North European notions of order. “Fascism,” he would declaim over a few drinks, “is above all the ideology of order.”

“Exclusive order, you mean?” I had once queried.

“There is no such thing, bastard,” he had replied. “You either have order or you have shades of disorder. All order is essentially exclusive; it does not have degrees, like disorder. You can have order only by eliminating. Elimination is its essence. All order has genocide hidden in its belly. Give it nine months and it will give birth, under clement conditions of course, to a holocaust.”

It was difficult to tell with Ravi’s theories. The ones that he proffered seriously could be the ones he held lightly, or vice versa. But the promise of spring in April was to test one of Ravi’s most commonly espoused theories, about plain women. Was Ravi’s theory falsifiable? Would it have satisfied Popper?

Because it was to be falsified soon. This is how it happened.

We had been out on our third, and last, double date. This time it appeared to be going well. We had met the women in Under Masken. My date was a German exchange scholar in biology, an attractive woman in her thirties. But the moment we shook hands and sat down, both of us knew that we would not go to bed with each other. We liked each other, it was not that. There was something else, something you come to recognize with time and experience—of which there was sufficient on both sides. You meet someone on a date, you like her, she likes you, and what you feel is a friendship brewing, not romance. When you are young or desperate, you ignore that feeling and spoil what could have been a beautiful friendship. But my date and I were neither too young nor too desperate; we recognized the feeling in each other and we respected it. It led to a pleasant evening of conversation. Neither of us contemplated taking it any further. After about half an hour in Under Masken, we left for another place, as my German date was not a smoker and did not like the smoky atmosphere of the pub.

We left Ravi with his date, a rather pretty—though evidently plain in Ravi’s eyes—Turkish woman, who had grown up in Denmark. They appeared to be conversing intently in Danish. Unlike me, Ravi, thanks partly to his prior knowledge of German, spoke the language with near-native fluency. He waved perfunctorily at us when we left. But an hour later, I got a SMS from him: “Collimate Unibar when done with your Deutsch. ” I was not “done with my Deutsch” until after ten, and as mobiles often do not function in the basement where Unibar is tucked away—to avoid affronting the lurking, invisible Calvinist in Danes, Ravi always claimed—I decided to pop in and check on my way back to Karim Bhai’s flat. Ravi was not there. He was not in Karim Bhai’s flat either. By midnight, when I went to bed, he had still not returned. I think I heard him return at three or four that night.

Karim Bhai had left for his shift when I woke up around nine and started brewing coffee. Karim Bhai only drank tea, made the Indian way with tea leaves, water, milk, sugar and a dash of cinnamon boiled together in a pan, so the coffee machine was for our use. This was lucky for us, as Karim Bhai sometimes left very early and the coffee machine made a hell of a noise.

Perhaps it was the noise that woke Ravi. Or perhaps he had already been awake, for he came out looking less bleary-eyed than he usually did in the mornings.

“Toast?” I asked him, as he poured himself a cup of coffee.

He shook his head and sat down opposite me at the small kitchen table, cupping his mug and looking into it.

“Hangover?” I asked.

He shook his head again, gazing intently into his future in the coffee cup.

“When did you come in?”

“Around three, I think.”

“What happened?” I asked. “You weren’t at Unibar.”

“I was there until about ten. I fell in with some people I know, PhD students and suchlike.”

“I reached the place a bit later,” I explained. I wanted to add “you could have SMS-ed.” But that sounded like needless nagging, the sort of thing one says to a partner, not to a friend.

Ravi kept staring into his cup.

Then he looked up and his face creased into a brilliant smile.

“You know, bastard, I think I fell in love,” he said, and shook his head in wonderment.

Ravi explained that his date with the Turkish woman had been promising, despite the fact that she spoke almost entirely in slang, until she started complaining about immigrants. The core of her complaint was that immigrant men make gross passes at Danish women. Ravi, the Defender of Minorities of All Ilk, could not let that go unchallenged. He argued that all heteromen show interest in women, and many men make passes; the reason why immigrant men become more obvious in a place like Denmark has to do with a certain failure to read signals on all sides. “I can show my interest in Danish women without them getting offended because, thanks to my colonial brainwashing, I do it the way it is sanctioned in Danish society,” he claimed, and proceeded to illustrate this with examples. She countered with examples. He deconstructed her examples with increasing relish. She looked irritated. Ravi finally told her to read Fanon, try not to speak so much slang, as she did not need to prove how “well-integrated” she was, and left.

“I don’t know what is worse,” he said to me, sipping his coffee, “a white woman trying to be colorful or a colored woman trying to be white!”

That was when he had headed for Unibar, where he met a group of PhD students and junior teachers who had been attending a cross-disciplinary conference—“Music and Literature: National Notes, Global Resonances”—and had ended up in the bar too. He had been having a nice time, planning to hang on until I joined him.

“But then,” he said, looking at me with a crooked smile, “she walked in.”

“Who?”

“Lena.”

Lena, spelled the Swedish way with an “a,” not an “e,” Ravi clarified, as if it was a matter of vital significance, was one of the participants at the conference. She was doing her PhD in musicology but she was also a professional singer, the lead voice in a local jazz band, and a trained opera artiste.

“Don’t laugh, bastard,” Ravi continued. “This sounds like a cliché. It is a cliché. You know, here I am, in a crowd of men and women, and she walks in. Suddenly the fucking room empties. All I see is her, and I think, where has she been all these years? And, you know, bastard, she comes up to join us and I see her look at me with her green-green eyes, just for a second, you know, just a second; it is a look that speaks to me, it speaks clearly as words; I know, I know that she is thinking exactly the same thing, that the only person she can really see in that fucking crowded room is me.”

I might have smiled if it had been anyone other than Ravi: Ravi, who did not believe in love at first sight, Ravi who did not believe in relationships that could last.

“So, what did you do, Great Casanova?” I asked. He gave me his crooked smile again.

“Not me,” he replied, “we. We hung around for twenty minutes, pretending to pay attention to the others. Then we started talking only to each other and drifted away from the table. Don’t smile, bastard: it wasn’t planned. She knew a bit about me, had even read my story in the Mishra anthology. She told me a bit about herself… We ended up walking and talking and then sitting in a café and talking a bit more until, suddenly, it was three. Both of us thought it was only around midnight. I am sorry, I would have SMS-ed you if I had realized how late it was getting…”