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

“And, and…” I encouraged him, buttering my toast.

“Nothing, bastard. She went home; I came back.”

“That is unusual for you, isn’t it, Don Juan? Expect me to believe that? I have seen you with women and women with you…”

“This is different, you vulgar Paki,” he said.

“Why?” I asked him. “Is she much too plain for your honor?”

“No, bastard,” he replied, and he meant it, “she is too fucking beautiful.”

He stroked his newly cultivated French beard thoughtfully.

At that moment, the phone rang in the lobby. I went to pick it up. It was the woman who would call on occasion and ask for Karim; I am sure it was the same woman who had not understood me the last time she had called, and had even failed at first to understand Ravi’s beautifully intoned Danish. But this time she must have understood my Danish response: Karim er på arbejde. Karim is out working. She disconnected the line immediately. I remember thinking with a smile, surely Karim fulfills his carnal needs despite his Islamic halo!

When I returned to the kitchen, Ravi refused to be drawn back to the topic of Lena. I left soon; I had an appointment with a research student and planned to spend some time after that in the library.

It was one of those days when the wet coldness of late winter turns crisp and you can glimpse the sun behind a thin screen of white clouds. Light fills the land. The bare grey trees, with just a trace of green here and there, fill with diffused sunshine. It is a great time to go out for walks, properly wrapped up, of course, for it is still a cold light that falls from the skies, and the wind, when it blows, can carry shivering tales from the ice further north.

I decided to walk back all the way from the library building to Karim’s flat. I reached it well after seven in the evening; I could see that Ravi’s sports cycle was not parked outside. Ravi was a cycling enthusiast (I wonder: Do you still cycle now, Ravi? Can you?). The only times he did not use his cycle was when there was a storm or when he had to go out with me, because I do not cycle. He often claimed that the orderly cycle lanes in Denmark were the only redeeming feature of the country’s obsession with control and order.

Inside, there was a note on the kitchen table in Ravi’s scrawl, signed with an elaborate paraph. It said: “Enjoy your solitude, O Researcher of Literary Superficialities. Karim Bhai rang to annunciate his hegira on ‘urgent business,’ may Al Qaeda plague you with nightmares, O Apostate; and I am aaf to Lundhun for a hafta or two…”

There are cheap Ryan Air flights to London from Århus’s airport as well as neighboring Billund: they usually cost less than a train ticket to Copenhagen. Ravi availed of them on a regular basis, sometimes for seminars or literary readings, and sometimes—always on the spur of the moment—to see a play or just visit friends and buy spices for his cooking. Unlike me, he did not have to teach regularly.

Karim was away for longer than usual. He was away for two nights. When he came back, he looked visibly drained. His face was paler, his short thinning hair and lush greying beard in unusual disarray. But, as always, he did not want to say anything about what he had done and where he had been.

I do not mean to make this sound as suspicious as it does when I write it down here. It is important to explain this, though I am sure my MFA-girlfriend had strictures against such explanations. In any case, I am not writing a novel. This is an account of events that you have read about. And it is necessary to explain that when Karim Bhai returned after two nights, tired and red-eyed, I did not feel suspicious then. Or not suspicious along those lines; I just suspected him of moral double standards. The darker suspicions came only later, when other events overtook us.

One evening Great Claus and Little Claus dropped by as they often did. I remember this was in the week when Ravi was away.

Karim Bhai was home by then. He bustled about the kitchen, brewing chai for his guests. The two Clauses always had tea the Indian way; I think it was one of the things that endeared them to Karim, along with their broken attempts at Urdu.

Great Claus lit his pipe. He knew that Karim Bhai, a regular smoker, would not mind. Little Claus did not smoke, but he had obviously got used to inhaling Great Claus’s fumes over the years.

Great Claus’s hands shook slightly, as if he was in a state of suppressed excitement. He recounted some tale from his hospital and then the two, old-fashioned social democrats to the core of their hearts, launched into one of their regular critiques: how, over the years, Danish governments had been cutting down on Denmark’s public health system in the name of streamlining and at the same time effectively subsidizing private hospitals.

Karim Bhai listened and nodded. He did not participate in the critique. It was then that I realized how, unlike Ravi and, to a lesser extent, myself, Karim Bhai never criticized Denmark. He listened to the criticism with a smile at times, combing his fingers thoughtfully (or craftily? That alternative struck me much later) through his flowing beard. He added a few bits of fact or asked a question. He agreed with the criticism in most cases. But he never said anything critical himself.

I wondered whether it was because he did not trust any of us. Was he more unguarded with his Quranic discussion group when we were not around? Or was it because he did not really care, having given up on Denmark as the land of infidels? The criticism that Ravi or the two Clauses aired was, in different ways, based on a participation in some aspects of life and thinking which was shared by other Danes too. Did Karim Bhai dismiss Denmark to the extent that he felt no need to criticize it?

There was a knock on the door that night, well after eleven. Karim Bhai had fallen asleep, so I opened the door. I had known from the knock that it would be Great Claus. But I was not prepared to find him standing outside in his pajamas, clutching a pillow and with blankets draped all over him.

“Did I wake you up?” he whispered to me.

“I was reading,” I replied.

He slid into the lobby, still whispering.

“Can I sleep in Ravi’s room tonight?” he asked. He knew that Ravi was in London. “There are guests at our place. I will disappear in the morning.”

I was surprised. I had not heard the sound of visitors tramping up the wooden stairs, and it would have taken a horde to make Claus and Pernille run out of beds: they had two extra bedrooms, with their twin daughters having moved out, and a large futon in their sitting room. But I saw no reason to refuse.

Great Claus disappeared sheepishly, blankets trailing behind him, into Ravi’s room and carefully closed the door. When I woke up the next morning, the door to Ravi’s room was slightly ajar and Great Claus had left. There was a note on the kitchen table, thanking Karim, me and even Ravi, in absentia, and promising us a “pucca mughlai dinner soon as thanks for your garrib-nayvaizzi.”

When Ravi returned from London, the first thing he did—after stuffing the larder and the freezer with the Indian ingredients that filled most of his suitcase—was to shut himself up in the toilet. He came out fifteen minutes later, looking a bit different.

He had shaved off the French-style beard that he had grown over the past few weeks.

“What happened, bastard?” I asked him. “Lost your faith so soon?”

“Experiment successfully completed,” he replied.

It turned out that his beard had been the outgrowth of Karim Bhai’s Quranic sessions but in a typically idiosyncratic way. Indiosyncratic way, Ravi would have said. He had grown it to find out if, as claimed by some of Karim Bhai’s fellow-believers, a beard on a Middle Eastern-type face impeded progress through Customs in European airports. Having flown to London, and then to Amsterdam, and from there back to Århus, via Copenhagen—his trajectory over the past week of travels and visits—he had put the hypothesis to test.