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

“Tell her the truth then. Whatever it might be.”

“What if the truth is harder on her?”

“Believe me, Claus. It will be kinder than to leave her guessing. If you cannot tell her, get some friend to do so. Karim Bhai, for instance…”

To our surprise, Claus burst out laughing.

“No.” He chuckled, actual tears of laughter in his eyes. “No, no… I can’t see good old Karim telling her this…”

But then he collected himself. “I will think about what you said, Ravi,” he promised. We started talking about other things.

Little Claus arrived within half an hour. He looked flustered.

The two friends hugged as if they were meeting after years. Then they left silently. We heard their footsteps going down the staircase until the main door closed and the silence surged back. It was late: the night was all wrapped up in itself. The twin flat upstairs was silent too.

Summer had partly gagged Ravi’s criticism of the Danish weather in the past too. The most he could say was that you had to be attentive to derive the benefits of the Danish summer: you might blink, and it would be over. But the two weeks to two months that it usually lasts are, even he had to concede in the past, undoubtedly glorious. The sun is warm and the breeze still on the cooler side. The parks and countryside are dotted with yellow and white lilies, purple bellflowers, marigolds and a dozen other blooms I could not identify but Ravi could. The grass gets so uniformly and deeply green that, Ravi claimed, he was physically repelled by the color in his second summer in the land and almost threw up. It was too green, yaar; a bit like watching an obese man stuffing himself in a crowd of anorexics.

This summer, though, basking in the light of two Danish suns, he did not make too many quips like that one. Actually, on the train from Copenhagen to Elsinore that month, he relented long enough to praise the view. The sea rippled on one side, like a piece of parchment, crumpled and then carefully smoothened out, unbelievably blue.

The trip to Elsinore was Ravi’s idea. Inevitably. Those days he was always coming up with ideas for visits and tours, most of which never bore fruit. Not all of us shared his disregard for schedules or his penchant for sudden projects and trips. This one we did take up, mostly because—for some reason—neither Lena nor I had been to the Kronborg castle in Elsinore. Set to patrol the sound between Sweden and Denmark—the cannons pointing at the sea had been good investment for centuries, ensuring toll collection by whoever controlled the castle—and built and destroyed a few times in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Kronborg’s claim to fame probably rests on the fact that Shakespeare made it Hamlet’s castle.

“You have to hand it to Old Sheikh Pir,” commented Ravi, as we lay down—a pause before descending into the dungeons—on one of the green slopes around the castle. Flocks of cloud scudded across the sky; seagulls drifted on invisible currents.

“Some cheek the guy had! He steals a story from someone, gets the facts mixed up and the time wrong, transports a prince from Jutland all the way to here and hatches a bloody masterpiece out of it. But, of course, he did not have you Eng Lit types telling him what to do in those days…”

Ravi was always good company; there is no doubt about it. Even Ms. Marx, who was not much given to flippant and dismissive remarks, would condescend to smile at some of his statements. But I have never seen anyone hang on his words and strive to match their brilliance as much as Lena. During that trip I wondered whether she did not, at times, feel a bit tired, that she did not sometimes feel that she had to let go, relax, not be so brilliant and poised all the time. Why didn’t I feel that about Ravi? Why did I feel that for him it wasn’t a strain? Was it because he allowed himself those moments of weakness, blankness and nonsense that Lena never revealed?

In the dungeons below, he paused in front of the muscular statue of Holger the Dane, his Viking head resting on the hilt of his sword. “Look!” Ravi proclaimed to Lena. “The Danish national hero: dreamed up by a Frenchman, fought all his life for the Germans, came back to Denmark and, guess what, immediately fell asleep forever.”

Lena laughed. Even in the dark, rough, echoing dungeons, her laughter sounded like something that belonged in a room of china and tablecloths, its windows long and closed, its gossamer curtains slightly ruffled by the draft.

On the way back from Elsinore, we stopped for a couple of days in Copenhagen. As Copenhagen was known territory for all of us, we did not do much sightseeing, preferring to walk around and visit friends. Ravi did get us to go on one of those tourist walks, the one that takes you along the coast and past the Little Mermaid because, he claimed, he had failed to notice the mermaid statue when he last did the walk. “It’s so bloody little,” he offered as an explanation.

On our last night in Copenhagen, we did the customary pub crawl and ended up in a pub we had not been to earlier, well after midnight. Even as we ordered drinks at the bar—sticky with spilled beer—we realized that this was not the sort of place we would have chosen to come to. It was full of young and middle-aged men—and almost no women—in various stages of drunkenness: Lena and Ms. Marx turned every pair of male eyes in the room. But it was too late; we were not even sure if other places were open this late.

I think Ravi and Lena noticed the atmosphere less that we did: they were too busy with each other. Even when a couple of men tried to chat up Lena—blatantly ignoring Ravi—I don’t think they noticed. Lena, cold in her normal state, was icy with them. They returned to a group of rowdy, sullen men in their thirties at the back of the room, who were monopolizing the pool table.

A little later, another man from the group came up to us. Ignoring both Ravi and me, he asked Lena and Ms. Marx—in Danish—to join him and his friends for a drink. He was squat and sweaty; he had trouble standing straight. When he was politely refused, he turned and glared at us. Then he went back to the group around the pool table. There was some jibing and laughter. Then the squat, sweating man was suddenly back at the bar. He poked a stubby finger into Lena’s shoulder. He zipped open his trousers and took out his dick. It hung half-limp, half-erect in his hands.

He said to Lena, in English this time, “Has your Italian boyfriend anything as good?”

I looked at Ravi, as both of us moved to get off our stools. I did so with greater reluctance than Ravi, I am sure. I disliked the option of regress to the caveman—always a danger in pubs full of men—though I also knew from experience that evolution is a fickle matter. Ravi, faster on the trigger in such matters, would have already landed a punch on the man, if he had not been on the wrong side of Lena.

But Lena anticipated it. In retrospect I could not help admiring her calm. She held up a hand to stop Ravi and turned to the man, who was suddenly looking just a bit foolish, with his dick hanging out and half the room staring at him. She looked him in the face for some calculated seconds and said, cold and collected as always, “Why, that thing! I wouldn’t even feel it.”

Swiveling again on her stool, she returned to her drink, turning her back on him.

The man looked bewildered. Ravi was off his stool now, ready to intervene if the man reacted violently. Then the barman, who had moved closer to us, started laughing. Some other people in the room followed his example. The squat man looked around. I think he decided that the laughter was not mocking; it was largely friendly, the sort of laughter a beloved clown evokes. Perhaps it was. Perhaps he was the resident clown, not the resident caveman, as we had assumed. He swayed, mumbled, tucked his dick away and shambled back to the pool table, where some of his friends were chuckling too.