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

Lena raised a thin, perfectly sculpted eyebrow at Ravi. Ravi winked.

Apart from this last-minute drama, I have good memories of our vacation together. I think of this brief summer as one of those periods one harkens back to as one gets older, a time when the sunshine was full of hope, the breeze whispered of happiness. All of us have such periods in our lives.

Perhaps it was the Danish summer; perhaps it was the radiant aura of love that wrapped Lena and Ravi. Once again, I could not help feeling that as a couple, in corny phrasing, the two were made for each other. Others must have thought so too: total strangers would turn and smile at them on the streets; bored waiters would smarten up to serve them with grace.

Ms. Marx agreed with me, but she also had her reservations. Ms. Marx had, by then, grown a bit skeptical of what she termed Ravi’s “influence” on me: you two are not all that similar, she had told me, but when you are together, you start acting and talking as if you are Ravi’s twin. I feel she underestimated both our similarities and differences.

Later, when we discussed the trip to Elsinore and Copenhagen, she complained about how difficult it was to travel with Ravi.

“He always tries to pay for everything,” she said. “If you don’t watch out, he pays for your drinks behind your back. After some time, you hesitate to order anything with him around.” That explained the moments when she had seemed slightly irked with Ravi. Not Lena, though; if she found Ravi too quick on the trigger of tabs, she never betrayed it.

Yes, I already knew that Ravi liked to pick up tabs. He had offered to do so in Århus too, sometimes even if it meant that he had to walk back to the flat instead of catching a bus. But I had never found it excessive; I felt he was “Western” enough to curb such “Oriental” gestures when he needed to do so. Had he lapsed, in his love for Lena? If so, why hadn’t I noticed it? Both Ravi and I were aware of this as a cultural difference in Northern cultures. We knew (without being fully conscious of it) that Ms. Marx and Lena, like all our Danish friends and colleagues, always paid for themselves and seldom offered to pay for others. It was not that they were tight; their generosity was occasioned and premeditated. There was just no excess to it. It was another kind of generosity, or so I felt.

I mentioned this to Ravi in his last weeks in Århus, those long November days so different from these days of summer.

“Nonsense, yaar,” he retorted, “generosity is always in excess.”

Strangely, I have almost no recollection of our return journey to Århus, but then that could have been because all of us—except Karim Bhai, who hardly commented on it—got preoccupied by the “Norway attacks,” which took place that very afternoon. Ravi, in particular, did not hide his disgust at the ease with which many in the Danish media first blamed it on Islamists and then, when it became clear that a white, right-wing, Christian fundamentalist was behind these acts of terror and genocide, somehow still managed to suggest at times that immigration and Muslims were the real cause. He tried to discuss this with Karim over the next few days, but Karim Bhai just shrugged, sad, unconcerned or guarded. It was something I mentioned to the police officers later on.

I do remember that Ms. Marx left us at the station, as her row house was in the opposite direction, while Ravi and I took a bus to Lena’s place—mostly to help her carry her luggage—before going on to Karim’s flat. I recall that we remained on the pavement. Ravi handed Lena her suitcase, which he had been carrying for her. I lagged behind a bit to give them some space. They kissed, very decorously, a surprisingly proper peck on the lips. Then Ravi said to her, softly, though his voice—unintended—carried over to me by one of those quirks of the wind, “Will you wave to me before you go in? I always like it when you do.”

Lena looked surprised and grateful. The ice of her poise cracked for just a micro-second: in that instant, she betrayed the sort of gratefulness that Ravi sometimes displayed in her presence. It was as new to her as it was for Ravi. But there was no doubt in my mind that both of them were grateful for and surprised by each other’s love, or perhaps just by the fact of love. As if they could not believe their luck. This was not the first time that I noted how they parted. It was as if every parting, the shortest separation, was forever. Perhaps that is why Ravi wanted her to wave.

Lena opened the door of her building. Just before going in, she turned and waved. It was only then that Ravi started walking away.

What else? What else do I recall from that period? The torrent of the past seeps through the sieves of our memories and we clutch at the silt that sticks, trusting that it contains gold. Perhaps it does; perhaps not.

I recall lying in bed with Ms. Marx soon afterwards; we had just made love. Somehow, I don’t remember why, we ended up talking about the scene in the pub, when that drunken clown had flashed at Lena. I must have praised Lena for her poise and her perfect put-down.

To my surprise, Ms. Marx was far less impressed.

“Ah, you men are such boys,” she scoffed, reclining on the pillows, her forehead still slightly beaded with sweat. “Can’t you see that poor Lena lives on male attention? All her perfection and poise is an index of her desperate need for it. She expects men to compliment her or flash at her!”

I felt that was unfair to Lena, but I dropped the topic with a laugh. You do not defend another woman when lying in bed with your girlfriend. I was not such a boy as that.

Despite that remark, Ms. Marx and Lena were always friendly with each other. It was also obvious that they would never be good friends. They met because of Ravi and me; left to themselves, they would not have gone beyond a polite hello or a coffee with university colleagues, I suspect.

The one person who had trouble being even friendly with Lena on the very few occasions when she visited us was Karim. He always got even more stiff and formal in her presence, and often left the flat abruptly. In my memory, I associate Lena’s arrival in our flat with Karim’s retreat, often abrupt, to his room or to the cab that would then start with a cough and a grumble and drive away. Was it her beauty? Was it because Ravi, to use a cliché, had stars in his eyes when he was with her, at least in those weeks? Was it the fact that Lena always dressed a bit too smartly and flamboyantly for the Islamist in Karim?

I never found out. Despite my lingering suspicion in those days that his Islam did not hinder Karim from frequenting prostitutes, it was never easy to talk about women, flippantly or seriously, in Karim’s company.

One of my cousins was getting married in Lahore that August. August is not the best time for marriages in Lahore, but then the seasons have very little to do with weddings in the professional classes of Pakistan and, if Ravi is to be believed, India any longer. There was a time when there used to be marriage seasons, which varied a bit from community to community, region to region. Now, with jobs and education scattering the supposedly privileged all over the globe, weddings are usually crammed into the summer and winter vacations across the subcontinent.

Ravi had been talking about going to Pakistan with me, but that was until a few months ago. I knew he had no desire to leave the vicinity of Lena now. I made a quick one-week trip—sandwiched between the interminable sham-exams that cut into all vacations in Danish universities—and returned to find Ravi waiting for me at the airport.

I was touched. Ravi hated receiving or seeing people off at airports or railway stations. But no, Ravi was there primarily because he had news for me.