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

“Karim Bhai is in a foul mood: don’t even mention Great Claus to him. He is liable to blow a fuse if you do!”

On the way back by bus—the airport is half an hour out of town—Ravi filled me in. It had to do, at least in his account, with Ravi’s advice to Claus. Claus had followed the advice. He had told Pernille the truth. Pernille had been relieved; Karim Bhai had been scandalized.

“The closet,” Ravi expanded. “Claus hath taken a mighty leap into the roaring Chandrabhaga!”

There had been no woman involved. It was more convoluted—or simpler—than that. Years ago, after he had fathered two daughters, Great Claus had discovered that he was gay. For years now, he had had a steady lover: Little Claus. There was nothing to be done about it. Great Claus felt he had to maintain the pretence of being a solid “familiefar”—family father—as long as his girls were too young and at home. But when they moved out, he could no longer keep on playing the part. He wanted to move out and become what he considered himself to be.

Pernille, Ravi said, had taken this revelation very well. She had even gone out eating with both the Clauses, and had helped Great Claus move most of his stuff into Little Claus’s suburban house. The daughters too had been, if anything, jubilant about this turn of events. “You see, bastard,” said Ravi to me, as the excessively green and even Danish countryside started giving way to a bit less green but as even Danish urbanity, “having an affair with a woman is kind of tacky and underhand. But who, with his heart in his left breast, can deny a man his true individuality! I wonder why good Old Claus hesitated in coming clean: the guy obviously does not understand contemporary Western civilization.”

It looked like Karim Bhai did not understand it either. When Claus came to tell him, with both Little Claus and Pernille in tow, Karim Bhai looked shocked. “His face drained of color, yaar,” recounted Ravi, who was there, all his aunts in tow. “I thought he would faint. Then he got up, walked to his room and closed the door.”

“That is so stupid, Ravi! You should talk to Karim. He listens to you,” I told Ravi, though even to me this advice sounded hollow. I felt angrier at Karim than I could convey to Ravi, for I suspected Karim of double standards regarding his relations to women.

“I did, bastard. You know what he did? He fetched his Quran and read out a surah to me. I can still recall the words almost verbatim. It went a bit like this: ‘If two men among you commit a lewd act, punish them both. If they repent and mend their ways, let them be. God is forgiving and merciful.’ End of discussion. He refuses to say anything more, or just stalks off. So, bastard, keep off all main and subordinate Clauses in his company for the next few weeks, parse your phrases, will you, Teach?”

But Karim Bhai was not home when we got back. He had been called away once again: he had left a note in his careful handwriting, telling us that he would not be back for a couple of nights.

Karim looked so tired and worn out when he returned that we decided to wait a bit before confronting him about his homophobia. Also, by then Ravi was less concerned with Karim’s reaction, and more bemused by what he called “our failure to read the signs.”

“How did we fail to spot it, bastard?” Ravi said to me at least twice that day. “It was so bloody obvious!”

“Are you teaching today?” asked Ravi, as he gathered up a few odds and ends on his way out of the flat on a Tuesday morning. From the way he was dressed, the subdued but clear hint of expensive aftershave that he exuded, and the careful disorder of his long hair, I could tell that he was on his way to the neighborhood of Lena.

“Yes,” I replied. “ Wuthering Heights .”

“Ah.” Ravi paused in his gathering of odds and ends. He could not ignore this opportunity to comment on literature; he seldom did. I often wondered what perverse impulse had driven him to do a doctorate in history rather than literature, except, of course, when he commented on what he called “Eng Lit types.” The impulse always clarified itself then: The only time his voice dripped more sarcasm was when he commented on surgeons.

“Bet you a hundred you are going to give the standard poco take on Heathcliff, and your colleagues and most of your students are going to file it away as a quaint little notion, something that justifies your presence as multicultural artifact number one, though they won’t say or even quite allow themselves to think so,” he continued.

“What is the standard poco take, Ravi?” I asked him, though I already knew the answer.

“You know: Heathcliff as lascar; Heathcliff as a blackie, etc…” He held up a finger to preempt my response. “Yes, yes, I know what the text says, and sure I buy that reading. It is just, kind of, so obvious. Only whities could have missed it for close to two centuries. You know, bastard, most whities wouldn’t notice a wart on the top of their nose if it happened to be black, which inevitably creates darkies who can spot a black hair on a polar bear at the distance of five kilometers. But the point of Heathcliff and Wuthering Heights is not really all that. Never underestimate a gal like Eternal Emily…”

“Enlighten us, O Great Critic,” I responded, as he probably expected me to. Not that Ravi needed any encouragement from me.

“See, the problem in that novel is the problem of love: how, if it is really love, it is destined to fail in our world. This is not due to machination or enmity or other such humdrum matters, as in the weaker plays of your Billy Great Shakes. This is in the nature of love, which exceeds and challenges the order of our world. Hence, the only time it can come close to realization is in the wild, not in society. Finally, Heathcliff and Cathy haunt the sublime heath, while the rest of us go for walks in beautiful parks…”

Looking back and recalling this conversation, I realize that I should have suspected what was to come. But we are always wiser in retrospect.

As we could not possibly invite the Clauses to our flat without seriously inconveniencing our host and possibly the Clauses, we decided to ask Great and Little Claus to join us for an evening out in town. Ms. Marx was supposed to come too, but her babysitter absconded at the last moment and she had to cancel.

We met in a German “biergaarten,” a place of much wood and heavy beer mugs. The Clauses were already there when we arrived. Great Claus had regained his bounce: his booming “sob kuch teek-taak, na?” had people at other tables turning around and looking at us when we entered. Ravi replied in Hindi, which of course Claus did not understand but pretended to.

Lena joined us but left early: she always had a busy schedule. However, even in that short while, she managed to fascinate the Clauses: her poise and beauty were of the sort that obviously left an impact even on gay men. Great Claus had already met her, but this was the first time Little Claus was meeting her, and he did not hide his admiration. After she left, Little Claus remarked, partly as a compliment to Ravi, that Lena was his notion of a really beautiful woman.

Ravi thought about it. Then he said, “Have you seen Waheeda Rehman, Claus? Say, in one of those Guru Dutt films? Now that was a woman who could manage to seem beautiful without being either showy or cold. That is difficult. I have never met a woman like that in real life.”

Once again, I recount this little episode with the dubious benefit of hindsight.

There were three identical envelopes in the mailbox early that October. They were addressed in the same handwriting. I gave the one addressed to Karim to him, and went into Ravi’s room to hand him his envelope. The third one bore my name. There were other letters, and a couple of journals for Ravi and me. We took the lot to the kitchen table. Karim Bhai was already there. He had opened his envelope and was now ripping it into vehement shreds. He was very intent on it. We watched him, a bit surprised. He threw the pieces in the garbage bin under the sink and left the flat on his way to work.