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

Ravi turned to her suddenly and said, with his usual abruptness in jumping from one topic to another, “Didn’t you take riding lessons, Lena?”

If Lena was surprised by the sudden change of topic, she did not show it. She seldom showed real surprise; if it showed on her fine porcelain face, it was because she knew it was expected and proper.

“Oh yes, as a kid,” she replied. “For seven or eight years. I was pretty good too. My mother insisted on it: she loves horses. I never really did and I stopped as soon as I could. I have not ridden since then.”

“But you still know all about bridle and snaffle…”

For a micro-second, she looked mystified. “Y-yes, I think I do,” she almost stammered.

“See,” Ravi turned and smiled brilliantly at me, “lots of snaffle and curb, but very little horse.”

Then he pushed his chair back so suddenly that it almost fell over and he went out. We could see him light up a Marlboro outside.

I avoided looking at Lena. I knew she was confused. I could sense her sadness. For the second time I saw her mask slip, her fear show. But then she tried to pull herself together and started conversing with all of us, almost her usual charming, smiling self. Was I the only one who sensed the fine lines of worry and loss that fractured her poise and control? You had to be very observant to notice how suddenly her green eyes would flicker—with something of the palpitation of a caged bird—towards the window outside which Ravi stood, his back to us, smoking. Why don’t you get up and go to him, I felt like saying to her. Don’t you hear it? The murk of the café was repeating it in a persistent whisper all round us, in a whisper that seemed to wither, hollowly, like sand falling in a glass: her name, her name, in his silent voice.

But I knew I couldn’t say it; I knew she would refuse to understand me if I did. That was a dialect for times long gone. She would never run out, grab him by the collar and kiss him. I looked at her again. The doll’s smile had come back, stapled to her face.

Ravi returned only when it was time for us to leave for the theater.

A few words return to me here; words uttered by Ravi around that time, I am certain, though I cannot recall the context. Did he drop in at my office, or were we talking in one of the canteens? Was he lounging about, in my room or his, skimming quickly through a book? Or was he rolling a cigarette with Karim Bhai in the kitchen?

I do not remember, but the words I recall: “Did I tell you when I decided not to play the piano professionally? Somehow my dad had fewer objections to Western classical music—it was compatible with a scientific career in his mind, if only because of Einstein—than to my becoming a journalist or studying art. But one day I knew it was not for me. That was when my third piano teacher told me I had perfect pitch. I knew then that I had no future in music. Perfection condemns you to glorious mediocrity. It is in the gap between your imperfections, honestly faced, and your desire for something beyond perfection that you can achieve genius. Perfect pitch, perfect life, perfect love—these are dead ends.”

I will leave the rest of it out. It is not just families that are happy in the same way but sad in entirely different ways. So are individuals.

But I will mention just one more thing. This must have taken place in the first week of December, or maybe a bit earlier or later. It was the week in which Ravi finally submitted his PhD thesis. He told me one morning that he’d a dream which finally made him “understand.”

Understand what? He did not elaborate.

He claimed he had never dreamed in Denmark before, that the moment he came to Denmark, he stopped having the few dreams that he used to have. You just don’t remember them, I told him.

No, he replied, seriously, yaar; I don’t think I have dreamed a single dream in Denmark before this one. Not even a nightmare. I suspect they have ordered dreams away in this country.

Ravi wrote down the dream, with some poetic license, as a short story. It was one of the stories he shared with me. A week or two later, he posted it on an open-access online site. He had never done so with any of his creative writing before, and he hasn’t done so since, as far as I can see. Ravi was a book person. Online publishing did not mean much to him. If you Google him, this is the only open-access story or poem by him that you will be able to find. I think he wanted someone in particular to read it. Though sometimes I wonder.

He called the story “A State of Niceness”; it was narrated in the third person. The version that I have copied here is taken from that online edition.

But it was difficult to locate when I wanted to find it for inclusion in this account. I got a number of hits when I Googled “A State of Niceness.” I had always considered it a brilliant title for a story set in Denmark. But, obviously, Ravi and I were not the only people to think so.

So much for originality!

I hit upon another story—published in print in several places but not accessible online—with exactly the same title. By a strange coincidence, this story is also by an Indian writer—a chap called Khair—who had lived in Denmark some years ago. I could not find a copy of Khair’s story. I do not know if it shares anything with Ravi’s story of the same title. Anyway, it is Ravi’s story that concerns us, and that is the story I have copied in the next chapter.

The wipers made a slight sucking noise that Ravi felt at the back of his head. Maybe they made the noise only in his head. Surely that was the case: how could he possibly hear the sound of wipers brushing away the relentless autumn drizzle in a car that was hermetically sealed against the outside? It is something he never got used to: these sealed cars; windows up, always. No draft except the smooth artificial airflow of the air conditioner. Just warm enough. A smell like that in a room closed for too long, like a prison room, the smell of staleness deodorized to a nicety. But it persisted. Ravi smelled it in all such cars, Fords, Mercedes, Chryslers, cars so different from those, even when imported, that he had driven, windows down, wind ruffling his hair, in India.

A wall covered with Virginia creeper flashed past; it was blood red now. Autumn had entered the short phase, a few weeks between drizzle and barrenness, when an explosion of colors redeems the death to follow. But he was insulated against even that.

The car smelled of a stuffy niceness. Or did it? He could see his parents-in-law, both schoolteachers, both extremely nice people, sitting up front. His father-in-law, reasonable, sane, grizzled blond hair now gone a steely grey, was driving. His mother-in-law, reasonable, sane, blond hair still kept blond with the help of various lotions and dyes, was leafing through a sales catalogue. They obviously could not smell the stale niceness that pervaded the car. Ravi wished he could lower the windows or get out for a quick breath. But it was drizzling outside, and cold. It would be strange if he lowered the window. It wouldn’t sound nice if he said he wanted to get out and breathe. Shout. He had been conscripted into niceness by his decision to stay in this country, his decision to marry here two years ago.

He closed his eyes and imagined his wife cycling to meet them. She was returning from her singing classes: she now taught singing in an adult education university, while she continued with her post-doc. Her parents, still living in the village near Aalborg where she had grown up, were passing through the city and had invited them out for dinner. Dinner at six. Sharp. That was another of the things Ravi had to get used to.

In his mind, he could see her cycling, wearing her smart brown raincoat, focused—as always—on what she was doing, busy, busy, busy. Her golden blonde hair was tied into a neat orderly bun. She had been less focused once, she had claimed, but then that period, if it ever existed, was before Ravi had met her. She was not doing a PhD in musicology then, let alone a post-doc; she had even had a breakdown of some mysterious sort. Ravi could not imagine her breaking down now: she was always so much in control. He wished he had known her then. Then, when she had spent a couple of years dabbling in the humanities, a relationship to time and degrees that Ravi, coming from a country where careers were aborted by a single lost month, would have failed to understand if he himself had not come from what his Maoist friends in India liked to call the filthy rich.