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

But even then, at the time when she was dabbling in the humanities, Ravi already had a career as a journalist in India. After an initial hesitation, which had lasted for almost two years, he had quit his job, spent a year in USA and then moved to this country to do a PhD in history. He had started off, like any other immigrant in West Europe, by earning extra money doing odd jobs, mostly menial work that could be performed by those who did not speak the language. His PhD had progressed slowly. He had finally finished it, though, and was now teaching in a high school. He felt he had drifted into something to which he was largely superfluous. This controlled world, the universe of his married life, this orderly state of niceness all around him, his own inability to be rude.

They must have SMS-ed or synchronized their watches. They had just parked the car and walked to the entrance of the restaurant when Lena, his wife of the past two years, cycled up and joined them. The restaurant was in a dour, late-nineteenth-century building, grey and solid. It looked more like an office building than a restaurant. But it was, Ravi knew, an expensive place, the sort of place frequented only by those who were in the know.

Past the flanking columns of the door, engraved into half-pillars, there was suddenly a darkly red-carpeted, sumptuous world. There were rows of coats, overcoats and jackets. A low, diffuse light burned overhead. To the right was the door to the hall of the restaurant, up three small steps. It exuded warmth.

Ravi could not follow his in-laws and Lena through the door into the restaurant because he was the last one in the row, and when he hung up his jacket, first Lena’s jacket and then her mother’s coat fell off the hooks on which they had been precariously and hurriedly placed. By the time Ravi had hung the jacket and the coat back on the pegs, Lena and her parents had entered the restaurant and disappeared in its artificial candle-lit gloaming.

Inside, at the reception counter, Ravi was stopped by a very Scandinavian-looking waiter—tall, broad, blond, even teeth cared for by state-subsidized dentistry from kindergarten onwards—who looked at him with some surprise. When Ravi’s eyes got used to the gloom and began to register the other guests (almost all the tables appeared to be occupied), he could understand the surprise in the waiter’s eyes: Ravi was perhaps the only dark person in the hall. I am meeting friends here, Ravi told the waiter and walked in. The waiter did not look convinced and might have intercepted Ravi, but at that moment some elderly ladies congesting a table beckoned for attention. The waiter moved in their direction with a dubious glance at Ravi.

Ravi was in a hall of wooden paneling and rich dark furniture. There were plain white tablecloths, thin elegant candle-stands, maroon or dark-green curtains. Everything was subdued and affluent, with the affluence of those who do not have to demonstrate their wealth or taste. It did not appear to be a particularly large hall to Ravi, but even then he could not spot Lena or her parents. They seemed to have disappeared, swallowed into this Aladdin’s cave of taste. They fitted into its careful order so well that Ravi could not discover them anywhere.

Walking about in the murky light, Ravi felt odd. He felt he stood out: was it due to his consciousness of the difference of his skin or the difference of his activity in this place? He was the only person who appeared to be looking, and people who look around always seem a trifle lost. All the others were firmly ensconced in their places; they looked like they belonged there and when they moved they had a definite goal: the restroom, the door, the counter. The waiters moved about with just as much assurance and certainty. Ravi wavered in their midst, talking a half-step in one direction and a step in another, looking.

Then suddenly he caught sight of Lena. He knew she was not allowing herself to look for him; he knew that the orderly rules of this place required such control from her and, as always, she was going to exercise full control. The room appeared to have changed. It had opened up. It was more cavernous and much larger than it had appeared at first. For the first time Ravi realized that he could not tell where the hall ended. It stretched in front of him, rows and rows of polished tables, ironed tablecloths, people pouring wine, consuming dishes, conversing in low tones, politely.

There was something like a huge bowl further up, with ramps leading up to it from four directions. The bowl appeared at least a story high. He realized, with no sense of shock, that it was a salad bowl, with other small bowls ranged around it: great cornucopias full of fruit and salad. He had glimpsed Lena walking calmly towards it, along one of the ramps, heading for one of the platforms from which people helped themselves to the salad.

He needed to get out of the shadows of the section where he was standing. He needed to catch her attention, though she was not looking around for him. She did not look around too much for him anymore. He suspected that her love for him, which she claimed was more than anything she had ever felt for anyone else, had its own place in her orderly life; one only looks around for things that have been misplaced.

Ravi realized that the section where he stood was a raised platform. The stairs were some way off. He could not reach them without losing sight of Lena. So he braced himself and, knowing it would draw eyes to him, jumped down from the platform to a lower level, a hop of three feet or less. All the diners around him turned and looked, precisely but briefly, perhaps even more briefly when they realized what he was, as if that explained his lack of etiquette, his jump.

But the jolt of the jump and the eyes turning to him had momentarily disoriented Ravi, and when he looked up, he could not spot Lena again. He stopped a passing waiter to enquire, but the waiter gave him a blank look and moved on.

Ravi was reminded of the lack that had crept into his relationship over the weeks. Or perhaps it had always been there; he had just become more sensitive to it in recent weeks. He missed the ordinariness of jerky gestures, the generosity of disorder: their relationship had always been too smooth, too fluent for him; things had fallen into place too easily.

This craving for clumsy, vulnerable things: the potted flower in the wrong corner, the striped curtain with a tear, the blackened pot simmering in the kitchen, the novel on the sofa, the crumbs of toast on the table, the voice raised in indecorous and joyous greeting, a spontaneous unpremeditated gesture. How easily Lena could have extended these to him, how steadfastly she refused to do so. Not out of cruelty or lack of love but because she took the normality of order and control for granted. She had grown up in a nice world. She had not had to constantly gather up fragments of the ordinary, the daily, in newly broken settings.

He felt it was like that with almost all of them, despite their concern, despite the niceness. And it was buttressed by a belief that, after all, they lived in the best of worlds—and any of his losses were amply compensated. The losses had to be acknowledged at times, but only at a hidden personal level, never as a matter of the world, a flaw that increasingly appeared structural to him, a way of life. What difference could even his rich childhood make to this structural flaw in the world? Never here, never with Lena, he feared, would there ever be a public acknowledgment of the right of loss, pain, disorder to be and to be freely expressed. It was also simply taken for granted that coming from where he did, being what he was—westernized, professional, irreligious—it was natural for him to seek to be here. And, as such, he felt, it was always him seeking (and often not finding); it was always he who had to move around, make space, look, ask, hold.