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

After we started seeing each other regularly—“became a couple,” in common parlance—Ms. Marx had no objection to me sleeping over and, late in the night, engaging in what Ravi once described as the pre-conjugal act. This was to be done carefully, of course, with a towel spread under us, for the easy elimination of evidence. But the first night we did so, just when the towel needed to be straightened, Ms. Marx’s son knocked on the door. It was eleven. We were under the impression that he had been asleep for close to an hour; Ms. Marx had worked hard on getting him to fall asleep, despite an obvious reluctance on his part, most of that evening.

Hvad er det nu, asked Ms. Marx, struggling to get back into her nightdress and keep irritation out of her tone.

He had had a nightmare, he claimed in a small voice.

Ms. Marx had to spend another half hour putting him to bed. When she got back, she was willing to roll out the towel again, but I dreaded another knock. I could not get rid of the image of a young boy pretending to sleep in his room, trying to avoid hearing those telltale sounds that, no matter how careful we tried to be, he could not avoid hearing in a small place, sounds that would be more disturbing to him because he could not really understand them. The pragmatic attitude that so many Danes, including Ms. Marx, have to these matters was not something I shared to such an extent. After that, we confined our love-making to periods when Ms. Marx’s son was staying with his father.

And yes, in case the image of a kitchen of bouncing pans and cascading plates still arises in your mind, let me add one further clarification: the towel stayed in place.

If Ms. Marx was disappointed in me as a Muslim, she tried not to show it. This was always a source of hilarity to Ravi, who urged various disguises of Muslimness on me for, in his words, the sake of good form.

Ravi could be very explicit in his curiosity and comments at times, though never without humor; in this too, he differed from Lena.

For instance, the evening he brought up circumcision. We had finished our dinner and were lingering in the kitchen. Karim Bhai and Ravi were smoking. I don’t think Ravi had smoked that day—he did not really like smoking—and so he had to light up before going to bed, simply to keep protesting against the Danish establishment’s anti-smoking policies on the behalf of women and the working classes.

The nicotine must have sparked some neurological circuit of needling in his labyrinthine mind, for he paused between puffs and said, “Sometimes I feel I should have introduced Ms. Marx to Karim Bhai here; he would have been less disappointing.”

Karim Bhai looked alarmed, not following the conversation but gathering that it had to do with women. I ignored Ravi. I was watching TV.

He continued, “You know, Karim Bhai, I suspect the bastard here is not even circumcised!”

This was sheer nonsense of the sort that Ravi was capable of spouting occasionally, but Karim Bhai trafficked only in sense. He looked at me, perturbed.

“Oh no, no, no,” he replied to Ravi. “All Muslims are circumcised. It is written in the Hadith.”

“I betcha this Paki turncoat ain’t!” Ravi maintained, not realizing that Karim was taking his needling seriously.

Karim Bhai turned to me for confirmation.

I gave up. I knew this would go on unless I set Karim’s mind at rest. Ravi would turn his idea into various other avenues of jocularity, unaware of the truck of Islam careening out of control in Karim’s mind. It was then that for the first time, fleetingly, I noticed a slight trace of bitterness—of disappointment, perhaps—in Ravi, which sometimes made him needle his friends. The reason was not difficult to guess. It was his brimming glass of Lena.

“Of course I am circumcised, bastard,” I replied.

“You mean, the proper way, when the barber seats five-year-old Munna on a stool, razor glinting, and says look look look a silver bird in the sky…” Ravi did not want his joke to deflate so soon.

“Know what, bastard,” I told him, “you are worse than the RSS: everyone goes to hospitals now. No one is circumcised like that anymore.”

Karim Bhai was smiling. I think he was so relieved to be assured of my Muslimness that he overcame his shyness about physical matters. “Not true,” he said to me, “I was taken to a barber, you know, silver bird and all…”

He went pink to the roots of his beard.

Let me try and be fair to Lena. I know my vision of her is clouded by the pain that I thought I detected on Ravi’s face, the hollowness in his heart that he struggled to hide and almost succeeded, those weeks when his hands were hummingbirds hovering over the flower of his mobile. To be fair, Lena is the only Dane I have known—apart from the Clauses who were always consciously “Asian” with us—who was infallibly courteous. This has to be put on record, I think.

Even Ms. Marx can be quite brusque, in a typically Danish way. I recall, when I first moved here, I had found the Danes an incredibly rude people. So had my ex-wife. I still find them rather rude. But I think I understand it a bit better now. It is not just the “unholy alliance of capitalist pragmatism and subterranean Protestantism,” as Ravi used to put it. It has to do with the myth of honesty that structures Danish society.

Look at it this way. Your Danish friend Mr. Xyzsen asks you to do something for him and, without telling him, you go out of your way to oblige. Mr. Xyzsen is happy but he does not feel obliged; he assumes that you did what you did because you too wanted to do it at that moment. Otherwise, surely, you would have refused. So when you ask Mr. Xyzsen to do something for you, he declines—because he is too busy or simply not in the mood. He is just being honest with you, because he assumes that you were being honest with him in the past. But, of course, courtesy is basically a matter of dishonesty—you hide your own inconvenience in order to be courteous and, sometimes, kind.

Lena, though, as I wrote, was always courteous and kind in company. Was she kind to Ravi? It is irrelevant; I don’t think he ever wanted kindness from her.

One night, late in that long multi-month November, as I lay on my back on the striped towel that we favored for the elimination of evidence, and Ms. Marx maneuvered marvelously atop me—her son was with his dad—the topic of Ravi and Lena came up. That is how I found out. Ms. Marx had a practical attitude to sex; she was capable of discussing anything from Norman Davies to the latest feud over the disposal of garbage among the residents of her housing co-operative until minutes before orgasm. So was I, to be honest.

That night, as she pinned the fundamentalist in me to a striped towel on her bed, she said, “You do know that your friend and Lena are not together anymore.”

My state of sensation was obviously more advanced than hers at that stage; her remark did not register.

“Um, um,” I think I replied. “Keep going, keep going…” She stopped.

That caught my attention.

“Your friend and Lena have broken up,” she said.

“Bullshit,” I replied, though actually I was not altogether surprised.

“Didn’t you know?” she asked me, showing signs of moving back into gear.

“How do you know?” I countered.

“When did you last see them together? And in any case, everyone at the university knows it is over…”

She was right, as I realized when I asked around the next day. I still do not understand why I had not noticed, though I can understand Ravi’s reluctance to mention it to me. After all, I was the only person to whom he had spoken of the depth of his passion for Lena.

To my credit, I did not ask Ravi about the break-up until, a couple of days later, he told me himself.