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

No wonder I took advantage of the many avenues of urbanity to shirk facing Karim. And perhaps it was this conscious decision to avoid Karim which returned from my unconscious that dream I had the night Ravi left for India.

I was in Mumbai airport in my dream. I had just landed there with Ravi. Mumbai airport was a mishmash of every airport in the world that I had ever traversed: Karachi, Islamabad, Lahore, Copenhagen, Stansted, Heathrow, Paris, Munich, Moscow, Billund and half a dozen others. This was inevitable. I had never been to Mumbai: my only trip to India had been via Delhi. But despite the mishmash and its ever-changing chameleon features, I knew this airport to be Mumbai.

Ravi had a smart little backpack: he always traveled light. I was bowed down with bulky hand baggage and dragging a huge suitcase whose wheels squeaked at regular intervals. Consequently, Ravi often left me behind and then had to wait for me to catch up.

We were heading out of the arrivals section of the airport. A small boy went past us, dragging a striped towel, and—with the sudden critical lucidity of dreams—I recognized the boy as walking out of my favorite comic strip, Peanuts , though he also seemed familiar in some other vague manner. He made me notice something in my dream. It appeared that everyone else, like the boy, was heading the other way; and when Ravi stopped, I asked him if we were going in the right direction. He nodded and we kept walking, the suitcase emitting piercing squeaks which almost woke me up.

Ravi was right. We came within sight of the exit. There were the usual armed policemen next to it. There was the usual crowd outside, and noise spilling like sunshine. People were jostling each other, eager for passengers to come out; there were taxi drivers, relatives with children, acolytes carrying garlands waiting for some godman, politician, cricketer or film star, and dozens of people holding name placards, some held high on sticks. It could have been Delhi or Karachi, but I knew it was Mumbai.

Ravi had left me behind again. I stopped. He turned around and peered at me quizzically, an eyebrow raised ironically, as he sometimes did.

Look, I said to him and pointed to the exit, which had suddenly come closer. Outside, the taxi drivers, relatives, acolytes, tourist guides, placard-bearers had metamorphosed into a mob.

They were still staying in place, behind the metal barricades. But the placards had changed into weapons: trishuls, spears, lathis, crescent-shaped swords. It was the same noise, though, spilling around us like the brilliant sunshine outside. All these people were still waiting to receive us, it appeared. Some were even smiling. But now, in place of placards, they were waving weapons and flags: green flags, saffron flags, white flags.

Ravi looked at the mob and turned back to me. He shrugged his shoulders and made a gesture for me to follow him. But I stood where I was. He looked again at me, the same quizzical look, eyebrow raised. I shook my head.

Ravi laughed. He had a clear, hearty laugh. The airport rang with it in my dream. Then, still laughing, he walked into the crowd of weapons raised to greet him, the noise and sunshine that swallowed him in a split second.

I looked around and realized that I was not in Mumbai airport after all. I was in a car, a Hyundai i10 parked on Kastelsvej, holding a small plastic container. On the container was a label with a name written on it which I could not read: the name never ended no matter how much I revolved the container. I knew I did not have the time to keep revolving the container. I had to keep the engine running, waiting for my chance. I knew I had to be quick. Dawn was about to break. A sliver of sunshine would pierce the overcast sky and fall on the wet, grey earth. I had to be fast. I had to fill my plastic container with the meager sunshine that would penetrate the clouds, fall fleetingly on the ground. I doubted it would be sufficient. I feared it would never be sufficient.

I remember thinking in my dream, even as I woke up feeling thirsty, that it is not just manufacturers of plastic containers who overestimate the capacity of man.

Thanks are due to Isabelle Petiot, for her generous understanding and feedback; to Sébastien Doubinsky, Indra Sinha, Matt Bialer, Mita Kapur, Caspian Dennis, V.K. Karthika, Ellen Dengel-Janic, Maria Beville, Aamer Hussein, Sharmilla Beezmohun, Renuka Chatterjee, Shashi Tharoor, Mohsin Hamid, Nicole Angeloro, Shantanu Ray Chaudhuri, Saugata Mukherjee, Charlotte Day, Etgar Keret, Jim Hicks, Michel Moushabeck, Hilary Plum, Zac O’Yeah and Ole Birk Laursen for feedback and faith; to Jamal Bhai, Dominic, Matthias, Christopher, Joe and Simon for coffee and conversation; to Hana Hasanbegovic, Jane L. Didriksen and Afsir Mama for a word each in three different languages; and to a host of “Eng Lit” writers, mostly dead, for necessary echoes, sometimes even duly acknowledged.

First American edition published in 2014 by

INTERLINK BOOKS

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Copyright © Tabish Khair 2012, 2014

Originally published by HarperCollins India, 2012

Cover image copyright © Navarone | Dreamstime.com

Cover design by Julian D. Ramirez

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ISBN 978-1-56656-946-0 (hb)

ISBN 978-1-56656-970-5 (pb)

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Khair, Tabish.

How to Fight Islamist Terror from the Missionary Position / by Tabish Khair. — First edition.

pages cm

ISBN 978-1-56656-970-5

1. Single men—Fiction. 2. Life change events—Fiction. 3. Denmark—Fiction. 4. Satire. I. Title.

PR9499.3.K427H69 2013

823'.92—dc23

2013023658

Printed and bound in the United States of America

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

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