How to Fight Islamist Terror from the Missionary Position (12 page)

It strikes me that I am probably letting my current state of knowledge influence my narrative of those weeks to some extent.

But not entirely, let me assure you. I might not have noticed that Karim was going through a period of anxiety and restlessness, perhaps linked to those mysterious phone calls and disappearances. It might be that I noticed this about Karim only a bit later, perhaps as late as the Friday Quran session in which I had to intervene. But the unhappiness of Claus was quite obvious to all of us even then. He had lost his bounce. He dragged his feet up and down the stairs. He even forgot to greet us with his trademark “sob kuch teek-taak, na?”

It all came to a head a few days after Ravi got back. I could have ignored Karim’s obvious irritation at Claus—he frowned every time the name cropped up in our conversations—but the aunties in Ravi would not be silenced. The glory of Lena’s love had dazzled them for a while, but nothing could muzzle them for good. Soon they were busy working on Karim, mining for information. Karim was rocky territory. He was difficult to penetrate. But the aunties in Ravi had various tricks up their sleeves. Just when, after a few sallies, I thought they had given up, Ravi came up with the right approach. I am sure he still had belief in words as the key to all locks in those days: he must have been dying of curiosity by then, for it was a wild gambit.

Over dinner one night, as Ravi ladled out the shahi daal and matar paneer that he had painstakingly cooked, he said to Karim,

“You see, Karim Bhai, there might be rumors.”

Karim was too busy relishing the food to fully comprehend; he loved Ravi’s cooking. He nodded, half-comprehending.

Ravi continued, matter-of-fact, as if he was discussing the weather, “Rumors, Karim Bhai. You see, people might think that Claus is unhappy because you and Pernille are having an affair, and that this is the reason why you and Claus do not get along any longer.”

Karim dropped his spoon with a clatter. He always ate rice with a spoon.

“That is not true, Ravi Bhai!” he exclaimed. “How can you believe it?”

“Well, Karim Bhai,” said Ravi, still as casual as ever, “you know people want answers and explanations, and you do not give them even to your friends…”

Karim Bhai slapped himself on his cheeks. This was the second time that I witnessed this traditional and theatrical act of contrition. Both times, I was surprised by the loud gesture; Karim was not a dramatic person, ordinarily.

“How can you say that, Ravi Bhai!” he muttered, his face a flaming red. I felt sorry for the guy; Ravi had been crueler than he was aware. Karim’s Allah was not a very forgiving one. Surely Karim was wondering if Allah’s angels trafficked in rumors too.

Karim turned to me and appealed to my estimate of his good character.

“You would not believe something like that?” he asked me. “Pernille is like a sister to me.”

I shrugged. There were times when Karim’s rigid morality, his conviction that Allah had personally penciled the flowchart of his life, made me feel cruel towards him. On such occasions, I wanted to shake him up as badly as Ravi claimed that he wanted to shake up the ordinary Dane.

Karim turned back to address Ravi, who was tucking innocently into the repast. Ravi ate Indian food only with his fingers.

“The Holy Prophet, peace be upon him, warned against talking behind people’s backs. I do not like to gossip, Ravi Bhai,” said Karim.

“Sure,” replied Ravi, munching. “Sure. But others do.”

“Not that it is something I cannot tell you,” Karim continued, after a moment of hesitation. “Pernille and Claus have spoken about it to their friends and family.”

Ravi continued eating nonchalantly, though I could sense the aunts in him straining at their leashes.

Karim hesitated for a few seconds more, drawing whorls in his rice with his spoon. Then he put the spoon aside, carefully this time. He lowered his eyes to his plate and disclosed the secret.

“You see,” he said, gazing intently at his plate, for he was too embarrassed to talk about such matters while looking at us. Perhaps his Allah had injunctions about that too: an ayat or surah announcing that the correct way to gossip is to look intently into a plate of whorled rice and curry. “You see,” he continued, “Claus has told Pernille that he wants a divorce. Pernille thinks he is having an affair, that he wants to leave her for another woman. She says she will never forgive him for that. Claus denies it; he says there is no other woman in his life.”

“What do you think, Karim Bhai?” Ravi asked him.

“I think Claus is lying. I do not understand how he can do such a thing. I thought he was a decent man,” replied Karim, shaking his head.

The matter took a further turn on a night when Karim had been called away by one of his mysterious phone calls. I recall it was a phone call, not one of his usual night shifts. I had picked up the phone. There had been a woman at the other end. The same voice. She had asked for Karim. As I knew she had trouble understanding my Danish, I had simply beckoned to Karim and handed him the receiver. He had spoken into it in monosyllables and muffled tones. He had left almost immediately, telling us that he was being called away on urgent business and would not be home the next two or three nights.

It was on the second night that Great Claus rang the bell of our flat. It was late. I had already put on my night clothes, and Ravi was lounging in the kitchen, TV switched on. He was probably whispering sweet nothings and translated poetry to Lena on his mobile, his almost-complete thesis languishing on the screen of his laptop.

We should have known that something was wrong, because Claus rang the bell. He was obviously too perturbed to knock, as he always did.

Ravi shouted to me to ignore the bell; we did not expect it would be Claus. But I went to the door anyway. Ravi was perhaps the only person in the world who could imagine that a shouted injunction not to answer the door, clearly audible on the other side, would serve its purpose. I was surprised to find Claus standing outside, in his slippers.

“Can I come in?” he asked sheepishly. “I need to borrow your phone.”

Great Claus went directly to the phone in the lobby and pressed the numbers. He called Little Claus. It was difficult not to overhear or get the gist of the conversation between them; it lasted for at least ten minutes. It turned out that Pernille had kicked Great Claus out of their flat. She had done it with such determination that he had not had the time to put on his shoes or pick up his mobile or car keys. He was afraid of making her angrier by going back and asking for them. Instead, he phoned Little Claus from our flat to ask if he could sleep over. Little Claus agreed to pick him up.

Ravi had already brewed coffee in the kitchen by the time Claus finished his phone conversation and joined us.

Claus looked at us and shrugged, slumping into a chair. He knew we had overheard. He did not have to explain the situation. Perhaps he was even under the impression that Karim had told us more than he had.

Ravi brought him a mug.

“Shit happens,” Claus said. He must have felt he had to say something.

Ravi turned a chair around and straddled it, joining us at the kitchen table.

“Shit happens,” he agreed, “but sometimes we make it happen, Claus.”

I was surprised that Ravi had decided to involve himself in the matter. He seldom took a stand on personal issues. Perhaps it was his relationship with Lena that made him care more about such stuff.

Claus did not say anything.

Ravi continued. “I think you should tell her, Claus,” he said.

“Tell whom?” Claus either pretended not to understand, or he was too confused to focus.

“Your wife, Pernille.” Ravi added, “You should give her a reason.”

When Claus did not respond, Ravi continued: “You know your culture, Claus; it is a reasonable society we live in here in Denmark. How can you leave Pernille without giving her a reason?”

I looked at Ravi. In the past, a statement like this from him would have dripped with irony and sarcasm. But he was sincere that night. He meant it. Ravi was never flippant when faced with genuine confusion or pain—unless it was his own. He leaned on the back rest of the chair, facing Claus. “You have to see it from Pernille’s perspective, Claus. You two have been together for years; you seem to share so much. Dammit, man, how many couples do you know who would agree to eat dinner under a Michael Kvium painting?”

Even Claus had to smile—wanly—at that.

“Now, suddenly, you want to leave her. Of course she wants to know the reason.”

“It is not sudden,” Claus mumbled. “We have discussed this for months, ever since the girls moved out…”

“That doesn’t make it easier for her, Claus. She still wants a reason. If you do not give her one, she has to imagine what it might be. It would be kinder to confess that you are leaving her for another woman…”

“I am not leaving her for any woman,” Claus interrupted decisively.

“Tell her the truth then. Whatever it might be.”

“What if the truth is harder on her?”

“Believe me, Claus. It will be kinder than to leave her guessing. If you cannot tell her, get some friend to do so. Karim Bhai, for instance…”

To our surprise, Claus burst out laughing.

“No.” He chuckled, actual tears of laughter in his eyes. “No, no… I can’t see good old Karim telling her this…”

But then he collected himself. “I will think about what you said, Ravi,” he promised. We started talking about other things.

Little Claus arrived within half an hour. He looked flustered.

The two friends hugged as if they were meeting after years. Then they left silently. We heard their footsteps going down the staircase until the main door closed and the silence surged back. It was late: the night was all wrapped up in itself. The twin flat upstairs was silent too.

LOUDLY SING, CUCKOO

Summer had partly gagged Ravi’s criticism of the Danish weather in the past too. The most he could say was that you had to be attentive to derive the benefits of the Danish summer: you might blink, and it would be over. But the two weeks to two months that it usually lasts are, even he had to concede in the past, undoubtedly glorious. The sun is warm and the breeze still on the cooler side. The parks and countryside are dotted with yellow and white lilies, purple bellflowers, marigolds and a dozen other blooms I could not identify but Ravi could. The grass gets so uniformly and deeply green that, Ravi claimed, he was physically repelled by the color in his second summer in the land and almost threw up. It was too green, yaar; a bit like watching an obese man stuffing himself in a crowd of anorexics.

This summer, though, basking in the light of two Danish suns, he did not make too many quips like that one. Actually, on the train from Copenhagen to Elsinore that month, he relented long enough to praise the view. The sea rippled on one side, like a piece of parchment, crumpled and then carefully smoothened out, unbelievably blue.

The trip to Elsinore was Ravi’s idea. Inevitably. Those days he was always coming up with ideas for visits and tours, most of which never bore fruit. Not all of us shared his disregard for schedules or his penchant for sudden projects and trips. This one we did take up, mostly because—for some reason—neither Lena nor I had been to the Kronborg castle in Elsinore. Set to patrol the sound between Sweden and Denmark—the cannons pointing at the sea had been good investment for centuries, ensuring toll collection by whoever controlled the castle—and built and destroyed a few times in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Kronborg’s claim to fame probably rests on the fact that Shakespeare made it Hamlet’s castle.

“You have to hand it to Old Sheikh Pir,” commented Ravi, as we lay down—a pause before descending into the dungeons—on one of the green slopes around the castle. Flocks of cloud scudded across the sky; seagulls drifted on invisible currents.

“Some cheek the guy had! He steals a story from someone, gets the facts mixed up and the time wrong, transports a prince from Jutland all the way to here and hatches a bloody masterpiece out of it. But, of course, he did not have you Eng Lit types telling him what to do in those days…”

Ravi was always good company; there is no doubt about it. Even Ms. Marx, who was not much given to flippant and dismissive remarks, would condescend to smile at some of his statements. But I have never seen anyone hang on his words and strive to match their brilliance as much as Lena. During that trip I wondered whether she did not, at times, feel a bit tired, that she did not sometimes feel that she had to let go, relax, not be so brilliant and poised all the time. Why didn’t I feel that about Ravi? Why did I feel that for him it wasn’t a strain? Was it because he allowed himself those moments of weakness, blankness and nonsense that Lena never revealed?

In the dungeons below, he paused in front of the muscular statue of Holger the Dane, his Viking head resting on the hilt of his sword. “Look!” Ravi proclaimed to Lena. “The Danish national hero: dreamed up by a Frenchman, fought all his life for the Germans, came back to Denmark and, guess what, immediately fell asleep forever.”

Lena laughed. Even in the dark, rough, echoing dungeons, her laughter sounded like something that belonged in a room of china and tablecloths, its windows long and closed, its gossamer curtains slightly ruffled by the draft.

On the way back from Elsinore, we stopped for a couple of days in Copenhagen. As Copenhagen was known territory for all of us, we did not do much sightseeing, preferring to walk around and visit friends. Ravi did get us to go on one of those tourist walks, the one that takes you along the coast and past the Little Mermaid because, he claimed, he had failed to notice the mermaid statue when he last did the walk. “It’s so bloody little,” he offered as an explanation.

On our last night in Copenhagen, we did the customary pub crawl and ended up in a pub we had not been to earlier, well after midnight. Even as we ordered drinks at the bar—sticky with spilled beer—we realized that this was not the sort of place we would have chosen to come to. It was full of young and middle-aged men—and almost no women—in various stages of drunkenness: Lena and Ms. Marx turned every pair of male eyes in the room. But it was too late; we were not even sure if other places were open this late.