How to Fight Islamist Terror from the Missionary Position (21 page)

Unlike Ravi, I dream often and incoherently. I sometimes remember the shards and pieces of my dreams beyond those seconds of fleeting lucidity that divide sleep from wakefulness but dissolve in the glare of day. This dream too slipped from my memory, and returned only yesterday—triggered perhaps by Ravi’s email or by a glimpse of Karim. I need to talk about both.

I had the dream the night Ravi left; I’d accompanied him to Copenhagen. We had friends there, and it seemed a good idea to hit the town in order to see him off. As Ravi’s flight to Amsterdam left at six in the morning, we had less than three hours of sleep after our evening out with friends. Around four we took a taxi to the airport; we were too bleary-eyed to take the tube or the bus, as we had originally intended. We left as quietly as we could, for we did not want to wake up the hung-over friends at whose place we had slept. We did not say much in the taxi either, or at the airport. After checking in, Ravi gripped me by the elbow and took the escalator into the security clearance sections of Kastrup.

I hung around, walking about the orderly, compact airport, and then buying myself an elaborate and slow breakfast. Around nine, I caught a train back to Copenhagen’s central station and from there, a little later, to Århus. It was a bit after three when I reached Århus. It was a Sunday; the town was largely deserted. A bit of snow had fallen. The parked cars and cycles looked like they had been dusted with talcum powder. I walked down the pedestrian street, stopping to have a shawarma sandwich and a coke at a small Turkish eatery; a bitter wind was blowing from the sea, chilly with the ice of the North. I felt the kind of exhaustion, exacerbated by lack of rest and drinking the night before, which demands but does not permit sleep.

The early winter night had fallen, darkening the streets, when I finally reached the small, freshly painted two-room university apartment I had rented at the campus after moving out of Karim’s flat. I tried to read a book but could not concentrate. I opened a bottle of red wine but had little desire to drink. Around eight, without warning, sleep descended on me in a swarm of tiredness, with the sensation of a flock of crow-like birds, of a dark cloud falling from the sky, and I just managed to reach the bed before falling asleep. I do not recall the night. And when I woke up, a bit too early next morning, the dream too had misted in my memory. It came back only yesterday, with Ravi’s email and a disturbing glimpse of Karim: two living ghosts who continue to haunt me, it seems. I think I saw Karim Bhai’s taxi yesterday. I was returning from Ms. Marx’s place; her son is with her this week and I always feel odd sleeping over when he is home, though she has no objection to it. It was not too late, perhaps a bit after ten at night. The roads were crowded with young people—improbably dressed, especially the women in their stockings and tights, despite the cold—and I wanted to escape the forced clockwork bonhomie. Ravi and his desperation to live without being lost in habit was on my mind. I walked briskly to a taxi stand and spotted what I thought was Karim’s cab parked there. I dodged into another street. Urbanity provides us with so many ways to avoid people. Isn’t that what distinguishes it from traditional rural life, where the onus, perhaps because it was difficult and rare, was more on greeting people?

I walked half a kilometer to another stand, wondering why I had avoided Karim. Was I ashamed of facing him again? Perhaps. But I think it was more than that. I was ashamed of facing him and not being able to apologize fully. I felt we had done him an injury by preferring our suspicions—and I was more responsible for this than Ravi—to the daily evidence that he had provided of courtesy and decency within the limits of his humanity. But it wasn’t even that: not apology, which was neither demanded nor required, but honest conversation was impossible now.

How could I talk to him—I more than Ravi—again? It is, after all, Karim’s kind of religion that is used by fundamentalists of a different sort to condone the murder of innocent passers-by, the incitement of young men and women to commit acts whose brutal consequences they are hardly aware of at times. It is his kind of literal reading of the Quran that is used by Islamists to justify beheadings or the veiling of women, and, strangely, by those who hate Islam to dismiss an entire and complex tradition. It is the same Towhid—so precious to Karim—that jihadists use to espouse an intolerance so extreme, an order so narrow that only someone like Ravi, with his insistence on the anti-universalism of fascism, could distinguish it from fascism. How could I have spoken with a clean heart to Karim Bhai? Too much stood between him and me, and there was no Ravi—with his mocking belief in all that is best in us—to bridge the chasm now.

Guilt, you say? No, guilt is too glib a word, too simple—the sort of answer demanded of, and sometimes given by, novelists. Ravi might have felt some guilt for giving in to what, I suspect, he finally considered my fears for my own safety rather than his own opinion of Karim Bhai. But guilt is not what I felt, or not mainly. After all, I had not turned Karim over for interrogation by the Pakistani or Indian police, or sent him to Abu Ghraib! All I had condemned him to was relentless questioning, over cups of coffee perhaps, by orderly Danish investigators, no matter how prejudiced—questioning that, I am sure, would have come his way in any case, given his name and location. Think of the “Norway attacks” last year and the confidence of Danish journalists in attributing them to Islamists: what kind of people do you think would have been picked up for questioning if it had not been discovered that the perpetrator was a light-eyed, light-skinned Norwegian? No, guilt is not the word.

What I felt was the impossibility of conversation, as if I would have to shout across a Niagara of noise to Karim Bhai and what would come across, if anything, would not be the words I meant or the words he uttered but a sort of crude pantomime. It was not that we did not wish to talk. But the Niagara of suspicion and prejudice and brashness cascading around us made honest conversation impossible between the two of us.

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.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

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.