How to Fight Islamist Terror from the Missionary Position (6 page)

He had started working on the history of fascism and Nazism in Denmark. He could be acerbic about it: “They tell you the moment you set foot here that they managed to smuggle all the Jews out of Denmark when the Nazis wanted to round them up. They forget to mention that it was a German officer who leaked the Nazis’ plans to the Danish resistance, which was largely communist and outlawed by the Danish government. They forget to tell you that the only people, apart from the poor fucking Germans, to form a full SS regiment were the good blue-eyed Danes!”

But the thesis, like most PhDs, had changed direction over the years. Now it was a more theoretical study in which, Ravi claimed, he was tracing the links between fascism and North European notions of order. “Fascism,” he would declaim over a few drinks, “is above all the ideology of order.”

“Exclusive order, you mean?” I had once queried.

“There is no such thing, bastard,” he had replied. “You either have order or you have shades of disorder. All order is essentially exclusive; it does not have degrees, like disorder. You can have order only by eliminating. Elimination is its essence. All order has genocide hidden in its belly. Give it nine months and it will give birth, under clement conditions of course, to a holocaust.”

It was difficult to tell with Ravi’s theories. The ones that he proffered seriously could be the ones he held lightly, or vice versa. But the promise of spring in April was to test one of Ravi’s most commonly espoused theories, about plain women. Was Ravi’s theory falsifiable? Would it have satisfied Popper?

Because it was to be falsified soon. This is how it happened.

We had been out on our third, and last, double date. This time it appeared to be going well. We had met the women in Under Masken. My date was a German exchange scholar in biology, an attractive woman in her thirties. But the moment we shook hands and sat down, both of us knew that we would not go to bed with each other. We liked each other, it was not that. There was something else, something you come to recognize with time and experience—of which there was sufficient on both sides. You meet someone on a date, you like her, she likes you, and what you feel is a friendship brewing, not romance. When you are young or desperate, you ignore that feeling and spoil what could have been a beautiful friendship. But my date and I were neither too young nor too desperate; we recognized the feeling in each other and we respected it. It led to a pleasant evening of conversation. Neither of us contemplated taking it any further. After about half an hour in Under Masken, we left for another place, as my German date was not a smoker and did not like the smoky atmosphere of the pub.

We left Ravi with his date, a rather pretty—though evidently plain in Ravi’s eyes—Turkish woman, who had grown up in Denmark. They appeared to be conversing intently in Danish. Unlike me, Ravi, thanks partly to his prior knowledge of German, spoke the language with near-native fluency. He waved perfunctorily at us when we left. But an hour later, I got a
SMS
from him: “Collimate Unibar when done with your Deutsch.
” I was not “done with my Deutsch” until after ten, and as mobiles often do not function in the basement where Unibar is tucked away—to avoid affronting the lurking, invisible Calvinist in Danes, Ravi always claimed—I decided to pop in and check on my way back to Karim Bhai’s flat. Ravi was not there. He was not in Karim Bhai’s flat either. By midnight, when I went to bed, he had still not returned. I think I heard him return at three or four that night.

Karim Bhai had left for his shift when I woke up around nine and started brewing coffee. Karim Bhai only drank tea, made the Indian way with tea leaves, water, milk, sugar and a dash of cinnamon boiled together in a pan, so the coffee machine was for our use. This was lucky for us, as Karim Bhai sometimes left very early and the coffee machine made a hell of a noise.

Perhaps it was the noise that woke Ravi. Or perhaps he had already been awake, for he came out looking less bleary-eyed than he usually did in the mornings.

“Toast?” I asked him, as he poured himself a cup of coffee.

He shook his head and sat down opposite me at the small kitchen table, cupping his mug and looking into it.

“Hangover?” I asked.

He shook his head again, gazing intently into his future in the coffee cup.

“When did you come in?”

“Around three, I think.”

“What happened?” I asked. “You weren’t at Unibar.”

“I was there until about ten. I fell in with some people I know, PhD students and suchlike.”

“I reached the place a bit later,” I explained. I wanted to add “you could have
SMS
-ed.” But that sounded like needless nagging, the sort of thing one says to a partner, not to a friend.

Ravi kept staring into his cup.

Then he looked up and his face creased into a brilliant smile.

“You know, bastard, I think I fell in love,” he said, and shook his head in wonderment.

Ravi explained that his date with the Turkish woman had been promising, despite the fact that she spoke almost entirely in slang, until she started complaining about immigrants. The core of her complaint was that immigrant men make gross passes at Danish women. Ravi, the Defender of Minorities of All Ilk, could not let that go unchallenged. He argued that all heteromen show interest in women, and many men make passes; the reason why immigrant men become more obvious in a place like Denmark has to do with a certain failure to read signals on all sides. “I can show my interest in Danish women without them getting offended because, thanks to my colonial brainwashing, I do it the way it is sanctioned in Danish society,” he claimed, and proceeded to illustrate this with examples. She countered with examples. He deconstructed her examples with increasing relish. She looked irritated. Ravi finally told her to read Fanon, try not to speak so much slang, as she did not need to prove how “well-integrated” she was, and left.

“I don’t know what is worse,” he said to me, sipping his coffee, “a white woman trying to be colorful or a colored woman trying to be white!”

That was when he had headed for Unibar, where he met a group of PhD students and junior teachers who had been attending a cross-disciplinary conference—“Music and Literature: National Notes, Global Resonances”—and had ended up in the bar too. He had been having a nice time, planning to hang on until I joined him.

“But then,” he said, looking at me with a crooked smile, “she walked in.”

“Who?”

“Lena.”

Lena, spelled the Swedish way with an “a,” not an “e,” Ravi clarified, as if it was a matter of vital significance, was one of the participants at the conference. She was doing her PhD in musicology but she was also a professional singer, the lead voice in a local jazz band, and a trained opera artiste.

“Don’t laugh, bastard,” Ravi continued. “This sounds like a cliché. It is a cliché. You know, here I am, in a crowd of men and women, and she walks in. Suddenly the fucking room empties. All I see is her, and I think, where has she been all these years? And, you know, bastard, she comes up to join us and I see her look at me with her green-green eyes, just for a second, you know, just a second; it is a look that speaks to me, it speaks clearly as words; I know, I know that she is thinking exactly the same thing, that the only person she can really see in that fucking crowded room is me.”

I might have smiled if it had been anyone other than Ravi: Ravi, who did not believe in love at first sight, Ravi who did not believe in relationships that could last.

“So, what did you do, Great Casanova?” I asked. He gave me his crooked smile again.

“Not me,” he replied, “we. We hung around for twenty minutes, pretending to pay attention to the others. Then we started talking only to each other and drifted away from the table. Don’t smile, bastard: it wasn’t planned. She knew a bit about me, had even read my story in the Mishra anthology. She told me a bit about herself… We ended up walking and talking and then sitting in a café and talking a bit more until, suddenly, it was three. Both of us thought it was only around midnight. I am sorry, I would have
SMS
-ed you if I had realized how late it was getting…”

“And, and…” I encouraged him, buttering my toast.

“Nothing, bastard. She went home; I came back.”

“That is unusual for you, isn’t it, Don Juan? Expect me to believe that? I have seen you with women and women with you…”

“This is different, you vulgar Paki,” he said.

“Why?” I asked him. “Is she much too plain for your honor?”

“No, bastard,” he replied, and he meant it, “she is too fucking beautiful.”

He stroked his newly cultivated French beard thoughtfully.

At that moment, the phone rang in the lobby. I went to pick it up. It was the woman who would call on occasion and ask for Karim; I am sure it was the same woman who had not understood me the last time she had called, and had even failed at first to understand Ravi’s beautifully intoned Danish. But this time she must have understood my Danish response: Karim er på arbejde. Karim is out working. She disconnected the line immediately. I remember thinking with a smile, surely Karim fulfills his carnal needs despite his Islamic halo!

When I returned to the kitchen, Ravi refused to be drawn back to the topic of Lena. I left soon; I had an appointment with a research student and planned to spend some time after that in the library.

It was one of those days when the wet coldness of late winter turns crisp and you can glimpse the sun behind a thin screen of white clouds. Light fills the land. The bare grey trees, with just a trace of green here and there, fill with diffused sunshine. It is a great time to go out for walks, properly wrapped up, of course, for it is still a cold light that falls from the skies, and the wind, when it blows, can carry shivering tales from the ice further north.

I decided to walk back all the way from the library building to Karim’s flat. I reached it well after seven in the evening; I could see that Ravi’s sports cycle was not parked outside. Ravi was a cycling enthusiast (I wonder: Do you still cycle now, Ravi? Can you?). The only times he did not use his cycle was when there was a storm or when he had to go out with me, because I do not cycle. He often claimed that the orderly cycle lanes in Denmark were the only redeeming feature of the country’s obsession with control and order.

Inside, there was a note on the kitchen table in Ravi’s scrawl, signed with an elaborate paraph. It said: “Enjoy your solitude, O Researcher of Literary Superficialities. Karim Bhai rang to annunciate his hegira on ‘urgent business,’ may Al Qaeda plague you with nightmares, O Apostate; and I am aaf to Lundhun for a hafta or two…”

There are cheap Ryan Air flights to London from Århus’s airport as well as neighboring Billund: they usually cost less than a train ticket to Copenhagen. Ravi availed of them on a regular basis, sometimes for seminars or literary readings, and sometimes—always on the spur of the moment—to see a play or just visit friends and buy spices for his cooking. Unlike me, he did not have to teach regularly.

Karim was away for longer than usual. He was away for two nights. When he came back, he looked visibly drained. His face was paler, his short thinning hair and lush greying beard in unusual disarray. But, as always, he did not want to say anything about what he had done and where he had been.

I do not mean to make this sound as suspicious as it does when I write it down here. It is important to explain this, though I am sure my MFA-girlfriend had strictures against such explanations. In any case, I am not writing a novel. This is an account of events that you have read about. And it is necessary to explain that when Karim Bhai returned after two nights, tired and red-eyed, I did not feel suspicious then. Or not suspicious along those lines; I just suspected him of moral double standards. The darker suspicions came only later, when other events overtook us.

One evening Great Claus and Little Claus dropped by as they often did. I remember this was in the week when Ravi was away.

Karim Bhai was home by then. He bustled about the kitchen, brewing chai for his guests. The two Clauses always had tea the Indian way; I think it was one of the things that endeared them to Karim, along with their broken attempts at Urdu.

Great Claus lit his pipe. He knew that Karim Bhai, a regular smoker, would not mind. Little Claus did not smoke, but he had obviously got used to inhaling Great Claus’s fumes over the years.

Great Claus’s hands shook slightly, as if he was in a state of suppressed excitement. He recounted some tale from his hospital and then the two, old-fashioned social democrats to the core of their hearts, launched into one of their regular critiques: how, over the years, Danish governments had been cutting down on Denmark’s public health system in the name of streamlining and at the same time effectively subsidizing private hospitals.

Karim Bhai listened and nodded. He did not participate in the critique. It was then that I realized how, unlike Ravi and, to a lesser extent, myself, Karim Bhai never criticized Denmark. He listened to the criticism with a smile at times, combing his fingers thoughtfully (or craftily? That alternative struck me much later) through his flowing beard. He added a few bits of fact or asked a question. He agreed with the criticism in most cases. But he never said anything critical himself.