How to Fight Islamist Terror from the Missionary Position (3 page)

Ravi had raised his voice during this harangue, and one of the starers at the counter turned to frown at us. Ravi frowned back.

Medicine was Ravi’s weak point. He hated the field with a vengeance. He claimed it had to do with his dad, a legendary Mumbai surgeon, and the final fight that the two of them had when Ravi quit medical college in the third year and started doing a degree in the humanities. The university gold medal he got for his master’s in history had been scorned by his father. His subsequent diploma in journalism had not helped either. Or his aspiration to write a novel. Since then, they had only communicated through Ravi’s mother, though recently relations had thawed slightly. Ravi’s decision—after an abandoned career as a staff reporter and no evidence of a published novel—to do a PhD abroad (though still in history, which is what he was doing in Århus), had been more acceptable to his father.

I knew that the volume of his harangue would increase if he got started on medicine, as would his pugilistic tendency to take any objecting middle-aged man as a stand-in for his father. I steered him gently out of the pub, all four customers at the counter staring at us, and into the streets. They were probably safe now: there was a good chance our ex-dates had gone home.

When we returned to the flat that night, well after midnight, there was a note from Karim on the kitchen table. “Salaam- alai-kum. Night shift today; will be back for breakfast,” it said. Karim Bhai was very conscientious. He seldom left the flat without leaving a note for us. He kept a list of “supplies to be bought” hanging from a magnet on the fridge, and diligently crossed items out or added them in his neat handwriting. If he expected something similar from us, he bravely kept his disappointment from showing.

The next morning, I woke up expecting a call from my parents in Karachi. It was Saturday; they called every Saturday morning. I was waiting for the chirr of the phone while taking out cartons of milk and juice from the fridge and toasting bread. The coffee machine gurgled. Ravi was traversing the lobby, wrapped in a towel on his way out of the shower, and he picked up the phone when it rang. I expected him to hand it to me, but he continued talking into the receiver.

It soon became obvious that the caller was not one of my parents. It was someone doing tabligh: trying to preach the virtues of the Quran. Perhaps it was someone known to Karim. Perhaps he thought Ravi was Karim. I had heard of these phonic proselytizers, but never experienced one—and I wondered, for the person evidently spoke Urdu, if the call was not from India or Pakistan. In any case, the number was a secret one; it did not show on our phone.

Talking about the Quran was not an issue for Ravi, but the secrecy of the number perturbed the democratic Indian in him. Between questions and answers about the Quran, of which he probably knew as much as the anonymous proselytizer, Ravi kept querying him about his identity and the need to use a number that did not show.

I signaled to Ravi to cut the connection; I am expecting a call, I mouthed at him. He ignored me and continued to discuss some fine point of Quranic exegesis.

I wrenched the receiver away from him. He would have resisted but for the fact that he was still clad in a precariously knotted towel, which had to be kept in place with one hand.

“Hello, hello,” said the voice on the other end. Then it continued in chaste Urdu, “As the Quran Sharif says in its infinite wisdom…”

“Excuse me,” I said, in chaste Urdu too, “the connection is extremely bad. I cannot hear you very well.”

There was a bit of beeping. The guy evidently had a team working on the technology. Volume and audibility increased.

“Is it better now?” the anonymous proselytizer asked.

“Hello, hello,” I replied. “I cannot hear you…”

“Just a second, janaab. Don’t put down the phone.”

“Hello,” I said, “hello, hello, hello…” I put the receiver down.

The phone rang again in two seconds.

I put it down once more with a string of strangulated hellos. Ravi came out of his room, buttoning his jeans, bare-chested.

He shook his head.

“You, my friend, are the reason why the infidels are winning,” he said.

After a slow breakfast, he diligently practiced the postures of prayer that Karim Bhai was teaching him. He ignored my comment about it being symbolic compensation for the disappointments of last night.

When we finally left for the university library around noon, Karim Bhai had not returned despite his note of the previous evening.

RETROSPECTIVE MYSTERIES

By three in the afternoon, Ravi had abandoned the library building, ambitiously shaped to resemble a book from the outside, though the resemblance was more imaginary than architectural, and
SMS
-ed a rendezvous with one of his “plain” girlfriends. Ravi was a restless researcher: this did not show in his work or erudition, which was sustained by a consciously camouflaged ability to read and absorb faster than anyone else I have known. He must have been obnoxious as a school student. I would have hated going to the same class as him, for I came to my education through diligence and perseverance. Ravi tried to make light of this difference on the occasions I brought it up, pointing out the fact that while I was being taught English, Urdu and a faint smattering of French by my Jesuits in Karachi, he was being taught English, Hindi and French by his Jesuits, as well as Sanskrit, Latin, Gesrman and the piano by a succession of private tutors employed by his parents.

But it was true. Facts, fiction, languages did not flock to me, without significant effort on my part. They did to Ravi. They were like the “plain” women he dated—some of whom were plain only by the standards of a man who had grown up among Bollywood starlets. But flock to him they did, despite what Ravi called his “absolute honesty”: the fact that he made no promise of fidelity, that he actually promised infidelity and impermanence. I am a postmodern lover, he would clarify; you, bastard, are still stuck knee-deep in modernity.

When I returned to the flat that evening, there were sounds coming from Ravi’s room. The rhythm of love-making, communicated by the creaking of his bed, which soon swelled to an unrestrained crescendo of ecstasy in a male and a female voice. I was becoming familiar with these noises, and wondered what Karim Bhai thought of them. There was no sign of Karim Bhai, but I assumed he had called or met Ravi earlier on. I shut myself up in my room with one of the last volumes of my Proust.

An hour later, Ravi knocked on my door, opened it and did a fair imitation of a siren blowing. All clear, bastard, he announced. Let’s get a pizza.

Over the pizza, he asked me if Karim Bhai had come back and left again during his moments of ecstasy.

“But I thought you had heard from him,” I said.

“No. There was no sign of him.” We were somewhat worried.

“Should we call and ask?” wondered Ravi. We had exchanged mobile numbers on moving in. But we decided not to call; it appeared a bit excessive, given the phlegmaticism with which Karim mostly treated events and things.

This was our first month in the flat, and Karim had always appeared to be such a careful, methodical man: we could not help worrying. We were about to call him when, at about nine that night, we heard his cab pull up. Karim Bhai came in and went into his room. He usually kept the door of his room slightly open, even at night, but tonight he closed it firmly. Next morning, he remained reticent about his disappearance, and we saw no cause to press him for information.

In later months, we would get used to such sudden disappearances by Karim Bhai. We would not pay it much attention, perhaps even attributing it to the kind of carnal needs that we indulged in, Ravi with far greater abundance than me, and that Karim Bhai appeared to be so unaffected by. Perhaps, I remember thinking, he needs a day or a night out with some prostitute. It made sense to me: I could not imagine a man to whom sex did not matter.

Later on, when the controversy broke over us, we started pondering more about these mysterious disappearances of Karim Bhai. They came to be colored the shade of suspicion that was being cast on all of us by the Danish tabloids. But that was still almost a year off; I should stick to the forgotten injunctions of my girlfriend of yore and keep that story for later. Too much movement back and forth in time, I almost remember her quoting her MFA professor, loses more readers than it gains.

Ravi, who could have easily got a role as a star in any Bollywood film on the basis of his looks alone—not to mention the contacts that his surgeon father and his socialite-actress mother had in that city of connections—never dated girls he did not consider “plain.” He had a theory about it, which he had explained many times to me (and once, to her great irritation, to my ex-wife). One evening, with the February Århus sky blanketing all desire to go out, he explained it to Karim. We had been drinking gin—Ravi and I, that is—in his room, where he had installed a small bar with a fridge. While my room was filled with Ikea furniture and Karim’s with secondhand stuff bought over a number of years, Ravi’s room had an expensive four-poster bed, a small ivory-topped table, a revolving Victorian book rack, and this bar, leaving just enough space to walk from the door to the window at the other end.

Despite his legendary spat with his father, Ravi’s mother still sent him hundred-dollar bills in unregistered envelopes—something Karim Bhai was shocked at, for he was afraid the money would be lost in transit and did not realize how small these sums were for Ravi’s family. Consequently, Ravi usually had more money than he needed. The bar had been purchased to enable us to drink in his room when Karim Bhai was around. When Karim Bhai was in the flat, for some reason, even though he never forbade it, we never took a drink into the kitchen. We never even entered Karim Bhai’s room if we had been drinking, but we would sometimes go to the kitchen for a coffee, and then Karim Bhai, if he was around, joined us and pretended not to notice our slightly inebriated state.

“You see, Karim Bhai,” Ravi said that evening in the kitchen, more drunk than usual, “plain girls are the salt of the earth: they do things to you. Beautiful girls expect you to do things to them.”

“Do things for you?” Karim Bhai corrected him hesitatingly. He had just handed Ravi one of his carefully rolled cigarettes, after I had declined.

“No, Karim Bhai. To you. You know, they do things to you. They do not just lie under you or straddle you and expect their beauty to do all their work for them. If you want real sex, Karim Bhai, you know, the stuff that sends the world whirring for a minute like a ceiling fan, go for the plain women of the world.”

Karim Bhai was already blushing behind his beard. He had the pink complexion of some north Indian men, as did Ravi. I am much darker, and Ravi had on occasions pointed out, given his ironic penchant for stereotypes, that the two of them, despite being “bloody Indians,” would pass for any “frontier Pashtun,” while I, being “a bloody Paki,” disgraced my nationality and looked like a “darkie Hindoo.” That’s because, Ravi would add, this bastard is not a real Paki; he is a fucking mohajir.

That is true. My grandparents had left India with their children during the partition years. I sometimes meet mohajirs in Pakistan who wax eloquent about all they lost in India and lament the partition. In my case, I am grateful to Jinnah, Patel, Nehru, Mountbatten, Lady and Lord, whoever it was that fucked up in 1947 and sent millions of people to their graves or across invisible borders. Huge tragedy, sure, don’t misread me; but in my case, only good came out of it. I once, just once, visited the town—home, they called it until their death—that my grandparents had left in India. It was a desolate, dingy, dry little landlocked place called Phansa in Bihar. I returned to lovely, vibrant, seaside Karachi, relieved to be a mohajir. Since then, I have always been thankful to the whole blind bickering gang of them for their fuck-ups in 1947.

Ravi was blind to Karim Bhai’s blush. When Ravi got going on his theories, especially if he was a bit drunk, he seldom noticed their effects. All of Our Forcibly Shared Great Western Civilization, he once explained, is evidence of the fact that great men are never aware of the effects of their theories on others.

What Ravi claimed was not entirely true. Not all of Ravi’s “plain” girls did things “to” him. He himself divided them up into those with whom he had a Platonic relationship, those with whom he had a Gandhian relationship and those who joined him in a Marxist relationship. The Platonic ones were to contemplate and forget; the Gandhian ones were to fumble with, to hug and huddle, but nothing more; the Marxist ones were, as he put it, to screw and get screwed by.

Why Marxist, I had questioned him, for I considered myself more or less a Marxist.

“Because Marx had an illegitimate daughter, O Ignorant Son of the Bourgeoisie, because Engels had a series of mistresses, and, above all, because, as any True Marxist will tell you, history is merely the progress of the classes fucking each other up,” he had explained on that occasion.

But even when it came to his Marxist relationships, Ravi sometimes encountered women who either did not do things “to” him or who withdrew their initiative unexpectedly. At first, I had expected Ravi to take these setbacks in his stride; after all, it was seldom that he was not dating, openly and unabashedly, at least two women. And he did take them well, but not without a lurch. I knew one of his girlfriends had broken up with him unexpectedly, or vice versa, when Ravi would requisition me and march us to the nearest bar; he would proceed to get so drunk that I had to tuck him into his bed that night.

The last week of February was a particularly remarkable one on these counts. On Thursday, Ravi broke it off with one of the three women he was having his cultural revolutions with at the time.

“She is getting too emotional, you know, yaar,” he explained to me. “A bit like one of your purdah-shrouded khatoons probably got with you in Pakistan.”

“You don’t know what you are talking about, Ravi,” I countered.“Have you ever crossed the gates of any of those Muslim girls’ colleges? The kind of comments our gals in purdah aim at a good-looking man would drive any civilized Paleface to turn reddish Indian and scalp himself.”