How to Fight Islamist Terror from the Missionary Position (7 page)

I wondered whether it was because he did not trust any of us. Was he more unguarded with his Quranic discussion group when we were not around? Or was it because he did not really care, having given up on Denmark as the land of infidels? The criticism that Ravi or the two Clauses aired was, in different ways, based on a participation in some aspects of life and thinking which was shared by other Danes too. Did Karim Bhai dismiss Denmark to the extent that he felt no need to criticize it?

There was a knock on the door that night, well after eleven. Karim Bhai had fallen asleep, so I opened the door. I had known from the knock that it would be Great Claus. But I was not prepared to find him standing outside in his pajamas, clutching a pillow and with blankets draped all over him.

“Did I wake you up?” he whispered to me.

“I was reading,” I replied.

He slid into the lobby, still whispering.

“Can I sleep in Ravi’s room tonight?” he asked. He knew that Ravi was in London. “There are guests at our place. I will disappear in the morning.”

I was surprised. I had not heard the sound of visitors tramping up the wooden stairs, and it would have taken a horde to make Claus and Pernille run out of beds: they had two extra bedrooms, with their twin daughters having moved out, and a large futon in their sitting room. But I saw no reason to refuse.

Great Claus disappeared sheepishly, blankets trailing behind him, into Ravi’s room and carefully closed the door. When I woke up the next morning, the door to Ravi’s room was slightly ajar and Great Claus had left. There was a note on the kitchen table, thanking Karim, me and even Ravi, in absentia, and promising us a “pucca mughlai dinner soon as thanks for your garrib-nayvaizzi.”

When Ravi returned from London, the first thing he did—after stuffing the larder and the freezer with the Indian ingredients that filled most of his suitcase—was to shut himself up in the toilet. He came out fifteen minutes later, looking a bit different.

He had shaved off the French-style beard that he had grown over the past few weeks.

“What happened, bastard?” I asked him. “Lost your faith so soon?”

“Experiment successfully completed,” he replied.

It turned out that his beard had been the outgrowth of Karim Bhai’s Quranic sessions but in a typically idiosyncratic way. Indiosyncratic way, Ravi would have said. He had grown it to find out if, as claimed by some of Karim Bhai’s fellow-believers, a beard on a Middle Eastern-type face impeded progress through Customs in European airports. Having flown to London, and then to Amsterdam, and from there back to Århus, via Copenhagen—his trajectory over the past week of travels and visits—he had put the hypothesis to test.

“So?” I asked him.

“So what?”

“So, did your beard impede your progress?”

“By an average of two minutes and seventeen seconds—calibrated against previous non-bearded notations—per airport.”

“I don’t believe you, Ravi,” I said. “You must have done a Mr. Bean-draws-a-gun or scowled at them to attract attention.”

“But, of course, yaar, I had to make them notice my beard; I was not blessed with Karim Bhai’s hairy effulgence. And anyway, some experiments need a catalyst.”

A GLASS FULL OF LOVE

It was one of those Sundays when all three of us were home. When relaxing in the flat, Karim went about in a long embroidered kurta and white pajamas (stiffly ironed): he sat there in this home wear, the door of his room wide open, trying to surf news channels on an old desktop that stood (covered with plastic when not in use) in a corner of his room. Ravi wore his casually expensive shorts and emblazoned T-shirt, and I was fully dressed, in jeans and a shirt: Ravi had once noted that this was what proved my professional middle-class status, that only members of the upper classes and the lower or lower middle-classes in the subcontinent wore casual or Indian clothes in company.

Karim came out of his room. He looked disgusted.

“I should buy a new computer. This one is so slow,” he said to us. We were in the kitchen, watching BBC on a small TV that Karim had installed atop the fridge. He had a slightly bigger plasma TV on a wall of his room.

“Why don’t you, Karim Bhai? They are quite cheap now and you must be minting millions with all the extra shifts you do,” Ravi replied lightly.

Karim Bhai took the suggestion seriously. He did not always get light banter.

“Oh, I am not making that much money, you know,” he said. “And I have expenses…”

He always claimed he had “expenses” but never elaborated on the nature of these.

“You can use my laptop, Karim Bhai.” Mine was plugged in on the kitchen table and it was much faster than Karim’s antique machine. We were used to such situations by now: Karim would get fed up with his slow desktop, one of us would offer him one of our faster laptops, he would refuse, as was proper; the offer would have to be repeated; he would accept with formal thanks, and spend about an hour surfing for news, mostly from India and various Muslim nations.

Those days with Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, all on the boil, he was particularly interested in the news. So were we—it was one of the sources of Ravi’s frustration with Danish universities that our students seemed unaware of what was happening. But there was an obvious difference in our interest in the events of what I preferred to call the Jasmine Revolution and Ravi, with greater skepticism, termed the Twitter Twister. Ravi and I had opinions; we were members of democratic chat groups, we signed Avaaz petitions, our Facebooks were cluttered with radical quotations. But Karim Bhai simply went to the news pages, in English, Urdu and Arabic, read them so closely that his beard touched the keyboard; he never commented on anything. If he said something, it was usually very general: “It is better today,” or “It is a bit worse, I think.”

“It is better today in Cairo,” he said, after browsing for half an hour. He brought out his pouch and started rolling himself a cigarette.

By then Ravi had taken a shower and was dressed in a selection of his best jeans, shirt and pullover. It meant he was going out to see a woman. Ravi refused to go for walks on Sundays, claiming that a Sunday walk in the woods or the parks was a deeply religious act in Denmark. His argument ran like this: Protestants had started substituting God with Nature a long time back; there is nothing more religious than a Protestant going for a walk on a Sunday; it is the Protestant version of Sunday church-going. If Ravi had to do something religious, he said, he would do it consciously and openly; he would (and sometimes did) go to church on Sundays.

As Ravi had resolutely refused to say anything about Lena after returning from London, I was curious about his sartorial efforts that Sunday, more so because he had totally stopped going out with or being visited by any of his “plain” girlfriends. But I knew better than to quiz Ravi. Despite his seeming loquacity, he could be very tight-lipped on some matters.

“You seem to follow Cairo a lot, Karim Bhai,” I responded.

“I was there, you know. Didn’t I tell you?”

“Lucky you, Karim Bhai. I wish I could go there for a long vacation,” shouted Ravi from his room. The trace of some expensive aftershave wafted from his room. Ravi had been planning to go to Cairo for years.

“No, Ravi Bhai,” Karim corrected him, “I wasn’t there as a tourist. I studied there. I did my BA in Islamic jurisprudence and Arabic from Cairo.”

Ravi entered the kitchen, shirt still unbuttoned. He was intrigued.

“Cairo, Karim Bhai?” he asked. “I did not know Indian students went to Egypt to study.”

“Some do. There are a few scholarships, mostly for poor Muslim students,” Karim explained apologetically.

Ravi looked enlightened. He turned to me and said, almost forgetting that Karim was in the room: “See, bastard, and people like us only know of scholarships to the West! Wish I had known: I could have converted and gone to Cairo!”

“It is not that different from Delhi,” said Karim Bhai dismissively. “But, you see, I have friends there, so I get a bit worried…”

“Girlfriends too, I daresay, Karim Bhai,” Ravi teased him, as he sometimes did.

Karim Bhai blushed.

“Oh no,” he said, “we got married.” I almost spilled my coffee.

“I did not know you were married, Karim Bhai,” Ravi blurted in surprise.

“Oh, didn’t I mention it before? It was such a long time back. Thirty years ago, almost…”

“And, Karim Bhai…”

“Yes,” Karim Bhai interrupted, ruminating, “twenty-six years ago…”

“But Karim Bhai,” Ravi could not restrain himself, the aunties in him were clamoring for gossip. “What happened? We have never even seen a photo of…”

“I do not take or keep photos, Ravi Bhai. You know that it is against my religion,” Karim explained. And it was true, though I doubt that either Ravi or I had noticed it before: the flat was shorn of even a single representation of a human being, animal or bird. Karim did not even seem to have a photo album in his room.

Karim Bhai was talking again: “What happened, Ravi Bhai? Who knows?” He looked at me, and at that moment we thought we understood what might have happened. “Who knows what happens to us in this world and why?” he continued ruefully.

“Only Allah-tala knows.” Then he quoted from the Quran: “Allah has knowledge of all things.”

I had once said to Ravi: if you dislike this place so much, why did you apply for a PhD here?

“I applied to Stockholm, Copenhagen and Oslo too,” he had replied. “They gave me a full scholarship here.”

“But why Scandinavia, Ravi?”

“What choice did I have, bastard? Every Tom, Dick and Hari from India goes to USA, UK, Australia or Canada for a PhD these days. Look at what it does to them! Look at yourself, yaar. And I thought, well, I had enough German, might as well pick up another language through it and see what happens to civilization when it freezes.”

I am certain Ravi was not joking when he exclaimed that he would have converted and gone to Egypt.

I recall that Sunday for two other unusual happenings. Both of them involved women and Karim Bhai, which was unusual in itself. Isn’t that one of the twists of life? You spend weeks in the flat of a man who seems to have no relations with women, who does not even allow himself to sit alone in a room with a woman, and the day he reveals that he had once been married is also the day when he has intimate meetings with two other women? Oh, I am exaggerating: the intimacy was only of the emotional sort.

But there is no doubt that, whatever the causes, both women came to Karim Bhai in an obviously emotional state.

Ravi disappeared on his bicycle soon after our Cairo conversation, hunting out both his cycle lamps and his cycle clips, which indicated his intention to stay out until night and his desire to reach his destination in a high state of sartorial elegance. He wore his favorite leather jacket and his patent gloves too. I think I was still digesting the notion of Karim Bhai once being married when the doorbell rang.

Ajsa walked in with her Somali husband, Ibrahim, and Ali, who, I had been told, was inseparable from Ibrahim. They offered only a perfunctory nod to me—my door was open and I was revising a lecture at my small study table—and walked into Karim Bhai’s room. Karim Bhai closed the door of his room behind them. This was unusual, as you know; he seldom closed his door completely. But I did not mind. I had never liked Ali, with his saliva-spraying religious virulence, and I had never met Ibrahim. In fact, I still think this was the only time I saw him: such a fleeting glimpse that when I came across his photo in the papers much later, I did not recognize the man.

For the next hour or so, I heard their voices rise and hush in argument: the high tones came from Ali and, once or twice, Ajsa. They were speaking Danish—the only language all of them really shared—and all I could gather was that they were talking about Islam and insults to Islam at least once in a while. Of course, I might have imagined this later on; at that moment, annotating my lecture on
Gulliver’s Travels
, I did not really pay them too much attention.

Perhaps I really noticed that they had been arguing when Ali stalked out and, banging both the doors shut, left the flat.

Ibrahim followed him less than a minute later, leaving the door to Karim Bhai’s room ajar. But this, of course, was not sufficient for Karim Bhai. I heard him come to my door. He scratch-knocked on it and then put his head in, beard first. “Would you like to join Ajsa and me for a cup of tea?” he asked.

I had almost finished revising my lecture and, in any case, I was curious about the argument. I joined Karim and Ajsa in his room. She was sitting on the sofa. It looked like she had been crying. There were two plastic folding chairs—Karim Bhai kept six piled in a corner for his Quran sessions—next to the sofa. I took one of them. Karim Bhai bustled around, brewing tea. He was in such a rush or so agitated that he brewed it the Danish way and brought it in on a tray, with a pot of sugar and a carton of cold milk from the fridge.

Ajsa did not say much. Mostly they talked of the weather. When she got up to leave, Karim did something unusual. He put a hand on her shoulder. I wondered how many brownie points this gesture cost him in his paradise. She was a bit taller than him, so he had to look up at her. “Don’t worry,” he told her, squeezing her shoulder gingerly, “I will take care of it. I will talk to Ibrahim soon.”

The second female visitor Karim received that Sunday was just as unexpected. She had been there before, of course, but never so abruptly, and in such mental disarray.

I had agreed to cook dinner. Karim Bhai ate around Danish time, and we had gotten used to it too. It was a bit after six in the evening.

My cooking is not as elaborate as Ravi’s or as practiced, if limited, as Karim Bhai’s. I usually slice onions, tomatoes and whatever else might be within slicing distance, fry it with chicken or minced meat or, in Denmark, salmon, add salt according to taste as they say, and finally plop in a bottle of Uncle Ben’s jalfrezi or some such ready-made mix of spices. It goes with rice, seldom Basmati, or pasta.

I had just plunked in Uncle Ben’s korma mix when the bell rang. Karim, who was puttering around tidying up the flat, both TVs showing the same Danish news, went to open the door. There were muttered exchanges in Danish. I assumed it was some neighbor or a Jehovah’s Witness. But in a few seconds, Karim re-entered the kitchen with Pernille, Great Claus’s wife from upstairs.