by Tabish Khair
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.
I think Ravi and Lena noticed the atmosphere less that we did: they were too busy with each other. Even when a couple of men tried to chat up Lena—blatantly ignoring Ravi—I don’t think they noticed. Lena, cold in her normal state, was icy with them. They returned to a group of rowdy, sullen men in their thirties at the back of the room, who were monopolizing the pool table.
A little later, another man from the group came up to us. Ignoring both Ravi and me, he asked Lena and Ms. Marx—in Danish—to join him and his friends for a drink. He was squat and sweaty; he had trouble standing straight. When he was politely refused, he turned and glared at us. Then he went back to the group around the pool table. There was some jibing and laughter. Then the squat, sweating man was suddenly back at the bar. He poked a stubby finger into Lena’s shoulder. He zipped open his trousers and took out his dick. It hung half-limp, half-erect in his hands.
He said to Lena, in English this time, “Has your Italian boyfriend anything as good?”
I looked at Ravi, as both of us moved to get off our stools. I did so with greater reluctance than Ravi, I am sure. I disliked the option of regress to the caveman—always a danger in pubs full of men—though I also knew from experience that evolution is a fickle matter. Ravi, faster on the trigger in such matters, would have already landed a punch on the man, if he had not been on the wrong side of Lena.
But Lena anticipated it. In retrospect I could not help admiring her calm. She held up a hand to stop Ravi and turned to the man, who was suddenly looking just a bit foolish, with his dick hanging out and half the room staring at him. She looked him in the face for some calculated seconds and said, cold and collected as always, “Why, that thing! I wouldn’t even feel it.”
Swiveling again on her stool, she returned to her drink, turning her back on him.
The man looked bewildered. Ravi was off his stool now, ready to intervene if the man reacted violently. Then the barman, who had moved closer to us, started laughing. Some other people in the room followed his example. The squat man looked around. I think he decided that the laughter was not mocking; it was largely friendly, the sort of laughter a beloved clown evokes. Perhaps it was. P
erhaps he was the resident clown, not the resident caveman, as we had assumed. He swayed, mumbled, tucked his dick away and shambled back to the pool table, where some of his friends were chuckling too.
Lena raised a thin, perfectly sculpted eyebrow at Ravi. Ravi winked.
Apart from this last-minute drama, I have good memories of our vacation together. I think of this brief summer as one of those periods one harkens back to as one gets older, a time when the sunshine was full of hope, the breeze whispered of happiness. All of us have such periods in our lives.
Perhaps it was the Danish summer; perhaps it was the radiant aura of love that wrapped Lena and Ravi. Once again, I could not help feeling that as a couple, in corny phrasing, the two were made for each other. Others must have thought so too: total strangers would turn and smile at them on the streets; bored waiters would smarten up to serve them with grace.
Ms. Marx agreed with me, but she also had her reservations. Ms. Marx had, by then, grown a bit skeptical of what she termed Ravi’s “influence” on me: you two are not all that similar, she had told me, but when you are together, you start acting and talking as if you are Ravi’s twin. I feel she underestimated both our similarities and differences.
Later, when we discussed the trip to Elsinore and Copenhagen, she complained about how difficult it was to travel with Ravi.
“He always tries to pay for everything,” she said. “If you don’t watch out, he pays for your drinks behind your back. After some time, you hesitate to order anything with him around.” That explained the moments when she had seemed slightly irked with Ravi. Not Lena, though; if she found Ravi too quick on the trigger of tabs, she never betrayed it.
Yes, I already knew that Ravi liked to pick up tabs. He had offered to do so in Århus too, sometimes even if it meant that he had to walk back to the flat instead of catching a bus. But I had never found it excessive; I felt he was “Western” enough to curb such “Oriental” gestures when he needed to do so. Had he lapsed, in his love for Lena? If so, why hadn’t I noticed it? Both Ravi and I were aware of this as a cultural difference in Northern cultures. We knew (without being fully conscious of it) that Ms. Marx and Lena, like all our Danish friends and colleagues, always paid for themselves and seldom offered to pay for others. It was not that they were tight; their generosity was occasioned and premeditated. There was just no excess to it. It was another kind of generosity, or so I felt.
I mentioned this to Ravi in his last weeks in Århus, those long November days so different from these days of summer.
“Nonsense, yaar,” he retorted, “generosity is always in excess.”
Strangely, I have almost no recollection of our return journey to Århus, but then that could have been because all of us—except Karim Bhai, who hardly commented on it—got preoccupied by the “Norway attacks,” which took place that very afternoon. Ravi, in particular, did not hide his disgust at the ease with which many in the Danish media first blamed it on Islamists and then, when it became clear that a white, right-wing, Christian fundamentalist was behind these acts of terror and genocide, somehow still managed to suggest at times that immigration and Muslims were the real cause. He tried to discuss this with Karim over the next few days, but Karim Bhai just shrugged, sad, unconcerned or guarded. It was something I mentioned to the police officers later on.
I do remember that Ms. Marx left us at the station, as her row house was in the opposite direction, while Ravi and I took a bus to Lena’s place—mostly to help her carry her luggage—before going on to Karim’s flat. I recall that we remained on the pavement. Ravi handed Lena her suitcase, which he had been carrying for her. I lagged behind a bit to give them some space. They kissed, very decorously, a surprisingly proper peck on the lips. Then Ravi said to her, softly, though his voice—unintended—carried over to me by one of those quirks of the wind, “Will you wave to me before you go in? I always like it when you do.”
Lena looked surprised and grateful. The ice of her poise cracked for just a micro-second: in that instant, she betrayed the sort of gratefulness that Ravi sometimes displayed in her presence. It was as new to her as it was for Ravi. But there was no doubt in my mind that both of them were grateful for and surprised by each other’s love, or perhaps just by the fact of love. As if they could not believe their luck. This was not the first time that I noted how they parted. It was as if every parting, the shortest separation, was forever. Perhaps that is why Ravi wanted her to wave.
Lena opened the door of her building. Just before going in, she turned and waved. It was only then that Ravi started walking away.
What else? What else do I recall from that period? The torrent of the past seeps through the sieves of our memories and we clutch at the silt that sticks, trusting that it contains gold. Perhaps it does; perhaps not.
I recall lying in bed with Ms. Marx soon afterwards; we had just made love. Somehow, I don’t remember why, we ended up talking about the scene in the pub, when that drunken clown had flashed at Lena. I must have praised Lena for her poise and her perfect put-down.
To my surprise, Ms. Marx was far less impressed.
“Ah, you men are such boys,” she scoffed, reclining on the pillows, her forehead still slightly beaded with sweat. “Can’t you see that poor Lena lives on male attention? All her perfection and poise is an index of her desperate need for it. She expects men to compliment her or flash at her!”
I felt that was unfair to Lena, but I dropped the topic with a laugh. You do not defend another woman when lying in bed with your girlfriend. I was not such a boy as that.
Despite that remark, Ms. Marx and Lena were always friendly with each other. It was also obvious that they would never be good friends. They met because of Ravi and me; left to themselves, they would not have gone beyond a polite hello or a coffee with university colleagues, I suspect.
The one person who had trouble being even friendly with Lena on the very few occasions when she visited us was Karim. He always got even more stiff and formal in her presence, and often left the flat abruptly. In my memory, I associate Lena’s arrival in our flat with Karim’s retreat, often abrupt, to his room or to the cab that would then start with a cough and a grumble and drive away. Was it her beauty? Was it because Ravi, to use a cliché, had stars in his eyes when he was with her, at least in those weeks? Was it the fact that Lena always dressed a bit too smartly and flamboyantly for the Islamist in Karim?
I never found out. Despite my lingering suspicion in those days that his Islam did not hinder Karim from frequenting prostitutes, it was never easy to talk about women, flippantly or seriously, in Karim’s company.
WHEN AUTUMN LEAVES START TO FALL
One of my cousins was getting married in Lahore that August. August is not the best time for marriages in Lahore, but then the seasons have very little to do with weddings in the professional classes of Pakistan and, if Ravi is to be believed, India any longer. There was a time when there used to be marriage seasons, which varied a bit from community to community, region to region. Now, with jobs and education scattering the supposedly privileged all over the globe, weddings are usually crammed into the summer and winter vacations across the subcontinent.
Ravi had been talking about going to Pakistan with me, but that was until a few months ago. I knew he had no desire to leave the vicinity of Lena now. I made a quick one-week trip—sandwiched between the interminable sham-exams that cut into all vacations in Danish universities—and returned to find Ravi waiting for me at the airport.
I was touched. Ravi hated receiving or seeing people off at airports or railway stations. But no, Ravi was there primarily because he had news for me.
“Karim Bhai is in a foul mood: don’t even mention Great Claus to him. He is liable to blow a fuse if you do!”
On the way back by bus—the airport is half an hour out of town—Ravi filled me in. It had to do, at least in his account, with Ravi’s advice to Claus. Claus had followed the advice. He had told Pernille the truth. Pernille had bee
n relieved; Karim Bhai had been scandalized.
“The closet,” Ravi expanded. “Claus hath taken a mighty leap into the roaring Chandrabhaga!”
There had been no woman involved. It was more convoluted—or simpler—than that. Years ago, after he had fathered two daughters, Great Claus had discovered that he was gay. For years now, he had had a steady lover: Little Claus. There was nothing to be done about it. Great Claus felt he had to maintain the pretence of being a solid “familiefar”—family father—as long as his girls were too young and at home. But when they moved out, he could no longer keep on playing the part. He wanted to move out and become what he considered himself to be.
Pernille, Ravi said, had taken this revelation very well. She had even gone out eating with both the Clauses, and had helped Great Claus move most of his stuff into Little Claus’s suburban house. The daughters too had been, if anything, jubilant about this turn of events. “You see, bastard,” said Ravi to me, as the excessively green and even Danish countryside started giving way to a bit less green but as even Danish urbanity, “having an affair with a woman is kind of tacky and underhand. But who, with his heart in his left breast, can deny a man his true individuality! I wonder why good Old Claus hesitated in coming clean: the guy obviously does not understand contemporary Western civilization.”
It looked like Karim Bhai did not understand it either. When Claus came to tell him, with both Little Claus and Pernille in tow, Karim Bhai looked shocked. “His face drained of color, yaar,” recounted Ravi, who was there, all his aunts in tow. “I thought he would faint. Then he got up, walked to his room and closed the door.”