by Tabish Khair
This sharpening of the weapons of assault was widely discussed in the media, especially on TV. I remember one such discussion. First (male) panelist: It proves that he had intended to murder Herr Hansen. Why else should he sharpen the weapons? Second (male) panelist: It definitely indicates a degree of premeditation. Third (male) panelist: But does one need to sharpen a knife or an axe in order to kill a man? I mean, it is not as if flesh is that resistant or… Hostess (interrupting): Brrr, that’s gory… (and turning to the “expert on terrorism”): What would you say, colonel? Expert (male) on terrorism: There is a chance that the accused was specifically influenced by the Taliban brand of Islamism. In all known cases of Islamist assault, axes as well as ceremonial beheadings have been employed by Taliban-influenced militants four times more often than by other jihadist groups…
By and large, media experts agreed that the sharpening of weapons on a street-side bench was an act of premeditation and suggested devious planning. The fact that the Somali left his mittens on the bench also indicated (it was widely noted) that he wanted to retain full use of his hands.
It was not even ten in the morning when the Somali arrived at the house of Mr. Hansen.
Mr. Hansen, a sprightly sixty-nine-year-old man, lived with his wife, who was almost stone deaf and refused to use hearing aids at home. That morning, though, they were babysitting their granddaughters, two angelic children of seven and nine, as the media photos attest. Or Mr. Hansen was, as Mrs. Hansen had a migraine and was still in bed. The children had insisted on watching an American cartoon and Mr. Hansen had allowed them to do so. The TV was on a bit too loud, but Mr. Hansen did not mind. Tom was chasing Jerry around the house. It kept the girls glued to the screen, which is how Mr. Hansen wanted them to be for another hour or so, after which he planned to take them for a walk in the nearby park. He was in the kitchen fixing a few sandwiches for the park trip when someone rang the bell. Mr. Hansen let it ring a few times as he wrapped the sandwiches in silver foil. But then the person started hammering on the door, and Mr. Hansen could no longer ignore it. He lumbered across the sitting room and past the TV set—where Jerry, having imbibed a potion that he believed gave him superhuman strength, was now chasing Tom around the house—and, absentmindedly carrying a sandwich wrapped in silver foil, went to answer the loud, uncivilized knocking.
When Mr. Hansen opened the door, he realized that the man—an African or Arab, as he told the press in the initial interviews—had not been knocking on the door. He had been trying to break it down with an axe. The axe was still stuck to the door. It had been torn out of the man’s hand when Mr. Hansen had opened the door.
The man lunged for the axe handle, shouting something in a language that Mr. Hansen and all his neighbors, some of whom were now peering out of windows, could not understand. But Mr. Hansen knew what it was all about. He heard the word “Mohammad” repeated again and again. He felt the spittle on his face. He had been told what to do in such circumstances. He stayed calm and ran into the bathroom to his left. He closed and locked the door. The bathroom had been reinforced by anti-terror experts: it even had a direct line to the police department. Mr. Hansen called the line as the man—identified as the Somali who had sharpened an axe and a knife on a park bench—started trying to hack down the bathroom door, shouting English words like “revenge” and “honor” along with larger and possibly more complex constructions in some gobbledygook language.
Mr. Hansen had moments of doubt in the reinforced bathroom, though the police took only seven minutes to arrive. He was mostly worried about his grandchildren. He hoped the anti-terror experts were right when they told him that Islamists never attacked family members of their chosen targets. In any case, he knew he was too old to fight a young man armed with a knife and an axe. As he still held one of the sandwiches he had wrapped, he sat down on the toilet seat and unwrapped it. He took a bite from it and waited. The man raged and hammered outside.
Mr. Hansen could hear the TV in the background. A minute before the police arrived, he thought he heard his wife shout to him to get the kids to cut out the racket. When the police arrived, the kids were still watching TV—Tom was back to chasing Jerry around the house—and his wife was sitting up in bed. Despite her deafness, she had heard a bit of the commotion. She later complained to the policemen about how people always made too much noise in the house whenever she had a migraine.
The Somali ran out and threw his axe at the first police car (out of four) that pulled in, sirens blowing. It dented the hood, for which the man will be fined, opined experts on TV, whatever the result of the court case. Then he tried to attack the officers with the kitchen knife. He was easily overpowered and arrested.
“Somali man?” I recall saying to Ravi after I finished reading the article that morning. “Why the hell a Somali? Why not an Afghan, a Paki?”
“Good question, bastard,” replied Ravi. “You should hang your head in shame!”
It was hard to take the tragic farce too seriously: media claims of Al Qaeda and conspiracy appeared exaggerated to us. This was needless drama in a land of few incidents, we thought.
Even when Karim Bhai came back and informed us that the Somali in question was Ajsa’s Ibrahim, I don’t think we suspected what was to come. Karim, I realize in retrospect, was tense and nervous. But then, as we discovered later, he had other reasons too.
Ajsa must have called at least twice that evening. Once, I gathered from Karim’s response, someone else called too: I think it was that mystery woman.
The matter got murkier the next day. There were two developments: one of them was a report that had Ali boasting about the Friday Quran sessions that, he claimed, he organized in our flat and where “people of faith discuss what to do in the face of repeated assaults on the Prophet, peace be upon him, by the West.” Ali, we were told by the Clauses, who called up to express concern and support, had been on TV last night making similar statements. Evidently, he had been picked up, interrogated, and released by the police, after which—given that Ajsa refused to speak to journalists—he had been interviewed by everyone with a pen or a camera.
The other was an essay by Jens Hauge, a maverick colleague from another faculty, who ranted about “supposed Islamic intellectuals” who abuse Danish hospitality and intrigue against its “democratic principles.” It was clear that he had us in mind. I was surprised by how quickly he had managed to write the piece.
Hauge had met Ravi a number of times. Being, in very different ways, among those gaseous satellites of eccentricity that orbit the dense mass of academia, their trajectories had inevitably crossed. But Hauge conveniently forgot that Ravi was, technically speaking, a Hindu. He went on to compare Judaism with Islam and judged the former to be the better religion. I recall that the seriousness of the accusations had not really sunk into us: both of us found the article hilarious. Ravi had remarked, laughing, “This guy has been watching too many WWF matches on TV: Moses vs. Mohammad with Jesus as referee!”
But the smiles were to wear thin on our faces.
It was like the proverbial snowball rolling down a slope. It got bigger and bigger. By the evening we were getting so many phone calls—from media, friends, and strangers—that we stopped answering the phone and even, at times, our mobiles. The public and central registration of information in Denmark had enabled people to get our flat phone number simply on the basis of what Ali had said and what had been reported.
Karim had night duty. He went off looking worried. He had been uncommunicative all day.
I think I started getting seriously worried only when Karim Bhai did not return the next morning. This was not unusual: he might have worked another shift, or he might have been called away by his mystery woman.
Mystery woman? In many ways that was the first time I gave her serious thought. The Danish tabloids were full of suggestions of conspiracy and terror cells. How much did we really know of Karim Bhai? We had moved into his flat on one of Ravi’s whims. Who was Karim? Who was the
woman? What did he do when he disappeared? What did he do when he was in Cairo?
I was shaken by the fact that all this had not struck us as seriously suspicious in the past.
That night, when Karim had still not returned—he might have called, but we were not picking up the phone—I expressed my doubts to Ravi. He did not dismiss them outright, as I had expected him to. “Let’s wait for Karim Bhai to return,” he said.
Perhaps that was the best policy. But recall—and if you were in Denmark then, you will be able to recall without any effort—how much publicity Ibrahim’s “act of terror” was getting in those days. The Islamist Axe Plot; the Al Qaeda conspiracy. TV, talk shows, tabloids, broadsheets, politicians, police officers, security agents: everyone had an opinion, or spoke in loud ominous silence. The flat was already in the public eye; there were even clusters of people outside our building on occasions. Ali’s frequent interviews had ensured that. My colleagues—with some exceptions—pretended they did not know what everyone knew, that I lived in that flat. Our neighbors mostly avoided us.
Did I get paranoid? I don’t think so. I do confess that I walked into Karim’s room and poked around in it when Ravi was not around. I did not find anything incriminating. But then, I did not expect to. I even looked at the books in his cane bookrack. What was I expecting to find? They were mostly commentaries on the Quran in Urdu and English. The only books of literature I found were a hardback Urdu anthology of selections from Iqbal’s poetry, a tattered paperback by Somerset Maugham and Jim Corbett’s The Man-eater of Kumaon, carefully bound in brown paper.
I am not saying I was uninfluenced by the atmosphere: the “Islamist Axe Plot,” as it was being called, was at its height then, with adjectives being flexed and postures struck on all sides. But I still do not think I was paranoid. I had reasons to be suspicious, cause for caution. If you have a Muslim name, you have to be wary in some contexts. Remember the Indian doctor who was arrested and accused of being a terrorist in Australia just because his sim-card ended up in the wrong hands? There are many other stories like that, in Asia, America, Europe. Ravi could afford to ignore them; I could not.
It was I who talked Ravi into going to the police with a full account of our experiences in the flat.
“They will come to speak to us sooner or later,” I told him. “It is best that we go to them first.”
Ravi did not agree. We had a bit of an argument: this was an issue on which we had never seen eye to eye. Perhaps if Ravi was not still a bit lost as a result of the separation that he had imposed between himself and Lena, he would have refused. Or perhaps, with characteristic generosity, he considered my position as a person with a Muslim name and went along. I know that he let me do most of the talking at the police station.
The main police station in Århus must be one of the calmest, most normal-looking buildings in town. Tucked around the corner from the main bus station, it has no crowds of suspects or uniformed cops hanging around, no patrol cars parked within sight. Actually, when we got off the bus and walked the few steps to the place, I don’t think we saw a single person outside the building. Inside, with its counters, brochures and almost total lack of officers in uniform, it looked like any other government office.
Neither Ravi nor I had experienced a police station in India or Pakistan, except as something one drove past. But I am sure both of us associated uniformed people with authority. Even singly, a policeman or an army officer in Pakistan is a bit like a period: sentences stop or start around them. Here, they appeared to be not even a comma; they passed for just another alphabet, indistinguishable from the rest of us.
It was the normality of the place that struck me most. I mentioned this to Ravi while we waited on a bench, after speaking to a woman (was she a cop or a secretary?) at a counter. Ravi muttered some lines—sabse khatarnaak hota hai, murda shanti se bhar jaana, na hona tadap ka, sab sahan kar jaana, ghar se nikalna kaam par, aur kaam se lautkar ghar aana—in a monotone, but he did not say anything else. He was in a dour, uncommunicative mood.
After an initial interrogation by the officers in charge of the station, we were ushered into what looked like a secretary’s office, full of nondescript wooden furniture, replete with a tray holding cups, plastic flasks of coffee and tea (labeled) and a bowl of Danish butter cookies. There were even some tabloids and society magazines on a side table. We were then questioned, in greater detail, by two special officers, who did try to get Ravi to speak more at the beginning. But after getting all tied up in his laconic but factual replies—he said the Muslim prayers (Ravi was still “practicing,” which he omitted to mention) but no, he was a Hindu, etc.—they offered him a cup of coffee and decided to ignore him.
Of course, the police already knew about Karim’s Friday sessions: they had interrogated Ali, Ajsa and probably a few others. But they did not know of his sudden disappearances, his years in Cairo, his need for cash, the mystery caller.
They took my disclosures very seriously.
As I gave an account of our months in the flat, I felt convinced that we were doing the right thing. There was even a moment when I was amazed that we had not seen Karim in his true colors. The occasional secretiveness; the Quran club; the mystery disappearances. The times when he used my laptop: did he only surf for news? A narrow, religious man, intolerant of so many aspects of modernity, could there be any doubt as to his true affinities?
When we returned to the flat, after sharing a couple of silent drinks in a café, Karim had already been arrested. He had returned soon after we went to the police station, and the cops did not have any difficulty picking him up “for interrogation” on the basis of my declarations.
I was told later that they had picked Karim up even as we waited in the police station to sign the printed version of our statements. It must have happened quickly: the necklace of green-black beads and cigarette pouch that Karim always carried around had been abandoned on the kitchen table.
Ravi and I did not want to talk about it. I thought we had done the right thing, but it still felt wrong. Ravi was more affected than me. He murmured about how it all had started resembling the Black Plague years of European history, when the inability to find a reason for sickness and suffering had led to the widespread burning of Jews and strangers. Except that the invisible epidemic this time is capitalism, he grumbled, complicated by the fact that Europeans are accustomed to simply enjoying its advantages. Ravi had never shared my mistrust of Karim’s narrow religiosity. Perhaps, also, this was one break too many for him. He had cared deeply for Karim; he had loved Lena from the depths of his ironic soul.
But the flat still glared at us. The note on the fridge, listing in Karim’s neat handwriting all the things that had to be bought; the small TV in the kitchen; the coffee machine, which was there only for our use; the half-open door to Karim’s room, where his fraying sofa lay empty, sagging, shrouded with his pillows and blankets; the veiled bookrack; the suddenly silent phone in the lobby, the beads on the kitchen table. The flat accused us.
We decided to move out. I don’t think we even discussed it. We just started packing. Ravi had already booked his ticket to India: he was leaving in less than a month. He decided to leave his furniture—including the expensive bar—behind. If Karim does not want it, he can throw it out, he said.
We packed the rest of our things. Ravi gave most of his books away to the Clauses and Pernille; he packed them in two boxes and went up to Pernille’s flat with them. The next day we rented a storage unit and stored what had to be saved, mostly my furniture, threw out some things and, packing stuff for a week or so, moved into Cabinn.
I had left a curt note for Karim on the kitchen table, telling him that he could adjust this month’s rent against our deposit and keep whatever was left over. I had told him to call us on our mobiles if he had questions or differences. He never called.
When Ms. Marx discovered our relapse into Ravi’s old gypsy status, she invited us to sleep over at her place the next night.
Yes, you have guessed right: I am still seeing Ms. Marx. I am fond of her son and have even fetched him from school once or twice. That is why I have not named her in this account. I think we are reasonably happy with our half glasses of love. Or I am, in any case. Sometimes I detect a look in her eyes that makes me feel that she is still hoping for something a bit more, and she knows that it cannot be between us. Sometimes I feel her straining against that knowledge.
I don’t. I like to hold her in bed; I find the tiny white—they are not blonde—hairs on her arms very sexy; I like the way her thighs, which she considers too thick, swell and fall into trim knees, the way, when she combs her dyed hair, her biceps—which she considers too muscular—jump; I love the dimple she gets when she laughs—which is not often, for she is a serious, busy woman—and I love the slight sag in her belly, left over from childbearing, that she is always trying but unable to get rid of. I love the way she straddles me when we make love, but refuses to let me look at her. I even love her preference for the missionary position.
I am grateful for all this and a hundred other small things. But I am also grateful for the knowledge that she can go on without me and I can continue without her; that, in due course, if required, we might both find our glasses more or less half-full with love for someone else. I will remember her, in that case, as I remember my MFA-girlfriend or my ex-wife, neither more nor less.
That makes me wonder about Ravi, while I sit here typing my version of those days. And about Lena, whom I have glimpsed only occasionally on the campus, smiling, controlled and poised… if Ravi was right about the green depths that hid in her. No, do not misunderstand me: people as accomplished and beautiful as Ravi and Lena always go on too. Of course they will have other relationships. What choice do they have in that matter? I have no doubt of their perseverance. But will a half glass ever suffice for them? A predictable Eng Lit line comes back to me: After such knowledge, what forgiveness?