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State of niceness
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How to Fight Islamist Terror from the Missionary Position By Tabish Khair, Fourth Estate, Rs 450
Is it possible to like and not like a book at the same time? There is a candour in the way Tabish Khair chooses to tell his story that is endearing. Here, it seems, is an author who does not take himself too seriously, and can treat grave matters of the self and others with levity. But this quality is about all that can instigate one to go on till the end of How to Fight Islamist Terror from the Missionary Position without losing interest midway. Khair tries very hard to be funny, and while the humour works in some places, in most cases, it doesn’t. Besides, the plot is too scattered for the novel to create a lasting impression. If the reader really loses the plot in the middle of the novel, it would be quite ironic, since Khair talks constantly of beginning in medias res (which he chooses to call “in media res”) as a narrative and survival strategy. He does try that tactic out in this novel, which begins in medias res alright, but also seems to end there.
It is difficult to say what Khair’s novel is all about. There is a lot about Islamist terror, real and imagined, faith, love, disillusionment, and Denmark, where, incidentally, Khair lives. While the comments on the first few topics fail to add up to anything substantial, those on Denmark have a surprising directness that makes one feel that the expatriate author is trying to explain the mores of his adoptive country to himself and to his readers. Sample these: “It [Denmark] was perhaps the only country left in the Western Hemisphere where 80 per cent of all women were afraid of dating a coloured man but one per cent of the rest would only date coloured men if they had a chance”, “When I first moved to Denmark, where places like Pakistan are considered traditional, I was surprised by how many traditions structured, sometimes rigidly, the lifestyle of the Danish middle classes” or “I suspect they [the Danes] have ordered dreams away in this country”. If one is hoping to settle in Denmark then one should be thankful to Khair for having issued prior warning. But for those who have no such intentions, the reflections on the country will sound like coffee-table talk to which one listens attentively for the sake of politeness and then forgets.
But one guesses that behind all the disjointed comments about Denmark there lurks a critique of a nation that had published the cartoons on Muhammad supposedly to uphold the right to free speech and condemn the self-censorship it associated with Islam. Khair shows a Denmark that is anything but a free country itself, as the quotations above would indicate. There coloured people invite suspicion and even token acts of subversion like smoking in public places is banned. The Danes religiously turn their faces away from anything that may cause a ripple in their structured world of “comfort and convenience”. So something is still rotten in the state of Denmark, which is described as “a state of niceness” in a story within the story.
The deadliness of Danish nicety is concretized in the perfect Lena, who is rejected by Ravi because she seems frozen in her unfailing courtesy. Ravi — the disgruntled son of an upper-class Hindu family from India who goes to live in Denmark with his Pakistani friend, the unnamed narrator — stands for the warmth of disorder that is the hallmark of both India and Pakistan. At the novel’s end, he returns to India to be greeted by “trishuls, spears, lathis, crescent-shaped swords” in the narrator’s dream. Perhaps chaos, and its extreme effect, rebellion, are sometimes healthy for life, as for love. They are certainly preferable to the tedium of structures.
The other point of the triad at the centre of the novel is Karim Bhai, a devout Indian Muslim who holds Quranic sessions every Friday in his flat, which he rents out to Ravi and the narrator. Ravi, the scourge of propriety, the drifting bohemian with a heart of gold, the rebel who is ever alone in his difference, attends the sessions diligently because, as he says, “They discuss matters of significance and do it honestly: how to make sense of the world, how to make it a better world. They still have a conscience, these young men and women, not just a bank account like the rest of these people.”
The narrator, a Muslim himself, cannot but suspect that Karim is a bigot because his religious views make him shut his mind tightly to issues like homosexuality or uninhibited mixing among men and women. Besides, Karim keeps disappearing now and then, adding to the narrator’s misgivings. The lessons he imparts in his classes may have triggered off the “Islamist Axe Plot”, in which a Somali Muslim tries unsuccessfully to chop a Danish cartoonist with an axe. This turns on Danish paranoia in full blast, throwing the three central characters apart. When the dust settles, the cause of Karim’s mysterious disappearances is revealed — he had been going away regularly to look after his divorced Danish wife, 23 years older than him, who had succumbed to Alzheimer’s.
This makes one confront the critical problem of exegesis — which is also central to modern Islam. Karim had been more than honourable in his intentions. The narrator, for all his education, had read Karim in the way he wanted to, in the light of prevailing fears about Islamist terror. In the same way, Karim had perhaps been only discussing the truths of Islam during his Quranic sessions, but his students have interpreted them in their own way, to serve their own agendas. Amidst all this madness, it is only Ravi the Insane who retains his sanity by stolidly refusing to be taken in by structures. His refusal means that he is condemned to be free, to roam the earth without moorings, but this fluidity is also what interpretation, or life, is all about — the deferred meaning egging it on, like the eternally deferred hope. To become fixed would be to court death.
How to Fight Islamist Terror from the Missionary Position would have stood better as a short story than as the novel that it is. It is a well-intentioned work, which is why one tends to like it. But one also wishes that Khair had been less anxious to bring home the reverence in his irreverence. An intelligent reader would have got Khair’s point even if he had not made a god, of the Dionysian kind, out of the cheeky Ravi.
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