Free How to Fight Islamist Terror from the Missionary Position by Tabish Khair Page A

the future: it is infested by Eng Lit types.”
    “Why, what did they do to you?” I asked, not really interested. I knew it was just a prelude to banter for Ravi.
    “Do? Eng Lit First World types never do anything. That is why they are Eng Lit First World types. You see, bastard, I was having this gloriously political conversation with some guys from the French and Spanish departments, when in walk a group of Eng Lit types. They know some of us, so they join us; I continue lambasting Mubarak and the Egyptian army and the Twitter Twister. Then in steps one of your Eng Lit types with his two cents of political observation and quotes Yeats. Can you guess what he quotes?”
    “No.”
    “Oh, c’mon, yaar, give it a try. It is what you Eng Lit types quote habitually when you need to talk pol-eee-ticks. I have had it quoted at me at least fifteen times, and always by Eng Lit types. I’ll give you a hint: ‘passionate intensity.’”
    “The best lack all conviction, the worst are full of passionate intensity.”
    “Bullseye, O Eng Lit type!” exclaimed Ravi in his best theatrical mode.
    “How nightmarish,” I rejoined mockingly.
    “That’s an understatement. I observed that, personally, I prefer even shorter poems. I quoted Campbell: ‘You praise the firm restraint with which they write./ I am there with you, of course:/ They use the snaffle and the curb all right,/ But where’s the bloody horse.’ You know what he said?”
    “That it is a minor poem?”
    “Exactly. Your perception is to be maha-commended, Eng Lit type. It proves that you are Eng Lit (Third World Category) type, so that while you too waste your life worrying about the exact shades of the two-tone shoes worn by Billy Great Shakes, you manage to notice, unlike your First World colleagues, the mud and horse shit on Shakespeare’s shoes too. You are right; your colleague, or whoever it was, looked surprised. But it is a minor poem, he said mincingly. I looked him in the eye and pronounced: it is not the missing poem that concerns me; it is the fucking missing horse.”
    Then he added, as if it was an afterthought, though I realized that this was what he had come to my office to say: “Reminds me: don’t you think it is time you met Lena?”
    It was then I was certain that this was different. Ravi had never offered to introduce me to any of his girlfriends in the past and that too with such brusque tentativeness.
    Ravi later told me that he had finally confessed to Lena how he felt about her two days after he returned from his trip to London and Amsterdam. That trip was not just the culmination of his beard experiment; it was also his attempt to avoid making that confession to Lena. He had tried to push her away. He thought he had succeeded. But the day after he returned, he met her for coffee—knowing Ravi, it was probably a conscious testing of his will—and, as he put it, he “fell in love with her all over again, yaar.”
    The very next day he had asked her to join him for lunch at the Milano pizzeria. I was surprised. Milano pizzeria was a tacky place frequented only by students.
    “You mean you confessed your blooming love to her under the plaster statue of that woman, what is it, Athena-taking-to-purdah or spider-woman-entangled-in-her-own-web, hanging from the wall?” I mocked.
    “The very place, bastard. But not under that statue. I said it next to the smaller one of Laurel and Hardy, by the window.” He laughed.
    This is how it seems to have happened. I am putting it together now, from the various bits and pieces that Ravi revealed, sometimes unintentionally, over the next few weeks.
    They had ordered the usual lunch pizza, which you get for thirty crowns, a free Coke or Fanta thrown in. Lena, being vegetarian, had gone for a margherita. Ravi, as he almost always did, had ordered a pepperoni. Lena took a Coke; Ravi a Fanta.
    When I try to imagine the occasion, in my mind Milano pizzeria is not crowded. There are only four students