The acclaimed Indian writer Tabish Khair’s latest in a line of 10 books that includes The Thing About Thugs and Filming: A Love Story, is a poignant reflection on immigration, religion, and human relationships, disguised as comedy. After all, what could go wrong when an Indian, a Pakistani, and a Muslim fundamentalist live together under the same roof? The answer, Khair tells us, in a sparkling narrative that raises as many questions as it (eventually) answers, is: not quite what you’d expect.

The story of an unnamed Pakistani narrator, his Indian roommate Ravi, and their Islamic fundamentalist landlord Karim living in Aalborg, Denmark, delivers many wry laughs along the way as Khair observes what happens when both natives and immigrants are placed under the pressures of modern European life. Its emphasis on human rights, multiculturalism, and political correctness (and the hypocrisy behind all of this) is deftly contrasted with the chaos and vibrancy of their homelands. As the narrator says, “Sanity was banned in Pakistan by Zia … and that is one ban no one is going to lift.”

But its humour is continually chased by gentle melancholy evoked by the cold Danish landscape and way of life, which Ravi and the narrator must navigate as academics in a university town — the narrator a university professor and Ravi trying to complete his PhD. “It was one of those days when the wet coldness of late winter turns crisp and you can glimpse the sun behind a thin screen of white clouds,” Khair writes, anchoring the backdrop in sight, sound and sensation particular to Denmark. “The wind, when it blows, can carry shivering tales from the ice further north.”

The narrator and Ravi rent rooms in Karim’s house and adjust their ambiguity to organised religion in order to accommodate his religious leanings, a balance even more delicate for happening in a non-Muslim country already suspicious of Islam and its adherents. The narrator maintains a cool cynicism while Ravi grows a beard and starts “practicing” Islam in a way that can be interpreted as facetious or sincere, depending on Ravi’s mercurial moods. The two characters play off each other in dialogue and activities that Khair choreographs perfectly, with just the right amount of irreverence for each other’s countries, yet finding that happy congruence that so often happens when Indians and Pakistanis befriend each other outside of South Asia. When we meet them they’ve already fallen into comfortable patterns, rescuing each other from bad dates with pre-planned phone calls and calling each other “bastard” in gleeful recognition of both having gone to Jesuit schools on either side of the border.

Karim, a taxi driver by night, allows them to do what they want in their rooms, treating them as separate nation-states within the larger boundaries of his ideal country: a place where the Quran is the literal word of God, and where Danish people respect Islam, instead of finding it worthy of mockery and hostility. The other visitors to the flat — a pair of Danes called Great Claus and Little Claus, immigrants from Somalia and Bosnia — obey the Islamic rules of Karim’s domain, making it an unexpected oasis of belonging while the outside world continually reminds them of their outsider status as immigrants who have to efface their identities in order to integrate into Danish society.

As the narrator and Ravi try to figure out what’s behind Karim’s religiosity, his mysterious absences, the phone calls from a strange woman who asks repeatedly for him, they also try to figure out how to please their lovers: for the narrator, the fellow academic Ms Linen Marx, whose steady reliability and earthy sexiness prove a soothing counterpoint to a bruising divorce; and for Ravi, the statuesque Lena, another academic who moonlights as a jazz singer and lights his world up with her green eyes and perfect poise. Both the narrator and Ravi believe themselves to be learning important lessons in love, as their romances follow different arcs throughout the story: one succeeds while the other fails, and it isn’t the one you think.

The story moves along at a medium pace, as Khair builds up the narrative tension nicely. He halts the flow here and there to allude to future events, so that the reader always knows “something” big is going to happen. Until it does, Khair draws his portraits of the two protagonists and Karim, their ostensible foil, and their Danish friends and lovers like a painter, inserting more and more brushstrokes to bring out texture, shade, and tone. Events seem to repeat themselves, but each repetition is a deeper exploration of the same theme: love, gained and lost; belonging, yearned for and arrived at; wisdom, obtained and missed. Khair, beneath the playfulness of language and the witty dialogue, returns again and again to the same sadness that underlies the humour, like the Danish year that repeats the same grey month: “November, November, November.”

When the “something” finally happens, the story changes pace. While explaining the not-so-unexpected turn of events, the prose becomes less effervescent and more didactic: here’s where the story hits its one false note, with an unlikely incident happening in far-off Pakistan that has serious effects back in Denmark. The incident, a stretch even for the truth-is-stranger-than-fiction events that happen in Pakistan on a daily basis, jars because it’s the only off-key moment in an otherwise nearly pitch-perfect trajectory. Still, events that take place after the incident snowball quickly and confidently in Khair’s hands, and by the time the dust has cleared and the truth is revealed, you’re left heartsick by the way it all turned out — if only because Khair has made you care so much for the characters that you wish some of them had made different choices.

Khair captures beautifully the uncertainty at the root of the human condition, tracing what his characters do to one another as they try to make sense of confusing political times, unclear moral conditions, and ambiguous social situations. As Ravi says, when explaining his romantic dilemmas, “It is in the gap between your imperfections, honestly faced, and your desire for something beyond perfection that you can achieve genius.” And How To Fight Islamist Terror is perfectly summed up in his words.

The reviewer is a novelist

How to Fight Islamist Terror From the Missionary Position

(Novel)

By Tabish Khair

Interlink Publishing, UK

ISBN 1566569702

176pp.