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out fifteen minutes later, looking a bit different.
    He had shaved off the French-style beard that he had grown over the past few weeks.
    “What happened, bastard?” I asked him. “Lost your faith so soon?”
    “Experiment successfully completed,” he replied.
    It turned out that his beard had been the outgrowth of Karim Bhai’s Quranic sessions but in a typically idiosyncratic way. Indiosyncratic way, Ravi would have said. He had grown it to find out if, as claimed by some of Karim Bhai’s fellow-believers, a beard on a Middle Eastern-type face impeded progress through Customs in European airports. Having flown to London, and then to Amsterdam, and from there back to Århus, via Copenhagen—his trajectory over the past week of travels and visits—he had put the hypothesis to test.
    “So?” I asked him.
    “So what?”
    “So, did your beard impede your progress?”
    “By an average of two minutes and seventeen seconds—calibrated against previous non-bearded notations—per airport.”
    “I don’t believe you, Ravi,” I said. “You must have done a Mr. Bean-draws-a-gun or scowled at them to attract attention.”
    “But, of course, yaar, I had to make them notice my beard; I was not blessed with Karim Bhai’s hairy effulgence. And anyway, some experiments need a catalyst.”

A GLASS FULL OF LOVE
    It was one of those Sundays when all three of us were home. When relaxing in the flat, Karim went about in a long embroidered kurta and white pajamas (stiffly ironed): he sat there in this home wear, the door of his room wide open, trying to surf news channels on an old desktop that stood (covered with plastic when not in use) in a corner of his room. Ravi wore his casually expensive shorts and emblazoned T-shirt, and I was fully dressed, in jeans and a shirt: Ravi had once noted that this was what proved my professional middle-class status, that only members of the upper classes and the lower or lower middle-classes in the subcontinent wore casual or Indian clothes in company.
    Karim came out of his room. He looked disgusted.
    “I should buy a new computer. This one is so slow,” he said to us. We were in the kitchen, watching BBC on a small TV that Karim had installed atop the fridge. He had a slightly bigger plasma TV on a wall of his room.
    “Why don’t you, Karim Bhai? They are quite cheap now and you must be minting millions with all the extra shifts you do,” Ravi replied lightly.
    Karim Bhai took the suggestion seriously. He did not always get light banter.
    “Oh, I am not making that much money, you know,” he said. “And I have expenses…”
    He always claimed he had “expenses” but never elaborated on the nature of these.
    “You can use my laptop, Karim Bhai.” Mine was plugged in on the kitchen table and it was much faster than Karim’s antique machine. We were used to such situations by now: Karim would get fed up with his slow desktop, one of us would offer him one of our faster laptops, he would refuse, as was proper; the offer would have to be repeated; he would accept with formal thanks, and spend about an hour surfing for news, mostly from India and various Muslim nations.
    Those days with Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, all on the boil, he was particularly interested in the news. So were we—it was one of the sources of Ravi’s frustration with Danish universities that our students seemed unaware of what was happening. But there was an obvious difference in our interest in the events of what I preferred to call the Jasmine Revolution and Ravi, with greater skepticism, termed the Twitter Twister. Ravi and I had opinions; we were members of democratic chat groups, we signed Avaaz petitions, our Facebooks were cluttered with radical quotations. But Karim Bhai simply went to the news pages, in English, Urdu and Arabic, read them so closely that his beard touched the keyboard; he never commented on anything. If he said something, it was usually very general: “It is better today,” or “It