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Karim’s flat, I identified two kinds of phone calls. Most of them were the normal kind: Karim would pick up the phone and talk into the receiver, in Danish, English or Urdu, about various mundane matters. If one of us picked up the phone, there would be a voice at the other end identifying himself or (very rarely) herself and asking for Karim. Then there were the usual wrong numbers. Perhaps too many, I suspected later on, though some of them—like the woman who called asking, in slurred Danish, to be connected to her “mand,” or the child who dialed incorrectly—seemed innocuous enough.
    But the second kind of phone call was different and much rarer. So rare that we paid it sufficient attention only in retrospect, when suspicion left us with no choice. The phone would ring. If Ravi or I picked it up, sometimes it would go dead. It would ring again, and usually Karim Bhai would pick it up with alacrity if he was in the flat. If he wasn’t, it might go dead again and not ring for the next six hours, which was the usual duration of Karim Bhai’s shifts. When Karim Bhai picked up the phone, his conversation was restrained, seldom going beyond yes or no. Once I heard him say in Danish, in a tone of irritation, “Why do you always forget to call me on my mobile?” Though he was immediately contrite after that. He started apologizing, but then the phone went dead. A few seconds later Karim Bhai got a call on his mobile, which he answered in his room after, unusually, closing the door.
    All this went unremarked by me then, as did the young men and (fewer) women who came to Karim Bhai’s Friday sessions. Later, when I mentioned these calls to the police, the interrogating officer looked visibly pleased. He was less pleased by my inability to give him a full description of most of the young men and women. But, like the phone calls, I had not noticed them then. If I had noticed them, I had noticed the resemblance between them: beards and veils.
    On faces of different colors—mostly South Asian, occasionally European, African, or Indonesian- or Malaysian-looking—but framed by the same seriousness of purpose, the same solemnity, the same sparse or full growth of hair on their chins, the same wrap of cloth around their head… I could not have described them if I had wanted to. The only one I could have described was Ali. Or Ajsa. But of course, the police knew all about Ali and Ajsa by then. And, to be honest, Ajsa, as far as Ravi and I could recall, had attended only one of the sessions.
    It had been a morning in March. I am certain about that because, after relenting in February, the cold had returned with a vengeance so that, when the bell rang and I opened the door, the chill cut me to the bone, although the flat was on the third floor. Standing outside, all wrapped up, with just some wisps of her blonde hair showing, was a young woman. For a moment I thought she was one of Ravi’s new girlfriends, but she was by no means “plain,” even by Ravi’s standards. A tall, willowy woman, blue-eyed, blonde, almost my height: she was evidently Danish. I was surprised when she asked for Karim Bhai. She called him “bhai” too, which was just as surprising.
    As Karim had been on a night shift and was expected to return any moment, and as we were going to have breakfast in the kitchen, I asked her to join us. She did, though just for a coffee. When I introduced her to Ravi, she looked unsurprised—both by his looks, which seldom went unnoticed, and by his presence.
    “It is good to meet both of you,” she said. “Karim Bhai was so happy when you rented the rooms after Babo and Mama vacated in such a huff. He was uncertain he would be able to rent out the rooms again, at least not both of them. You know how Danes are.”
    It was then that we understood who she was. She was not Danish. She was the young Bosnian woman whose elopement with a religious Somali man had cost Karim Bhai his previous tenants. She introduced