The arrival of a good novel in English about modern Pakistan might surprise some people. But there are many things in this witty, observant and astute book that go beyond normal expectations.
The author, now living in New York, clearly knows Lahore's fun-loving elite well, and was perhaps at one time one of them. His attitude toward this vividly portrayed group of pleasure-lovers is, however, essentially that of an understated satirist.
They drive around their city in white BMWs, party on floodlit lawns, indulge in illicit alcohol and drugs, and dance to music specially mixed for the occasion by famous London DJs. Meanwhile they are observed by the novel's principal narrator, Daru, a young man who hopefully lingers on the fringes of their charmed world, yet who has always viewed the ways of his college peers with skepticism.
You eventually discover that Daru received his upper-class education on account of his father having been in the army with the much more affluent father of his best friend, one of the leading party-goers called Ozi. Matters quickly come to a head when Daru's independence of mind causes him to lose a comfortable job with a bank -- obtained, like all the best jobs in town, through the influence of elite acquaintances. He can no longer afford to associate with his former playmates, and only a secret sexual liaison with Mumtaz, Ozi's wife, keeps him in contact with the circle.
Prior to the break, however, he has witnessed a road accident in which Ozi, driving at speed through a red light at night, kills an impoverished, bare-footed adolescent boy. Unseen by Ozi, Daru had takes the boy's body to the hospital.
This is a first novel that received near-universal international praise when it was published in hardback last year. Its appearance this week in paperback should now elevate it to cult best-seller status.
Short though the book is, there are many incidentals of Pakistani life that the author finds space to explore. Mumtaz, for instance, is pursuing a secret career as an investigative journalist, writing articles under a pseudonym about such topics as prostitution, drug-dealing and corruption. This allows the story to incorporate a wide-ranging series of snapshots of aspects of life in Lahore that would be hard to obtain from any other source.
There are literary and historical antecedents to this book, too. Daru's servant, for example, as a boy used to sit astride the big gun Zam-Kammah, just as Kim does at the start of Rudyard Kipling's novel. And Ozi is meant to recall the great emperor of these parts, Aurangzeb.
This novel, in other words, dealing as it does with ecstasy and Johnny Walker Black Label, designer suits and parties to celebrate successful nuclear tests, casts a bright light on a little-known corner of the modern world, but from a knowing literary standpoint.
Kidney theft, teaching your girlfriend to box, a kite fight, sexual abandon on a dusty roof, orange parrots in the banyan's branches -- Pakistan provides the book with an unusual and exotic background.
Halfway through the story the monsoon breaks. But this year, after the lightning, and then the thunder, people instinctively pause for a moment, just in case these are followed by a wave of heat hotter than a thousand suns. This, after all, is 1998, and Pakistan's first post-nuclear monsoon.
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