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.
There are psychological depths hinted at in this deceptively lightweight tale, as in Daru's teenage closeness to Ozi, his current love for Mumtaz as that of a man searching for a mother-substitute, and Mumtaz's own remoteness from her son. There are other dimensions too, yet very delicately sketched in, so that you can hardly fathom them. But then Mohsin Hamid's lightness of touch is throughout one of his great strengths.
The title refers to moths that burn themselves in candle flames. Several characters in this book, as the author points out, are candles and moths at one and the same time.
Hamid uses the technique of giving several of his varied cast a chapter in which they display their way of looking at things. These usually come up with surprises, information you wouldn't have guessed from Daru's narrative which forms the bulk of the novel.
The author's own insight into people he fundamentally despises is illustrated by the money-laundering Ozi's monologue of self-defense. As he insists, "You have to have money these days. The roads are falling apart, so you need a Pajero or a Land Cruiser. The phone lines are erratic, so you need a mobile ... Thanks to electricity theft there will always be shortages, so you have to have a generator. The police are corrupt and ineffective, so you need private security guards ... You accept that you can't change the system [so you] create lots of little shell companies, and open dollar accounts on sunny islands far, far away."
Daru, meanwhile, has fallen from air-conditioned to non-air-conditioned status. Despite being approached by a bright-eyed fundamentalist in a cinema, his drug habit induces him to team up instead with his dealer, a rebellious rickshaw driver, and a kind of overweight Robin Hood.
The decline and fall of a mere meritocrat in a world of privilege is the theme of this novel. That the poor die while the rich look the other way is its unblinking moral.
There are several Pakistani words in the book that are not explained -- instead, you get to realize what they mean as you read. This is admirable. The book, you feel, is not robbed of its distinctive aroma just to satisfy the laziness and sense of superiority of pampered Anglo-Saxons.
Mohsin Hamid's first novel is lean, caustic, ingenious, and unwavering in its ethical orientation. The moral compromises of the rich, and the pressures (economic, social and even sexual) on the poor, are memorably conveyed. Lahore's well-heeled denizens are not going to be granted much consolation, in the unlikely event of their needing it, by reading this sharp, pointed, and curiously compelling little story.
For your information:
Moth Smoke
By Mohsin Hamid
247 pages
Granta Books, Paperback
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