Moth Smoke by Mohsin Hamid; Penguin Books; pages 247, Rs.250 (paperback).
"THE summer of 1947 was not like other Indian summers." This is the opening line of Khushwant Singh's novel, Train to Pakistan. The Pakistani writer Mohsin Hamid's debut novel, Moth Smoke, is set during a more recent summer, heated by the s udden explosion of nuclear rivalry in the Indian subcontinent.
There are more fissions and fusions in the novel. The young protagonist, Daru, loses his job in the bank in which he works and where he is expected to simulate canine servility for the benefit of the feudal nouveau riche. Then he falls in love with his b est friend Ozi's wife, Mumtaz, who has come back from the United States. Daru presents himself as the moth whose wings gets singed in love. Hence the title of the novel.
Other fires and smoke also linger between the pages of this book. Moth Smoke might as well have been entitled ''Hash Smoke''. The downwardly mobile Daru begins to peddle dope among the party set. The dope he himself falls for is heroin, the "big a itch" which he also calls "hairy". Murder, felony, violence all get described through a heroin haze. And yet, the book is sustained less by false highs than by its unstinting resolve to document the spiralling lows of a disintegrating society.
The drug that the whole of Pakistan - or at least its most affluent - is chasing is money. And Hamid draws a vivid portrait of this addiction. On this portrait of the privileged is daubed the pigment of socio-political determinations, including internati onal debt and fundamentalism of both the religious and economic variety. The description of the subcontinent's nuclearisation blends seamlessly with the emotional drama of the lives of the novel's characters - and we discover nationhood as a hangover. Po st-coloniality is the name of the condition called the day after. All of this makes Moth Smoke a particularly important literary event. We also get to hear a critique of the nuclear madness from the point of view of the non-elite.
Among the rickshaw pullers, at the garage where Daru picks up his dope, there is concern that tomatoes will now be two hundred a kilo. It is arguable that we here get a glimpse into the more rational attitude of the masses that, on our side of the Line o f Control, had wanted onions and not nuclear bombs:
"Right," continues Sindhi cap. "Everyone has a bomb. And now the Muslims have a bomb. Why should we be the only ones without it?"
"And when prices go up, and schools shut down, and hospitals run out of medicine, then?"
"Then we'll work twice as hard and eat half as much."
"We'll eat grass," says sweaty nose, quoting from one of the Prime Minister's speeches.
"And do you think people who eat grass will still go for rides on rickshaws?" asks an exasperated Murad Badshah.
This is good stuff. But, in reality, Hamid is the Balzac of the air-conditioned class. His depiction of the Pajero-driving, pot-smoking upperclass Pakistanis and their glitzy parties have the breezy feel of an inside job. In Darashikoh Shezad, our self-d estructive protagonist, we have a departure from Khushwant Singh's Juggut Singh or Jugga, the working-class hero of Train to Pakistan. Readers of that novel will remember that Khushwant Singh's narrative vested very little hope in the educated Com munist, Iqbal, and found redemption instead in the village ruffian, Jugga. There are no working class heroes in Moth Smoke, although Daru's boy-servant, Manucci, comes close to being a more likable model than his employer. Daru himself, like Jugga , is an unlikely hero. His appeal rests largely in his alienation from the ruling class to which he has belonged more as a hanger-on than a true member. His distance is fuelled as much by resentment as it is by issues of conscience. For Hamid's readers, most of whom are likely to be closer to Daru than to his superiors, this distance provides an attractive, ambivalent space to define their relationship to massive wealth, even if not to poverty.
All of this should be welcome news in the world of Pakistani letters. In the competitive world of Indo-Pakistan relations, it is generally conceded that Pakistan has the better group of world-class fast bowlers. On the other hand, there will be little he sitation in allowing that India can boast of a finer depth of writing talent in English. In such a world, Moth Smoke augurs the emergence from Pakistan of a cosmopolitan voice that is as sophisticated as it is critical. Trained as a writer under N obel laureate Toni Morrison at Princeton, and now reputedly a consultant on Wall Street, Hamid is an addition to that burgeoning category of expatriate desi writer in English. The merits and demerits of the group are still open to question, but, i n Hamid's case, the eye that looks homeward toward Lahore is less touched with longing than it is with questions that surround belonging. Here is Hamid's imaginative, but unambiguous, look at class divisions in Pakistan:
The first group, large and sweaty, contains those referred to as the masses. The second group is much smaller, but its members exercise vastly greater control over their immediate environment and are collectively termed the elite. The distinction between members of these two groups is made on the basis of control of an important resource: air-conditioning. You see, the elite have managed to re-create for themselves the living standards of say, Sweden, without leaving the dusty plains of the subcontinent . They're a mixed lot - Punjabis and Pathans, Sindhis and Baluchis, smugglers, mullahs, soldiers, industrialists - united by their residence in an artificially cooled world. They wake up in air-conditioned houses, drive air-conditioned cars to air-condit ioned offices, grab lunch in air-conditioned restaurants (rights of admission reserved), and at the end of the day go home to their air-conditioned lounges to relax in front of their wide-screen TVs. And if they should think about the rest of the people, thegreat uncooled, and become uneasy as they lie under their blankets in the middle of the summer, there is always prayer, five times a day, which they hope will gain them admittance to an air-conditioned heaven, or, at the very least, a long, cool drin k during a fiery day in hell.
In the emotional landscape of Moth Smoke, Hamid cuts another road beside Daru's, but, unlike the first one, the second road does not run into a dead end. This second road is named Mumtaz Shah (nee Kashmiri). Mumtaz has married into money; her fath er-in-law is introduced early in the book as "the frequently investigated but as yet unincarcerated Federal Secretary (Retired) Khurram Shah." Apart from being Daru's lover, Mumtaz has a double life also as a popular and provocative investigative journal ist. Her pen-name is Zulfikar Manto. Daru and she have a conversation about the name:
"Why Zulfikar Manto," I ask her."Manto was my favourite short-story writer.""And?""And he wrote about prostitutes, alcohol, sex, Lahore's underbelly."
"Zulfikar?""That you should have guessed: Manto's pen was his sword. So: Zulfikar."
In the Lahore that Hamid depicts, and one would think in Pakistan as a whole, the weapon of choice is a Kalashnikov. In those circumstances, the faith in the power of the pen is courageous, perhaps even commendable. Hamid's tribute to Manto is striking f or other reasons, however. In the moral economy of the novel, it is the fundamentalist right that is on the ascendant. At one point in the novel, in response to a question whether there are many Communists in Pakistan, we hear the following response: "No t anymore. The unshaven boys are the new populists.... Most of them have become experts at couching their beliefs in religiously acceptable terms. The academic version of Sufi poets, you might call them." In this absence, Manto might serve as a less unco nventional but nevertheless effective comrade in the act of protest. The "fundos" would prefer to kill prostitutes, or at least ignore them; in Hamid's story, Zulfikar Manto becomes the spokesperson for the prostitutes' stories. Although this is less app arent in the saga of the prostitutes, it is possible to say that Manto's unconventionality also allows Hamid to introduce a strong, female character into his narrative. Mumtaz Shah in Moth Smoke represents the most resilient and progressive face o f the otherwise crumbling Pakistani bourgeoisie. Her departures from its norms are a muffled protest against what she - and many other women around her, belonging to classes other than her own - experience as a denial, if not also death. If we recall the recent "honour killings" of women by their own families - one of them was gunned down in the law offices of Asma Jehangir in Lahore last year - then Hamid's Mumtaz begins to appear in a defiant light. She is a fighter, and, unlike Daru, she has the cour age and the wits not only to choose but also to win her battles.
Which leaves us with a question - if Daru is a failure, which he undeniably is, then what is the quality of his failing? If you are affliated to that strata of society that we are here calling the air-conditioned class, then, in a society trapped in its own corruption and atrophy, the only ethical imperative for the privileged is to turn out to be drop-outs or losers. Daru gives up his suit and tie in a climate-controlled environment for several broken teeth, drugs, and a shot at failed, illicit romance . He ends up in prison. The prison is a place that is neither home nor workplace; it is neither the parlour nor the street; it is a no-place that can only be described as dead limbo.
By putting Daru there, Hamid reminds us of his spiritual mentor, Manto. Manto's most famous creation, Toba Tek Singh, dies in the no-man's land between India and Pakistan because, deranged and inconsolable, he does not know where he belongs. Daru's probl em is that he does not even want to belong. Unable to choose between the contemporary Pakistan that he does not care for and a better Pakistan that he cannot even imagine, Daru commits social suicide in the no-man's land that divides the two states of na tional being.
Amitava Kumar is the author of Passport Photos, recently published from the University of California Press.
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