A story sans redemption

I first learnt about Moth Smoke, the highly acclaimed debut novel by Mohsin Hamid, when I visited chowk.com a few months ago (Book Review by Ras H. Siddique ). Run mostly by US-based Pakistanis, it is an Internet site I wholeheartedly recommend to anyone who wishes to be introduced to the thinking, questioning and creative minds of Pakistan, and who, like most chowkwallahs, long for peace and friendship between India and Pakistan. What I read about the novel had created such a huge interest in me that I thought of asking one of my friends in Pakistan to send it to me. Happily, Penguin India have published it in a low-priced edition (only Rs. 250), which I bought at Mumbai airport last week.

I must state at the outset that, as an Indian I didn't feel good to see Pakistani society presented in such starkly pessimistic colours. Indeed, it left me deeply depressed. So much so that the effect of depression combined with what began as a mild toothache during the day to create, by midnight, an unbearable mix of mental and physical unease. Like most readers of the novel, which is making waves within and without Pakistan, I had finished reading it in one long sitting. As I lay in bed, images of Daru, Mumtaz and Ozie, the main characters in this novel, kept popping up in my mind, forcing me to ask myself if the picture of Pakistan they presented - or the picture of love, betrayal and disintegration they presented -- is true and convincing.

The more I thought of it, the more I said to myself, "No, it cannot be". I do not disbelieve the moral depravities of the ruling class in Pakistan, nor its identity crisis as it unsuccessfully negotiates the conflicting pressures of Islam (both the ennobling and intolerant varieties of it), an unsure nationalism which can only define itself in anti-India terms, and a strong attraction towards and dependence on the very West whose culture it loves to decry. Still, I believe that the decadent, corrupt and uncaring upper crust of the Pakistani society portrayed by Hamid cannot be all there is to Pakistan. The description is skewed, one-sided and borders on exaggeration because of the absence of any redeeming features. And no society is without its redeeming features.

There is a temptation that budding writers from former colonies of the West who write in English usually fall prey to. It is the temptation of presenting only the dark side of their society to the West, which they have now chosen to be their home and which provides much of the market and the media glare for them to advance on a highly competitive and commercialised literary path. Sadly, for all his enormous talent, Hamid, a Lahore-born young writer who now lives in New York, seems to fit the bill.

The novel is unputdownable because Hamid has written it admirably well. The plot is gripping. Located in the lives of the elite of Pakistan, it holds sufficient interest for Indian readers for whom much of socio-cultural Pakistan is an alien territory. To those who have a mental picture of an Islamic society in which both personal and collective lives are governed by strict religious rules and traditions, it is a plot that shocks. Many Muslims, both in Pakistan and India, might even question it, for who wants to acknowledge the dark truths about one's society? But here it is. Both the feudal rich and the neo-rich in Hamid's debut novel exhibit unspeakable venality in their lives, replete with drugs, debauchery, disregard for the law and a propensity to bend the government machinery to further their own ends.

Give and take a few additions and subtractions here and there, such venality can be seen in a section of the Indian elite, too. But only a section. Which is what one suspects to be true also about the Pakistani elite. But reading the tale as told in Moth Smoke, one could easily come away with the impression that the life of the rich in Pakistan revolves only around heroin, ill-gotten wealth, kalashnikov guns, illicit sex and easily breakable laws. Hamid may have overstated this case as an attention-catching tactic.

Not only is the social landscape in Moth Smoke devoid of any redeeming features, but even the main characters look uni-dimensional and lack psychological depth. Even as the lives of Daru, Ozie and Mumtaz get sucked into a destructive whirlpool, none of them is ever assailed by a strong urge for introspection, a desire for self-correction or an impulse to help the other onto a path of redemption. Thus, Ozie continues to live a life of luxury, supported partly by his own American education but mostly by his corrupt father's fabulous riches. He remains supremely unconcerned by the plight of his fellow-beings. He is also uncaring towards the thoughts and feelings of his US-educated, self-willed wife Mumtaz, who has unwillingly mothered a two-year-old son for him. He revels in throwing expensive parties to the yuppies of Lahore, or attending parties thrown by them. These are parties in which drugs, dancing and sex are constant highlights and food specially airlifted from Karachi is not a rarity.

Mumtaz follows her husband to these parties, although she hides within her a deep boredom and dissatisfaction. Their marriage is coming apart. His unscrupulousness shocks her, such as his easy defense of his father's dirty means to amass wealth. When the chord of respect - the basis of all love -- which she felt for him when they studied together in the US four years ago finally snaps, she, while still formally in marriage, enters into a barely disguised relationship with Daru, her husband's best friend. To seek fulfillment in other creative ways, she also starts to work as a closet journalist, under the byline of 'Zulfikar Manto', and achieves phenomenal success.

Daru, though the protagonist of the novel, is also Hamid's weakest character. Not hailing from a rich family like Ozie, and fired from his modest bank job because he showed the courage not to kowtow to a wealthy and arrogant client, he is groping for a breakthrough in life. It is not easy being young, educated and unemployed. Especially at a time when the cost of living is rising. But the only avenue Daru chooses to enter is that of drugs (both selling and consuming it) and, later, crime. This process of waste and descent in Daru's life is where the novel disappoints the most.

Daru is now sleeping with his best friend's beautiful wife. And what the two have is not just sex. They make love, knowing that it could have dangerous consequences. ("The poets say some moths will do anything out of love for a flame," says Manucci, one of the characters in the novel.) There is no coarseness in their relationship, at least not initially. They can even find the beginnings of love in the ecstasy they both experience in their togetherness. Daru has, by now, also seen through the utterly unscrupulous nature of his once-best friend - he has seen Ozie kill a boy on the road under his recklessly speeding car, and then just speed away to hide his own hand in the crime. (In the end, Ozie, using his powerful contacts in the government, manages to implicate Daru himself, as a person who stopped by at the accident spot and took the victim to the hospital, in the crime and has him sent to prison.)

Strangely, and also sadly, neither Daru's worsening economic condition nor - more important -- his exhilarating contact with Mumtaz's beauty and love ever prods him into thinking that he should give up the path of drugs and re-build his life in a redeeming way. He might or might not have succeeded, but Daru doesn't even try. For all the heroin-induced hallucination and hangover he regularly experiences, we never find Daru in a paroxysm of existential conflict - asking himself questions about his own life, the life of the people he interacts with, and the life of his country. There is in him no rage, no idealism, no self-dialogue and no trying and falling and trying again. His descent into self-destruction is straight and linear, unhindered by any inner reconstructive endeavour. This is strange. It can't possibly happen that way in human beings, not even in coarse human beings. And Daru was never a coarse person.

Equally strangely and sadly, Mumtaz too doesn't actively help him to come out of his self-destructive condition. She doesn't even try. Indeed, in her not-so-secret visits to his house, they share not only their bodies but also the joint. She seems to be as hooked to drugs as the rest of the rich and famous in Lahore's party circuit. It is only towards the very end of their relationship that she, just before walking out on Daru, speaks disapprovingly about his dependence on drugs for both livelihood and survival. Such unconcern for her love and her lover is unconvincing, for Mumtaz is an intelligent, sensitive and socially aware person. Her choice of subjects for the anonymous articles she wrote as Zulfikar Manto adequately testify to that.

It seems that Hamid paid insufficient attention to developing his two key characters, Daru and Mumtaz, in a redemptive way. He infuses no invigorating, life-reviving idealism into their love. Which is unconvincing, for love, even extra-marital love between two sensitive persons, is always an idealism-tinged experience. Beauty is a transformational force. It spurs lovers to ask questions about themselves and their society. It pushes them to change their own lives for the better. They might fail (after all, one is not looking for a story with a happy ending), but they at least carry the sadness and satisfaction of trying. Daru and Mumtaz don't even try.

It must be said to Hamid's credit that, in spite of such questions one might ask about Mamtaz, she is the one who truly sparkles in the novel. Independent, strong-willed and unbowing to any circumstance that might debase her, she is the one person in the tale who doesn't disintegrate. She chooses Ozie on her own during their college days in the US. Later, her passionate relationship with Daru also owes itself to her own initiative. In both cases, she is untouched by guilt. If there is any guilt in her, it is what she feels for neglecting her little son, Muazzam. She is aware that he needs her love and care, and that she is not giving him enough of these. However, the mother in her slowly comes alive towards the end of the tragic tale. Her essential integrity and courage also assert themselves when she finally walks out of her marriage and defends Daru in the court in the road accident case. Hamid sketches this tale-ending sequence with masterly brevity, accentuating the reader's natural sympathy for Daru and admiration for Mumtaz.

What sharpens the Indian appetite for the novel, especially, is the writer's ambitious project: to weave the personal tale of the three main characters not only into the texture of the public life in contemporary Pakistan, but also to allegorise both the personal and the public with the historic memory of undivided India. Thus, Daru and Ozie are Darashikoh and Aurangzeb, named after the eldest and the youngest sons respectively of the Mughal emperor Shah Jahan. The full name of Mumtaz is Mumtaz Kashmiri.

It is natural, then, for an Indian especially to expect that the novel would take us on a tour of the present and the past, showing us subtle signposts of history, emotions and relationships and helping us to come to grips with the questions that bedevil us in our individual, national and sub-continental lives. Hamid, however, disappoints us.

The only faint linkage of the personal with the sub-continental comes in the context of Hamid's story: it happens in May 1998, when both India and Pakistan exploded nuclear devices to announce their entry into the club of nuclear weapons states. It is unclear why Hamid chose this linkage. If the attempt was to somehow decry the two nations' nuclear tests in their deserts as the atomic equivalent of a moth's self-destructive fascination for the flame (Kashmir?), then the message doesn't quite harmonise with the dangerous fascination of Mumtaz and Daru for each other.

The story of Ozie, Daru and Mumtaz sinks no roots in our subcontinental history at all, either modern or Mughal. The only place where the novel touches history is in the brief prologue before the story begins and the epilogue after the story ends, where Hamid has some written some haunting lines about a defining period in Mughal rule. I for one kept working my imagination to know how the story of Ozie and Daru had anything in common with the far more complex, intense and momentous episode in Mughal history involving Dara Shikoh, the liberal, broad-minded, Sanskrit-loving son of the king who built the Taj Mahal in memory of his wife Mumtaz, and a power-hungry and bigoted Aurangzeb, who did not hesitate to have his own brother decapitated and his father imprisoned to grab the Mughal throne.

In the end, I gave up, concluding that the only thing common is their names. If Hamid believes that there are other, more weighty commonalities, he should explore them under the light of his creative talent in a sequel to Moth Smoke. In novels like these, a reader does not look for one-to-one correlations between contemporary and historical characters and events. It is left to the writer's creative genius to develop the linkages as he or she wants, leaving the judgement and the interpretation to the readers. But the linkage must somehow justify itself intrinsically. In Moth Smoke, it doesn't.

I for one believe that the seeds of Pakistan were sown by Aurangzeb's five-decades-long rule during which, as Hamid himself acknowledges in the epilogue, the illiberal emperor strove to convert India into "a land of one belief". Since India could not become a nation of one belief, the believers of One-and-Only-Pure-Belief propounded the Two-Nation theory and succeeded, at a weak moment three hundred years later in this ancient civilisation's long history, in carving out a separate Land of the Pure.

How pure that land of Islam has become is vividly, if somewhat one-sidedly, brought out by Hamid's novel. But the pollution in Pakistan's society, culture and politics cannot be a matter of delight for us in India. We can hardly be blind to the enormous degradation of our own society, notwithstanding the legitimate pride we might feel for our secular multi-faith society, our syncretic culture and our democratic polity. If our two peoples have anything in common at all, it is our common obligation to cast an honest look at the way we live, the way our institutions function, the way our lofty religious, cultural and economic ideals operate in reality, and to ensure that we create conditions of peace, prosperity and growth for all our teeming brethren. (So that, our young people do not take to drugs and crime for a living; one does not have to be a crony of a rich Ozie to get a job; our collective destinies are not shaped by small and self-centred men; and everyone becomes more capable of living love-filled lives.)

Finally, it is also our common obligation to make a choice between Aurangzeb and Dara Shikoh (not the weak and wasting Daru in Moth Smoke, but the poet-scholar son of Shah Jahan, who dreamed of India as One People, One Civilisation and One Nation, based on many peacefully co-existing and mutually respecting faiths.) But perhaps I have digressed into a stream of thought that is not intrinsically and explicitly rooted in the novel.



I am a full-time activist of the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party in India and work in the Prime Minister's Office (Director, Communications & Research). Two things have most changed my outlook on Pakistan: 1) My visit to Pakistan, along with our Prime Minister in his historic bus-ride to Lahore, in February 1999. 2) My regular visits to chowk.com

I have worked for a decade in journalism in Bombay, before beginning my full-time work with the BJP in New Delhi. Need more introduction? I want to work for changing the attitude of Hindus towards Muslims, of Muslims towards Hindus, of India towards Pakistan and vice versa. You know what Swami Vivekananda said in the early years of the last century, when India was unfree but also undivided? "I see in front of my eyes this great resurgent nation of the future, with an Islamic body and a Hindu mind."