Book – Moth Smoke
Author – Mohsin Hamid
Published by – Penguin Books
ISBN – 0-374-21354-2
Language - English
Length – 256 pages
Genre – Fiction
Cover price – INR 250
Acclaim – “One
could not really continue to write, or read about, the slow seasonal changes,
the rural backwaters, gossipy courtyards, and traditional families in a world
taken over by gun-running, drug-trafficking, large-scale industrialism,
commercial entrepreneurship, tourism, new money, nightclubs, boutiques... Where
was the Huxley, the Orwell, the Scott Fitzgerald, or even the Tom Wolfe, Jay
McInerney, or Brett Easton Ellis to record this new world? Mohsin Hamid's novel
Moth Smoke, set in Lahore, is one of the first pictures we have of that world.”
– Anita Desai
When I read ‘The
Reluctant Fundamentalist’, through the pages of which I was first introduced to Mohsin
Hamid, I was bowled over by the strength of the narrative, by the author’s
refusal to take a moralistic stance (which would have been by far the easier option).
It was therefore only natural that I was waiting to get my hands on this book. It
was worth the wait.. More so after feeling let down by Hosseini’s ‘And the
mountains echoed..’, this book was a welcome relief. More than welcome,
truthfully. Laced with a generous amounts of hypocrisy, hedonism &
resentment, Mohsin Hamid’s ‘Moth Smoke’ is an absorbing read.
The novel begins by
attempting to draw a parallel between Dara Shikoh & Abul Muzaffar Muhi-ud-Din Mohammad Aurangzeb,
the fratricidal sons of the Mughal Emperor Shah Jahan, & Darashikoh &
Aurangzeb (or “Daru” & “Ozi” as we get to know them by), two of the
characters central to the plot. A few pages in, we are introduced to Mumtaz, Ozi’s
intoxicating wife & essentially the glue that holds Hamid’s story together;
no prizes for guessing where she gets her name from. Later, we also meet the
Obelix-minded Murad Badshah (the similarity lying in the I’m-not-fat syndrome),
proud owner of a fleet of auto-rickshaws & a hash-dealer on the side, without
doubt an intentional reference to Muhammad Murad Baksh, Emperor Shah Jahan’s
youngest son who had joined hands with Aurangzeb to vanquish Dara Shikoh. Although these allusions to the famed Mughals
are made only once more, & that too right at the very end, it only adds to
the overall grandeur of the setting.
The Indo-Pak nuclear
arms race provides the perfect easel on which Hamid’s untiring pen paints a flesh-and-blood
picture of the Pakistan as we have come to know, a sentiment that is best
expressed by Ozi when, in an acute matter-of-fact way, he says “You have to have money these days. The roads
are falling apart, so you need a Pajero or a Land Cruiser… The colleges are
overrun with fundos… so you have to go abroad… The police are corrupt and
ineffective, so you need private security guards… People are pulling their
pieces out of the pie, and the pie is getting smaller, so if you love your
family, you'd better take your piece now, while there's still some left.”
Ozi’s Pakistan is a fortress, money being the only way in. Daru’s Pakistan is a
victim of circumstance, ever uncertain with the ground always shifting beneath
its feet. Mumtaz’s Pakistan is a claustrophobic cage, much like her dysfunctional
marriage, that is trapped palpably between the real & the desirable.
There is a definite
Mughal-esque touch to Darashikoh Shezad’s dissolution, what with the primary
factors being a woman & a hash-turned-heroin addiction. And the woman herself
as a self-immolating addiction. Indeed, it would be a severe understatement to
term Daru’s plight as a rags-to-penury story; if anything, it is a tale of his plummeting
finances, his crumbling social position & consequently his rampant appetite
for self-destruction. For those of you who have read R. K. Narayan’s witty
short-story ‘Out of Business’ and believe that, like Rama Rao, losing one’s job
is but a temporary setback in the bigger scheme of things, you have another
thought coming. As Daru loses his job & his life goes for a free fall, he
goes from a mid-level banker to willing adulterer to self-deprecating drug-peddler
to a stoned criminal languishing in prison, the disintegrative process turning
him into a bitter man who hates everyone & everything. And as the last page
begins with “At the ends of their
stories, Emperors like empires have the regrets that precede beginnings”, we
realize that we couldn’t have done anything other than watching on in
mesmerized fatalism..
In Act III Scene II
of Shakespeare’s ‘Julius Caesar’, Mark Antony famously says “The evil that men do lives after them; the
good is oft interred with their bones”. Were I in charge of laying this
book to rest, the epitaph would read - Better
to burn out that to fade away..or so they say. That’s what a candle does, you
know. Burn out. & while she burns, there are always those who are willing
to fling themselves at her feet. Moths. Drawn to the flame. Inexorably. Willing
to die for her. Literally. & when the dust settles on her burnt out wick,
the smoke smells of the last lament of moths.. A longing. An annihilation. Dead
poetry. “Moth Smoke”.