Moth Smoke by Mohsin Hamid
I don’t quite know how I missed Mohsin Hamid’s Moth Smoke when it came out in paperback last year, but I did. It’s far too good and interesting a novel to let pass, and I should make amends.
The relatively recent flourishing, artistic and commercial, of South Asian authors has largely been comprised of Indian writers, leavened with a few Sri Lankans. Pakistan does not normally come to mind as either a source of authors or as a setting for (modern) novels. Moth Smoke was something of a wake up call—this is an edgy, modern novel, written with directness, about a country most of us know far too little about.
It is possible to read the book as a critique of modern Pakistani society (corruption, the spoiled upper classes, violence and drugs) against the backdrop of the 1998 atomic tests. Readers of a historical bent will notice that the two main characters, Ozi and Daru, are cast as modern-day versions Darashikoh and Aurangzeb, two sons of the Mughal Emperor Shah Jahan. The book also makes considerable use of symbolism: not just the atomic bomb, but also air-conditioning, with latter being a proxy for class status.
The symbolism and social critique provide the book with depth and tension, but the reader can ignore all this and just read the story.
Moth Smoke is the story of Daru, a young man who is fired from his job as a banker. He starts off with several strikes against him: while intelligent, his family could not afford the international degree that might made him part of the hip, mobile-phone-toting-crowd of which his childhood friend Ozi and his beautiful wife Mumtaz are a part. His banking job is the result of Ozi’s family connections rather than merit. But Daru himself, it appears, has never quite pulled his socks up, and finds a certain amount of solace in recreational hashish.
The loss of his job for refusing to grovel to an influential customer sends him into a downward spiral of self-pity, laziness, denial, desperation, increasing drug use and ultimately violence and crime. The alienation is so thick you can cut it with a knife. Ozi’s wife Mumtaz falls for Daru, probably because he isn’t Ozi. Almost everyone in the book blames circumstance for whatever happens to be wrong. It sounds awfully depressing, but it isn’t. Throughout it all, Daru retains a certain dignity and rakishness, as well as the affection of Mumtaz, who is also, secretly, an investigative journalist writing under a pseudonym, and an ironic sort of angel: she seems to be able to bestow upon Daru a tenderness she can’t give to own child.
What does all of this mean? Asian television viewers will see the Ozis and Mumtazes prancing about the Subcontinent-sourced and directed advertisements on Star TV. Who are the moths and what is the flame? Pakistan and the bomb? Mumtaz and Daru? Pakistan and the West? Did Daru kill the boy? That boy? And why exactly does Mumtaz write him in prison? Moth Smoke would make an interesting opera. Daru’s self-destruction and self-absorption echoes that of Don Jose in Carmen. The Ozi, Mumtaz, Daru triangle is reminscent of Verdi’s Don Carlos, while the emptiness of the party-crowd reminds one of La Traviata and we a Sparafucile in Murad Badshah. Operas have been based in stranger places. The book is a bit raw around the edges. Hamid’s use of multiple narrators does not always quite work; some are more credible than others. The characters sometimes tend to drift into being symbols rather than real people. But it might also be that, like a Pakistani carpet, a few blemishes (often added deliberately) add to the completeness of the work.