Moth Smoke - Book Review

“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, in whose pages 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.