Moth Smoke: A Novel

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Overview

When Darashikoh Shezad gets himself fired from his banking job in Lahore, he begins a decline that plummets the length of this sharply drawn, subversive tale. Before long, he can't pay his bills, and along with his electricity he loses his toehold among Pakistan's cell-phone-toting elite. As the jet set parties on behind high walls, Daru descends into drugs and dissolution. For good measure, he falls in love with the wife of his childhood friend and rival, Ozi--beautiful, restless Mumtaz, to whom he is drawn with the obsessive intensity of a moth circling a candle flame.

Desperate to reverse his fortunes, Daru embarks on a career in crime, taking as his partner Murad Badshah, the ...

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More About This Book

Overview

When Darashikoh Shezad gets himself fired from his banking job in Lahore, he begins a decline that plummets the length of this sharply drawn, subversive tale. Before long, he can't pay his bills, and along with his electricity he loses his toehold among Pakistan's cell-phone-toting elite. As the jet set parties on behind high walls, Daru descends into drugs and dissolution. For good measure, he falls in love with the wife of his childhood friend and rival, Ozi--beautiful, restless Mumtaz, to whom he is drawn with the obsessive intensity of a moth circling a candle flame.

Desperate to reverse his fortunes, Daru embarks on a career in crime, taking as his partner Murad Badshah, the notorious rickshaw driver, populist, and pirate. When a long-planned heist goes awry, Daru finds himself on trial for a murder he may or may not have committed. The uncertainty of his fate mirrors that of his country, hyped on the prospect of becoming a nuclear player even as corruption drains its political will.

Fast-paced, unexpected, and unfailingly entertaining, Moth Smoke portrays a contemporary Pakistan far more vivid and disturbing than the exoticized images of South Asia familiar to the West. His debut novel establishes Mohsin Hamid as a writer of substance and imagination.

Editorial Reviews

Sudip Bose

Indian writers of English prose are hot commodities these days, having plunged onto the Western literary scene like elephants into a placid pond. In India, the frenzy has caused a writing boom, inspired, perhaps, by the financial success of Arundhati Roy's The God of Small Things. But what about literary Pakistan? Fewer writers have emerged from there, and those who have are often overshadowed by, or lumped together with, their Indian counterparts. Though their voices are distinct, many Pakistani and Indian writers do share a concern for the defining moment in their nations' histories: the partition of the subcontinent in 1947. Mohsin Hamid's bold and ironic first novel is set long after that seminal event, but in its evocation of the anxieties of modern Pakistani life, the legacies of Partition are everywhere apparent.

Moth Smoke is set in the summer of 1998, when Pakistan detonated its first nuclear weapons in an escalating test-for-test with India. Like the atoms that must be split for a fission bomb to explode, modern-day Lahore is itself divided: between old and new, rich and poor, conservative and liberal. Lost amid this fractured society is Daru, a young man fired from his job as a banker, whose two great passions are hash and his best friend Ozi's wife, Mumtaz. Daru, an intellectual wastrel, has a kind of underworld existence; unable to afford electricity or air conditioning, he lives alone in sweltering darkness. Ozi and Mumtaz, in contrast, run with Lahore's urban hip, the sushi-and-mobile-phone crowd.

We are told early on that Daru has killed a boy. But did he really do it? The discovery of the truth leads us along Daru's downward flight from stability to desperation, from salaried banker to low-life addict. Daru is wracked by devastating hunger, for food and drugs as well as for the radiant Mumtaz. (Think Knut Hamsun writing Pakistani noir.) When Daru departs after a meal at his uncle's house, he is consumed by the aroma of leftovers: "The smell makes me hungry even though I've just filled my stomach with as much as I thought it could hold...I wonder why my body has chosen this moment to give me such an appetite, when I can least afford it." The food Daru has just consumed is a luxury beyond his means, as is Mumtaz, with her glamorous life of sleek cars and elite parties, though that doesn't prevent him from pursuing her.

The book's dominant image is of a moth circling a flame. In the darkness of evening, Daru watches the strange seduction played out: the moth "spinning around the candle in tighter revolutions," attracted to the fire. Ignited, the moth is consumed. The lingering moth smoke reminds Daru of burning flesh -- his own, for this Icarus ends up singed by his own irresistible attractions.

To tell Daru's story, Hamid employs multiple narrators, each with a distinct voice, none entirely reliable. This variety is, to my taste, a flaw, since none of the others is as finely pitched as Daru's tragic, ironic voice. When Daru isn't speaking, the prose tends to the flamboyant, with overworked metaphors and relentless punning, adding up to a bad Salman Rushdie impersonation. All in all, though, Hamid has turned a beautiful trick: He has made an old formula -- man, woman and cuckolded husband -- into something fresh and luminous. Rather like a moth turned into a butterfly.
— Salon

Publishers Weekly
Hamid subjects contemporary Pakistan to fierce scrutiny in his first novel, tracing the downward spiral of Darashikoh "Daru" Shezad, a young man whose uneasy status on the fringes of the Lahore elite is imperiled when he is fired from his job at a bank. Daru owes both the job and his education to his best friend Ozi's father, Khurram, a corrupt former official of one of the Pakistan regimes who has looked out for Daru ever since Daru's father, an old army buddy of Khurram's, died in the early '70s. As the story begins, Ozi has just returned from America, where he earned a college degree, with his wife, Mumtaz, and child. From the moment they meet, Daru and Mumtaz are drawn to each other. Mumtaz is fascinated by Daru's air of suppressed violence, and Daru is intrigued by Mumtaz's secret career as an investigative journalist; the two share a taste for recreational drugs, sex and sports. But their affair really begins after Daru witnesses Ozi, driving recklessly, mow down a teenage boy and flee the scene. Daru decides then that Ozi is morally bankrupt. But as Daru becomes more dependent on drugs, the arrogance he himself has absorbed from his upper-class upbringing stands out in stark contrast to his circumstances. Daru's noirish, first-person account of his moral descent, culminating with murder, interweaves with chapters written in the distinctive voices of the other characters. One in particular comes vividly to life: Murad Badshah, a sort of Pakastani Falstaff, officially the head of a rickshaw company, but kept afloat by drug dealing and robbery. Hamid's tale, played out against the background of Pakistan's recent testing of a nuclear device, creates a powerful image of an insecure society toying with its own dissolution. (Jan.) Copyright 1999 Cahners Business Information.
More Reviews (3) Fewer Reviews
Library Journal
Set in Hamid's native Lahore, Pakistan, this first novel provides a pitch-perfect tale of the destruction of a young man. Socialy unconnected, Daru loses his precarious footing among the respectably employed and falls into an abyss of emotional depression, moral turpitude, and criminal activity. He goes from bank employee to drug dealer to holdup man, while falling in love with Mumtaz, the journalist wife of Ozi, Daru's boyhood best friend and rival. Ozi strips daru of his self-respect, and Mumtaz can never merely be Daru's lover, for she is both liberated and besieged by her own moral ambiguity. With a sure hand, hamid paints Daru, Lahore, the weight of Western materialist values, and evolving and devolving friendships, giving us near-photographic realism softened by the shading influences of well-turned phrases. Moving quickly but inviting prolonged retrospection, this first novel lays bare a human core that festers in its own unremitting heat. Hamid is a writer to watch. For all public libraries.-Francisca Goldsmith, Berkeley P.L., CA
Jhumpa Lahiri
[A] brisk, absorbing novel...Hamid steers us from start to finish with assurance and care.
—The New York Times Book Review
The New Yorker
It's Hamid's achievement that we remained charmed by Daru throughout; the fast paced, intelligent narration pulls us, despite ourselves, into his spiralling wake.

Product Details

  • ISBN-13: 9780374213541
  • Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
  • Publication date: 2/1/2000
  • Edition description: 1 ED
  • Edition number: 1
  • Pages: 244
  • Product dimensions: 5.82 (w) x 8.53 (h) x 0.86 (d)

Meet the Author

Mohsin Hamid grew up in Lahore, Pakistan, and attended Princeton University and Harvard Law School. His work has appeared in The New York Times. He currently lives in New York City.

Read an Excerpt




Chapter One

My cell is full of shadows. Hanging naked from a wire in the hall outside, a bulb casts light cut by rusted bars into thin strips that snake along the concrete floor and up the back wall. People like stains dissolve into the grayness.

    I sit alone, the drying smell of a man's insides burning in my nostrils. Out of my imagination the footsteps of a guard approach, become real when a darkness silhouettes itself behind the bars and a shadow falls like blindness over the shadows in the cell. I hear the man who had been heaving scuttle into a corner, and then there is quiet.

    The guard calls my name.

    I hesitate before I rise to my feet and walk toward the bars, my back straight and chin up but my elbows tucked in close about the soft lower part of my rib cage. A hand slides out of the guard's silhouette, offering me something, and I reach for it slowly, expecting it to be pulled back, surprised when it is not. I take hold of it, feeling the envelope smooth and sharp against my fingers. The guard walks away, pausing only to raise his hand and pluck delicately at the wire of the bulb, sending the light into an uneasy shivering. Someone curses, and I shut my eyes against the dizziness. When I open them again, the shadows are almost still and I can make out the grime on my fingers against the white of the envelope.

    My name in the handwriting of a woman I know well.

    I don't read it, not even when I notice the damp imprints my fingers begin to leave in the paper.


Chapter Two

judgment
(before intermission)


You sit behind a high desk, wearing a black robe and a white wig, tastefully powdered.

    The cast begins to enter, filing into this chamber of dim tube lights and slow-turning ceiling fans. Murad Badshah, the partner in crime: remorselessly large, staggeringly, stutteringly eloquent. Aurangzeb, the best friend: righteously treacherous, impeccably dressed, unfairly sexy. And radiant, moth-burning Mumtaz: wife, mother, and lover. Three players in this trial of intimates, witnesses and liars all.

    They are pursued by a pair of hawk-faced men dressed in black and white: both forbidding, both hungry, but one tall and slender, the other short and fat. Two reflections of the same soul in the cosmic house of mirrors, or uncanny coincidence? It is impossible to say. Their eyes flick about them, their lips silently voice oratories of power and emotion. To be human is to know them, to know what such beings are and must be: these two are lawyers.

    A steady stream of commoners and nobles follows, their diversity the work of a skilled casting director. They take their places with a silent murmur, moving slowly, every hesitation well rehearsed. A brief but stylish crowd scene, and above it all you preside like the marble rider of some great equestrian statue.

    Then a pause, a silence. All eyes turn to the door.

    He enters. The accused: Darashikoh Shezad.

    A hard man with shadowed eyes, manacled, cuffed, disheveled, proud, erect. A man capable of anything and afraid of nothing. Two guards accompany him, and yes, they are brutes, but they would offer scant reassurance if this man were not chained. He is the terrible almost-hero of a great story: powerful, tragic, and dangerous. He alone meets your eyes.

    And then he is seated and it begins.

    Your gavel falls like the hammer of God.

    Perhaps a query (Where did I get this thing?) flashes through your mind before vanishing forever, like a firefly in the belly of a frog. But the die has been cast. There is no going back.

    The case is announced.

    The prosecutor rises to his feet, and his opening remarks reek of closure.

    "Milord," he says (and he means you), "the court has before it today a case no less clear than the task of the executioner. The accused has stretched out his neck beneath the heavy blade of justice, and there is no question but that this blade must fall. For he has blood on his hands, Milord. Young blood. The blood of a child. He killed not out of anger, not out of scheme or plan or design. He killed as a serpent kills that which it does not intend to eat: he killed out of indifference. He killed because his nature is to kill, because the death of a child has no meaning for him.

    "There can be no doubt here, Milord; no more facts exist to be found. The balancing of scales awaits, Milord; redress for wrong is come. Tender humanity screams in fear, confronted by such a monster, and conscience weeps with rage. The law licks its lips at the prospect of punishing such a one, and justice can shut its eyes today, so easy is its task."

    The prosecutor pauses, his words leaping about the courtroom like shadows cast by unsheathed knives in the flickering light of some dying candle.

    "For this, Milord, is his crime ..."

Table of Contents

Prologue 3
1. One 5
2. Judgment (before Intermission) 7
3. Two 10
4. Opening the purple box: an Interview with professor Julius superb 35
5. Three 39
6. The big man 59
7. Four 72
8. What lovely weather we're having for the Importance of air-conditioning) 101
9. Five 111
10. The wife and mother (part one) 147
11. Six 159
12. The best friend 184
13. Seven 195
14. Judgment (after Intermission) 234
15. Eight 237
16. The wife and mother (part two) 241
17. Nine 245
Epilogue 247

Customer Reviews

Average Rating 4.5
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Sort by: Showing all of 5 Customer Reviews

  • Anonymous

    Posted August 3, 2002

    interesting...highly disturbing

    This was a well written book, but at times I felt that the figurative language and imagery was over used or over emphasized. However, it is a page-turner. Some of the characters were quite realistic whereas some were exaggerated. All in all I was quite disturbed and felt sick from inside (to tell you the truth) after finishing this novel. It leaves one thinking about it continuously, pondering over the details and problems, especially if you are Pakistani, but please remember this is NOT all of modern day Pakistan. Hamid's style reminded me a lot of V.S. Naipaul... which I didn't appreciate because I don't like Naipaul.

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  • Anonymous

    Posted April 28, 2000

    A good start, but there is more to Pakistan

    While it is refreshing to see a novelist of Pakistani origin publish a novel with a major publisher, I must say that this book is over-rated. Though the nuanced allegories in the book will undoubtedly strike chords with many Pakistani elite (often the ones who are web-savvy), Western readers must not take this to be a representation of 'Pakistani society' as some of the reviewers seem to be stating. Hamid is describing the top 0.01 % of Pakistan's pretentious elite -- which is fine, but unfortunately the book is being marketed as if it were about Pakistani culture -- which it is not. In fact much of the 'wannabe' cultural attributes that Hamid highlights among Pakistani elite can be found in most developing country elite from Argentina to Zimbabwe (I can speak from personal experience of interacting with elite from both those counties as well). The imagery is lyrical and at times compelling, but the language does not reflect the stylistic maturity of other South Asian writers such as Sara Suleri or Anita Desai. Nevertheless, a good start. I hope that Hamid's next novel will also try and cover some of the more exemplary attributes of Pakistani society, particularly among the majority of the populace who do NOT drive Pajeros or drink Scotch!

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  • Anonymous

    Posted April 16, 2000

    Mesmerizing

    I'd never really pondered what one might encounter living in Pakistan. Fortunately, I stumbled upon Hamid's beautifully detailed story of Daru's downward spiral. The story is both poetic and haunting. India and Pakistan's entry into the nuclear arms race defines the mood as much as the oppressive heat of the Lahore summer. Each character is honestly stuck with numerous flaws, but I know exactly why they are who they are. I accept them wholly.

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  • Anonymous

    Posted March 15, 2000

    One of the best

    Just loved it. This book takes you on journey to Lahore in time machine. I would say that this book definitely deserves to get short-listed for Bookers Award. Coming from the heartland of America (Minneapolis), it was very hard to picture Lahore but writer made it simple and beautiful trip to mysterious and thrilling city. I would recommend this book to every one, who is looking for an excellent read.

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  • Anonymous

    Posted February 14, 2000

    Terrific

    This was a beautifully-written, witty and bittersweet book that I could just not put down. The characters were flawed and real and perfectly realized. I highly recommend this book.

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