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Mohsin Hamid: the enfant terrible of Pakistani literature

By Miranda Husain

LAHORE: It was dark and rainy and it seemed an appropriate day to meet the author of Moth Smoke, the best-selling novel set in the city.

Mohsin Hamid was educated at Princeton and Harvard Law School and came out with his debut novel three years ago. The book, published in the US by Picador, was an instant smash and put Lahore and Mr Hamid on the literary map. Moth Smoke has already been turned into a television series called Daira for Indus and has just been picked up by Caroline Link, the Oscar-winning director of Nowhere in Africa. Miramax Pictures will likely produce the picture.

Today, Mr Hamid is compared to Arundhati Roy, Booker winner for God of Small Things, and to Kirin Desai, who, like Mr Hamid, won the Betty Trask award for her debut novel, Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard. Mr Hamid has presence. He exudes a quiet confidence that can fill a room. He cuts an affable but imposing figure. He launches into a defence of his book, which has been criticised by some as an Orientalist work. “I cannot control the reader’s perceptions,” he said, arguing that the book was structured to get the reader to weigh in.

He describes the book as a trial and the reader as jury. “The trial represents the journey of two contradictory narratives, which must be undertaken to arrive at the truth. The point of the book is that the reader himself delivers the final verdict,” he said. The novel was written for a Pakistani ear, not a Pakistani audience, he said. Still, the novel shattered preconceptions about Pakistan in the West, he added. Mr Hamid finds it ironic that some Pakistani readers have tried to dismiss the book as Orientalist.

“If we resent ‘the other’ claiming to know what ‘we’ think and feel without actually sharing our experience, then we too should recognise that our own sometimes misguided judgment of ‘the other’ without a shared experience is the same crime under a different guise,” said Mr Hamid. “And if we continue in this way, we will never manage to arrive at some twilight of truth and understanding.” Moth Smoke was not received well by South Asians in the UK. The immigrant’s romanticised notion of his homeland is to blame, said the author. “A place that is unchanging is forever welcoming, it remains a place that can be returned to, a virtual paradise,” he said, “to read an account of the homeland, with all its idiosyncrasies and ever-evolving transformations, can truly be unsettling.”

This is a theme Mr Hamid warms to. The self-confessed “nomad of sorts” has spent 13 of his 32 years away from Pakistan. (His father, a widely respected economist works for the Asian Development Bank.) It is the US that seems to bring out the fire in him. Mr Hamid seems genuinely fond of Boston and New York, where he spent many years as an investment banker and the subject of his upcoming book.

The as-yet-untitled work is about a young Pakistani man who must come to terms with the fact that he is moving from post-Sept 11 New York. It is a trek across the inner landscapes of the soul, a timely story of self-discovery and identity. Writing is one way of dealing with the realities of life, said Mr Hamid, who is anchored in London and is a regular contributor to both Time magazine and the New York Times Magazine. He is now on the second draft of his new book.

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