At one point in Moni Mohsin’s Between You, Me and the Four Walls, the fictional narrator Butterfly — who is on top of Pakistan’s social ladder with ancestral land, an “Oxen (Oxford)”-educated husband, and connections extending up to Dubai and London — is seen responding to a mob attack on a Pakistani Christian couple. Killed in a village near Lahore for allegedly disrespecting the Quran, the couple was part of the extended family of Martha, Butterfly’s “sweepress”, who seeks comfort from her mistress after the harrowing incident. After listening to what the couple went through, Butterfly shows a rare moment of sensitivity: “They were both so young. He was about thirty. And she was only in her twenties. I wonder how long they had been married. I wonder if they had any children” And if they did, how many they had and how old they were? And who will look after them now? I wonder how the news was broken to their parents? Their children?” But, as in her previous books in which Mohsin highlights the hypocrisies and foibles of Pakistan’s moneyed, Butterfly’s moment of sober reflection is immediately — and deliberately — undercut by the presiding preoccupation of her life: the lives of the “haves and the have mores” of Pakistan and their intellectual vapidity. The instrument that Mohsin chooses to accomplish this with is humour — her forte — which works at multiple levels in the book. There is, of course, the absurdity and irony of the situations that Social Butterfly and her coterie of family members and “kitty” pals find themselves in. During the pandemic, for instance, her friend Bechari BT’s biggest concern is how her to-be-married daughter won’t be able to have an outlandish wedding. “How will she wear her 20 lakh ka jora? Her do crore ka necklace?” But there is also a deep self-awareness behind her tongue-in-cheek humour. This is familiar territory for Mohsin and she has honed her satire to a fine art. The third part of Mohsin’s Social Butterfly chronicles, the book spans the rocky eight years between February 2014 and November 2021 — the Modi wave in India in 2014; the rise of the Tehreek-e-Insaaf in Pakistan and Imran Khan emerging as the political leader; the 2019 Pulwama attack; Donald Trump’s rise and the consequent political crisis in America; and finally, the pandemic — through the eyes, and journals, of a socialite. The events are real and troubling, but in Butterfly’s world they emerge as afterthoughts — “Leading human rights activist Asma Jehangir dies aged 66; Butterfly recalls a protest march she once attended.” Social Butterfly is at the top of her game, as is Mohsin herself.
