Pak writer releases post-nuclear fiction

Published by Farrar Straus & Giroux, this 288-page novel seeks to encapsulate Pakistan’s travails through a fratricidal saga. And if the excerpts posted on Hamid’s website (mothsmoke.com) indicate a lavishness with similes and incomplete sentences, the blurbs cited alongside provide more than a teaser. “Not often does one find a first novel that has the power of imagination and skill toorchestrate personal and public themes,” gushes Gordimer, “and achieve a chord that reverberates in one’s mind. Moth Smoke is one of the two or three best novels I have read this year.”

It is not quite clear whether the year in question is 1999 or 2000 (given the fact that Hamid rushed in his final manuscript to his publishers only in August 1999). But any cynicism stemming from Normal Mailer’s effusive blurb for a recent book he confessed he had not read is amply countered by similar exultation from Joyce Carol Oates, Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, anonymous Amazon.com surfers besides reviews from Kirkus, Elle and The L.A. Times.But first the story, which is set against the backdrop of the Chagai nuclear explosions.

In a clear take-off from the Mughals’ propensity to self-destruct in the struggle for legacy, Hamid’s central charactersare named Aurangzeb (Ozi to friends) and Darashikoh (Daru). Ozi, son of a corrupt official, Khurram Shah, returns to Lahore after a pampered studenthood in an AmericanUniversity and immerses himself in money-laundering. His childhood friend Daru, on the other hand, finds himself jobless; that is, no foreign degree means no job, which means no money for electricity, which means no air-conditioning.

“There are two social groups in Pakistan,” goes Daru’s mentor’s theory. “The distinction between members of these two groups is made on the basis of control of an important resource: air-conditioning.” And later in the novel when Daru finds solace in the arms of Ozi’s wife, Mumtaz, the narrator muses: “Mumtaz would later wonder whether Darashikoh’s lack of air-conditioning played a role in attracting her to him. No one will ever know the answer to that question, but it must be said that if air-conditioning doomed her relationship with her husband, it doomed her relationship with his best friend as well. You see, Mumtaz was over-air-conditioned and longed to be uncooled, while Darashikoh was under-air-conditioned and longed to be cooled. Although they walked the same pathfor a while, Mumtaz and Darashikoh were headed in opposite directions.”

Moth Smoke’s history posted on the site is a saga in itself. An undergraduate at Princeton University, Hamid started work on the novel at a fiction workshop with Toni Morrison and finished a 150-page draft before graduation. Work on another draft continued on his return to Lahore, and yet again when he enrolled for a law degree at Harvard, where he convinced a professor to let him present his novel, now structured as a trial, as his thesis.

During the next two years while working with the consultancy firm McKinsey & Co, Hamid put together the final draft. No wonder, he says he plans to embark on his next book “as soon as he catches his breath.”