Moth Smoke Read online

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  MOTH SMOKE

  Finalist for the PEN/Hemingway Award

  Winner of a Betty Trask Award

  A New York Times Notable Book of the Year

  ‘Brisk, absorbing, inventive. Hamid steers us from start to finish with assurance and care’ The New York Times Book Review

  ‘Not often does one find a first novel that has the power of imagination and skill to orchestrate personal and public themes of these consequences and achieve a chord that reverberates in one’s mind … One of the two or three best novels I have read this year’ Nadine Gordimer

  ‘Extraordinary’ Philadelphia Inquirer

  ‘An irresistibly engaging adventure and a searching portrait of contemporary young people in Pakistan’ Joyce Carol Oates

  ‘Beautiful prose and uncomfortably acute insights’ Guardian

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Mohsin Hamid grew up in Lahore, attended Princeton University and Harvard Law School, and worked as a management consultant in New York and London. He is the author of two internationally bestselling novels translated into over twenty-five languages. The first, Moth Smoke, won a Betty Trask award, was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year, and was a finalist for the PEN/Hemingway award. The second, The Reluctant Fundamentalist, won several prizes including the Anisfield-Wolf Award and the Ambassador Book Award, and was shortlisted for many others including the Man Booker Prize, the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, and the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award.

  Moth Smoke

  MOHSIN HAMID

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USA

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  Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  www.penguin.com

  First published in Great Britain by Granta Books 2000

  Published in Penguin Books 2011

  Copyright © Mohsin Hamid, 2000

  The moral right of the author has been asserted

  All rights reserved

  Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

  ISBN: 978-0-141-96914-5

  For

  Nasim,

  Naved,

  and

  Zebunnisa

  Contents

  prologue

  1. one

  2. judgment (before intermission)

  3. two

  4. opening the purple box: an interview with professor julius superb

  5. three

  6. the big man

  7. four

  8. what lovely weather we’re having (or the importance of air-conditioning)

  9. five

  10. the wife and mother (part one)

  11. six

  12. the best friend

  13. seven

  14. judgment (after intermission)

  15. eight

  16. the wife and mother (part two)

  17. nine

  epilogue

  It is said that one evening, in the year his stomach was to fail him, the Emperor Shah Jahan asked a Sufi saint what would become of the Mughal Empire.

  ‘Who will sit on the throne after me?’ asked Shah Jahan.

  ‘Tell me the names of your sons,’ replied the saint.

  ‘Dara is my eldest son.’

  ‘The fate of Dara should be asked from Iskandar.’

  The Emperor’s toes curled beneath him. ‘Shuja is my second son.’

  ‘But Shuja is not shuja.’

  ‘What about Murad?’

  ‘Murad will not fulfill his murad.’

  The Emperor closed his eyes. ‘Aurangzeb is my youngest son.’

  ‘Yes,’ said the saint. ‘He will be aurangzeb.’

  The Emperor gazed across the plain at the incomplete splendor of his wife’s mausoleum and commanded his workers to redouble their efforts. It would be finished before the war of succession began.

  The truth of the saint’s words became apparent. Aurangzeb was crowned Emperor, and he obtained from the theologians a fatwa against his defeated brother, charging Dara Shikoh with apostasy and sentencing him to death.

  The Alamgirnama records the incident thus: ‘The pillars of Faith apprehended disturbances from Dara Shikoh’s life. The Emperor, therefore, out of necessity to protect the Holy Law, and also for reasons of state, considered it unlawful to allow him to remain alive.’

  Imprisoned in his fort at Agra, staring at the Taj he had built, an aged Shah Jahan received as a gift from his youngest son the head of his eldest. Perhaps he doubted, then, the memory that his boys had once played together, far from his supervision and years ago, in Lahore.

  When the uncertain future becomes the past, the past in turn becomes uncertain.

  Yesterday, an ordinary man may have been roused from his sleep to sit in judgment at the midnight trial of an empire. Before him, as he blinked dreams from his lashes, sat a prince accused of the greatest of all crimes, a poet and pantheist, a possible future. None present were innocent, save perhaps the judge. And perhaps not even he.

  1

  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, paus
ing 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.

  2

  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 …’

  3

  two

  Steadying the steering wheel with my knees, I pull the last unbroken cigarette out of a battered pack of Flakes. There are trees by the side of the road, but only on one side, and it’s the wrong side, so their shadows run away from me in long smiles that jump over boundary walls and grin at each other while I bake in my car like a snail on hot asphalt.

  Knees turn the wheel left, then right, steering around an ambitious pothole, a crack aspiring to canyonhood. Fingers twist the barrel of the cigarette, loosening the tobacco, coaxing it into a sweaty palm, rubbing the Flake between thumb and forefinger until it’s almost empty. Eyes flick up and down, watching the road through the arc the steering wheel cuts above the dashboard. Foot gentle on the accelerator.

  Slide the ashtray out and tip half the tobacco in. Take the compass I’ve had longer than I’ve had this car, which is a long time, and spear the hash on one blackened end. Left hand holds the tobacco in its palm and the compass in its fingers, right hand grips a plastic lighter while its thumb spins the flint. Sparks, no flame. Sparks, no flame. Then a light, and when the blue fire licks the hash, a sweet smell with a suddenness that’s almost eager.

  Crumble the hash into the tobacco, crush it, break it, feel the heat telling nerves in fingertips to pass on the message of a little hurt. Knead it, mix it thoroughly. Hold empty Flake in mouth by its filter, suck and refill, pack against a thumbnail, tip tip tip, repeat, tip tip tip, and twist the end shut. Incisors grab a bit of filter, pull it out, gently, like a bitch lifting a pup. Tear off a strip to let the smoke through, reinsert the rest to hold open the end and keep things in their place.

  I light up while rubbing the hash and tobacco residue off my hand and onto my jeans. Rolling while rolling, solo, and baking while baking in the heat. It helps kill time on long afternoons, and I haven’t traveled very far, but I know that no place has afternoons longer than this place, Lahore, especially in the summertime.

  Two drops of Visine and I’m set.

  The sun sits down. Evening. I pull up to a big gate in a high wall that surrounds what I think is Ozi’s place. His new place, that is. His old place was smaller. I’m a little nervous because it’s been a few years, or maybe because my house is the same size it was when he left, so I swing my face in front of the rearview and look myself in the eye. Then I honk out a pair of security guards.

  ‘Sir?’ one says.

  ‘I’ve come to meet Aurangzeb saab.’

  ‘Your name?’

  ‘Tell him Daru is here.’

  Access obtained, I cruise down a driveway too short to serve as a landing strip for a getaway plane, perhaps, and pass not one but two lovely new Pajeros. Yes, God has been kind to Ozi’s dad, the frequently investigated but as yet unincarcerated Federal Secretary (Retired) Khurram Shah.

  The front door opens and a servant leads me inside and upstairs. Time has ripened Ozi’s face and peeled his hairline back from his temples with two smooth strokes of a fruit knife. We crouch, facing each other with our arms spread wide, and pause for a moment, grinning. Then we embrace and he lifts me off my feet. I thump him on the back and squeeze the wind out of his lungs for good measure. Neither of us says hello.

  ‘You’ve gone bald,’ I exclaim.

  ‘Thanks a lot, yaar,’ he replies.

  Mumtaz steps forward and kisses me on the cheek. ‘Hello, Daru,’ she says. Hoarse voice, from intimacy’s border with asthma: parched beaches, dust whipped by the wind. Very sexy but not much to drink.

  I try on a welcoming, harmless smile. It gets caught on my teeth. ‘Hello, Mumtaz.’

  ‘And this,’ Ozi says, hoisting up a tired little boy, ‘is Muazzam.’

  Muazzam starts to cry, wrapping his arms around his father’s neck and hiding his face.

  ‘You certainly have a way with kids,’ Ozi tells me.

  ‘He’s exhausted,’ Mumtaz says. ‘You should put him to bed.’

  A muffled ‘No’ comes from the boy.

  We sit down on a set of low-slung sofas like black-cushioned metal spiders. Mumtaz is watching me and I look away because she’s beautiful and I don’t want to stare. I haven’t seen her since the wedding, and I must have been more drunk than I thought because I don’t remember thinking then that Ozi was such a lucky bastard.


  ‘Scotch?’ Ozi asks.

  ‘Of course,’ I respond.

  Ozi starts to hand Muazzam to Mumtaz, but she stands up. ‘I’ll get it,’ she says.

  ‘Do you really think I’ve gone bald?’ Ozi asks me.

  ‘I’m afraid so, handsome,’ I tell him, even though he still has hair left. Ozi’s vain enough to survive a little teasing.

  Mumtaz pulls an unopened bottle of Black Label out of a cabinet. My bootlegger tells me Blacks are going for four thousand apiece these days. I stick to McDowell’s, smuggled in from India and, at eight-fifty, priced for those of us who make an honest living. But Ozi can afford the good stuff, and Black Label is fine by me, provided someone else is paying.

  ‘Ozi claims he was a real heartthrob in his younger days,’ Mumtaz says, cracking the seal.

  ‘He certainly was,’ I reply. ‘Lahore ran out of tissues the night you two were married.’

  ‘I still am a heartthrob,’ Ozi protests, touching his temples. ‘A little skin is sexy.’

  ‘Absolutely.’

  ‘At our age, my hirsute chum, all women care about is cash. And my bank account is hairy enough for a harem.’

  ‘Such refinement,’ Mumtaz says, handing me a Scotch, nicely watered and iced. ‘Are all Lahori men like him?’

  ‘Certainly not,’ I tell her.

  ‘Be careful, Daru,’ Ozi says, accepting his glass from Mumtaz. ‘She’s trying to divide us.’

  Mumtaz sits down next to him. Her drink is stiffer than either of ours. ‘Since you’re one of my husband’s dearest friends,’ she says, ‘I have little hope for you.’

  Ozi gives me a wink.

  ‘But a little hope,’ she adds, ‘is better than none at all.’

  ‘Cheers,’ I say. The three of us clink our glasses.

  You know you’re in trouble when you can’t meet a woman’s eye, particularly if the woman happens to be your best friend’s wife. So I’m definitely in trouble, because I keep looking at Mumtaz and jerking my gaze away whenever she looks at me. I hope she doesn’t notice, but she probably does. Then again, maybe I’m thinking too much. Stoner’s paranoia.