 |
THE
RELUCTANT
FUNDAMENTALIST
Mohsin Hamid
Penguin
192 pp; Rs 295 |
On September 11,
2001, Mohsin Hamid, a consultant with McKinsey and Co, was in London,
away from New York where he had lived since his graduation from Princeton
and Harvard. He had had recently completed a draft of his second novel,
about a Pakistani in America, and his initial infatuation with and gradual
estrangement from his adopted home. “It was a quiet novel, overwhelmed
by events,” Hamid says, sipping green tea at a restaurant in west
London.
When he saw the
crumbling towers, he thought of a friend who worked at Goldman Sachs,
and tried reaching her. After some anxiety he managed to track her down,
but he was flabbergasted by the range of emotions the attacks provoked.
“I had written
my novel before September 11. It would be silly not to deal with it,”
he says.
On September 11,
2001, Changez, a Princeton graduate in Hamid’s new novel, The
Reluctant Fundamentalist, is in Manila with a group of other young associates,
the kind Tom Wolfe once described as “the masters of universe”.
Young, arrogant, intolerant of inefficiencies, driven by results, earning
obscene amounts of money as the foot-soldiers of capitalism.
When Changez is
in his hotel room and sees the first plane crash on TV, he thinks it
is a movie. When he realises the magnitude of what has happened, he
is surprised to discover that he actually smiles. He has lived and worked
in lower Manhattan, has friends there. But he does not think of them,
or of the deli where he eats, or of the subway station where he gets
off daily. Instead, he smiles, as if saying: America had it coming.
 |
Carolin
Seeliger |
| |
For Hamid,
the idea was to include the audience in
the narrative so
it too becomes a character called upon to judge |
He is able to snap
out of that feeling. When he meets his colleagues, he looks suitably
horrified, and does not rebel when his own microcosm changes fundamentally:
longer waits at immigration, suspicious glances, detailed questions
at customs, deflated tyres in car parks.
When Hamid saw
the planes crashing into the towers, he knew it would change the way
we look at our world. “My mother, who loves America, was deeply
upset. But I was struck when I saw images of children dancing; I heard
people, and not just Muslims, say that the US had it coming. How do
you divorce the symbolic appreciation of that act as a form of response,
from the catastrophe it caused?”
The world as he
understood it, and his own reality — of being a Pakistani in the
West — altered profoundly. He returned to Pakistan when tensions
rose along the Indian border after the attack on the Indian Parliament.
He went back to the West, only to return once more, to pursue the novel,
and, as he puts it, “the woman who became my wife”. Her
name is Zahra Khan; she is a Pakistani actress, finishing her masters
in cultural studies at Goldsmith College in London.
Why does Changez
silently cheer the crumbling of the twin towers? Kamila Shamsie, the
talented author of four novels around her home, Karachi, says that to
understand that, one has to go beyond 9/11. What happened that day is,
in a way, less important than what preceded it, she says. She can understand
why Changez smiled.
Is Changez Hamid’s
alter ego? Outwardly, their stories part — to use that word again
— fundamentally. Changez tries to stay on in New York; he waits
patiently for Erica, the woman he loves; he works at a firm that values
other companies, assisting what economists call “the creative
destruction of capital”.
But his heart is
no longer in his work. He loses his job, and returns to Pakistan. There,
he becomes more radical, criticising the West, but embracing capitalism.
He teaches finance at a university, but his rhetoric gives him greater
notoriety than his academic credentials. On the evening around which
the novel is set, he meets a menacingly quiet American, and talks to
him for a full 174 pages, during which he narrates the story of his
life.
Hamid, too, returned
to Pakistan briefly, but came back to London, and now works at a brand
management firm under a deal that allows him to work only three days
a week. “I write best when I have a job,” he says. “I
can’t be a full-time writer. Being starved of time makes me more
productive.”
This is the tale of
the failed love
affair in the heart of many who have embraced America and felt
horrified by its post-9/11
transformation |
Hamid grew up in
Lahore where his younger sister now teaches journalism. His father worked
at the Asian Development Bank in Manila to finance Hamid’s education
in the US; his mother worked in the voluntary sector. Hamid studied
at the American School in Lahore, and at one level, his Americanisation
began early. At Princeton, he studied international relations, but also
took a class in creative writing under Toni Morrison. An early draft
of his first novel, Moth Smoke, has her notes in the margins.
Moth Smoke went
on to win Britain’s Betty Trask Award for writers under 35. It
is a fine novel about a middle-class Pakistani man’s fall from
grace, but is also, essentially, a courtroom drama, with parallel, contradictory
narratives that force you to pay attention, and make up your own mind
about the book’s events. (Hamid was still writing it when he joined
Harvard Law School; to keep up with course requirements, he turned in
the draft as a case involving various characters and viewpoints, each
argument cogently made.) In The Reluctant Fundamentalist, he takes the
trick further, letting the reader decide who really is the fundamentalist.
In the end, the novel is less about the two characters, and more about
our preconceptions about what we read and want to believe.
The story Hamid
tells is essentially the story of the failed love affair in the heart
of many — not all of them Muslims — who have embraced America,
and felt horrified by its post-9/11 transformation into a grotesque
bully, confirming stereotypes perpetuated by Leftist demagogues. There
was a poignant cartoon on the cover of the New Yorker within weeks of
the attacks: it showed a bearded New York cabbie, obviously a Muslim,
huddled worriedly in his driver’s seat, with dozens of US flags
planted on his car, as if loudly proclaiming that he is American, and
loves America.
That was so not
New York! A friend of mine who works there calls it an international
city coincidentally attached to the US. Changez thought that too, and
probably so does Hamid. At a perceptive moment in the novel, he laments
how New York became more American. “Many of us felt betrayed by
that new America. It was real anger, because we had courted America
so long,” he says now.
In fact, it changed
so drastically for men like Hamid, that he says at least half the westernised
Pakistanis he knew in the US returned to Pakistan after 2001. Shamsie
has it that Hamid has accurately captured the angst of the Pakistani
abroad in the wake of 9/11. But even as that picture is an accurate
reflection of how many Muslim men felt and responded, many Muslim women
abroad reacted differently. In particular, the now-US-based, former
Dutch parliamentarian who fled Somalia, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, has been making
waves, raising questions about Islam. For lapsed Muslim women like her,
integrating into Western society — with its promise of sexual
equality and its Enlightenment legacy of an openness of mind —
is a matter of joy, not sorrow. Ali is not alone. In Canada, feminist
Irshad Manji has challenged Muslim orthodoxy, called herself an Islamic
Refusenik, and reminded her sisters that their hopes lie in a flawed
but equal West, and not in the more deeply flawed and unwilling-to-change
East.
