Fiction
Exploring fault lines
MUKUND PADMANABHAN
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This is not an exercise in unqualified anti-Americanism but a subtle analysis of the cracks that run through the world today.
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The Reluctant Fundamentalist, Mohsin Hamid, Penguin/Viking, p.192, Rs. 295.
"EXCUSE me, Sir, but may I be of assistance? Ah, I see I have alarmed you. Do not be frightened by my beard: I am a lover of America." So begins Mohsin Hamid's exceptionally taut and gripping novel that gently explores the fault lines between the American West and the Islamic East.
Questions of identity
A monologue delivered by a bearded, Pakistan man (Changez) to a nameless American stranger at a Lahore café, The Reluctant Fundamentalist examines the narrator's disenchantment with America, his identity and his allegiances shifting under the cloud of mistrust after September 11. A hugely successful student at Princeton, Changez is snapped up by Underwood Samson, a valuation company that instructs its recruits to "focus on the fundamentals" and seduces them into discreetly accepting the American way of life. Things go swimmingly for the young Pakistani, who becomes the boss' blue-eyed boy, strikes a close friendship with a beautiful Wasp woman (Erica) and allows himself to be culturally subsumed in his surroundings. ("I was immediately a New Yorker.").
Epiphanic moment
Then September 11 happens and Changez, who watches the twin towers disintegrate in a hotel room in Manila and is "caught in the symbolism of it all", is surprised and somewhat ashamed at his reaction. ("Yes, despicable as it may sound, my initial reaction was to be remarkably pleased."). The young man returns to an America that has irrevocably changed, that is much more suspicious and distrustful. Then, the events in the wake of September 11 (the war against Afghanistan and the sabre-rattling on the India-Pakistan border) push him further towards his Pakistaniness that was till then innate, concealed by his suit, suppressed by his expense account and his job with Underwood Samson.
The crisis leads to a moment of self-discovery and Changez suddenly sees himself not so much as a successful executive but a "modern-day janissary" and a "servant of the American empire".
Strange symmetry
There is a symmetry between the disintegration of his personal life (the relationship between Changez and Erica, who is obsessed about her past lover, begins to fall apart) and the souring of his American dream. Perhaps, Hamid is hinting here that failed love affairs can result in a larger sense of bitterness. Or perhaps, he is suggesting that the free and uninhibited Erica, who sometimes appears as a symbol of America, is much too caught up in some romantic ideal to connect with the here and now.
This is not an exercise in unqualified anti-Americanism but a subtle analysis of the cracks that run through the world today. As a civilisational critique, it comes from an unusual perspective; as an upper class Pakistani, Changez is locked with America in an unusual embrace, warm, mistrustful, affectionate, hostile. In truth, Changez is not so much a reluctant fundamentalist as a half-hearted one.
Restrained work
The dramatic monologue is not a genre one associates with the word "thriller" or "page-turner", labels that the novel has (justifiably) acquired. In this regard, Hamid seems to have pulled off the near impossible. This is a meditative novel written in an introspective manner as monologues inevitably are. But this is also a deeply suspenseful work, the sense of anticipation heightened by Hamid's wonderful use of restraint.
It is a short book, very difficult to put down once you have begun. Read it at one sitting if you can find two or three hours to spare. But do read it.
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