Moth Smoke.

Mohsin Hamid came to my attention last winter due to the praise lavished on his most recent novel, Exit West, which was a finalist for the Booker Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award, a book I enjoyed and appreciated on several levels. Shortly after I read it, I found a copy of his first novel, 2000’s Moth Smoke, on one of my prowls through used book stores; it’s not as weighty or immediately relevant as Exit West but still showcases his intelligent yet brisk prose as well as his strong sense of characterization.

Moth Smoke tells the story of Darashikoh, known as Daru, an intelligent but shiftless young Pakistani man whose academic promise was short-circuited by his family’s lack of money and status, leading him to a series of dead-end jobs – one of which he loses at the start of his narrative – and a life of drug addiction. The novel begins with a brief passage telling us that Daru is on trial for killing someone, a framing story that we’ll receive in dribs and drabs in interstitial passages between the chapters where Daru narrates his life story. His jealousy of his friend Aurangzeb, known as Ozi, eventually leads him to an affair with Ozi’s wife Mumtaz – all three of their names coming from the Mughal Empire, which covered most of modern-day India, Pakistan, and Afghanistan – with the expected tragic consequences, and some unexpected ones as well.

If Moth Smoke is unfocused at times, as is common in first novels, it’s a function of Hamid’s ambition to lampoon so many parts of Pakistani society of the time period: the feckless youth of wealthy and corrupt oligarchs, the amoral subculture of ‘entrepreneurs’ trying to make a living without the benefit of patrons in the government, the way electricity and gas are wielded as weapons to keep the poor in poverty, widespread drug use among those who might publicly preach the abstinence prescribed by their faith, and so on. Lurking in the background of the novel is the cold war between Pakistan and India, as the former tried to catch up to the latter in testing nuclear weapons, which the Pakistani government under Nawaz Sharif achieved in 1998. Hamid appears to be drawing a parallel between Daru, who is trying to keep up with his wealthier and more successful friend Ozi but only manages to sink himself deeper into trouble, and the country where he lives. Daru may achieve temporary victories, but it’s clear he’s going to end up with less money, in worse health, and without any morals he might have once possessed.

The real Dara Shikoh lived in the 1600s, the eldest son of the Mughal Emperor Shah Jahan and the Emperor’s second wife Mumtaz, and was heir to the throne until his younger brother Prince Muhiuddin killed him, later taking the name Aurangzeb when he became emperor. The characters Daru and Ozi in Moth Smoke aren’t brothers, but are close friends from childhood, Daru fatherless and boosted by Ozi’s father and other relatives, who drift apart when Ozi’s privilege takes him to school in the United States while Daru must remain home in Pakistan. When Ozi returns, with a new wife in tow and lucrative career waiting for him, a rivalry emerges between the two men because their fortunes have diverged so much in the interim. They’re the same age – just as the modern nations of India and Pakistan, achieving independence one day apart during Partition, are – and could be natural allies, but their relationship is instead marked by bitter and often petty rivalry. Hamid borrows other character names from this period in Pakistani history – Daru’s servant is named Manucci, the name of the Italian traveler and writer whose records provide much of what we know of that time period; Daru’s previous girlfriend, Nadira, shares her name with the real Dara Shikoh’s only wife, perhaps a way for Hamid to signal that his Daru has never gotten over the broken affair with Nadira – although some of this seems like mere allusion rather than metaphor.

The title of Moth Smoke appears during the story when Daru watches a moth dance around a flame and eventually dive into it, after which all that is left is smoke. He is, of course, the moth in the novel, aware on some level that he’s going to burn himself up but still unable to stop himself from taking the actions that will lead him there, which in turn seems to be an indictment of Pakistani culture and the country’s government, often run by its military, which pursued self-destructive policies like nuclear armament that provided the people with a temporary high but ultimately left the entire subcontinent worse off. It’s simplistic compared to Exit West, a book of indignation that works through a compelling story of self-destruction like Appointment in Samarra or any of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novels, and accessible even without knowledge of the history or contemporary state of Pakistan that underlies it.

Next up: Nearly done with Ben Rhodes’ The World As It Is: A Memoir of the Obama White House.