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| May 1, 2000 | ||
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| Strange
Love in Lahore Old histories, new crises--and that deathly N word By Ira
Pande
Mohsin Hamid's protagonist, Daru (short for Darashikoh), once a brilliant student of Lahore's elite Government College, is an orphan. His father died of gangrene in the Bangladesh war and his mother was killed by a stray bullet from a Kalashnikov fired during a wedding procession. The book opens with him working in a bank and living a blameless, if boring, existence. Then a scrap with a rude client costs him his job and he discovers that the system has no place for a loser and, worse, one with no family money behind him. At this point he meets up with a childhood friend Ozi (short for Aurangzeb) and his beautiful wife Mumtaz who have recently returned from New York and live with Ozi's rich parents. A hideous Faustian tale follows as Daru gets sucked into a love affair with the bored Mumtaz. She plays Helen to his Faustian theme of damnation and leaves him a broken criminal. The end, as in all moral tales, has strong overtones of retribution, except that the victim and the villain interchange places. In India, Shobha De tries to portray this scenario in her books set mostly in Bollywood (our Karachi, with Delhi being the Indian Lahore). But what makes Hamid's book a different level of fiction altogether from De's potboilers is that he writes with a sense of history in his bones, where she writes of a De-in-De-out life with no connective tissue underneath the surface glitter. No reader can afford to be unmoved by the strong allegorical tones that underlie Hamid's cleverly crafted book. Take the names, Darashikoh, Aurangzeb, Mumtaz -- Mughal names all, associated with the greatest tales of medieval love and tragedy, and redolent with violence and grandeur. Not only are the deaths of Daru's parents significantly like the death of the old Pakistan, the spectre of a nuclear arms race between the two nations occupies a sinister place in the narrative. Dramatic scenes are equally deftly woven into the story -- an aandhi sweeps the city after the nuclear explosion, the electricity to Daru's flat is cut off and leaves him powerless in every way. Moths come each evening to the candles that are lit in his flat -- to immolate themselves on the candle flame, much like the manner he himself is beckoned to his own doom by the glitter of Ozi's and Mumtaz's life. Tehmina Durrani's book, set in the '70s
and '80s, showed us a Lahore that was disturbing enough. But Hamid's '90s
Lahore shows us to what depths a society can stoop when corruption
overtakes it. Instead of preening ourselves on our "secular" and
"democratic" goodness, we should see "them" as a
mirror of what we are likely to become in a few decades. Hamid's book is
just a prologue to a frightening tragedy that will one day emerge from
this sibling rivalry that has become an unending war of succession between
our two nations. NEW RELEASES Tales of Ancient India Himalayan Journals Jute The Kamasutra for Women IC814 Hijacked! |
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This
deeply disturbing book should be read by all those in the subcontinent who
have noticed signs of a dangerous game of one-upmanship being played
between India and Pakistan ever since 1971. Set in the Lahore of the '90s,
its cast is the city's brat pack which lives in air-conditioned homes,
drives Pajeros and parties on money earned by corrupt fathers. In short,
it is what our lifestyle supplements valourise and sell every day:
beautiful women in designer clothes with scotch-drinking,
cigarette-smoking young men who have studied in the best American
universities and who carelessly run over innocent people in cars gifted by
adoring parents.