All Smoke, No Fire

For me the best feature of the book is the voice in which it is written-not that of the several characters who present the narrative in the first person, but the author's own voice. It is familiar. Though the author is Pakistani, his voice sounds like that of any Indian man belonging to his social class. It is confident, ironic and worldly. It has known the pleasures and freedoms of living in the West as also the disillusionments. It could belong to many people I know; so it is to me an attractive voice. Less attractive, however, are the voices of the actual characters through whom the author speaks.

The protagonist, Darashikoh Shezad, is in his late 20s. The book has barely begun when he's fired from his bank job. He lives alone in his family house, attended by his young servant Manucci. The loss of his job is a terrible blow; slowly, the padding that keeps an upper middle-class person comfortable in this hard world wears away. His electricity is cut off, Manucci leaves, the phone dies. But he soldiers on, refusing self-pity, remorse or respectable solutions.

Dara's best friend Aurangzeb or Ozi has recently returned from the US. He was a highly successful businessman, but back in Pakistan the luxuries he enjoys are the result of his father's ill-gotten wealth as a corrupt bureaucrat. Ozi is married to Mumtaz and they have a four-year-old son.

Hamid permits Mumtaz unusual freedoms. He has her sparring (literally) with Dara early in the illicit romance that becomes the emotional focus of the story. Mumtaz smokes, drinks and enjoys recreational drugs. She is smart without being boring; beautiful without being unbelievable. She enjoys sex without guilt; she does not see motherhood as the ultimate aim of a woman's life. This makes for a refreshing change in heroines, not just in Pakistan, but anywhere in the world.

Nevertheless, something's incomplete. The omnipresent pall of decadence forces the characters to become silhouettes of themselves, until finally the decadence becomes the main character. Did the author really intend this, I wonder? I can't tell. It seems he began his narrative with the idea of charting Dara's decline while permitting connections to form in the readers' minds between the fate of this orphaned young man and that of orphaned young nations. Heroin, suggests Hamid, turns out to be for Dara what the atomic bomb may, God forbid, turn out to be for all of us.

Unfortunately, he does not allow this interesting metaphor to mature into a main thesis: it remains one more silhouette in the fog. It is as if the writer becomes one of his own characters-clever, talented, witty and well-intentioned, but unwilling to commit to a moral stand. This is most obvious when he permits us to hear Ozi's version of events, almost as if to prove that he isn't such a prig after all and that he can parade the awful self-justifications of an Ozi with an insider's understanding.

Similarly, I disliked the tawdry theatricality of the opening and closing references to the Mughal era-like inserting song and dance sequences into a serious film.

For me the particular thrill of reading a novel by a Pakistani is akin to the remembered pleasure of night-spending at a friend's home: very similar but in poignant, surprising ways, not the same as my own. I lived in Pakistan as a child and was happy; though this novel is set in Lahore, not in Karachi where I lived, it revives those distant memories.