From: Toronto Star (April 22, 2007)
Taut tale of two cities, cultures
A young Pakistani man returns home from America, post 9/11, A stand-in for Western unease
By VIT WAGNER
If you're like me and most of your impressions of Pakistan have come via the Western news media, it is hard to think of the country without experiencing a twinge of unease.
Images from BBC World – the most likely source of scenes from the streets of Karachi, Islamabad or Lahore – routinely show mobs of angry men protesting against Danish cartoons or some other perceived affront to the Islamic world. Outside of the cities, the coverage is usually of frontier regions bordering Afghanistan that are said to provide safe haven to Al Qaeda and Taliban fighters.
Then there is the memory of American journalist Daniel Pearl, who was beheaded in 2002 after being plucked from the streets of Karachi while investigating possible links between Islamist terrorists and Pakistani intelligence services. Read Who Killed Daniel Pearl? by French author Bernard-Henri Lévy and you will be left with a decidedly unwelcoming perception of Karachi as a possible tourist destination.
Doubtless there are many wonderful things to be said for Pakistan. Ranked highly among the country's attributes is its flavourful cuisine, which serves as a particular source of pride to Changez, the variously solicitous, deferential and insistent narrator of Mohsin Hamid's taut and absolutely absorbing second novel, The Reluctant Fundamentalist.
Mind you, even some of the culinary options are bound to seem a tad intimidating to the faint of heart and the unadventurous of palate.
"These, sir, are predatory delicacies, delicacies imbued with a hint of luxury, of wanton abandon," advises Changez, trying to tempt an unconvinced American visitor with the prospects of stewed goat's foot or spiced sheep's brain. "Not for us the vegetarian recipes one finds across the border to the east, nor the sanitized, sterilized meats so common in your homeland! Here we are not squeamish when it comes to facing the consequences of our desires."
By this point in the story, darkness has descended on Old Anarkali, the Lahore bazaar where Changez has spent the past several hours bending the ear of a foreigner who has served as his conscripted – if not quite captive – audience.
Nothing much happens between Changez and his listener beyond the ordering of drinks and food and attendance to the everyday activity around them. But it is the situational context – familiar to Changez, disconcertingly alien to the foreigner – that amplifies author Hamid's real subject: cross-cultural misunderstanding and even distrust.
In the story within the story, Changez shares in great detail the events of his life before returning to Pakistan from America. He was a scholarship student at Princeton, where he graduated "without receiving a single B" before landing a coveted position with a Manhattan firm in the business of evaluating the financial worth of companies on the selling block. In the corporate world, Changez initially fashioned a similarly unblemished record of success, in the process cultivating a romantic relationship with a well-bred but emotionally unstable resident of the Upper East Side.
It all goes well enough, at least professionally, until the events of Sept. 11, 2001. After the attack on the World Trade Center, Changez begins to question his sense of himself as an assimilated, accepted New Yorker. His doubts are fed both by the indignities he suffers in the U.S. at the hands of airport customs officials and taunting louts in the street, as well as his resentment toward the retaliatory aerial bombardment of Afghanistan.
Psychologically, however, The Reluctant Fundamentalist is at least as much about the apparent unease felt by the listener – and reader – in hearing the story, as it is about the growing sense of cultural displacement described by Changez.
We never hear the American stranger speak in his own words. Instead, his thoughts and feelings are filtered through Changez. We know the listener is uneasy because from the very first page Changez repeatedly seeks to put the stranger's mind at rest, assuring the foreigner he has nothing to fear from Changez, the waiter or anyone else who might be skulking about.
How many times do you have to be told you have nothing to fear before you become convinced that there really is serious cause for concern? Alternatively, what if your fears have been seeded by preconceived notions of a place you don't understand?
The stranger could be paranoid. Or it could be that people really are out to get him. Hamid, a Pakistani-born writer now living in London, makes it impossible for the reader to know for certain whether danger actually lurks or whether the reader's perceived sense of dread and underlying malice is nothing more than the product of an overactive, media-fed imagination.
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