Just completed a visit to Pakistan of the late 1990s through the book Moth Smoke by Mohsin Hamid.
I can only think of a couple of other books I’ve read that take place even partially in Pakistan. While Moth Smoke doesn’t make this time and place sound like an idyllic vacation spot, it felt very real, and clear and palpable as the characters’ home.
The heat, the dust, the rooftops, the banyan tree in the backyard, the kite fights. The hunger, the poverty, the sweat, the food, the hash, the cost of two bottles of scotch. The clothes, the kalashnikovs, the traffic, the cars, the casual reckless disregard of some people in them for the people outside them on the streets.
The load shedding and losses of power. The politics of air conditioning, and how it feels to have it … and not. And how much traveling here — to 1998 Pakistan — today feels like a glimpse into some aspects of my own country’s not-too-distant future at the crazy rate we’re going, but without our own legendary backstory to make better predestined spiritual sense of it.
The characters. The one with a secret identity that I didn’t see coming when I picked this book up, and completely fell in love with. Well worth the trip (for us, but perhaps not for her).
In just the few hours that have past since I read the final pages of this book, I’ve developed a weird loyalty to Lahore that reminds me how I felt traveling to Albania in 1994. Maybe because, like Daru (the main character in Moth Smoke), I like underdogs. But I think it’s something else.