This summer has been a very special summer. I’ve done my first residential summer course, got my first set of exam results and received my first summer reading list. It is the last of these achievements that is significant in this post, however.
It’s everything a reading list should be. It has a peaceful image of reading as a background. It has a long list of books sorted in no particular order. It’s got the authors right next to the name of the books. It has the sort of books you approach with caution. They’re not intended for light reading. They’re books like Wuthering Heights and Anna Karenina. Some of them have strange names like A Case of Exploding Mangoes and A History of the World in 10½ Chapters.
Innocuously slotted in the list is a book entitled The Reluctant Fundamentalist by Mohsin Hamid. As I read through the reading list yesterday, my eyes settled upon this particular title in the middle column. Immediately, my mind flashed back to a rainy afternoon eons (well, more like a few years, to be perfectly honest) ago. I sat in the bedroom, watching my dad pack his suitcase to go travelling somewhere or the other, and in my typical restless manner, my eyes travelled to his bedside table, on which sat the book. I opened it up, and began poring over the first few pages. I don’t remember my exact thoughts, but I do know that I found it an interesting book, and would have subsequently spent the next few hours finishing had my mother not plucked the book out of my hands, citing inappropriate content and placed it back on the bedstand. In a fit of childish pique, I stalked out of the room, promising to finish the book some other time with that kind of youthful resolve that never really comes to fruition.
Now, all those years later, I finished the book. And I quite enjoyed it.
It’s written from the perspective of a Pakistani man, Changez, telling his story. He’s telling it to a random American gentleman who he’s basically just plucked off the street. Being the charming young lad he is, he decides to treat his new friend to the best of a Lahore night, starting with a meal and desert in a typical roadside restaurant all the way to a nighttime walk down market road. All throughout the night, he tells the American gentleman his story. In order to save you the trouble of a google search, let me quickly recount it for you. Changez grew up in Lahore and then went to Princeton. Having successfully completed the first portion of his quest for his American Dream, he then goes on to work at a firm named Underwood Samson, a firm which specialises in the valuation of firms. He is, naturally, very good at what he does. Unfortunately, this path to success is somewhat hindered by the events of 9/11. Now, being Pakistani, Changez is affected by the anti-muslim sentiments that pervade America in the months after, and the rest of the book details what he does as a result of this. I’m not going to spoil what happens, but I will say this: the title of the book is a clue.
To be brutally honest, it doesn’t seem like the most interesting of books. There’ve been hundreds, if not thousands of books, movies and other forms of mass media pertaining to the same topic, and I’ve come across more than a few of them. What really appeals to me about this book is the eyes through which the reader views the plot. Changez, having grown up in Lahore before moving to the States, is an interesting breed of human. He’s not quite American, his naturally reserved and impeccably Pakistani mannerisms ensuring that he’s never quite at home with his more outgoing american colleagues. He’s not, however, Pakistani, either- having been exposed to the United States and its people’s M.O, he has changed. He no longer finds it odd to see women baring their skin, and he begins to think of himself as a New Yorker, as anyone who lives in the city for more than 4 months will do.
What this means is that in many ways, Changez and I are very similar. We both have spent significant periods of our lives in countries outside that of our passports, and as a result harbour niggling doubts over where we really belong. I love Singapore and am incredibly fortunate to live here, but at the same time, I know that it will, in the future, not be the place I choose to stay in, and so I live here with the knowledge that my time here will come to an end. We both live within bubbles in our country- Changez in a bubble bordered by his job and few friends, and I in a bubble surrounded by my school, my friends and family and the places I go to. When we go back to our native countries, we enjoy every bit of the experience, but at the same time can’t help comparing them to our home countries. We notice cracks in walls, power faults and the chaos on a road that just don’t happen in Singapore or New York, and we both feel that pinprick of shame that comes with comparing two things that can’t possibly be compared. India is, in thousands of ways, vastly superior to Singapore. It’s so much more exciting, dynamic, organic and vibrant, but because I have almost no memories of ever having lived there, each trip there involves more discovery than it does the feeling of having come home. That is, by no stretch of the imagination, a bad thing. It just means that the sense of familiarity one gets from having lived in a country is not present for me when it comes to India. The book makes this all real, simply because the Pakistan described in the book is so similar to the India I know and recognise. The sounds, smells, sights and general atmosphere could have been taken from the New Delhi or Calcutta I see when I drive around there.
The Reluctant Fundamentalist grows on you. At first, it’s a bit of a surprise, much like Changez is to the American gentleman on that warm Lahore evening. It starts to grow on you, though, until you can’t stop going further into the story until you, like the American gentleman, have nothing left to learn.
Abzonnian Ramblings 