At a café in the Old Anarkali Bazaar of Lahore, a bearded Pakistani ‘fundamentalist’ named Changez plays host to an American interlocutor engaging him in a most ineluctable monologue, the hypnotic spell of which is so powerful that one can’t immediately see the speciousness in its apparently self-righteous tone.

He tells him how America has made a fundamentalist of him. The fury of his passion casts a spell; his courtly but steely earnestness makes one incapable of disagreeing with him.

As any communist in India would swear, anti-Americanism is as much a time-honoured tradition here as it is in the Arab and Muslim world as in parts of Europe.

Anyone soaked in the literature of Noam Chomsky— America’s arch renegade, must know anti-American agitprop, clumsily masquerading as either a work of art or activism, has its worldwide adherents. Quite frankly, not without reason.

That America is phenomenally rich at the cost of the poverty and suffering of other nations is again the success story of a capitalist system. Its large immigrant population must vouch for its status as the most preferred destination because America has the promise to make one rich giving one the fullest possible opportunity for individual growth. The largest paradox is that in seeking to become a part of American engine of wealth, and thus pandering to their personal greed for affluence, they become also accomplices in America’s crimes.

Like Changez— the protagonist of Mohsin Hamid’s novel— a Pakistani boy, the young scion of a Lahore family in decline, who attended college in Princeton and works for a select New York finance firm specialising in the valuation of businesses: Changez is in love with an American woman.

Like Hamid himself— born in Pakistan, graduated from Princeton University and Harvard Law School, who worked for several years as a management consultant in New York, and now living in London: In short dabbling with capitalist institutions and colonialist nations that believe in liberal capitalism and therefore, all the more risible for wreaking havoc on a vast section of the world.

Driven manically by results, suffering no inefficiencies and earning obscene amounts of money, they perhaps all become foot-soldiers of capitalism. Changez becomes a ‘reluctant’ fundamentalist in the wake of 9/11, though the momentous events of 9/11 did not make America an empire overnight, as its hunger for capital is as old as the time of its making.

Changez owed a lot to America. But 9/11 was precisely the trigger by which he begins to question his allegiances, which had always remained problematic.

During a vacation in Greece with his college friends, he joked about becoming “the dictator of an Islamic republic with nuclear capability”. Surely the bugbear stuff, America always kept saying about Pakistan, should Musharraf depose and its nukes fall into the hands of mad mullahs.

He was distasteful of the ease with which “they (the Americans) parted with money”, their lack of deference to the elders, their “lack of refinement” and worst of all, their eagerness to “conduct themselves in the world as though they were its ruling class”.

Later when Changez goes to meet Erica, the woman he loves, in her posh Upper East Side apartment, he grows resentful of the “American undercurrent of condescension”, of Erica’s father who, upon learning that Changez is a Pakistani, says: “You guys have got some serious problem with fundamentalism”.

On that fateful day of September 11, 2001, he is in Manila, where he has gone to value an ailing recording company for his firm, trying to “focus on the fundamentals”, which was incidentally the motto of the company he was working for. This obsessive craze for “fundamentals” is a grim irony on what the West thinks of Islamic fundamentalism.

Upon seeing the twin towers crash down on the telly, he notes with considerable perplexity: “I stared as one— and then the other— of the twin towers of New York’s World Trade Centre collapsed. And then I smiled. Yes, despicable as it may sound, my initial reaction was to be remarkably pleased.”

Before that day, he was moderately complicit, save a sudden joust of class-angst here and there, in the Great American Dream and in his love for Erica. Once he reaches his moment of epiphany, his world is turned upside down.

The process of his radicalisation begins, and like the Twin Towers, his earlier assumptions also come tumbling down.

Enemy of America
Upon his return from Pakistan, he puts on his beard as a conscious badge of honour. Changez’s last but abortive business trip to assess a publishing company in Valparaiso, Chile— where he spends his time visiting Neruda’s house and lunches with Juan-Bautista, the head of the publishing company— violently tugs at his moorings. Juan-Bautista compares him to a modern-day ‘janissary’— one of the Christian youths captured and then conscripted by the Ottomans, compelled to do battle against their own civilisation.

As he returns to New York, he experiences the terrible humiliation of racial profiling mostly for his bearded look and his Pakistani origins. 

He comes back to Pakistan, possibly never to return to America and takes up the job of a college lecturer. His transformation into an antagonist of America is complete. The only consolation is that he becomes a liberal fundamentalist and not a Mohammad Atta.

The spare, minimalist tone of Hamid’s account is daunting and the unruffled coldness in sustaining the thriller feels like the blade of the butcher. Its political content, though, is open to scrutiny. Hamid wants America to hear Pakistan’s side of the tale.

“You should not imagine that we Pakistanis are all potential terrorists, just as we should not imagine that you Americans are all undercover assassins.” “In history”, Changez says to his American interlocutor, “it is the thrust of one’s narrative that counts, not the accuracy of one’s details”. Hamid ‘s disturbing narrative can thus be as forceful as to earn him a Man Booker.