topics: |  fiction | south-asia | pakistan | diaspora

The protagonist Changez has returned to Pakistan from a successful career on Wall Street. Many who have returned from the west to their homes will find his initial experience familiar, when his own gaze surprises him:

how shabby our house appeared, with cracks running through its ceilings and dry bubbles of paint flaking off where dampness had entered its walls. ... This was where I came from, this was my provenance, and it smacked of lowliness.

Changez is part of an elite breed of financial wizards. Building on Mohsin's own experiences - summa cum laude at Princeton, and then Harvard Law School, before a career at McKinsey - Changez also joins an elite Wall Street firm, the group that Tom Wolfe has called "masters of the universe". However, in the end, he fails to insulate what he is doing so competently, from his own conscience. In this we hear an echo of the motto enunciated in "Bonfire of the Vanities":

    ''If you want to live in New York, you've got to insulate, insulate,
    insulate,'' meaning insulate yourself from those people.

NRIs who return from Empire

   Changez's story reminded me of all my friends who have also returned
from empire - faculty at the IITs, NRI entrepreneurs, US PhD's joining
challenging positions at the helm of India operations - all of us go
through this phase of the initial gaze, linked to a sense of shame.  What 
shambles is this world I find myself in -- yet it is my world.  This sense
of inadequacy is fuelled in the early months by the foreign world's sense
of overnight can-do optimism, resulting in crusades on matters large and
small, from telephone connections to drivers' licenses to innovative
schemes for changing the lives of the masses.  Tirelessly, we broadcast our
proposals for change - through e-mails, exhorting our lackadaisical
friends, and through discussions with all and sundry.

   Old-timers at IIT immediately recognize this initial evangelist zeal;
"Yes," they nod their heads, "they still smell of the US", but underlying
the condescension, there is also a hint of approval for their young energy.
Over time, they know that this missionary zeal will fade, and their gaze
will change imperceptibly, from one of shame, to one of acceptance, or even
of pride.

she is very much in love, but to a person you or I might call "deceased".

Mohsin's entire story is a monologue, where Changez is talking to an American passerby at a Lahore restaurant in the old city. He describes his own change of gaze as wilful - since the environment is the same, it is only he who must have changed. Later, he consciously decides to exorcise that alien sensibility, and he sees the house

        properly again, appreciating its enduring grandeur, its
        unmistakable personaolity and idiosyncratic charm.  Mughal
        miniatures and ancient carpets graced its reception rooms; an
        excellent library abutted its veranda.  It was far from
        impoverished; indeed, it was rich with history.  (114-115).

A desire to change the world

   The returned-NRI may occasionally experience such pride - for example if
an entrepreneur sees his business blooming - but it is much rarer in
academia, where there appears to be increasingly little to be proud of.
Consider the faculty at AIIMS, who find their respected director kicked out
by political lords, their governing board stashed with acquiescent directors
and bureaucrats.  

Across India's elite institutes, the new breed of directors find themselves
unable to resist the politician's ingress; and many an IIT and IIM has had
its governing board infiltrated by IAS officers from the ministry, in a
trend that accelerated beginning around 2000.  Indeed, the
returned-from-empire faculty member may find that the autonomous traditions
of many institutes, such as the fiercely democratic nature of the faculty,
are crumbling, and he finds himself adrift on a tidal wave of mediocrity.

Yet somewhere inside, like Changez (who also becomes an academic), the
rebel lives on, in his interaction with students, at least some of whom
remain a strong source of inspiration.  In the end, perhaps he too finds
himself as ambiguous as is Changez near the end of he story, where the
American he has been talking to increasingly seems like a CIA agent, and
Changez himself emerges as part of a plot to deliver him into the hands of
Baluch extremists.

Insulate against the horde

   The failure to insulate may be a characteristic common to many in the
foreign-returned group.  The foreign experience has rendered him class-less.
In my initial months after coming back, I used to easily strike up
conversations with all classes of people, waiting at railway stations, at
chance meetings at the milk depot.  I was surprised by the ability of friends
to adopt absurdly unfeeling stances over servants and other lowlies.  A
friend who joined IITB is noted for his deep conversations, inquiring into
the personal life of auto rickshaw drivers.  After some years though, the
surrounding world engulfs oneself - a sense of futility descends on the
iconoclastic conversations.  Personally, I often wonder at how completely I
have surrendered to my own class - I have adopted an insular "master of my
universe" lifestyle, living alone in a large bungalow, while seven creatures
live in the "servant's quarters" behind, toiling away maintaining the house
and garden, with pittance for pay.

   The Reluctant Fundamentalist may mark the first wave in a new breed of
fiction that we may term as the "returned from empire" genre of
subcontinental fiction.  In Kiran Desai's Inheritance of Loss we find an
insipid echo of Changez in the Cook's son - having lived as an illegal,
immigrant cook in New York's basement kitchens, he returns to Darjeeling,
lost and powerless; unlike Changez, he finds his decrepit immigrant life
losing its meaning.

   We hope we'll see more of this literature, fueled by the rising tide of
expatriate passions lapping back at our shores, and perhaps it will fuel the
new renaissance that has also come to the subcontinent, with people's voices,
and people's ties overcoming the machinations of the rulers.  Who knows,
perhaps even democracy may return to our academia.

Love story: Erica and Changez

Notably interwoven into the story is the love story of Erica and Changez.
Erica is burdened by an inability to forget her childhood lover, Chris, who
died of cancer while she was at Princeton.  Though drawn to Changez, she can
get wet and enjoy sex only when he urges her to imagine he is Chris.  Later,
a nurse at the institution she is admitted to tells Changez that she is very
much in love, but to a person you or I might call "deceased".

[new Lahore] is poorly suited to the needs of those who must walk.  In their
spaciousness -- with their public parks and wide, tree-lined boulevards --
they enforce an ancient hierarchy that comes to us from the countryside: the
superiority of the mounted man over the man on foot.  But here, where we sit,
and in the even older districts that lie between us and the River Ravi -- the
congested maze-like heart of this city -- Lahore is more democratically
urban.  [Here] it is the man with four wheels who is force to dismount and
become part of the crowd. 32

America had universities with individual endowments larger than our national
budget for education. 34

["soft skills training"] we were divided into two teams of three
... role-playing such as dealing with an irate client or an uncooperative
CFO.  We were taught to recognize another person's style of thought, harness
their agenda, and redirect it to achieve our desired outcome; indeed one
might describe it as a form of mental judo for business. 36

not all our drinkers [in Lahore/Pakistan] are western-educated urbanites such
as myself; our newspapers regularly carry accounts of villagers dying or
going blind after consuming moonshine.  Indeed, in our poetry and folk songs
intoxication occupies a recurring role as a facilitator of love and
spiritual enlightenment.  What? Is it not a sin?  Yes, it certainly is -- and
so, for that matter, is coveting thy neighbour's wife.  I see you smile; we
understand one another, then. 54

[About romance and girlfriends in Pakistan]
So we learned to savor the denial of
gratification -- that most un-American of pleasures!

[At two points in the story, an interviewer, and the supreme boss, points at
some feeling he is having, while confiding something themselves.  Jim has
invited him to his own pad, a large fashionable loft in TriBeCa:]
   "I never let on that I felt like I didn't belong to this world.  Just like
you."
   It was not the first time that Jim had spoken to me in this fashion; I was
always uncertain of how to respond.  The confession that implicates its
audience is -- as we say in cricket -- a devilishly difficult ball to play.
Reject it and you slight the confessor; accept it and you admit your own
guilt.  So I said, rather carefully, "Why did you not belong?" 70

[Changez's rented car tire has had the air taken out.  While he's changing,
Jim adjusts his "solid, diver's chronometer"]
There was an almost ritualistic quality to his movements, like a batsman --
or even, I would say, a knight, -- donning his gloves before striking onto a
field of combat. 96

[Jim, pointing to the building of the cable firm they are evaluating for
evisceration and layoffs]
They try to resist change.  Power comes from becoming change.  97

We built the Royal Mosque and the Shalimar Gardens in this city, and we built
the Lahore Fort with its mighty walls and wide ramps for our
battle-elephants.  And we did these things when your country was still a
collection of thirteen small colonies, gnawing away at the edge of a
continent. 102

Surely it is the gist that matter; I am, after all, telling you a history,
and in history, as I suspect you -- an American -- will agree, it is the
thrust of one's narrative that counts, not the accuracy of one's details.
[sarcastic about the American sense of history]

Political undertones

earlier that week armed men had assaulted the Indian parliament 121
[event forgotten by the west, and also the Pakistan-as-ally and American
presence there immediately after 9/11]

There are adjustments one must make if one comes here [to Pakistan] from
America; a different way of observing is required.  I recall the
Americanness of my own gaze when I returned to Lahore that winter .. how
shabby our house appeared, with cracks running through its ceilings and dry
bubbles of paint flaking off where dampness had entered its walls.  The
electricity had gone off that afternoon, giving the place a gloomy air, but
even in the dim light of the hissing gas heaters our furniture appeared dated
and in urgent need of reupholstery and repair.  I was saddened to find it in
such a state -- no, more than saddened, I was shamed.  This was where I came
from, this was my provenance, and it smacked of lowliness.

    But as I reacclimatized and my surroundings once again became familiar,
it occurred to me that the house had not changed in my absence.  _I_ had
changed; I was looking about me with the eyes of a foreigner, and not just
any foreigner, but that particular type of entitled and unsympathetic
American who so annoyed me when I encountered him in the classrooms and
workplaces of your country's elite.  This realization angered me; staring at
my reflection in the speckled glass of my bathroom mirror I resolved to
exorcise the unwelcome sensibility with which I had become possessed.

    It was only after so doing that I saw my house properly again,
appreciating its enduring grandeur, its unmistakable personaolity and
idiosyncratic charm.  Mughal miniatures and ancient carpets graced its
reception rooms; an excellent library abutted its veranda.  It was far from
impoverished; indeed, it was rich with history. ... I wondered how I could
have been so ungenerous - so blind ... 114-115

Recriminations in Chile

    I too had traveled far that January, but the home of Neruda did not feel
as removed from Lahore as it actually was; geographically, of course, it was
perhaps as remote a place as could be found on the planet, but in spirit it
seemed only an imaginary caravan ride away from my city, or a sail by night
down the Ravi and Indus.

[Juan-Bautista, editor of failing publishing enterprise in Chile, takes
Changez out for lunch.
compares janissaries with modern immigrants decimating businesses
that are to be acquired by others - ]
   "They were Christian boys captured by the Ottomans and trained to be
soldiers in a Muslim army, at that time the greatest army in the world."
   He tipped the ash of his cigarette onto a plate. "How old were you when
you went to America?" he asked.  "I went for college," I said. "I was
eighteen."  "Ah, much older," he said. "The janissaries were always taken in
childhood.  It would have been far more difficult to devote themselves to
their adopted empire, you see, if they had memories they could not forget."
151

[After his return to NYC]
I resolved to look about me with an ex-janissary's gaze -- with, that is to
say, the analytical eyes of a product of Princeton and Underwood Samson, but
free to consider the whole of your society... I was struck by how
traditional your empire appeared.  Armed sentries manned the checkpost at
which I sought entry; being of a suspect race I was quarantined and subjected
to additional inspection; once admitted I hired a charioteer who belonged to
a serf class lacking the requisite permissions to abide legally and forced
therefore to accept work for lower pay; I myself was a form of indentured
servant... 157

You wish to pay half? Absolutely not; besides, here we pay all or we pay
none.  ... how alien I found the concept of splitting a bill... 161

terrorism = organized and politically motivated killing of civilians by
	  killers not wearing the uniforms of soldiers. 178
[Implication: drop the "not" and it is America.]