A Pakistani in America

, I was reminded of an incident during a coach tour in Britain years ago. My dining companions""a South African couple, polite but also largely uninformed about the world outside their backyards""had made a stereotypical remark about Indians: I don't recall the specific point (it may have been an expression of surprise that we could speak fluent English) but I remember bristling strongly. For someone who's been dissociated from many of the important elements of "Indian-ness"""such as religion, rituals, strong family ties and the continual assertion of patriotism""it was unnerving to discover this level of cultural sensitivity beneath a "citizen of the world" facade.

Hamid's powerful novella is the story of a young man who is fairly liberal-minded to begin with, but who changes as he perceives threats to his identity. Changez is a young Pakistani who graduates from Princeton University and gets a job working as an analyst (loosely: a "fundamentalist") at a prestigious valuation firm named Underwood Samson. The company shares more than its initials with the United States: from the moment Changez begins working there, he feels like he is in a great melting pot. When he first speaks of this, while describing an induction party, his tone is uneasy. Something inside him rallies against being homogenised, and it's interesting that he expresses this in military terms.

I looked around as we raised our glasses...we all exuded a sense of confident self-satisfaction, and not one of us was either short or overweight. It struck me that shorn of hair and dressed in battle fatigues, we would have been virtually indistinguishable.

"Beware the Dark Side, young Skywalker," a colleague tells Changez at the party. This is said in jest, but the Star Wars story of a youngster who betrays his own kind for an evil Empire will uncomfortably resonate with Changez's own integration into American life. Later in the narrative, he will hear about the janissaries, "the Christian boys who were captured and trained to be soldiers in a Muslim army, at that time the greatest army in the world...they had fought to erase their own civilizations, so they had nothing else to turn to". These analogies will tap into his deep-rooted fears: the fear of contributing to the wealth-generation of the most powerful empire in the world, even while his own country languishes in poverty. The fear of a "global world" where "global" is defined by the US model. The fear of becoming, inadvertently, a foot-soldier in America's march of progress.

Significantly, Changez doesn't hail from a very orthodox background. Most of his family members, the women included, are working professionals. Nothing in his attitude suggests the sort of conservatism that might lead to a reflexive hitting out against the Western way of life. He has an easygoing relationship with his friends in New York, he has "experienced all the intimacies college students commonly experience", and American pop-culture references come naturally to him, as they do to urban youngsters around the world. And yet this liberal young man slowly becomes conscious of the need to assert his identity. This comes to a head after the 9/11 attacks and the racial profiling that accompanies it.

Changez's dilemmas are complicated by his feelings for a girl named Erica, a fellow Princetonian; they become close but she is haunted by memories of a deceased boyfriend, and an awkward lovemaking scene shows us that Changez's relationship with her mirrors his relationship with the US""he can possess her only by pretending to be someone he is not. However, Hamid is too sensitive a writer to use the relationship as a mere symbol. It's a moving subplot in its own right and it gives us insights into Changez's character in emotional rather than ethnical terms. There is more than one indication that if this relationship had worked out it would have been easier for him to resolve his other conflicts.

But this is not to be, which is why we get Changez's story in the first person a few years after he left the US for good and returned to Pakistan. In a charming narrative device he doesn't directly address us; instead he's talking to an American tourist whom he encounters one evening in Lahore and has a long conversation with over tea and dinner (we never hear the tourist's voice, only Changez's). His general tone is hospitable, but there are traces of bitterness when he speaks of America. And though Hamid ends the book on an ambiguous note, refusing to divulge the extent to which Changez has traded one fundamentalism for another, we understand how easily an atmosphere of mutual distrust can be created between cultures. That the protagonist here is a "normal" young man (and not the terrorist-figure suggested by the menacing close-ups on the book's cover) makes this understanding even more potent.

The Reluctant Fundamentalist

Mohsin Hamid
Penguin/Viking
Price: Rs 295; Pages: 184