Where were you when 9/11 happened?
Most of us who had living memories of 2001 will have remembered where we were sitting and when we were watching the news. For me, I was back at home in a former home in Australia watching the lukewarm comedy of Rove Live when they stopped the broadcast for the news. It was surreal at first — one of the towers were smoking from its belly, and the footage of the second plane hitting came minutes later. Little did we know that the world from then will be divided into pre 9/11 and post 9/11, as it is now with Covid. I am sure that there will be other unwanted milestones to come, but 9/11 was the first significant event post cold war worthy of the question of where were you? since the fall of the Berlin Wall.
Plenty of the literature post 9/11 which concerns the event is written from an American perspective. At least what we see in Western bookshelves. The protagonist, Changez, is a Pakistani immigrant who made it through the ranks of the upper echelons of Princeton graduates with a lucrative career. The fact that he looks the way he looks had already a bearing on him before 9/11 — that he sits on the outer edges of his “friends”, and finding it difficult to assimilate and make friends in his adopted home. When 9/11 hits, everything went to shit.
I can’t deny that the way the story is told is refreshing. We take the position of an American tourist in Lahore, who came across a bearded stranger who’s keen to tell his story and share the hospitality of his country. He addresses us as readers in the second person. We are obliged to join Changez for the conversation over tea. The interaction is one-sided, but we don’t mind because for a while the story is interesting. We get glimpses of what he thought about America seated now back in Lahore, and meditating his experience in retrospect. We witness his observations — two girls in t-shirts and jeans and the conservative men looking at them, the street giving way to pedestrians as the darkness sets into the city, the brash motorcyclists in the city. It is a novel that can be finished in a day, to follow suit with the conversation that we imagine in the book.
That’s where the novel is at the strongest and perhaps elevates the story from what it was. Changez’s journey from a Princeton alum to an elite employee is palatable, even somewhat enjoyable. But it’s when Erica comes into the mix that the book really sways and stumbles. The romance between a Pakistani migrant and a sorority lit student may fit better in a trashy novel storyline. Sure, there are some deep and meaningful observations about the oil and water mix of East and West — that regardless of how well Changez assimilated into American life, he’s had trouble getting the girl. And Erica’s superficial fascination of Changez’s orientalism. But he was just a sad fucking simp for her, and you can’t help whether he friendzoned himself many times over. But I just don’t find how else this relationship adds to the book.
The book enjoyed its controversies when Changez, on witnessing the attack on 9/11 couldn’t help but smile. Although he felt empathetic to the innocent deaths in the tragedy, he was glad that someone managed to put America to her knees. From then, things take a downward turn as he loses his bearings — he becomes the subject of conversation in the workplace, strangers loathe the look of him and Erica, who was keen on him before seemed repulsed by him, as though he was one of the attackers of 9/11. This started a downward spiral which took him back to Lahore to tell the story to the stranger, to become a “fundamentalist”.
I think the novel could be more than what it was if it had avoided the tropes of romance and the typical fish out of water storyline that we often see. Much of these had become clichéd and although the point of view of the novel is fresh, the story feels too familiar. There wasn’t much in the explanation of how Changez became an active though albeit reluctant fundamentalist. Hamid uses the concept of bringing things back to the basics, as is the motto of Changez’s employers. But I really can’t connect the dots of how that is relevant to the story. Is Hamid referring to our fundamental being as well — that we are nothing more than racist and bigoted, not to mention sexual beings? I couldn’t work it out, and don’t really want to. I don’t really want to go too deep into this book.
Still, I cannot merit Hamid enough for his description of Lahore. I did say that the novel’s perspective is the strongest part of the book, but his depiction of Lahore with its hustle and bustle, strangers people watching over tea, the angry-looking waiters, sumptuous food and dark alleyways, make the place fascinating and vivid in my mind.
