Mohsin Hamid - Moth Smoke

‘There can be no doubt here, Milord; no more facts exist to be found. The balancing of scales awaits, Milord; redress for wrong is come. Tender humanity screams in fear, confronted by such a monster, and conscience weeps with rage. The law licks its lips at the prospect of punishing such a one, and justice can shut its eyes today, so easy is its task.’

The prosecutor pauses, his words leaping about the courtroom like shadows cast by unsheathed knives in the flickering light of some dying candle.

‘For this, Milord, is his crime …’

Steadying the steering wheel with my knees, I pull the last unbroken cigarette out of a battered pack of Flakes. There are trees by the side of the road, but only on one side, and it’s the wrong side, so their shadows run away from me in long smiles that jump over boundary walls and grin at each other while I bake in my car like a snail on hot asphalt.

Knees turn the wheel left, then right, steering around an ambitious pothole, a crack aspiring to canyonhood. Fingers twist the barrel of the cigarette, loosening the tobacco, coaxing it into a sweaty palm, rubbing the Flake between thumb and forefinger until it’s almost empty. Eyes flick up and down, watching the road through the arc the steering wheel cuts above the dashboard. Foot gentle on the accelerator.

Slide the ashtray out and tip half the tobacco in. Take the compass I’ve had longer than I’ve had this car, which is a long time, and spear the hash on one blackened end. Left hand holds the tobacco in its palm and the compass in its fingers, right hand grips a plastic lighter while its thumb spins the flint. Sparks, no flame. Sparks, no flame. Then a light, and when the blue fire licks the hash, a sweet smell with a suddenness that’s almost eager.

Crumble the hash into the tobacco, crush it, break it, feel the heat telling nerves in fingertips to pass on the message of a little hurt. Knead it, mix it thoroughly. Hold empty Flake in mouth by its filter, suck and refill, pack against a thumbnail, tip tip tip, repeat, tip tip tip, and twist the end shut. Incisors grab a bit of filter, pull it out, gently, like a bitch lifting a pup. Tear off a strip to let the smoke through, reinsert the rest to hold open the end and keep things in their place.

I light up while rubbing the hash and tobacco residue off my hand and onto my jeans. Rolling while rolling, solo, and baking while baking in the heat. It helps kill time on long afternoons, and I haven’t traveled very far, but I know that no place has afternoons longer than this place, Lahore, especially in the summertime.

Two drops of Visine and I’m set.

The sun sits down. Evening. I pull up to a big gate in a high wall that surrounds what I think is Ozi’s place. His new place, that is. His old place was smaller. I’m a little nervous because it’s been a few years, or maybe because my house is the same size it was when he left, so I swing my face in front of the rearview and look myself in the eye. Then I honk out a pair of security guards.

‘Sir?’ one says.

‘I’ve come to meet Aurangzeb saab.’

‘Your name?’

‘Tell him Daru is here.’

Access obtained, I cruise down a driveway too short to serve as a landing strip for a getaway plane, perhaps, and pass not one but two lovely new Pajeros. Yes, God has been kind to Ozi’s dad, the frequently investigated but as yet unincarcerated Federal Secretary (Retired) Khurram Shah.

The front door opens and a servant leads me inside and upstairs. Time has ripened Ozi’s face and peeled his hairline back from his temples with two smooth strokes of a fruit knife. We crouch, facing each other with our arms spread wide, and pause for a moment, grinning. Then we embrace and he lifts me off my feet. I thump him on the back and squeeze the wind out of his lungs for good measure. Neither of us says hello.

‘You’ve gone bald,’ I exclaim.

‘Thanks a lot, yaar,’ he replies.

Mumtaz steps forward and kisses me on the cheek. ‘Hello, Daru,’ she says. Hoarse voice, from intimacy’s border with asthma: parched beaches, dust whipped by the wind. Very sexy but not much to drink.

I try on a welcoming, harmless smile. It gets caught on my teeth. ‘Hello, Mumtaz.’

‘And this,’ Ozi says, hoisting up a tired little boy, ‘is Muazzam.’

Muazzam starts to cry, wrapping his arms around his father’s neck and hiding his face.

‘You certainly have a way with kids,’ Ozi tells me.

‘He’s exhausted,’ Mumtaz says. ‘You should put him to bed.’

A muffled ‘No’ comes from the boy.

We sit down on a set of low-slung sofas like black-cushioned metal spiders. Mumtaz is watching me and I look away because she’s beautiful and I don’t want to stare. I haven’t seen her since the wedding, and I must have been more drunk than I thought because I don’t remember thinking then that Ozi was such a lucky bastard.

‘Scotch?’ Ozi asks.

‘Of course,’ I respond.

Ozi starts to hand Muazzam to Mumtaz, but she stands up. ‘I’ll get it,’ she says.

‘Do you really think I’ve gone bald?’ Ozi asks me.

‘I’m afraid so, handsome,’ I tell him, even though he still has hair left. Ozi’s vain enough to survive a little teasing.

Mumtaz pulls an unopened bottle of Black Label out of a cabinet. My bootlegger tells me Blacks are going for four thousand apiece these days. I stick to McDowell’s, smuggled in from India and, at eight-fifty, priced for those of us who make an honest living. But Ozi can afford the good stuff, and Black Label is fine by me, provided someone else is paying.

‘Ozi claims he was a real heartthrob in his younger days,’ Mumtaz says, cracking the seal.

‘He certainly was,’ I reply. ‘Lahore ran out of tissues the night you two were married.’

‘I still am a heartthrob,’ Ozi protests, touching his temples. ‘A little skin is sexy.’

‘Absolutely.’

‘At our age, my hirsute chum, all women care about is cash. And my bank account is hairy enough for a harem.’

‘Such refinement,’ Mumtaz says, handing me a Scotch, nicely watered and iced. ‘Are all Lahori men like him?’

‘Certainly not,’ I tell her.

‘Be careful, Daru,’ Ozi says, accepting his glass from Mumtaz. ‘She’s trying to divide us.’

Mumtaz sits down next to him. Her drink is stiffer than either of ours. ‘Since you’re one of my husband’s dearest friends,’ she says, ‘I have little hope for you.’

Ozi gives me a wink.

‘But a little hope,’ she adds, ‘is better than none at all.’

‘Cheers,’ I say. The three of us clink our glasses.

You know you’re in trouble when you can’t meet a woman’s eye, particularly if the woman happens to be your best friend’s wife. So I’m definitely in trouble, because I keep looking at Mumtaz and jerking my gaze away whenever she looks at me. I hope she doesn’t notice, but she probably does. Then again, maybe I’m thinking too much. Stoner’s paranoia.

We’re well into our second round of drinks when I pull out a pack of reds. ‘Smoke?’

‘I’ve quit,’ Ozi says.

‘You can’t be serious.’ The Ozi I knew was a half-pack-a-day man. The very fellow, in fact, who got me started on cigarettes in the first place, when we were fourteen, because he looked so cool smoking on the roof of his old house.

‘I’m a father now. I have to be responsible.’

‘To whom?’ I ask. ‘I feel abandoned.’

‘You should quit, too.’

I extend the pack. ‘Come on. One more. For old times.’

He shakes his head. ‘Sorry, yaar.’

‘Well, I haven’t quit,’ Mumtaz says, taking one. ‘And I’ve been dying for a smoke.’

Ozi gives Mumtaz a look over the head of their son.