Mohsin Hamid - Moth Smoke

But it takes a long time for a good marriage to die, and even a dead marriage can pretend to be alive, with habit as respirator and heart machine. We stayed in America for another two years and people thought we were happy. We were invited everywhere. And we entertained lavishly. But we never could find a babysitter Ozi approved of. Every month or two he made me get a new one.

Sometimes I would explode at Ozi, and then he would take me seriously, almost become the Ozi I’d fallen in love with. But only for an hour or two. After a while I found that I was getting angry at him just for attention, which made me feel like such an infant that I stopped doing it. Ozi still came to me when he needed to be held and comforted, and I was so lonely that I was grateful for the opportunity. But my resentment grew. I had two selfish children on my hands, and they were making me miserable.

I started drinking Scotch, neat, during the day.

I didn’t tell anyone how I really felt. Not my best friends. Not my mother. And certainly not my husband. It was a new experience for me. I’d never been ashamed of anything I’d done in my life. But this wasn’t something I’d done. This was me. Not an act but an identity. I disappointed me, shamed me. So I hid my secret as well as I could. And to do that, I had to hide it from myself.

Perhaps the strangest thing of all was what I was writing. After trying my hand at a few edgy pieces and finding it a nightmare to get them published, I wrote an article on lullabies for a women’s magazine. Really. I put an international spin on it, interviewing friends who came from all over the planet. Enough to put anyone to sleep, I thought. But I was wrong: it was a hit. The magazine was flooded with letters. And I was asked for more. So I did one on herbal remedies for diaper rash and vegetable balms for baby skin. Another winner.

I kept writing, glad for the distraction from the constant demands of my son. The income was important to me, as well. Between Ozi and his parents, we had everything we needed, but the idea of taking pocket money from my husband had begun to grate on me. So I managed to earn some financial independence writing about parenting, little hypocrite that I am. It was satisfying in a strange way, and in a not so strange way, too. The strange satisfaction came from at least being able to write about motherhood well. It helped me hide from myself. And the not so strange satisfaction came from learning that I was a good writer, feeling new muscles growing in my back, wing muscles, the kind that mean you’re learning to fly.

But it wasn’t the right season to lift off. Not yet. I sat in my apartment and looked out over the city, and I just didn’t feel any passion to write about the place. I didn’t give a damn about local politics, I wasn’t moved by the issues. I missed home. And I was frustrated by people who actually thought the world had a center, and that center was here. ‘The world’s a sphere, everyone,’ I wanted to say. ‘The center of a sphere doesn’t lie on its surface. Look up the word “superficial,” when you have a chance.’

Slowly, even though I thought it would never happen, New York lost its charm for me. I remember arriving in the city for the first time, passing with my parents through the First World Club’s bouncers at Immigration, getting into a massive cab that didn’t have a moment to waste, and falling in love as soon as we shot onto the bridge and I saw Manhattan rise up through the looks of parental terror reflected in the window. I lost my virginity in New York, twice (the second one had wanted to believe he was the first so badly). I had my mind blown open by the combination of a liberal arts education and a drug-popping international crowd. I became tough. I had fun. I learned so much.

But now New York was starting to feel empty, a great party that had gone on too long and was showing no sign of ending soon. I had a headache, and I was tired. I’d danced enough. I wanted a quiet conversation with someone who knew what load-shedding was.

Then Ozi decided he’d had enough of being a well-paid small fish in Manhattan. His father needed him, and he wanted to go home. I agreed. I was desperate for a new start, too. So we took a deep breath and jumped and landed with a loud splash one summer in beautiful Lahore.

But Lahore wasn’t the answer. I didn’t know anyone, I had nothing to do, and I hated living with Ozi’s parents.

At least Muazzam’s new nanny was a blessing. For the first time since before he was born, he wasn’t completely dependent on me, and that was liberating. I started thinking about what I wanted to do with my time, and then about what I wanted to do with my life. My twenty-sixth birthday reminded me that I was still young.

I tried to restart my marriage, to rediscover everything that had made me love Ozi in the first place. Honestly I did. But it didn’t work, because I lost my respect for him. And once that happened, there was nothing more I could do.

How do you lose your respect for the person you love? It isn’t easy. It takes – it took – a lot. It took his mother, for one thing. She’d spent half her life making her son into the man she’d wished she’d married, and now that he’d returned, she was back in business. She corrected his posture, critiqued his suits, made him self-conscious about his receding hairline by telling him again and again how a good haircut would hide it. And the effect she had on him was incredible. One look from her would transform the relaxed, charming, sexy man I’d married into an uncomfortable little schoolboy.

But it took more than his mother to utterly destroy my respect for Ozi. It took his father, too. No matter how much I wanted to believe otherwise, I quickly realized that the rumors about Ozi’s father being corrupt were true. And when I finally, delicately, confronted Ozi, he seemed almost surprised that it bothered me. In fact, he said one of the main reasons he’d come back to Lahore was to help his father protect his assets, kickbacks from the good old days when Dad was a senior civil servant with the country at his feet.

Even then I might have stayed with my increasingly emasculated, amoral husband for quite some time. It took some serious miscalculations on his part to extinguish the last, lingering, stubborn spark of respect I had for him. It took one manipulative comment too many, one more comparison of myself to his perfect mother than I could take. I didn’t confront him. I just gritted my teeth, took out a needle, and worked him out of my heart like a splinter.

But I still wasn’t ready to leave him.

It might seem strange after everything I’ve said that Muazzam should prevent me from leaving my husband. But he did. I still wanted to believe that I loved my son, that I was a good mother, that I was a good person. I knew it would be wrong to abandon him. And I knew I couldn’t take him with me. I couldn’t bear it, having sole responsibility for the child. I didn’t trust myself, and I didn’t want to.

But a crack down my middle was splitting open, and I couldn’t be just the good wife and mother anymore.

So how did I, after being faithful for four years of marriage, come to start having sex with my husband’s best friend? It all began with writing under a pseudonym. A double life has to begin somewhere. There has to be a first lie, a first deception. And mine began when I decided to start working as an investigative journalist called Zulfikar Manto. It wasn’t because Ozi would have objected that I didn’t tell him. (He married a woman he slept with on the first night, remember that. He wasn’t a close-minded man.) It was because I wanted to create a life that he knew nothing about.

But as soon as I began, wings that had been growing for years stretched and pushed and I found myself flying. I was home again, and there was so much I wanted to say. I found myself sitting up all night at the computer, writing with all of my soul, the window open and my wrists sweaty against the keyboard as Ozi slept under his blanket in the next room. I spoke with prostitutes and policemen who might have killed a girl and lawyers who gave safe haven to fugitive women from abusive marriages and an Accountability Commission investigator with one arm and a grip so strong my hand hurt for days.