Mohsin Hamid - Moth Smoke

‘You’re not a monster.’

‘Don’t be sure.’

I massage the back of her neck, kneading with my thumb, pulling with my fingers, following the line of her spine. She has soft hair there, thin and smooth, and I feel the long cords of her muscles flaring gently as she moves her face forward to stroke my cheek with hers.

Unexpectedly, I find myself thinking of Ozi smiling at me on a rooftop many Basants ago, as I hold a red ball of string for his kite. The sun is behind him, hurting my eyes. I remember not paying attention for a moment, turning to watch some girls in the courtyard beneath us. My surprise as the ball jumps from my hand and falls, knocking over a tray being carried by a bearer far below. Ozi’s yelp as his kite is pulled from his hands. Shouts from the girls. And the two of us staring at each other, wide-eyed, laughing, with our hands on our knees. We really were brothers, once. And now I’m kissing his wife, my arms encircling her possessively, our bodies pressing together.

But I also remember being angry with my mother for no reason, being upset after Khurram uncle’s visits to our house, maybe because they reminded me of the permanent absence of a father I never knew but imagined vividly. I remember Khurram uncle’s rough hands as he taught Ozi and me how to hold a bat, the slaps when we made mistakes, not hard but not gentle, either. I remember his hands touching my mother’s elbow after giving me presents I needed but almost didn’t want.

I stroke the side of Mumtaz’s neck with my teeth, tracing two lines in her skin. Then I think of Manucci and take her upstairs. She turns to me in the darkness of my room and we make love like we’re furious with each other, silently, brutally. And when we’re spent I lie with my head on her chest and she strokes my hair and I fall slowly, slowly asleep. My dreams are so deep I wake with no idea of where I’ve been, and I don’t know when she left me during the night.

Fatty Chacha has never given me a lecture before in his life, not really, so he keeps looking down as he speaks, as though he wants to apologize for what he’s saying. And his embarrassment more than anything else makes it impossible for me to be annoyed with him.

‘You know how proud we are of you, champ,’ he’s saying, rubbing his hands together. They’re big for his size, broad but not long, with strong fingers. Good boxer hands. Hard to break. ‘You’ve always done so well. You worked at a top bank. You went to a prestigious school. You have friends from the best families.’ His gaze drifts up from my feet to my chest, then sinks back down. He tries to laugh. ‘You probably made more money last year than I did.’

I don’t say anything. I’ve never made much, just a low-level banker’s salary, and Fatty Chacha’s remark, if he’s right, is more of an insult to him than it is a compliment to me.

He goes on. ‘But now I’m a little worried by what I see. You’ve stopped looking for a job. You sit at home doing nothing.’

‘There aren’t any jobs,’ I interrupt. ‘The rupee’s at fifty-five. People are pulling their money out of banks to buy dollars, now that their foreign currency accounts are frozen. All the imported stuff is disappearing from the markets. There’s no business to be done, and no one is hiring at banks or anywhere else, not unless they owe your father a favor.’

‘You need to keep trying. Maybe you’ll have to accept a more junior position. Nothing will happen if you give up.’

‘I haven’t given up. But I’m not going to work at a mindless job for ten a month.’

‘Ten a month is enough to feed yourself and have lights instead of candles.’

‘Ten a month is four bottles of Scotch. It isn’t enough to turn on an air conditioner.’

Fatty Chacha smiles and finally manages to look me in the eye. ‘You sound like your father. He would say something like that: four bottles of Scotch.’

‘I don’t know how to live on ten a month.’

‘It’s better than living on nothing a month, champ. You have rich habits, but we aren’t rich. You can’t afford to turn down work because it’s beneath you.’

‘I haven’t turned down anything. I don’t think I could find a job that paid me ten a month even if I wanted one. There are a hundred guys for every opening, and the one who gets hired is the one with connections. I’ve given my c.v. to twenty companies. I’ve had twenty rejections. Only one even pretended to consider me seriously, and that was because he didn’t want to offend you.’

Fatty Chacha cracks his knuckles, one by one. ‘I know it’s difficult. Especially for you. You’ve always succeeded so easily. But you must keep trying.’

I don’t say anything. It’s strange to hear myself described as someone who’s succeeded easily. But compared to Fatty Chacha I suppose it’s true enough. He never really succeeded at all. He didn’t marry until he was forty. And even now he barely manages to support his family.

I tell him I’ll do my best, and he seems relieved, tapping a beat on his belly with his hands. This conversation was clearly difficult for him. And I think it gave him an appetite, because he looks at his watch and wonders aloud what might be waiting at home for dinner. When he asks me to join the family at his place, I lie and say I’m going out with friends.

A freshly bathed Manucci, his hair still wet, comes in just as Fatty Chacha is leaving. My servant is wearing an old kurta shalwar I gave him after one of my little cousins spilled a bottle of ink on it. But Manucci must have bleached it or something, because the stain is hardly visible, and although it isn’t starched, it has been freshly ironed. I look from myself, in my dirty jeans and T-shirt, to Manucci, in his crisp white cotton, and feel a strange sense of unease.

‘Well, well, Mr Manucci,’ Fatty Chacha says. ‘Looking very smart this evening.’

Manucci’s face breaks into an enormous smile.

‘Go clean my bathroom,’ I tell him. ‘And scrub behind the toilet. It’s getting filthy.’

I show Fatty Chacha out myself.

I think it’s safe to say Mumtaz is already at least a tenth mine. At least. I saw her sixteen hours this week. I know, because I timed it. And even though a tenth of someone is a lot to have, she has more than a tenth of me. I’m always dreaming of her, or thinking of her, or fantasizing about her, or waiting for her to come or to call. Even when I’m with her I miss her.

And she cares about me.

‘I tried heroin,’ I say, my lips touching the soft skin where her jaw meets her neck.

‘Was it good?’

‘Unbelievable.’

‘That’s bad. Don’t do it again.’

I’ve already decided not to, but I say, ‘Why not?’

‘Some things are too good. They make everything else worthless.’

‘Like you?’

‘Say you won’t do it again.’

‘I won’t.’

‘You won’t what?’

‘I won’t do it again.’

Mumtaz has six moles. Two are black: behind her ear and on her hip, in the trough of the wave that crests at her pelvis. Three are the color of rust: knuckle, corner of jaw, behind knee. And one is red, fiery, at the base of her spine, where a tail might grow. I touch them and know them because I watch her like a man in a field stares up at the stars, and I love her constellation because it contains her story and our story, and I wonder which mole is the beginning and which is the end.

I have no moles. Not even one. I didn’t know that, but Mumtaz has looked and looked, and now she’s given up.

Manucci adores her. He brings us tea without us asking for it and leaves it outside my bedroom when the door is shut. Mumtaz likes chatting with him. She says someday she wants to write an article on young pickpockets in the old city, and Manucci has promised to take her on a guided tour of his former haunts. Once, when I haven’t seen Mumtaz for a couple of days and she wastes half an hour talking to Manucci before she comes upstairs to wake me, I get upset and tell her I don’t understand why she would rather spend her time with him than with me. She says it’s cute that I’m jealous. And I become angry, asking how she could even suggest I’m jealous of my own servant. She says she was only joking, and then I feel completely embarrassed, and when we make love I keep looking at her to see if she’s laughing at me.