Mohsin Hamid - Moth Smoke

Then one night Mumtaz asks me if I’ve done heroin again, even though I haven’t, and it turns out Manucci has told her I spend all my time sitting on the sofa, rolling joints and smoking. I decide enough is enough. I go to the servant quarters with a leather belt and tell him I’ll thrash him if he talks about me behind my back. He pulls his bedsheet up around his eyes and stares at me. But he doesn’t do it again.

The next day I see Mumtaz cry. Not just shed tears but cry, with furious gasps and shouts of pain. Her voice is always throaty, almost hoarse, but when she cries she chokes off her words, and it hurts me to watch.

When she stops trembling and sobbing and can speak, I ask her why.

‘I’m a bad mother,’ she tells me.

‘You’re not.’ I stroke her hair.

‘You don’t know,’ she says, frighteningly serious, her eyes wide and sharp. ‘You don’t know.’

‘Why do you say that?’

‘Muazzam told me I don’t love him.’

‘Why?’

‘He wanted me to read him a story and I came here instead.’

‘Read him a story when you go back.’

‘I don’t want to. That’s the problem. I don’t want to.’

I don’t understand Mumtaz’s relationship with her son. Sometimes she does so much for him, too much, everything he asks, from the time he wakes until the time he goes to bed. But she never seems to do it because she wants to, only because it upsets her when he gets angry with her. And sometimes she won’t do anything for him, leaving him at home with his nanny all day.

We think Ozi still doesn’t know about us. Mumtaz rarely stays with me for more than a couple of hours at a time, unless he’s in Switzerland or the Caymans. I’m surprised he doesn’t smell me on her. Maybe he doesn’t care, but I doubt it. Part of me wants him to know. Part of me is afraid. When we were small Ozi was a bully, but then he was just a boy, and if you were bigger than him he went away. Now he’s not a boy. He’s a man and his father’s son, and what they want done can be done and done quietly.

Maybe I should ask Murad Badshah if I can borrow his revolver.

When I’m not with Mumtaz, I usually have nothing to do. When I’m not with Mumtaz and I do have something to do, I’m generally selling hash. It isn’t much money. And even if it does buy me petrol and food, I don’t like doing it. I don’t like the way I think I look to other people when I’m doing it, and I don’t like the way they treat me.

One day I catch Manucci taking a hundred-rupee note, washed out and red, from my wallet.

‘What are you doing?’ I ask him, coming into the living room.

He drops my wallet and the note onto my jeans and starts to back away. ‘It was to buy groceries for the house, saab,’ he says.

I take hold of him by the flesh of his upper arm and squeeze until he cries out. He’s never been so eager to do the grocery shopping before that he couldn’t wait until I woke up.

‘You weren’t stealing from me, were you?’

‘No, saab.’

‘If you ever steal from me, I’ll make you wish my mother never took you off the street.’

‘Please, saab.’

I let go and he runs into the kitchen. I know I haven’t paid him in a long time. But he isn’t going hungry: he eats food from my kitchen and sleeps under my roof. Sometimes servants only want their pay so they can leave, and if that’s his plan I won’t make it easy for him. Not that he has anywhere else to go.

One day I’m at Main Market, picking up a paan and a pack of smokes from Salim, when I see Pickles get out of his Land Cruiser and walk over to a Pajero. He embraces someone I haven’t met in a while, and I go to say hello with a big grin.

I tap Arif on the back. ‘Oh-ho,’ he exclaims, hugging me with enthusiasm. ‘This is turning into a reunion.’

I like Arif. A bit slow, he was the butt of our section’s jokes in senior school. Luckily for him, his family owns half of Sialkot.

Pickles and I shake hands. ‘Listen, boys,’ he says. ‘I’m having a little get-together for some of our batchmates at the Punjab Club this evening. You must come.’

The ‘must’ may be meant more for Arif than for me, but I smile anyway and say, ‘I’d be delighted.’ It’s not every day I’m invited to the Punjab Club, after all.

‘Batchmates only,’ Pickles says. ‘So no wives or fiancées. And jacket and tie, Daru.’

That night, as I’m getting ready, Manucci reminds me he can’t iron my shirt without electricity. ‘Boil some water and put it in the iron,’ I say. ‘Do the best you can.’

I pull into the Punjab Club, curving around the tennis courts, and park in front of the bakery. The car next to mine is a Suzuki Khyber, which makes me feel good, because most of the spaces are filled by huge monsters.

A uniformed bearer greets me as I enter and directs me out the back to the swimming pool area, where I see thirty or so very familiar faces, rounder, of course, their flesh hanging more loosely from their bones, but still familiar.

Ozi waves me over. ‘How are you, yaar?’ he asks, shaking my hand.

‘How are you?’ I respond, wanting to look friendly but aware that the smile on my face is forced. I hold on to him longer than is comfortable, trying and failing to think of anything to say, and I avert my eyes before letting go. I’m confused and a little out of breath, unsure whether what I’m feeling is fear or anger or guilt or dislike. Probably a bit of each. I force myself not to think about it as I drift about, chatting and embracing old buddies, but I’m deeply unsettled, and it’s some time before I manage to relax.

Dinner is a delicious march through colonial culinary outposts like mulligatawny soup and roast beef and caramel custard. As I eat, I find myself starting to enjoy the evening, temporarily taken back to the days when I had a crew cut and a sportsman’s colors on my blazer. It’s amazing how quickly old school friends slip back into remembered relationships. For an hour I’m not the poorest person here by far, the only one without a job or any secure source of income, but a schoolboy good at academics, a solid athlete, and a heroic prankster with a legendary raid on our headmaster’s house to my credit.

Then I meet Asim and reality slaps my beaming face.

Asim was our section’s arm-wrestling champ. I haven’t seen him in years, but it looks like he’s taken up bodybuilding.

‘Oye, Daru,’ he yells.

It’s clear he’s drunk, and I wonder where he’s hidden his booze.

‘Oye, Asim,’ I yell back.

‘Is it true you’re selling charas now?’ He says it in a loud voice that I’m sure is overheard.

‘Very funny,’ I say quietly.

‘That’s sad, yaar, sad.’ He shakes his head.

I’ve had enough. ‘What’s your problem, sisterfucker?’

‘Don’t speak to me like that.’

‘Suck me.’

He grabs me by my shirt, and I’m about to knock his teeth in when we’re pulled apart and I hear Pickles cry, ‘No fighting, no fighting.’

‘Bloody charsi,’ Asim yells, struggling against the hands that restrain him.

‘Ignore him,’ Ozi says, leading me away.

But I can’t ignore him. The words have been said. I’m sure everyone wants to know what the scuffle was all about, and by the end of the evening they will.

Remember Daru? He’s selling drugs now.

I pull away from Ozi and head for my car.

To hell with them all.

This time I buy a thousand worth from Murad Badshah. I’ve sold half of it when Shuja calls. He wants some more hash, so I tell him to come and get it.

He arrives later that night, in a car with a driver.

‘How old are you?’ I ask him as I take him inside. I’m stoned, as usual, and a little lonely because I haven’t had anyone to talk to today.