Mohsin Hamid - Moth Smoke

‘Of course not. She worked, for one thing. And I went to school during the day, sports in the afternoons. And at night I went out with my friends.’

‘But when you were home together?’

I think of my mother and feel myself starting to slip, a sudden weightlessness, the dip in my stomach as a car crests a hill, fast, the uncertainty that entered my life the day she died. I pull Mumtaz to me. ‘We used to talk. We were close.’

‘You see. I hear it in your voice. Muazzam is never going to speak of me that way.’

‘You don’t know that.’ I kiss her, softly. ‘You’re wonderful. You make me feel completely cared for.’

She stops breathing and stares at me for a moment, almost a glare. I pause. Then it passes. Her body relaxes, her waist sinking deeper into the bed, the curve from her shoulder to her hip becoming more pronounced.

‘Maybe that’s why I’m here,’ she says. She doesn’t smile, but she kisses me back, and both of us shut our eyes.

Sometimes when Mumtaz is with me, moving about the house, I watch her. I’m mesmerized by her posture. She stands with strength and poise and supple flexibility, like a village woman balancing a pitcher of water on her head as she walks home from the well. Shoulder blades pulled back. Chin up.

The muscles of her neck flare, taut when she turns, when she inhales before speaking.

She has the long torso of Sadequain’s imagination. And solid, strong legs. One half slender, one half less so. A mermaid.

Her breasts are small and wonderfully round. One hangs half a rib lower.

Her fingers are thin. Nails short, unpolished. Veins raise the smooth skin of her hands before subsiding into her forearms. Roots feeding blood to her grip.

She curls and uncurls her toes without thinking when she sits.

And her mouth is wide and alive.

I commit her to memory.

When I’m alone, I feel a strange yearning, the hunger of a man fasting not because he believes but because he’s ashamed. Not the cleansing hunger of the devout, but the feverish hunger of the hypocrite. I let her go every evening only because there’s nothing I can do to stop her.

And I ask myself what it is about me that makes this wonderful, beautiful woman return. Is it just because I’m pathetic, helpless in my current state, completely dependent on her? Or is it my sense of humor, my willingness to tease her, to joke my way into painful, secret places? Do I help her understand herself? Do I make her happy? Do I do something for her that her husband and son can’t do?

Has she fallen in love with me?

As the days pass and I continue to heal, my body knitting itself back together, I begin to allow myself to think that maybe she has.

And one day, after many joints, as we lie replete in bed, as I play with her hair and she kisses my hand, I realize that she watches me. That she touches me not just with tenderness but with fascination.

And my mind starts to whirl.

Suddenly I think I’m about to understand.

She’s drawn to me just as I’m drawn to her. She can’t keep away. She circles, forced to keep her distance, afraid of abandoning her husband and, even more, her son for too long. But she keeps coming, like a moth to my candle, staying longer than she should, leaving late for dinners and birthday parties, singeing her wings. She’s risking her marriage for me, her family, her reputation.

And I, the moth circling her candle, realize that she’s not just a candle. She’s a moth as well, circling me. I look at her and see myself reflected, my feelings, my desires. And she, looking at me, must see herself. And which of us is moth and which is candle hardly seems to matter. We’re both the same.

That’s the secret.

What moths never tell us as they whirl in their dances.

What Manucci learned at Pak Tea House.

What sufis veil in verse.

I turn her around and look into her eyes and see the wonder in them that must be in mine as well, the wonder I first saw on our night of ecstasy, and I feel myself explode, expand, fill the universe, then collapse, implode like a detonation under water, become tiny, disappear.

I’m hardly aware of myself, of her, when I open my mouth. There is just us, and I speak for us when I speak, and I must be trembling and crying, but I don’t even know if I am or what I’m doing.

I just say it.

‘I love you.’

And I lose myself in her eyes and we kiss and I feel myself becoming part of something new, something larger, something I never knew could be.

Union.

There are no words.

But after.

‘Don’t say that,’ she says.

And faintly, the smell of something burning.

When I wake, it seems a little less hot than usual, so I’m worried I have a fever until light flashes behind the curtains and the sound of a detonation rolls in with a force that makes the windows rattle. As I step outside with a plastic bag over my cast, a stiff breeze pulls my hair away from my face, and I see the pregnant clouds of the monsoon hanging low over the city.

The rains have finally decided to come.

I sit down on the lawn, resting my back against the wall of the house, and light an aitch I’ve waited a long time to smoke. Suddenly the air is still and the trees are silent, and I can hear laughter from my neighbor’s servant quarters. A bicycle bell sounds in the street, reminding me of the green Sohrab I had as a child. Then the wind returns, bringing the smell of wet soil and a pair of orange parrots that swoop down to take shelter in the lower branches of the banyan tree, where they glow in the shadows.

A raindrop strikes the lawn, sending up a tiny plume of dust. Others follow, a barrage of dusty explosions bursting all around me. The leaves of the banyan tree rebound from their impact. The parrots disappear from sight. In the distance, the clouds seem to reach down to touch the earth. And then a curtain of water falls quietly and shatters across the city with a terrifying roar, drenching me instantly. I hear the hot concrete of the driveway hissing, turning rain back into steam, and I smell the dead grass that lies under the dirt of the lawn.

I fill my mouth with water, gritty at first, then pure and clean, and roll into a ball with my face pressed against my knees, sucking on a hailstone, shivering as wet cloth sticks to my body. Heavy drops beat their beat on my back and I rock slowly, my thoughts silenced by the violence of the storm, gasping in the sudden, unexpected cold.

The parrots the monsoon brought to my banyan tree have decided to stay awhile. There’s been a break in the downpour today, and I can see them from my window, swimming in and out of the green reef of the canopy like tropical fish, blazing with color when the sun winks at them through the occasional gap between storm clouds.

Along with parrots, the rains have brought flooding to the Punjab and a crime wave to Lahore. Heists and holdups and the odd bombing compete with aerial food drops and humanitarian heroics for headline space on the front pages of the newspapers. Looking out on the soggy city, I pretend to move my hand through a table-tennis shot, but I’m really reenacting the slap that sent Manucci away, wondering how a little twist of the wrist could have such enormous consequences.

What am I going to do? I don’t know how to cook or clean or do the wash. And I’ll be damned if I’m going to learn. The only people in my neighborhood who don’t have servants are servants themselves. Except for me. And I refuse to serve. I’m done with giving. Giving service to bank clients, giving respect to people who haven’t earned it, giving hash and getting punished. I’m ready to take.

‘What are you looking at?’ she asks me.

‘Parrots,’ I tell her.

She gets out of bed, picks up my jeans, and puts them on, rolling the waistband down so they don’t fall off her hips. ‘Do you have a shirt I can wear?’ she asks me.