Mohsin Hamid: Moth Smoke

Mohsin Hamid grew up in Lahore, attended Princeton University and Harvard Law School, and worked as a management consultant in New York and London. He is the author of two internationally bestselling novels translated into over twenty-five languages. The first, Moth Smoke , won a Betty Trask award, was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year, and was a finalist for the PEN/Hemingway award. The second, The Reluctant Fundamentalist , won several prizes including the Anisfield-Wolf Award and the Ambassador Book Award, and was shortlisted for many others including the Man Booker Prize, the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, and the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award.

It is said that one evening, in the year his stomach was to fail him, the Emperor Shah Jahan asked a Sufi saint what would become of the Mughal Empire.

‘Who will sit on the throne after me?’ asked Shah Jahan.

‘Tell me the names of your sons,’ replied the saint.

‘Dara is my eldest son.’

‘The fate of Dara should be asked from Iskandar.’

The Emperor’s toes curled beneath him. ‘Shuja is my second son.’

‘But Shuja is not shuja.’

‘What about Murad?’

‘Murad will not fulfill his murad.’

The Emperor closed his eyes. ‘Aurangzeb is my youngest son.’

‘Yes,’ said the saint. ‘He will be aurangzeb.’

The Emperor gazed across the plain at the incomplete splendor of his wife’s mausoleum and commanded his workers to redouble their efforts. It would be finished before the war of succession began.

The truth of the saint’s words became apparent. Aurangzeb was crowned Emperor, and he obtained from the theologians a fatwa against his defeated brother, charging Dara Shikoh with apostasy and sentencing him to death.

The Alamgirnama records the incident thus: ‘The pillars of Faith apprehended disturbances from Dara Shikoh’s life. The Emperor, therefore, out of necessity to protect the Holy Law, and also for reasons of state, considered it unlawful to allow him to remain alive.’

Imprisoned in his fort at Agra, staring at the Taj he had built, an aged Shah Jahan received as a gift from his youngest son the head of his eldest. Perhaps he doubted, then, the memory that his boys had once played together, far from his supervision and years ago, in Lahore.

When the uncertain future becomes the past, the past in turn becomes uncertain.

Yesterday, an ordinary man may have been roused from his sleep to sit in judgment at the midnight trial of an empire. Before him, as he blinked dreams from his lashes, sat a prince accused of the greatest of all crimes, a poet and pantheist, a possible future. None present were innocent, save perhaps the judge. And perhaps not even he.

My cell is full of shadows. Hanging naked from a wire in the hall outside, a bulb casts light cut by rusted bars into thin strips that snake along the concrete floor and up the back wall. People like stains dissolve into the grayness.

I sit alone, the drying smell of a man’s insides burning in my nostrils. Out of my imagination the footsteps of a guard approach, become real when a darkness silhouettes itself behind the bars and a shadow falls like blindness over the shadows in the cell. I hear the man who had been heaving scuttle into a corner, and then there is quiet.

The guard calls my name.

I hesitate before I rise to my feet and walk toward the bars, my back straight and chin up but my elbows tucked in close about the soft lower part of my rib cage. A hand slides out of the guard’s silhouette, offering me something, and I reach for it slowly, expecting it to be pulled back, surprised when it is not. I take hold of it, feeling the envelope smooth and sharp against my fingers. The guard walks away, pausing only to raise his hand and pluck delicately at the wire of the bulb, sending the light into an uneasy shivering. Someone curses, and I shut my eyes against the dizziness. When I open them again, the shadows are almost still and I can make out the grime on my fingers against the white of the envelope.

My name in the handwriting of a woman I know well.

I don’t read it, not even when I notice the damp imprints my fingers begin to leave in the paper.

You sit behind a high desk, wearing a black robe and a white wig, tastefully powdered.

The cast begins to enter, filing into this chamber of dim tube lights and slow-turning ceiling fans. Murad Badshah, the partner in crime: remorselessly large, staggeringly, stutteringly eloquent. Aurangzeb, the best friend: righteously treacherous, impeccably dressed, unfairly sexy. And radiant, moth-burning Mumtaz: wife, mother, and lover. Three players in this trial of intimates, witnesses and liars all.

They are pursued by a pair of hawk-faced men dressed in black and white: both forbidding, both hungry, but one tall and slender, the other short and fat. Two reflections of the same soul in the cosmic house of mirrors, or uncanny coincidence? It is impossible to say. Their eyes flick about them, their lips silently voice oratories of power and emotion. To be human is to know them, to know what such beings are and must be: these two are lawyers.

A steady stream of commoners and nobles follows, their diversity the work of a skilled casting director. They take their places with a silent murmur, moving slowly, every hesitation well rehearsed. A brief but stylish crowd scene, and above it all you preside like the marble rider of some great equestrian statue.

Then a pause, a silence. All eyes turn to the door.

He enters. The accused: Darashikoh Shezad.

A hard man with shadowed eyes, manacled, cuffed, disheveled, proud, erect. A man capable of anything and afraid of nothing. Two guards accompany him, and yes, they are brutes, but they would offer scant reassurance if this man were not chained. He is the terrible almost-hero of a great story: powerful, tragic, and dangerous. He alone meets your eyes.

And then he is seated and it begins.

Your gavel falls like the hammer of God.

Perhaps a query ( Where did I get this thing? ) flashes through your mind before vanishing forever, like a firefly in the belly of a frog. But the die has been cast. There is no going back.

The case is announced.

The prosecutor rises to his feet, and his opening remarks reek of closure.

‘Milord,’ he says (and he means you), ‘the court has before it today a case no less clear than the task of the executioner. The accused has stretched out his neck beneath the heavy blade of justice, and there is no question but that this blade must fall. For he has blood on his hands, Milord. Young blood. The blood of a child. He killed not out of anger, not out of scheme or plan or design. He killed as a serpent kills that which it does not intend to eat: he killed out of indifference. He killed because his nature is to kill, because the death of a child has no meaning for him.