Moth Smoke

by Mohsin Hamid

  As it gets darker, Manucci starts lighting candles, and I pray that tonight we will have fewer visiting moths than normal, but here my luck leaves me. Mumtaz raises an eyebrow more than once at the whirring guests who join us for tea, bumping noisily into walls and windows.

  Once Manucci’s gone, Mumtaz puts her arms around me and pulls me close. We kiss, and she gives me a long lick, like a cat tending to its paw. I hug her, squeezing, and her ribs flex with the pressure. I feel my face flush with excitement, and at the same time I’m surprised by how comfortable this is, how new but also familiar.

  ‘Sorry about the Pajero comment,’ I say.

  ‘Don’t worry.’

  We kiss again, harder this time.

  ‘Why did you write that article about prostitutes?’ I ask her.

  ‘Manto often wrote about prostitutes.’

  ‘But why the fascination with Manto’s subject matter?’

  She pulls back slightly and looks at me. ‘A few years of marriage and motherhood, I suppose. Finding I don’t quite fit into what’s expected. I’m interested in things women do that aren’t spoken about. Manto’s stories let me breathe. They make me feel like less of a monster.’

  ‘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.

  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.

  ‘Sixteen.’

  I wonder whether sixteen’s too young to be smoking hash. Then I decide it isn’t. I wasn’t much older than that when I started, and kids today are doing everything earlier than we did. It’s the MTV effect.

  Manucci watches as Shuja and I exchange the hash for a thousand, a disapproving look on his face. I give him a quick glare, and he ducks back into the kitchen.

  ‘How long have you been a doper?’ I ask Shuja.

  ‘Oh, you know.’

  ‘I don’t know. Six months? A year?’

  He looks uncomfortable. ‘A month, maybe. A couple of my friends tried it before that, but we never had anyone to buy from.’

  Maybe I shouldn’t sell it to him. But he pays a thousand when all my other customers pay five hundred. Besides, he’s nothing to me.