Moth Smoke

by Mohsin Hamid

  ‘Stop.’

  The sharpness of her tone makes me realize I’m getting carried away, and I bite down on my words. But I feel myself choking on all I’m leaving unsaid.

  ‘Don’t,’ she says. ‘I don’t want to lie here and attack Ozi. It isn’t right.’

  ‘You said it was a mistake to marry him.’

  ‘For me, yes. But which one of us is the problem? Ozi’s a good father. He’s sweet. He’s generous. He’s smart …’

  I feel the muscles in my chest contract. ‘He’s rich. He’s got everything he wants. He’s perfect.’

  She pulls back. ‘Why are you so bitter?’

  ‘He’s a bastard.’

  ‘There’s no reason for you to be jealous.’

  My mouth is wet with unswallowed spit. ‘If you think he’s so wonderful, maybe you shouldn’t be here.’

  She watches me, her eyebrows rising, wrinkling her forehead. ‘Are you serious?’

  I realize she’s getting angry. And I don’t want to fight. ‘No,’ I say. And when she doesn’t respond, I add, ‘I’m sorry.’

  She’s quiet for a moment. ‘I don’t think I should be married to Ozi. But not because of him. Because of me. I’m really not all that nice. I don’t think I’m the sort who should marry at all.’

  ‘That isn’t true.’

  She smiles. ‘You don’t know me that well. I’m a bad wife. And I’m a worse mother.’

  I put my arm around her and she presses against my side. ‘You’re just stuck in a bad situation.’

  She shakes her head. ‘I chose my situation. No, it’s deeper than that.’

  ‘What is?’

  ‘Where am I right now?’

  I stroke her back. ‘With me.’

  ‘And what about my son? He’s at home. He misses me. But I leave him with Pilar as much as I can. I can’t help it. I’m flawed. A bad design.’

  ‘It’s normal. Everyone gets tired of their children sometimes.’

  ‘I’m not talking about getting tired sometimes. I don’t know. I don’t think I can explain it.’

  ‘My mother didn’t spend every minute with me.’

  ‘No?’ Her belly swells against my side with her breathing.

  ‘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.

  ‘Nothing clean,’ I answer.

  ‘It doesn’t matter.’

  I take a white undershirt out of my closet and sniff it. Smells neutral enough. She puts it on and walks out of the room, her bare feet avoiding the dead moths and the puddles near the windows.

  ‘You need a replacement for Manucci,’ she says.

  ‘I can’t afford one,’ I reply, following her.

  She sees what she’s looking for, a box of matches, and lights her cigarette. Then she sits down on the couch and pulls her legs under her. ‘I’m going to give you some money until you find work.’

  I sit down next to her and shake my head. ‘I don’t want any more of Ozi’s money, thanks.’

  She kisses me. ‘Well, once you’ve started having an affair with his wife, taking his money doesn’t seem like such a big step.’

  I rub the corner of her jaw with my chin, feel my stubble scratch her skin, turn it red. ‘I don’t want to be having an affair with his wife.’

  She smiles. ‘Tired of me so soon?’

  ‘I’m serious.’

  She shakes her head and looks away. Her hair covers the patch of redness. ‘Don’t do this.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Don’t make this into something it isn’t.’

  ‘What isn’t this?’

  ‘This isn’t a courtship.’

  I tug at the bottom of her undershirt. My undershirt, on her. It’s old, the cotton very soft, fraying slightly around the collar. ‘This isn’t just sex.’

  She turns and looks at me. One hand covers mine, stops my tugging. ‘Nothing is just sex. I care about you. I need this right now.’

  ‘I love you.’

  ‘Stop saying that.’

  I pull on her shirt again, gently. ‘Do you think you can go back to Ozi as though nothing ever happened?’

  ‘Daru, I don’t have to go back to him. I’m married to him. I’d have to leave him to go back to him.’

  ‘But you started this.’

  She takes my hand off her shirt. ‘You didn’t exactly resist.’

  ‘But you’re the one who made it happen.’

  ‘I just got over my guilt first.’

  ‘So why hold back now?’

  ‘Daru, I’m married. I have a son. I’m not looking to mate. I’m looking to be with a man for me, because it makes me happy.’

  ‘And I don’t make you happy?’

  ‘You do.’

  ‘But you don’t care about my happiness.’

  ‘Of course I do. That’s why I’m being honest with you. If you’re looking for a wife, you need to look somewhere else. I’m an awful wife. And I’m already married.’

  I walk over to a cabinet and take out the hairy. I haven’t told Mumtaz I’ve been smoking the stuff. But suddenly I see no reason to hide. Let her be angry.

  Then again, maybe she won’t even care. I’m just her lover, after all.

  I light up and she asks for a puff.

  ‘No,’ I say.

  She stays seated, hugging her knees on the sofa. ‘Why not?’

  I pull the smoke into my lungs, growing calm before the aitch has even begun to work: the relaxation of anticipation. ‘You don’t want it.’

  ‘Are you angry?’ Her tone is neutral, neither cold, accusatory, nor warm, inviting reconciliation.

  ‘It’s an aitch.’

  ‘Aitch?’

  ‘Aitch. Hairy. Heroin. Bad for your health.’

  She’s quiet. I don’t feel any need to say more. I like this, the sense that she’s trying to communicate with me while I hold back, waiting.

  ‘You’re more stupid than you look,’ she says.

  I ignore her. The aitch is almost gone. I hold it between thumb and forefinger, fill my chest with a last puff.

  ‘Are you such a coward?’ she snaps. ‘Have you really just given up on everything?’

  ‘Don’t overreact. I’ve had some occasionally. Twice or thrice.’ I’m acting cool, but inwardly I’m overjoyed by her reaction. She’s furious. Which means she’s concerned.

  She glares at me. ‘You have to stop it.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Don’t be an idiot. It’s heroin. It isn’t hash or ex. It isn’t a nice little recreational drug.’

  ‘It depends on how much you have. I’m a recreational user.’

  ‘Do you think you can quit?’

  ‘I’m not hooked. How about you?’

  She’s touching her chin with her finger. ‘How about me?’

  ‘Do you think you can quit?’

  She shakes her head and gives me a frustrated smile. ‘I don’t smoke heroin, you maniac.’

  ‘Quit Ozi. He’s bad for you. You’re unhappy.’

  She looks at me, still shaking her head. Then she lights a cigarette. ‘Let’s not confuse things. Your doing heroin has nothing to do with my marriage.’

  ‘You’re here every day. Why don’t you leave him?’

  ‘I have a son, in case you’ve forgotten.’

  With the heroin comes clarity. And a certain cruelty, a calm disregard for consequences. ‘You don’t give a shit about your son.’

  She stops smoking. ‘Don’t say that,’ she says in a low voice.

  ‘You don’t love him. Stop pretending.’

  She drops her cigarette on the floor. ‘I’m leaving.’

  ‘You run away from him every chance you get. Do you think it’s good for him that you stay? He’s going to grow up wondering why his mother never really talks to him, why she’s always so distant. And do you know what that’s going to do to him? He’ll be miserable.’

  She stares at me, eyes wet, face hard. ‘You’re a bastard.’

  ‘Quit them,’ I say. ‘It’s for the best.’<
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  She stands, wipes her tears.

  I reach out, but she slaps my hand away. Pain slices up from my finger.

  ‘I don’t love you,’ she says. ‘And the reason you’re so desperate to think you’re in love with me is because your life is going nowhere and you know it.’

  With the pain in my hand comes unexpected, ferocious anger. But even more than anger, I feel triumph straighten my back and flush my face, triumph because I know I’m right about her, because she’d never be so vicious if I were wrong.

  She holds out a note. ‘Here’s a thousand. You’ll need it.’

  ‘I don’t want it.’

  She walks into the bedroom, strips naked, puts on her clothes, and leaves without another word.

  When she’s gone I pick up the clothes she was wearing and put them on. I can smell her in them, and I’m suddenly filled with the longing to speak with her.

  Then I find the thousand-rupee note in my wallet.

  I’m at once furious and ashamed, furious because people give money after sex to prostitutes and ashamed because I’m so hungry that I have to take it. But I make a decision. To hell with handouts. I’m ready for a little justice.

  I’m driving slowly to Murad Badshah’s workshop, trying not to splash pedestrians wading through the flooded streets with their shoes in their hands and their shalwars pulled up their thighs, when I’m overtaken by a Land Cruiser that sprays muddy water in its wake like a speedboat and wets me through my open window. Bastard. I dry my face on my sleeve and clear the windshield with the wipers.

  All my life the arrival of the monsoon has been a happy occasion, ending the heat of high summer and making Lahore green again. But this year I see it as a time of festering, not rebirth. Without air-conditioning, temperatures are still high enough for me to sweat as I lie on my bed trying to sleep, but now the sweat doesn’t evaporate. Instead, it coagulates like blood into peeled scabs of dampness that cover my itching body. Unrefrigerated, the food in my house spoils overnight, consumed by colored molds that spread like cancer. Overripe fruit bursts open, unhealthy flesh oozing out of ruptures in sickly skin. And the larvae already wriggling in dark pools of water will soon erupt into swarms of mosquitoes.