The Reluctant Fundamentalist By Mohsin Hamid Penguin, Rs 295

Changez, the protagonist of Mohsin Hamid’s second novel, begins his working life as a business consultant in New York. Educated at Princeton and remarkably successful in his job, he becomes exhilarated, for a while, with the Great American Dream, before he responds to the inexorable pull of the “fundamentals” and returns for good to his homeland, Pakistan. “Fundamentals” is the operative word here, invested with various meanings — from the sublime to the banal.

The motto of Underwood Samson, the US firm that Changez works for, demands him to “Focus on the fundamentals”: “It mandated a single-minded attention to financial detail, teasing out the true nature of those drivers that determine an asset’s value”. Changez doesn’t even have to reach Wall Street to figure out that attention to the fundamentals constitutes the first principles of American life. After all, he is elected, out of many hundreds, to attend Princeton “not only by well-honed standardized tests but by painstakingly customized evaluations”. The rights of admission into the greatest nation on earth have always been reserved for the “best and the brightest”.

The more familiar, political meaning of the magic word — fundamentals — comes from the father of Changez’s American girlfriend. “You guys have got some serious problems with fundamentalism,” he tells Changez about the political crisis in Pakistan, unable to keep the “typically American undercurrent of condescension” out of his tone. Beyond these two usages of fundamentalism — as consumerist jargon and as a by-word for terrorism — lurk the other fundamentals of human life: the search for home, the need for love and a sense of identity. American capitalism, absorbed as it is in the mining of human capital, sadly neglects these emotional coordinates that hold humankind together. Even as Changez cannot help being fascinated by “the power of that system, pragmatic and effective”, he becomes steadily disenchanted with its pitilessly determined pursuit of the fundamentals that don’t matter.

Only in the cosmopolitan generousness of New York does he feel at home — among the Urdu-speaking cab drivers, the corner-shops called “Pak-Punjab Deli” and the experience of “hearing [on Fifth Avenue] from loudspeakers mounted on the South Asian Gay and Lesbian Association float, a song to which [he] had danced at [his] cousin’s wedding”. “I was, in four and a half years, never an American; I was immediately a New Yorker.” It is this affectionate homeliness of New York that turns him into “a lover of America”, Changez confesses to an American stranger in Lahore.

Changez accosts this unnamed American in the Old Anarkali district of Lahore, famous for its exquisite cuisine, and leads him to his favourite restaurant for “the perfect cup of tea”. The American remains on the edges of the narrative, a mostly silent listener caught in the spell of the glittering eyes and intense volubility of his Pakistani host. Changez’s autobiography becomes, for his listener, as hypnotic and inescapable a destiny as the stories that Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner or Sindbad the Sailor told their audiences. The American is left feeling claustrophobic (his reactions are reflected in Changez’s anxious monologue): he feels oppressed as much by the foreign setting — he cannot “relinquish [his] foreigner’s sense of being watched” — as by the foreigner’s intimate self-revelation.

A sense of urgent purposefulness (“tonight is…a night of some importance”) impels Changez to bludgeon his American guest with the most private details of his past. He reveals to him, unhesitatingly, his love for Erica, the deeply troubled girl who could never get over the premature death of her former lover, Chris, and remained unable to reciprocate Changez’s overtures. Erica was one of those “fundamentals” that mattered to Changez, but could never step outside her essential solitude. She is smitten by Changez’s impeccable refinement, even by the beard that he starts growing after the fall of the twin towers of the World Trade Center, but not quite enough to escape the echo-chamber of her mind.

Changez’s awakening out of the American Dream and into the fundamentals of humanity, in a sense, begins as the enormity of 9/11 dawns on him. He watches the spectacle of destruction on TV in Valparaiso, where he is on an assignment, and “caught up in the symbolism of it all…American [brought] to her knees”, his face abruptly breaks into a smile. It is as if his mounting frustration with the job, his hopeless, directionless love for Erica, and the sheer incredulity of the catastrophe, come together in that smile. During this fateful time, as Changez negotiates his inner workings, he is taken out to lunch by Juan Bautista, the elderly, Borgesian publisher for whom he is working in Valparaiso. Over lunch, this relic from the Old World tells the crestfallen young man about the janissaries of the Ottoman Empire, the Christian boys who were captured in their infancy and trained to fight against their own people with ruthless ferocity. This parable leaves Changez feeling like “a form of indentured servant whose right to remain [in the US] was dependent upon the benevolence of [his] employer”.

Back in New York, he experiences the terrible humiliation of racial profiling. Earlier, dressed in his work-suit, he would mingle with the subway crowd every morning, drawing no stares, except the occasional invitational smiles from one or two “gay gentlemen”. He returns to the city, among his colleagues, arrogantly keeping the beard which made him “uncomfortable in [his] own face”. Just as Changez’s geographical home slips away, so does his metaphysical home, Erica, who remains fixated on the irredeemable past, her “home was a guy with long, skinny fingers”. Between 9/11 and Changez’s eventual return to Pakistan, a symbolic, Dickensian scheme of naming becomes clear: Erica is actually Am-Erica losing herself in a “powerful nostalgia” following the terror attacks, and Changez is, what his name literally suggests, change.

Symbolism apart, the characters remain rooted in reality, although the modest scale of the narrative leaves them somewhat sketchy and incomplete. But the abiding fascination in the novel is Changez’s voice — his courtly, genteel manner, unabashedly confessional but also hiding as much. It is the portrait of the urbane, Pakistani voice, with the cadences of Urdu built seamlessly into the spoken English that sustains the momentum of the narrative, which might have otherwise become slightly tedious. As Changez returns to Pakistan, he takes up the less glamorous job of a college professor, teaching his students the human costs of focussing exclusively on the inhuman fundamentals. He epitomizes the figure of the reluctant fundamentalist, who journeys to the far ends of the world to find self-knowledge in the protean word, “fundamentals”, that lies at the essential core of humanity.

However, Changez’s story does not end with the comfort of stability, of arriving, at last, to a state of native purity after a long and arduous human journey. The mutual suspicion between the men — Changez and the American visitor, who is probably an undercover agent — is sustained till the very end, even as they depart. At the door of the hotel, Changez becomes momentarily dazzled by the “glint of metal” from what he presumes to be the American’s business card holder, which would perpetuate the bond of “a certain shared intimacy” between them forever. But, after this, he is heard no more.