Pakistani columnist Moni Mohsin was pleasantly surprised to find she had a fan following in India

Fools are her theme, satire her tenor. So when Moni Mohsin lets her pen flit over the life of the social butterfly scaling heights of frivolity with her tabahi parties and Harrod’s-obsessed tales, she does not merely provide a peepshow into Pakistani high life. She lets loose a scathing attack on Pakistani politics.

And appropriately enough she has readers addicted to her brand of lampooning with her hit column — The Diary of a Social Butterfly — that features in Pakistan’s national weekly The Friday Times. So much so that when she came down to India to attend the Jaipur Literary Festival earlier this year, she was taken aback to find that even Indian readers knew the Butterfly.

She returned home to London, promptly re-opened the diary entries and compiled them into a book that has been released only in India under the Random House umbrella. Mohsin is hoping for a launch in her home country soon.

The Diary of a Social Butterfly has been going strong right from the early ’90s when it was started after its author chanced upon a conversation at a lunch party in Lahore. It went somewhat on these lines:

An amply proportioned Begum with diamond studs the size of rupee coins and huge designer sunglasses was holding forth on her newly purchased shahtoosh. “Haan so I got this one yesterday only. It is seven also yards, na. I had two from before also but they were three yards only. So I thought, chalo, might as well get a big one also.”

Her companion in a slinky sari and a minuscule blouse flicked back her long highlighted tresses and said: “I tau don’t wear shawls, baba. One looks too much like an ayah.”

Out of this idle banter emerged the idea of a column that would mock the ways of the spoilt rich and also, simultaneously, be a commentary on the times. “Before this column, I was writing a light-hearted column called By The Way that was about my life as a single woman. But it began to bore me very soon. So The Diary of a Social Butterfly slid into its place perfectly,” says the 45-year-old author.

Butterfly is a knuckle-brained socialite who has the unusual talent of delivering a bolt from the blue with her by-the-way shrewd, political comments. And malapropism is her forte and stock-in-trade. So the Kinnaird College-educated “sophisty, smart and socialist” lady sails through politically volatile times, right from 9/11 to Benazir Bhutto’s assassination, with her tittle-tattle and parties.

Some of her traits admittedly spring from her creator. “There is a Butterfly in all of us. Like her, I love a fun party and a good gossip. I enjoy feasting on Vogue and Elle and (dare I say it?) even Hello,” says Mohsin.

But times are getting worse for the Butterfly. She has men armed with Kalashnikovs guarding her home while thieves lecture her neighbours on appropriate clothing the Muslim way — the latter having been culled from an incident in real life.

“My editor never once asked me to water down my social critique, nor did I feel in the least bit apprehensive when voicing it. Contrary to Indian perceptions, the media in Pakistan enjoys a fair bit of latitude,” says Mohsin who made her debut as an author in 2006 with the well-received novel, The End of Innocence.

It drew on her memories of the war of December 1971. “My first real memory of it was being woken up in the middle of the night by a loud drilling sound outside my bedroom window. I peered out of the window and saw what I thought were fireworks in the garden. Suddenly my mother was there in the bedroom that my sister and I shared and she was bundling us out of there. It’s the only time I’ve seen strafing,” she says.

Her new book with its tongue-in-cheek tone, is in a sense therefore a break from her earlier novel. She stopped writing the column about three years ago, because she found that being a mother to her young children was a full-time job. But she had to bring the Butterfly back on popular demand.

Ask her how she managed to drum out her columns sitting in her London home (she moved there in 1996 after her marriage) and she reckons it all has to do with being steeped in the culture and language of Pakistan. Also, her sister Jugnu Mohsin who often supplies her with nuggets of information and all the latest gossip from Pakistan. Satire obviously runs in the family, because her sister writes another satirical column called Ittefaq Nama in The Friday Times. “Let’s say mimicry runs in the family,” laughs Mohsin.

Belonging to a liberal upper-middle class family, she went to the UK for higher education after a convent education in Lahore. After getting a degree in social anthropology at Cambridge University she returned to Pakistan and started working as a features writer covering environment and heritage with The Friday Times.

Having grown up in times when there were no computers, DVDs or video games and only one TV channel, entertainment meant indulging in board games (she vouches that she can still play a mean game of Scrabble) and reading up Enid Blytons and later, Mills and Boon romances.

“But then, thanks God, as the Butterfly would say, I discovered Kipling, Stevenson, P.G. Wodehouse, the Brontes, Jane Austen and also, a great favourite Jim Corbett. That discovery, both as a reader and future writer, was my salvation,” adds Mohsin.

She’s about to start writing a new novel but she insists that her life revolves completely around her family. “That includes long walks with my husband and children, lying-in on a Sunday morning with all the weekend papers spread out over my bed and a mug of coffee on my bedside table, travelling together to new places (this year we visited Galle in Sri Lanka, Florence in Italy and the Antibes in France), making complicated Lego models with my son, listening to and advising my 9-year-old daughter on her new novel — she begins a new one every month!”