Moni Mohsin

In the last few days, I have been chatting to the Pakistani writer Moni Mohsin about her very funny novel, Tender Hooks, which was published in January this year in India by Random House India (Rs 199, about £2.76).

Here, in the UK, it has just been brought out also in paperback by Chatto & Windus (£12.99).

“The British edition is only very slightly different (from the Indian one),” says Moni. “There are some words like khata pita which I have taken out and bhookha nanga because they (British readers) would not be able to understand. I have substituted ‘hungry naked’ for bhookha nanga.”

Moni has also been giving interviews to Kirsty Lang and Harriett Gilbert on two BBC arts programmes, Front Row on Radio 4 and The Strand on the World Service. Kirsty quite rightly called the book “laugh out loud funny”.

There was a time when if a book sold briskly in Britain, a cheaper edition would eventually appear in India and Pakistan. Now, quite often, the process is reversed, as with Tender Hooks, a novel which has evolved from Moni’s column, The Diary of a Social Butterfly, in The Friday Times, the English-language weekly newspaper based in Lahore.

Moni went to Delhi and Bombay earlier this year to give interviews because she has something of a fan following in India.

In her spoof diary which chronicles the life and times of the rich and privileged in Lahore, Moni has created a cast of characters headed by a Lahori Begum, a “raving snob” who thoroughly dislikes the “beardo weirdos” of the Taliban who disrupt her appointments for “facials”.

The Lahore lady has an imperfect grasp of English grammar and is prone to such malapropisms as: “Pakistan has become a safe heaven for terrorists.” Her heroine mixes up “buffet” for “bouquet” of roses, enthuses over “three tiara cakes” and makes a “beehive”, instead of a “beeline”, for a target. “Wash up” gets substituted for “wash out”, as in: “The play was a total wash up; (or) third day of the match was a complete wash up.”

Incidentally, “Tender Hooks” stands for “tenterhook”. As someone with a receptive ear for dialogue, Moni jots down memorable utterances from family and friends: “‘I’ve had five fatal accidents,’ meaning five serious accidents.”

What is remarkable is that Moni has been writing her diary for many years from London where she lives with her British Pakistani husband, Shazad Ghaffar, a financier resident in the UK for 30 years, and their children, Laila and Faiz.

At 16, Moni came from Pakistan to study at a boarding school in England, followed by Cambridge, which her elder sister, Jugnu, also attended. Jugnu is publisher and a columnist on The Friday Times, while her husband, Najam Sethi, is its eminent editor.

“My sister Jugnu writes two diaries: a diary called Ittefaq Nama, which is in the voice of Nawaz Sharif, and a column called Howzzat, which in the voice of Imran Khan,” Moni tells me. “Every third week it’s my turn.”

I tell Moni that her novel was recommended by a friend, Nusrat (“Nuscie”) Jamil, when I was in a Lahore in late March when it was a hot topic of conversation. I hurried to a Lahore bookshop and bought a copy for 375 Pakistani rupees (about £2.65).

Romola Garai and Ben Whishaw, who play producer Bel Rowley and reporter Freddie Lyon in The Hour; (above) the new Sherlock on BBC television stars Benedict Cumberbatch as Sherlock Holmes and Martin Freeman as Dr John Watson

Along with other rich people from Lahore, Moni’s social butterfly is currently on holiday in London, living in “a two-bedroom, two-bathroom, very nice flat near Harrods her husband has rented just a stone throw — or was it rock throw? — from Harrods and there she has been hanging out all day and night”. “But the problem with Harrods is there are a lot of Indians there at the moment and unfortunately they have become very rich recently so they have become a bit show offy. I am not saying anything against anybody, really, but they spend a lot and they buy all the bags I want and I think that is a bit unfair on me...”

Moni is quite a mimic.

When I say I was much taken with Lahore, Moni’s response is sombre: “It’s a fabulous place but if you are in the cross heads, it’s not so wonderful.”

Lahori Begum has figured in Moni’s last two reports from London. “She has just discovered that back home she has been thrown out of her kitty because she had not been there for a while and the ‘kitty coup’, as she calls it, has been done by her friend, Sunny. But Butterfly is plotting revenge.”

Moni cheerfully admits there is a bit of Butterfly in her. “I love reading Hello! magazine, I like reading the Vogue magazine, I like watching Mad Men, I like watching Sex and the City. Of course, the subject matter is very dark but if the approach is light it allows people to read it.”

There is just a touch of Jane Austen in the world inhabited by Butterfly, admits Moni, who has also been compared with Helen Fielding, creator of Bridget Jones.

Two of Butterfly’s favourite films are Gurinder Chadha’s Bride and Prejudice and Kuch Kuch Hota Hai. “I think it’s the arranged marriage; if you are lucky you marry slightly above your class, so all those kinds of concerns still hold true in Pakistan and in India, I imagine. What this book is asking is, ‘How do you live in a country unravelling around you?’ I wanted to show how removed the privileged people in Pakistan are from reality.”

That said, “this book is a celebration of the resilience of Pakistani people,” emphasises Moni. She is considering setting her next novel among the Asian community in London.