“At a cafe table in Lahore, a bearded Pakistani man converses with an American stranger. As dusk deepens to dark, he begins the tale that has brought him to this fateful meeting…” – from the back cover of Mohsin Hamid’s ‘The Reluctant Fundamentalist’.

These lines make so much more sense after reading the book, because words like “bearded” and “stranger”, and even “fateful” are key elements in the narrative. The story is a monologue by a Pakistani who embraces the US and its ways after coming to America as an undergraduate student, and holds these bindings closer as he starts working in a coveted position at a valuation firm.

A turning point in the story is the terror attacks of September 2001. (A short aside: The attacks seem to have happened just yesterday or ages ago depending on how you look at it. Many people, including yours truly, can still recall what exactly they were doing when the shocking news came upon them. And yet, now when it figures in the news because certain photographs have been released, it seems like an event that took place in some long-lost and misplaced memory.)

Sometimes the writing gets intensely personal, and strikes a chord with the reader’s sensibilities. For instance: “… [Jim] continued to look at me in his steady, penetrating manner until eventually he said, “You’re a watchful guy. You know where that comes from?” I shook my head. “It comes from feeling out of place,” he said.” Now, this happens long before 9/11, before the protagonist Changez senses alienation in his adopted country. It makes the reader wonder whether Changez felt at home in the first place. Does any immigrant ever feel at home? What is it that ties a person to his roots – what makes Changez happy after he returns to Lahore? But he is not ungrateful, for he realises that the US is perhaps one of the rare places where he can hope to achieve so much without the backing of connections.

Parallel to this thread of political disillusionment runs the story of Erica – Changez’s girlfriend – who loses herself to depression. The book does try to portray the emotional fallout of 9/11 on the minds of Americans, but even the loss of Erica is not so much about her as about him. And while it may seem that Changez loses his quality of being a “shark” that never stops swimming, never stops competing, that notion could be mistaken. For it is this nature of his that urges him to lead protests and demonstrations in Lahore. And ultimately results in the ending that manages to be unexpected enough to stop your thoughts and yet expected enough to be believable. And this, in spite of flaws such as a glossed-over description of Changez’s Lahore days, makes the book worth reading.

A question: why do many books end up giving the feeling that the penultimate parts have been hurried through? Also, since the book made it to the Booker shortlist, the question arises: isn’t it too short for a Booker? But then, if ‘The White Tiger’ could get shortlisted, and win, why not this? Perhaps there is a real shortage of books with more substance, or perhaps authors and publishers believe the Twenty20 generation cannot handle anything more complicated.