HM Naqvi’s stunning debut novel shows how the lives of three young Pakistanis are transformed by 9/11, writes Naresh Fernandes.
Months after the World Trade Centre had crumbled, many New Yorkers confessed that they continued to sense the towers looming on the skyline like “ghost limbs”, referring to the phenomenon by which people who have had an arm or a leg amputated feel that their missing appendages are still attached to their bodies. The events of 9/11 aren’t described in detail in HM Naqvi’s Home Boy, a disquieting novel about three Pakistani hipsters in New York. But the phantom attacks hang over the pages like the thin layer of moondust that settled all across Lower Manhattan in the aftermath of the tragedy, suffusing the novel with a throbbing anxiety that fuels the high-octane narrative.
For Naqvi, who returned to Karachi after studying and working in the US for four years, the sense of foreboding wasn’t merely imaginary. “I began Home Boy one night in the Bowery in New York circa ’03, sitting at the bar, scrawling on the back of a cocktail napkin,” he told Time Out in an email interview. “My brother had been visited by the authorities. I had recently lost a friend. It was an unsettled time. We all had to contend with a changed world, changed realities, with history.”
Home Boy chronicles the adventures of Jimbo, an American-born Pashtun DJ with a conservative father in New Jersey and a WASP girlfriend on West Broadway, the prodigiously well-read AC and Chuck, the narrator, who is trying to come to terms with losing his job at a financial firm. Though its central characters are Pakistani, the novel swaggers far beyond the confines (and concerns) of New York’s South Asian neighbourhoods. “Since Home Boy is a novel set in America, contending with contemporary American history, I made a conscious effort to ground the narrative in American literary traditions and steer the narrative through day-to-day American life and Americana,” said Naqvi. “The novel, for instance, is populated with characters that include an African-American sommelier, a Caucasian woman hailing from East Coast aristocracy (known as The Duck), a Congolese taxicab driver, a Moroccan newspaper seller. And of course, there are a bunch of animated Pakistanis.”
Naqvi’s deft portrayal of how the lives of his protagonist are transformed by 9/11 is an elegant exposition of US paranoia after the attacks and seems to establish conclusively that Pakistan’s younger novelists are driven by the political realities of their homeland much more intensely than their Indian counterparts. Home Boy shares the concerns of Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist and Mohammed Hanif’s A Case of Exploding Mangoes. But Naqvi cautions that the work of his compatriots – and their Indian colleagues – shouldn’t be typecast so easily. “The story becomes complicated if one considers recent political Indian novels such as The Inheritance of Loss and the White Tiger and apolitical Pakistani novels such as I Dream of Microwaves and Passarola Rising,” he said. “The matter is not simple, straightforward, and though I don’t have a neat theory about it, I do enjoy engaged, engaging novels.”
Among these, Naqvi lists two post-9/11 novels that he’s recently read: Joseph O’Neill’s desolate Netherland and Ken Kalfus’s satirical Disorder Peculiar to the Country. “Both are excellent,” said Naqvi. “Every tragedy, whether WWI, WWII, Partition or the Holocaust, inspires a body of literature. Writers, here, there, everywhere, will continue to work on developing a narrative that complements the discourse of reportage.”
Home Boy, HarperCollins, Rs 399.
Source : Time Out Delhi ISSUE 11 Friday, August 20, 2010
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