Someone e-mailed me this joke recently: In New York’s Central Park, a huge Rottweiler breaks loose from its leash and savages a small blonde child. A skinny young man rushes up and, at great risk to himself, saves the child by wrestling the dog to the ground and finally, in desperation, killing it.
When it’s all over, the child’s mother comes up to the little bloodied man and thanks him profusely. It turns out she’s a famous journalist and she tells him she’s going to run a front page story about him in the New York Times headlined, “American hero saves child from vicious monster”. “But madam, I’m not American,” the little man replies. “Oh, what are you then?” asks the journalist. “I’m a Pakistani, madam”.
So the next day’s New York Times carries a screaming headline, “Terrorist strangles pet dog”.
No, it is not a great time to be a Pakistani. Your country is collapsing around you; your political system is one of the most rotten in the world; your society is fractured down the centre; the religious loonies are baying at the gates of your home. For many years Pakistanis who had the talent or the means usually chose to escape overseas, but in today’s world the ‘T’ word hangs threateningly over their heads wherever they go. And that is what Husain Naqvi’s Home Boy is all about.
Boulevardiers and raconteurs
It’s the story of three Pakistani 20-somethings living in Manhattan: Shehzad (“Chuck”), an investment banker; Jimbo, a hip-hop deejay; and AC, a dilettante and intellectual bum. They are “boulevardiers, raconteurs, renaissance men.” They hang around their favourite Tribeca bar-lounge, drinking vodka-on-the-rocks with a gaggle of socialites, arrivistes, metro-sexuals and wannabe models. They work; they play; they listen to Afro-jazz; they get in and out of trouble; they make pilgrimages to Jackson Heights to eat kabab-roti . But the theme that always seems to be playing in the background is the situation back home and “Hey-I-believe-Musharraf-is-making-an-important–speech-on-TV-today-don’t-miss-it.”
After 9/11, however, the world is not the same for someone with a brown skin and a Muslim name. The three boulevardiers do something silly and the next thing they know is they’re blindfolded and squatting on the floor of a detention centre. Their homes are raided; a copy of The Anarchist Cookbook on the bookshelf is construed to be a bomb-making manual; Ibn Khaldun’s great philosophical classic Muqadimah is made out to be some kind of Islamic terror guide. And suddenly there’s an enormous FBI interrogator looming over them, saying “No phone call, no lawyer, no nothing. And if you’re lucky someday we’ll put you on a plane with a one-way ticket to Bumfuckistan. So let’s start again….” In today’s world, it’s something that could easily happen to you, or to me.
Stylish and eclectic
Naqvi writes with a stylishness and eclecticism that is so self-assured it’s almost arrogant: the fact that the book opens upon three selected quotes - the first from F. Scott Fitzgerald, the second from Urdu poet, Faiz Ahmed Faiz, and the third from hip-hop artists, Eric B. & Rakim - is just an indication of the shape of things to come. But then Naqvi is a man who grew up in Algiers, graduated from Georgetown University, worked as an investment banker, has been a slam poet, and taught creative writing at Boston University. In fact he claims that Home Boy actually began as a slam poem, scribbled on a cocktail napkin in 1993, after his brother was routinely picked up by the cops for interrogation. And it’s that slam poet’s instinct that buzzes below the book’s sharp, sleek prose and its tightly wrought structure.
Home Boy was selected as one of the top 10 novels of the year by the Huffington Post , alongside Orhan Pamuk’s The Museum of Innocence and Ha Jin’s A Great Fall . So if I say it is one of the richest, most stylish novels I’ve read in a long time, I am in good company.
Home Boy;H.M. Naqvi, Harper Collins, Rs 399.
