Changed man

Q: Tell me about growing up in Lahore.

A: My teens were in the Zia years. In the 1980s, Pakistan was ruled by a dictator of the name of Zia ul-Haq. He was a big American ally, got billions of dollars of American money, and his mission was to [Islamicize] Pakistan. There was an atmosphere of repression when I was growing up. There were also — because of the Afghanistan war that Pakistan was allied with the Americans on, against the Soviets in the ’80s — all these bearded men with guns that had begun to appear. There was this flood of heroin into the city. Pakistan went from no real heroin addicts to a million heroin addicts in the space of the ’80s, because heroin was used to finance the Afghan war. Similarly, there were just weapons everywhere — Kalashnikovs and automatic rifles — that filtered back into the country from Afghanistan. The blowback, it was called. [All that] really shaped my teenage years.

Q: Were you always interested in writing, or was this something you discovered later on?

A: I discovered writing later on. I was always a daydreamer as a kid. As a little boy, I could sit on the branch of a tree and imagine the grass underneath me was the big sea, and I was on the prow of some ship. When I got to college, the idea of writing about Lahore, which I missed while living in America … I really enjoyed it.

Q: Were you writing to keep Lahore alive in your mind’s eye?

A: It was more than that. It started off as missing Lahore, and then it became trying to make sense of this place I was going back to every summer, looking at it with my somewhat foreign eyes, but also as an insider. The reverse of which is what I did in my book, The Reluctant Fundamentalist, which is looking at America, where I have lived for all these years, but as an insider. But also as someone with foreign eyes.

Q: How did The Reluctant Fundamentalist come to be a one-person narrative?

A: Well, it’s this dramatic monologue where this Pakistani man is speaking to this American man [and they are suspicious of each other]. I like that frame, because it parallels the way the world looks at each other. Pakistan, or the Muslim world, looks at America and the West, and wonders exactly that: Are you out to get us? Are you a bunch of completely aggressive maniacs or are you people we see on Seinfeld and Friends? Similarly, America wonders that about the Muslim world: Are you a bunch of terrorists, or just regular people with families and kids? That sense of ambiguity, or not knowing, I think, is what the frame allows me to capture.

Q: Is there some of you in Changez?

A: No, he’s not me, actually, at all. The big difference between me and Changez [is] by the time I was 30, I’d basically lived exactly half my life in America, and that’s when Sept. 11 had happened. I was a relatively more formed man. Changez is a very young man, almost a boy, of 22, who has lived his entire life in Pakistan. So his reactions are very different from my reactions. His vulnerability and sense of confusion is much more than mine. What he feels and [how he] reacts is very different from how I felt and reacted to things. But the worlds he lives in — the worlds of Princeton, of corporate New York, of Pakistan, even the trips to Chile and the Philippines and Greece — are things I have done, and so I write about things that I know. But I don’t necessarily write about myself.

Q: Where were you on 9/11?

A: I was in London, actually, when it happened. My ex-roommate worked in the World Financial Centre and my first reaction was to call her and see if she was alive, or if she was OK. I had just moved then. I didn’t feel particularly at home in London, I was missing New York already, and I thought, this is a disaster. In my heart of hearts I thought, please, don’t let it be Muslims who are responsible, but I thought probably it will be. And then I thought, the reaction is going to be terrible. I thought life for people like me was going to be hard because these two worlds are going to be increasingly split.

Q: How do you feel when you are called on to talk about the Muslim world?

A: [I have tried to] separate religion from politics, in a way. Changez’s experience in America is not primarily a racially defined one. He hasn’t really encountered heavy racism, maybe a little here and there. Nor is it a religious one. He’s not particularly religious, actually. It’s a very personal and political story, and [I tried to] separate the religious aspect … this is not about Islam; it’s not about Christianity, either. It’s about very real political differences. We tend to confuse the idea of religion with people’s very real and pragmatic struggles, and so I try to move away, really, from the conversation about religion.

If we want to talk about religion, we should talk about, how does one live one’s life in a just way, which is what religion is about. How does one make sense of the fact that one will die one day? How does one negotiate the relationship with God, and feel closer to the divine? Those are religious questions. But those are the things we are never talking about when we talk about Islam.

Q: Do you consider yourself a political novelist?

A: Some artists say the art and the political must not mix. That strikes me as a very peculiar concept, and it often feels very rooted in a Western, middle-class world, where perhaps politics is not that important. In much of the world, politics is life and death. How you live a life without politics is like saying, “How do you live without eating?” If politics means your house will be bombed by some other country and your parents will be dead, to say that your art won’t reflect that seems absurd. So for me, it’s impossible to write without thinking politically, even in the most quietly, non-political sort of settings.

Q: What do you hope readers will get out of this novel?

A: Well, if you get nothing else, I think the idea one should get is that things are complicated, and we have been living in a world where a belligerent simplicity is deployed. It’s us versus them. There’s an axis of evil. It’s Islam versus Christianity or the West. All of these things are absurd. We’re not talking about conflict between peoples or conflict between religions. We’re talking about simple politics and billions of people with differences of perspective running around inside it. What the novel tries to do is hold up a mirror to the reader and say, “Look, you’re complicated. The way you are reading this is complicated. And the characters are complicated. That is the world.”