53 pages • 1 hour read
Mohsin HamidMoth Smoke
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2000A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Themes
What’s in a Name?: Honor and Hypocrisy
The importance of names in Moth Smoke cannot be overstated: The names of the main characters all have historical resonance, and in their very identities their destinies are writ large. Darashikoh, Daru’s given name, was the moniker of Shah Jahan’s oldest son, whose head was served to his father by his youngest son, Aurangzeb, Ozi’s namesake. Murad and Shuja were Shah Jahan’s other sons, and the novel duly provides a Murad, who functions as Daru’s drug dealer and partner in crime, and a Shuja, whose youthful cowardice leads to the ferocious beating of Daru. Thus, do all of these contemporary characters carry within their names the destinies of their 17th-century Mughal Empire counterparts. In providing his characters with such resonant names, the author suggests that his tale, while set among the social climbers of 1990s Pakistan, is epic in scope, comparable to the exploits of the legendary emperors of previous centuries.
Darashikoh, a name associated with the great Persian emperor Darius, meets a tragic end at the hands of his brother, who labeled him an apostate. While the reader never learns the specific fate of Daru in the novel—the verdict at the trial is never handed down—it is clear that Daru’s life spirals in a downward direction. He drinks, though alcohol is expressly forbidden in Muslim society, uses drugs of increasingly addictive properties, and engages in an extramarital affair. In comparison to his best friend, Ozi (Aurangzeb), who no longer smokes or uses drugs, Daru certainly appears to have fallen far from a righteous path. When he is approached in the movie theater by a former classmate inviting him to a meeting, Daru demurs: “I could tell he was a fundo from the moment I saw him. […] I say gently, ‘I’m not a very good brother, brother. I don’t think I’m the sort you’re trying to recruit’” (225). “Fundo” is Daru’s pejorative shorthand for fundamentalist Muslim believers; he considers himself to be too cosmopolitan and educated for such beliefs. When the man leaves him, Daru crumples the paper with the meeting information on it and thinks, “I need a drink” (226).
Alcohol, of course, is off-limits for devout Muslims, and even Murad Badshah, Daru’s hashish and heroin dealer, refuses to accept a drink. His name also holds historical resonance, though in an ironic rather than imitative manner. Murad was another son of Shah Jahan, and his fate is predicted in the Prologue: “Murad will not fulfill his murad” (3). “Murad” can be translated to mean “wish” or “desire”; thus, Murad, historically speaking, will not live up to his father’s desires for him. In the novel, Murad Badshah—literally, “Bad King”—will fulfill his goals of robbing the rich in order to line his own once-impoverished pockets. While he spouts Marxist-inspired ideologies—“the poor have a duty [to steal from the rich], for history has shown that the inaction of the working classes perpetuates their subjugation” (64)—he exaggerates his exploits in order to feed his ego. He rules over his rickshaw business like a petty kingpin and drags Daru into his robbery scheme—without sharing the spoils. In short, Murad turns out to be a hypocrite.
Aurangzeb Shah, or Ozi, like Murad, harbors a morally suspect double standard: He launders money, following in his father’s footsteps, in order to stay wealthy and influential, while pointing out Daru’s hypocrisies. He chalks up Daru’s downfall to jealousy and weakness, in a self-revealing manner: “Lahore’s a tough place if you’re not an important person. Too tough for my best friend, apparently” (184). He again reveals more about his own feelings when he accuses Daru of jealousy; Ozi himself is jealous of the attention that Daru received after his father died. He bitterly resents Daru for “calling himself a self-made man, whining that he’s the victim of the system” (186), whereas Ozi believes Daru undeservedly got his advantages from Ozi’s own father. Meanwhile, Ozi justifies his money laundering by comparing it to the organizations that award Nobel prizes and Rhodes scholarships—this was all once dirty money, too, he reasons.
Ultimately, Ozi replicates the historical Aurangzeb’s victory over his brother, Darashikoh: He allows Daru to take the fall for his own actions in the hit-and-run accident. When he discovers that Daru and his wife are having an affair, he asks rhetorically, “So what did I decide to do?” and answers bluntly, “Nothing” (193). This is true in relation to Daru’s arrest, as well; Ozi does nothing to defend his former best friend or to tell the truth. In the end, he completely elides his own involvement in the accident altogether: “So: no, I’m not sad to hear he killed the boy. I won’t lie to you. But I certainly didn’t frame him for it. I’m not the sort” (194). Thus, Ozi serves Daru up to the court, as Aurangzeb once accused his brother Darashikoh of apostasy—an offense punishable by death. Ozi himself, it appears, will retain the role of little emperor in a corrupt society, in an ironic testament to the namesake that means “Honor of the Throne.”
Sex, Drugs, and Moths on the Wall: The Destructiveness of Desire
The precipitous decline of Darashikoh Shezad is instigated by his affair with his best friend’s wife and hastened by his increasing misuse of drugs. Underlying these specific lapses in judgment is an ego bruised by what he perceives as his socioeconomic disadvantage, coupled with a long-standing sense of the injustice of his middling position. Daru is not so much jealous of Ozi’s social standing as he is conflicted about it: On the one hand, he expresses antipathy toward Ozi’s entitlement and disapproves of how the Shah family comes by their wealth. On the other hand, he covets Ozi’s wife (and air-conditioning: see Symbols & Motifs) and desperately wants to acquire the societal respect that comes with economic privilege. The moths that Daru idly watches—and often casually kills, smudging their remains across his walls—appropriately symbolize his own predicament, drawn to the dual flames, sex and drugs, that will engender his downfall.
The moths flood the apartment when Daru loses electricity; after being fired from his job, he can no longer afford to pay his electric bill. He must depend on candles for light, and the moths are drawn to the flame. Thus, their very appearance signifies Daru’s declining circumstances, as well as the underlying arrogance that feeds his downward spiral—he has been terminated from his bank job for insubordination. When his servant, Manucci, points out that the moths are “in love” with the candlelight as well as being afraid of it (137), Daru replies that they “should be. Love’s a dangerous thing” (138). This clearly refers to his own affair with Mumtaz, his best friend’s wife, which will take over most of his waking thoughts. In addition, it denotes Daru’s increasing attraction to drugs, which will dominate most of his time, between selling them and using them. When a moth immolates itself in the flame, Daru “think[s] [he] smell[s] burning flesh” (139). The moth is a metaphor for Daru’s trajectory, fatally drawn to illicit sex and drugs.
Later, Daru explicitly compares his affair with Mumtaz to moths circling a flame: “She’s drawn to me just as I’m drawn to her,” he thinks (203), noting that they alternate between playing the moth and being the candle. He exaggerates his hold on her, getting caught up in the danger and drama of the affair: “She circles, forced to keep her distance […] But she keeps coming, like a moth to my candle, staying longer than she should” (204). Further, he realizes that this impulse is destructive, that this affair comes at a cost. He understands that “[s]he’s risking her marriage for me, her family, her reputation” (204). However, his perception is once again colored by his self-absorption. While Daru believes that the pair are “the same” (204), Mumtaz herself discourages his romantic obsessions. She may not end up staying with her husband, but she is also very much invested in finding her own individual identity, free from entanglements.
When Mumtaz finally ends the affair, growing tired of Daru’s possessiveness, she urges him to get help for his drug addiction. It is now obvious that he has a heroin addiction, and it has clouded his ability to think clearly and behave rationally. After she leaves, he again smells “the stench of burning flesh” (229), even imagining himself to be on fire. He has flown too close to the twin flames of sexual obsession and drug addiction, and he is predictably burned in the process. It is telling that, after he commits the robbery with Murad, Daru quits his habitual killing of the moths; he knows his own time flying too close to the flame is over. When he holds the envelope from Mumtaz in his prison cell, he is reluctant to read it: “It reminds me of things I’d rather not remember, a smell of burning flesh, a hazy world seen through smoke” (245). All that is left of his love, both for Mumtaz and of heroin, is a smudge of moth smoke on the wall.
The Price of Power: Privilege and Corruption
The novel is rife with descriptions of class and privilege, and it burns with Daru’s desire for social status and the comforts afforded by wealth. He is embarrassed about his socioeconomic status, though he actually owns a home and employs a servant—financial security is relative—in a country still beset by widespread poverty. It is only when comparing his modest means to that of Ozi and his ultra-wealthy (and, implicitly, ultra-corrupt) group of friends that Daru finds his own situation lacking. His resentment about what he sees as an unfair inequality between the friends accelerates his declining circumstances; it only feeds his drug addiction, which eventually leads him to armed robbery. Still, Daru’s objections to an inherently corrupt system are not without warrant: The wealthy classes come by their money dishonestly, and Daru’s own trial can be seen as an exercise in protecting the powerful and privileged.
From the beginning of the book, Daru takes note of Ozi’s privilege as compared to his own: Ozi drives a new Pajero SUV, while Daru drives an old Suzuki; Ozi lives in a large gated home, while Daru’s house is small; Ozi offers “Black Label” Scotch, while Daru can only afford the cheaper brand (13). Daru not-so-subtly hints that this wealth is ill-gained: “Yes, God has been kind to Ozi’s dad, the frequently investigated but as yet unincarcerated Federal Secretary (Retired) Khurram Shah” (11). Daru also becomes increasingly aware of the political privilege that wealth affords Ozi. While Daru is stopped at a checkpoint and forced to bribe the police in order to avoid an arrest for drinking alcohol, Ozi’s Pajero automatically puts him above suspicion—or, at least, above the law in a corrupt society.
Daru’s nostalgia for his childhood friendship with Ozi is tainted by this close association with wealth and privilege, the fact that corruption affords these perks. The kinds of parties Ozi likes to attend are filled with social climbers, and Daru is both resentful of Ozi’s divided loyalties and bitter about his own lower social status: “Information is key at these things: no one wants to be caught holding social stock that’s about to crash” (27). It is telling that the metaphor conflates financial wealth with social status; Daru already occupies a precarious place in the social pecking order, and once he loses his job, his financial situation is shaky at best. At another party, Daru realizes that he is being largely ignored by Ozi’s new group of friends: “They’ve sized me up, figured out I’m a small fish, and decided to let me swim by myself for the evening” (77). Later, his social status is called into further question by the rumors circulating that he has turned to selling drugs.
Still, Daru clings to his own brand of snobbery, needing to set himself apart from and above those whom he considers to be of lower-class status. This includes Murad Badshah, from whom Daru buys drugs—which reveals Daru’s comfort with a certain level of hypocrisy. After Murad turns down Daru’s offer of a beer, citing his adherence to Muslim principles, Daru is offended: “I don’t like it when low-class types forget their place and try to become too frank with you. But it’s my fault, I suppose: the price of being a nice guy” (42). Daru also constantly berates his servant, Manucci, for any perceived slip in his deference toward his “master of the house” (164). This relationship hinges on the vestiges of imperialism that trickle down throughout Pakistan’s postcolonial society, symbolized most specifically by one of the dinner parties Daru attends. The privileged classes of Lahore still offer meals that would please an Englishman, their former colonizer: “Dinner is a delicious march through colonial culinary outposts like mulligatawny soup and roast beef and caramel custard” (175). The rigidity in the division of social classes is, ironically, inherited from the colonial past, like the repast offered by a wealthy school chum—as is, it is also implied, the corruption that funds the wealthy classes.
Daru’s trial itself is evidence that the new ruling class—as represented by Aurangzeb “Ozi” Shah—uses its power and privilege in order to skirt the rules. Ozi freely admits that he, like his father, makes his money by laundering dirty cash; he also freely admits that he harbors no guilt about such practices. It is simply part of doing business in postcolonial Pakistan, and those who do not participate in the inherently corrupt system—like Daru—inevitably lose out. Thus, Daru stands trial for the crime that Ozi commits. Daru attempts to reveal the underlying corruption that is at the heart of his trial, but the prosecutor characterizes Daru’s claims as fantastic. The prosecutor sums up Daru’s allegations in his closing arguments, addressing the judge:
You are instead to put your faith in the promises of the accused, in his fantasy that he is being framed by interests powerful enough to corrupt the professionalism of the police, wealthy enough to bribe these legions of witnesses, and malicious enough to destroy the life of a man who is as innocent of this crime as the innocent can be (235).
Ultimately, Daru is silenced, and he is not afforded the agency that wealth and privilege can purchase. While he may be guilty of many other offenses, he is not rich and powerful enough to be guilty of gaming the system.
Related Titles
By Mohsin Hamid
