A tale of two stories...

...The Great and Reluctant Adaptations

It is almost amusing how Changez never looks within himself, and always searches elsewhere for reasons and destination for his anger. In the novel, for example, the main spark for his fury is the build-up of military force between India and Pakistan following the attack on Parliament on December 11, 2001 -– something for which Changez never assigns blame except on America, which he argues was pushing India into confrontation although Pakistan had been such a loyal little ally. He doesn’t appear particularly religious, a point Hamid recently stressed in a Guardian op-ed, but he does repeatedly call Afghanistan a “fellow Muslim nation”, and talks about Lahore as being at the edge of a contiguous map of safely Muslim-majority countries, “the last Muslim city... [with an] understated bravado characteristic of frontier towns.” Changez is definitely not a Punjabi first, unlike enough other people in Lahore. “Not for us,” he says proudly of his warrior heritage at one point, “the vegetarian dishes one finds across the border to the east.” Yes, Indian Punjab, that vegetarian paradise.

This is an excellent piece, much in agreement with my own poor opinion of the novel.