Great Game on Mall Road

The novel comes in the form of a long monologue. Twenty-something Changez accosts a visibly American stranger in old Anarkali, and over cups of milky tea tells him the story of his life so far. After four years in Princeton, he was recruited by the company he most wanted to work for, Underwood Samson, a slim, mean outfit engaged in valuation of firms ripe for acquisition. The American Dream was within grasp. He had met Erica, an engaging and attractive woman from New York’s Upper East Side. In the company’s internal evaluations, he was consistently first.

But with the events of September 11, 2001, Changez slipped into an identity crisis, nudged in no small part by the new inspection regime he had to submit himself to at the airport and his apprehensions of a fallout in his native Pakistan, especially his hometown Lahore. He first returned home for a short break, and was inclined to linger on but his parents insisted he go back to New York. But in America old comforts were drifting out of his reach. Erica herself was succumbing to a make-believe world with her former and long dead partner, Chris. Connecting with her, in a psychiatric facility, was becoming ever more difficult. (Notice the overt symbolism: Erica standing in for America, and her lurch for Chris in the aftermath of 9/11 paralleling the United States’ empathic disengagement from the rest of world and retreat to the long-exhausted comforts of its foundational legends.)

Changez, more disturbingly, was finding it difficult to adhere to the “fundamentals”. “Focus on the fundamentals,” he narrates to the stranger about the basics at the firm. “This was Underwood Samson’s guiding principle, drilled into us since our first day at work. It mandated a single-minded attention to financial detail, teasing out the true nature of those drivers that determine an asset’s value.” (Later, as Changez’s motives back in Lahore become suspect, the reader will wonder if in fact the title refers to the reluctance to adhere to the fundamentals of the financial marketplace.)

Valuation has in any case been a concern with Changez. To be part of the relatively better performing international representation at Princeton, he had to get financial aid, something that his Punjabi pride made him work hard to conceal. He tells the stranger that his great-grandfather was a barrister, his grandfather and father went to university in England, his family home was an acre plot in the heart of Lahore richest district. But: “The half-century since my great-grandfather’s death has not been a prosperous one for professionals in Pakistan… But status, as in any traditional, class-conscious society, declines more slowly with wealth.” So just as back home he’d take consolation in his club memberships, and sniff at the new rich, in America he measures his friends against the old standard. But those consolations are not be had: “I, with my finite and depleting reserve of cash and my traditional sense of deference to one’s seniors, found myself wonder by what quirk of human history my companions — many of whom I would have regarded as upstarts in my own country, so devoid of refinement were they — were in a position to conduct themselves in the world as though they were its ruling class.” As elsewhere, Changez’s personal meditations mirror geopolitical sentiments.

As Changez draws nearer to the present time, every chapter aligns to a rhythm — the gates shutting to give over the area to pedestrians, the passing hours bringing the next course to the table, and Changez himself articulating the centuries-old code of the bazaar. Also a dread gathers momentum. What secret could Changez be harbouring? Is this really a chance encounter? Are his repeated assurances to the “stranger” that it’s okay to drop his guard meant in hope that East and West may yet have an honest conversation? Or are they meant to lull the “stranger” into trusting him? Or is it in fact the “stranger” who’s pursuing Changez, and drawing a confession out of him?

Hamid leaves the reader no choice but to invest heavily in the whys of the narrative, and thereby make a commitment in terms of his or her perspective.