Moth Smoke

“He killed as a serpent kills that which it does not intend to eat: he killed out of indifference. He killed because his nature is to kill, because the death of a child has no meaning for him.”

The prosecutor is presenting opening arguments against Daru in the sham trial that is underway throughout the book. His simile—Daru is like a snake—functions to dehumanize Daru, thus making it easier for the judge to find him guilty. There is also irony here because Daru does, in fact, daydream about killing Mumtaz’s child, Muazzam, in order to have her all to himself, later in the novel.

“At our age, my hirsute chum, all women care about is cash. And my bank account is hairy enough for a harem.”

Daru’s best friend, Ozi, is speaking here, bragging about his wealth and implicitly goading Daru to feel ashamed about his own relative lack of privilege. It is the first indication of the long-lived underlying tension between the two. It is also ironic that Ozi describes his wealth as “hairy,” which will later be what Daru nicknames his heroin-laced hashish: Each signifies the moral lapse of the men: Ozi’s corrupt money and Daru’s drug addiction.

"ZM: Criminal, crime, and conspiracy. That’s why everyone is talking about it?

JS: One more thing: sex, which is purple. This box is covered with it. Painted. Smeared. Naturally, if there is a big purple box lying around, people will stare. That’s why everyone is talking about it.”

In the interview between journalist Zulfikar Manto (actually Mumtaz Kashmiri) and Professor Julius Superb, the two speculate about why the trial of Daru Shezad is garnering such media attention. Superb points out that the criminal, an orphan gone wrong, has its appeal, as does the fact that the accused is making allegations that the trial is corrupt. But, ultimately, the fact of the affair between Daru and Mumtaz—the “purple” sex—is too titillating to ignore. Ironically, the professor is being interviewed by one of the participants in said affair.

“This is the very sort of attitude that pisses me off with most of the party crowd. They’re rich enough not to work unless they feel like it, so they think the rest of us are idiots for settling for jobs we don’t love. ‘I need the money,’ I explain to her, as I would to a child. ‘I don’t have a choice.’”

This is yet another indication that Daru’s relative lack of money and privilege cause him great resentment. While he feels that the job at the bank is beneath him, he also feels morally superior to people like Mumtaz (and, by extension, Ozi) because of his socioeconomic position. He condescends to Mumtaz, treating her like an ignorant child.

“Lately I’ve been eating more than usual, and I wonder why my body has chosen this moment to give me such an appetite, when I can least afford it. Then again, animals tend to fatten up in anticipation of lean times ahead.”

Daru leaves his aunt and uncle’s house with a large container of leftovers, after having already eaten a big meal, in the wake of losing his job. This is another example of dehumanization: Daru metaphorically compares himself to an animal preparing for a hard season. His thought also foreshadows his growing drug use—he has not yet indulged in heroin at this point—which will lead to drastic weight loss.

“Darashikoh was an intriguing fellow. Excuse me for speaking of him in the past tense, but that is how I think of him. He was ruggedly handsome (like knows like, as they say) but cold, with a steady gaze and a cruel mouth.”

Murad Badshah, rickshaw kingpin and drug dealer, describes Daru, whom he cajoles into committing the robbery with him. Murad already knows that the outcome of the trial is a foregone conclusion; thus, he speaks of Daru as if he were already gone. He also employs biased language in describing Daru, which reveals Murad to be both a braggart and an unreliable narrator.

“Yes, armed robbery is like public speaking. Both offer a brief period in the limelight, the risk of public humiliation, the opportunity for crowd control. And in both, what you wear is an often ignored but vitally important factor.”

Murad employs a humorously incongruous simile here, noting the not-so-obvious similarities between armed robbery and public speaking. He relishes the notion of attaining notoriety—he has already admitted such in the course of relating his personal history—as well as the opportunity for power and control, especially over the rich. Daru is the decoy, dressed like one of the patrons, in order to allow the lower-class Murad to gain entry.

“The red Pajero is parked in the driveway, Ozi watching a servant wipe the dent in its bumper with a wet cloth. My best friend is wearing sunglasses, a bright T-shirt, and knee-length shorts. He looks like an overgrown child. A child who gets everything. Gets away with everything.”

After Daru witnesses Ozi hit the child and drive away, he confronts him at his house. In this scene, it becomes increasingly clear to Daru that Ozi’s wealth and privilege—themselves the products of corruption—afford him the ability to escape this crime unscathed. The corruption begets corruption, and it stunts the moral growth of Ozi: He is a spoiled child.

“For some reason I find myself doing what I used to do as a child, even though now there’s no one to hide from: going to stand in the lee of the banyan tree. I feel the pressure building around me, feel it between the hair of my forearms and the skin, along the back of my neck, the line of my shoulders.”

After Daru witnesses the hit-and-run accident, he returns home, expressing a yearning for the lost innocence of his youth: His friendship with Ozi has been irrevocably compromised by the accident and Ozi’s self-centered reaction to it. Daru seeks shelter in the familiar, standing underneath the sturdy banyan tree as the monsoon blows in. This can also be read as a final moment of peace, the calm before the storm fully arrives.

“For air-conditioning can be divisive not only in the realm of the political but in the realm of the personal as well.”

In Professor Julius Superb’s treatise on air-conditioning, admitted as evidence in Daru’s trial, the opinions of the various characters on the relative merits of air-conditioning are delineated. Murad is against it, for reasons that have to do with the gulf between rich and poor; Ozi loves it because it symbolizes his wealth; Daru hates it because it signifies his lack of status. Ultimately, the political is the personal.

“But Darashikoh believed in consequences. He knew that his mother would not have died if the AC had been cooling her room that night, and when he lost his job and had his power disconnected, he felt more than just the discomfort of the heat in his house.”

Daru despises the elusive air-conditioning not only because it represents his relative poverty but also because he believes it was instrumental in his mother’s death. On one warm night when he was a boy, the electricity is cut, and they go up to the roof to sleep. A stray bullet—from celebrations or criminal activity is unknown—strikes and kills her. Thus, Professor Julius Superb supposes that air-conditioning is an important factor leading him “inexorably toward a life of crime” (109). While sounding absurd, it is accurate, in the sense that air-conditioning is a symbol of wealth and privilege—which Daru lacks and desires.

“Joints have started giving me a headache rather than a buzz. Their smoke lingers in my sinuses, in my nasal cavities, air trapped in pockets between irritated membranes, drums reverberating with my heartbeat. I rub the ridges above my eyes with my fingers, the rooted hair of my eyebrows slipping over hard, impenetrable bone, swollen flesh over dead skull over incessant pain. Maybe I’m dehydrated. Maybe it’s the heat.”

Daru initially admits that his drug addiction is causing him harm, only to pivot at the end. Even before he begins to lace his hashish with heroin, he recognizes that he is indulging too much. However, as with much in Daru’s character, an excess of something—whether it be money or drugs or Mumtaz—is the only amount that satisfies.

“‘He has a nanny, Pilar. She’s lovely. She cut the umbilical cord.’

‘In America?’

‘No, here. Muazzam had me on a leash until she came along. But now I can disappear for the entire day and I don’t have to worry about him. I could disappear forever, I suppose.’

I grin. ‘That wouldn’t be very motherly of you.’”

Mumtaz and Daru are talking at the zoo; the exchange foreshadows the fact that Mumtaz will ultimately leave her son and her marriage. She expresses anger at Daru’s teasing suggestion, revealing an underlying sense of guilt about her lack of motherly feeling already. She asks Daru, “Who are you to judge me?” (131), which reverberates with his own trial that is interspersed throughout the book.

“And Manucci must be leaving the screen doors open, because there seem to be more moths in the house every evening, circling candles, whirring in the darkness. I kill them when I can catch them, until my fingers are slick with their silver powder.”

This scene takes place right before Daru embarks upon the affair with Mumtaz. They have already been flirting and kissing, but they allow themselves to fall fully into a sexual relationship at this point. It foreshadows Daru’s obsession with Mumtaz, as well as the dangerous nature of the affair—like moths death-diving into a candle flame.

“Even then I might have stayed with my increasingly emasculated, amoral husband for quite some time. It took some serious miscalculations on his part to extinguish the last, lingering, stubborn spark of respect I had for him. It took one manipulative comment too many, one more comparison of myself to his perfect mother that I couldn’t take. I didn’t confront him. I just gritted my teeth, took out a needle, and worked him out of my heart like a splinter.”

In Mumtaz’s narrative, she emphasizes why she has fallen out of love with Ozi, further evidence that the affair was more about separating from her roles as wife and mother than being in love with Daru. The simile here is revealing: Ozi is compared to a splinter, a minor annoyance to be removed.

“Heroin and charas mixed. ‘I’ll call you hairy,’ I say, pleased with the name. My curiosity has been killing me, but I haven’t yet tried the stuff. Tonight I feel reckless, feel like having sex on the roof in the moonlight, except that Mumtaz hasn’t called since that crazy night, and this hairy will have to do.”

Daru’s restlessness comes after making a drug deal wherein he is treated like a social pariah; the students do not want their drug dealer to stay at the party. He comes home, angry and resentful, and threatens to strike Manucci when the servant asks for his (overdue) pay. The drugs are a balm to his fury and bitterness, as well as a substitute for sex and/or love. Like Ozi’s wealth (earlier called “hairy”), Daru’s drugs are a supporting prop.

“The house itself is gaudy, huge and white, with massive columns and pediments and domes and even a fake minaret, as if it’s uncertain whether it wants to be the Taj Mahal or the Acropolis when it grows up.”

Daru arrives at the house of Shuja, ostensibly to sell the teenager more drugs. He soon finds that Shuja’s fundamentalist father has found out who has been supplying his son with drugs, and Daru will be badly beaten. The house symbolizes new wealth, propped up by foreign aid, wherein the Eastern influences (Taj Mahal) are mixed with Western imperialism (Acropolis). It is also significant that the Taj Mahal was built by Shah Jahan, the historical Darashikoh’s father.

“Thanks to electricity theft there will always be shortages, so you have to have a generator. The police are corrupt and ineffective, so you need private security guards. It goes on and on. People are pulling their pieces out of the pie, and the pie is getting smaller, so if you love your family, you’d better take your piece now, while there’s still some left. That’s what I’m doing. And if anyone isn’t doing it, it’s because they’re locked out of the kitchen.”

Ozi justifies his—and, by extension, his father’s—corruption. Essentially, he shifts the blame away from his family via circular reasoning: Corruption begets corruption. This underscores his sense of entitlement and amoral sensibilities. It also reveals an underlying contempt for people like Daru, who are “locked” outside the pantry of ill-gotten goods and services.

“Wrapped inside my painkillers and the shell of my scars and bruises like a slow-growing larva, I wait.”

After Daru is beaten so badly he almost loses his life, he metaphorically compares himself to an insect—like the moth of the book’s title—in a cocoon: He is in the process of undergoing a transformation. The bitterness that he has barely contained will come bursting out of him once he is healed; he will agree to accompany Murad on the robbery.

“I can’t believe I forgot to take my automatic off safety before I came in. He could have killed me. Thinking that makes me want to kill someone just to calm down.”

Another piece of evidence that casts doubt on whether Daru pulled the trigger during the armed robbery: He is so unfamiliar with using a gun that he has neglected to take off the safety. However, immediately thereafter, he confesses that his nerves—and the potential that he could become a victim (again) in this scenario—prompt murderous thoughts. The author deliberately leaves this scene, like the ultimate verdict against Daru, unclear; it is for the reader to determine.

“The accused has been described as untrustworthy by a former employer, as a peddler of drugs by a father whose son he corrupted. He has been seen consorting with known outlaws. Illegal narcotics and an unlicensed firearm were found in his home. The words of such a man must be given little weight, Milord, if indeed they are to be given any weight at all.”

The prosecutor presents his closing arguments, suggesting all of the ways in which Daru cannot be trusted. Indeed, all of the above things he says about Daru are true: He has been selling drugs to young people; he has been consorting with Murad; he has been using illicit drugs, and Murad did give him a weapon. Still, Daru is not guilty of the crime of which he is accused. This is another instance of how the author enlists the reader as judge: Does the reader condemn Daru, knowing all of these things to be true? Or does the reader presume innocence, knowing Daru is framed for Ozi’s crime?

“When she walks away my body remains erect. And when I open my eyes I find I have the strength to stand.”

Before Daru is arrested, he goes to see Mumtaz one final time. They do not speak to each other, and he sinks to his knees before her for a moment as she comforts him. The above moment suggests that Daru gets strength from Mumtaz; he can now stand on his own, and own up to what he has done. She will proceed to defend him in the trial that follows.

“I’ve interviewed people who are willing to say, anonymously, of course, that a Pajero and not a Suzuki killed the boy. And certain members of the Accountability Commission, while refusing to be quoted, have pointed out that it would be extremely inconvenient for Khurram Shah, himself under investigation, if his son were to be accused of this crime.”

Mumtaz knows that Daru is falsely accused; she knows that Ozi’s Pajero SUV struck the boy, not Daru’s old Suzuki. Many others know, as well, but they refuse to speak on the record. This is the evidence that Daru’s claims that the wealth and privilege of the Shah family has corrupted the justice system are accurate. The trial is revealed—as if the author’s emphasis on the theatrical nature of it were not enough—to be a sham.