Mohsin Hamid: 'Pakistan and India are incredibly similar'

The author on why his novel How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia is a 'secular Sufi love poem' and why some fans of The Reluctant Fundamentalist would like more 'drugs and sex'

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• • Homa Khaleeli
  • The Guardian, Tuesday 26 March 2013 
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    Mohsin Hamid … 'Every city struggles with the same things'. Photograph: Sarah Lee for the Guardian

    
    
    Mohsin Hamid loves to play with narrative voices. From the multiple storytellers in his first novel, Moth Smoke, to the book-long monologue of The Reluctant Fundamentalist, the skill has won the novelist acclaim. But finding his own voice was not so easy
    

    

    Hamid was just three, and a "fluent Urdu conversationalist", when his parents moved from Pakistan to California. One day his mother found him on a neighbour's doorstep weeping and surrounded by other children. They began asking his mother, in the offensive terms of the day, whether he was "retarded" – if that was why he couldn't speak. For the next month he refused to utter a word – and when he did finally talk, "it was in English, in full sentences".
    
    
    Six years later, the experience found its echo when the family returned to Pakistan. Hamid had forgotten Urdu, forcing him "to relearn my first language as my third language". While he may not remember this period of silence, it shaped his personality. "I feel, in any context, that I need to conduct myself so I am not surrounded by people who ask 'What's the matter with him? Is he retarded'. So, I learnt … a chameleon-like quality that allows you to fit in."
    
    In the smart London hotel where we meet, Hamid certainly looks at ease. His accent is a fluid mix of British and American pronunciations, with Pakistani inflections, while his clothes are dark, smart and neutral. A former Harvard law student and management consultant in New York, and brand manager in London, his career path looks successful. Yet, during his corporate adventures, he was writing, inspired by his outsider status. "If your sense of self is destabilised," he explains, "to imagine being another becomes pretty easy."
    
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