The Reluctant Fundamentalist

by Mohsin Hamid

But status, as in any traditional, class-conscious society, declines more slowly than wealth.

Four thousand years ago, we, the people of the Indus River basin, had cities that were laid out on grids and boasted underground sewers, while the ancestors of those who would invade and colonize America were illiterate barbarians. Now our cities were largely unplanned, unsanitary affairs, and America had universities with individual endowments greater than our national budget for education. To be reminded of this vast disparity was, for me, to be ashamed.

I wanted to know what it was, what had caused her to create the pearl of which she had spoken. But I thought it would be presumptuous of me to ask; such things are revealed by a person when and to whom they choose. So I attempted to convey through my expression alone my desire to understand her and said nothing further.

“C.—I’m in the Hamptons. A bunch of us were hanging out on the beach today and I went for a walk by myself. I found this rock pool. Do you like rock pools? I love them. They’re like little worlds. Perfect, self-contained, transparent. They look like they’re frozen in time. Then the tide rises and a wave crashes in and they start all over again with new fish left behind. Anyway when I got back everyone kept asking where I’d been and I realized I’d spent the entire afternoon there. It was kind of surreal. Made me think of you.—E.”

I discovered that the best way of doing this was to come close to touching her—to rest my hand on a table, say, as near as possible to hers without actually making contact—and then to wait for her to become aware of my physical presence, at which point she would shake her head as if waking from a dream and bridge the gap between us with a small caress.

“They try to resist change. Power comes from becoming change.”

Just remember your deals would go ahead whether you worked on them or not. And focus on the fundamentals.”

I had over these past weeks—sentimental and old-fashioned as it may sound, but then I was raised in a family where brief courtships were the norm—been indulging in daydreams of a life as Erica’s husband; now I found not just those daydreams but the woman herself vanishing before my eyes.

I wanted to help her, to hold on to her—indeed, I wanted to hold on to us—and I was desperate to extricate her from the maze of her psychosis. But I did not know how to proceed.

The entrance between her legs was wet and dilated, but was at the same time oddly rigid; it reminded me—unwillingly—of a wound, giving our sex a violent undertone despite the gentleness with which I attempted to move.

I remember it well: I felt at once both satiated and ashamed.

I did not know whether I believed in the truth of their love; it was, after all, a religion that would not accept me as a convert. But I knew that she believed in it, and I felt small for being able to offer her nothing of comparable splendor instead.

I found it ironic; children and the elderly were meant to be sent away from impending battles, but in our case it was the fittest and brightest who were leaving, those who in the past would have been most expected to remain.

It was all I could do not to kiss her then; perhaps I should have. I had to choose whether to continue to try to win her over or to accept her wishes and leave, and in the end I chose the latter. Maybe, I told myself as I drove away, it was a test and I failed; maybe I should have risked it. I almost turned around and went back, but in the end I did not do so. Things might have worked out rather differently if I had turned around; then again, things might have worked out exactly the same.

I could not respect how he functioned so completely immersed in the structures of his professional micro-universe. Yes, I too had previously derived comfort from my firm’s exhortations to focus intensely on work, but now I saw that in this constant striving to realize a financial future, no thought was given to the critical personal and political issues that affect one’s emotional present. In other words, my blinders were coming off, and I was dazzled and rendered immobile by the sudden broadening of my arc of vision.

Probably this was why I had been willing to try to take on the persona of Chris, because my own identity was so fragile. But in so doing—and by being unable to offer her an alternative to the chronic nostalgia inside her—I might have pushed Erica deeper into her own confusion.

I was a modern-day janissary, a servant of the American empire at a time when it was invading a country with a kinship to mine and was perhaps even colluding to ensure that my own country faced the threat of war.

There is in such situations usually a moment of passion during which the unthinkable is said; this is followed by a sense of euphoria at finally being liberated; the world seems fresh, as if seen for the first time; then comes the inevitable period of doubt, the desperate and doomed backpedaling of regret; and only later, once emotions have receded, is one able to view with equanimity the journey through which one has passed.

He told me the family would of course look after me. I did not say that I had hoped to be the one looking after them, and I continued to cradle my drink for some time after the call was done.

I wandered about the city revisiting places she had taken me to, whether because I thought I might see her or because I thought I might see something of us, I am not now certain. A few of these places—such as the gallery in Chelsea we had visited on the night of our first date—I proved unable to find; they had vanished as though they had never existed. Others, like the spot in Central Park where we had gone on our picnic, were easy to locate but seemed to have altered. Perhaps this was the effect of a change in season; perhaps also it was in the city’s nature to be inconstant.

Such memories occupied my waking hours in those days after her disappearance, and likely also permeated my dreams; they were in that period my only form of contact with her.

But I had begun to understand that she had chosen not to be part of my story; her own had proven too compelling, and she was—at that moment and in her own way—following it to its conclusion, passing through places I could not reach.

As a society, you were unwilling to reflect upon the shared pain that united you with those who attacked you. You retreated into myths of your own difference, assumptions of your own superiority. And you acted out these beliefs on the stage of the world, so that the entire planet was rocked by the repercussions of your tantrums, not least my family, now facing war thousands of miles away. Such an America had to be stopped in the interests not only of the rest of humanity, but also in your own.

I thought of Erica removing her clothes and then, having shed her past, walking through the forest until she met a kindly woman who took her in and fed her. I thought of how cold she would have been on that walk. And so I left my jacket on the curb as a sort of offering, as my last gesture before returning to Pakistan, a wish of warmth for Erica—not in the way one leaves flowers for the dead, but rather as one twirls rupees above the living.

I remained emotionally entwined with Erica, and I brought something of her with me to Lahore—or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that I lost something of myself to her that I was unable to relocate in the city of my birth.

I responded to the gravity of an invisible moon at my core, and I undertook journeys I had not expected to take.

Often, for example, I would rise at dawn without having slept an instant. During the preceding hours, Erica and I would have lived an entire day together. We would have woken in my bedroom and breakfasted with my parents; we would have dressed for work and caressed in the shower; we would have sat on our scooter and driven to campus, and I would have felt her helmet bumping against mine; we would have parted in the faculty parking area, and I would have been both amused and annoyed by the stares she received from the students passing by, because I would not have known how much those stares owed to her beauty and how much to her foreignness; we would have gone out for an inexpensive but delicious dinner in the open air, bathed by the moonlight beside the Royal Mosque; we would have spoken about work, about whether we were ready for children; I would have corrected her Urdu and she my course plan; and we would have made love in our bed to the hum of the ceiling fan.

I have also been transported in ways that were no less vivid but far more fleeting. I recall once, during the monsoon, watching a puddle form in the rut of a muddy tire track beside the road. As raindrops fell and water filled the banks of this little lake, I noticed a stone standing upright in the center, like an island, and I thought of the joy Erica would have had at gazing upon that scene. Similarly, I recall another incident, after I had a collision on my scooter, when I returned home and stripped off my shirt to see a livid bruise on my rib cage, where hers had...

Such journeys have convinced me that it is not always possible to restore one’s boundaries after they have been blurred and made permeable by a relationship: try as we might, we cannot reconstitute ourselves as the autonomous beings we previously imagined ourselves to be. Some...

Erica, however, never appeared in those pages, and while it was possible that mention of her had slipped by unnoticed in one of the issues that the vagaries of the international post had prevented from arriving, I drew hope and sorrow in equal measure from each of her episodic absences.

Of course, humanity’s respite was brief:

I had, in my own manner, issued a firefly’s glow bright enough to transcend the boundaries of continents and civilizations.

It seems an obvious thing to say, but you should not imagine that we Pakistanis are all potential terrorists, just as we should not imagine that you Americans are all undercover assassins.