The return of the Butterfly | Magzines | DAWN.COM

The return of the Butterfly

Reviewed by Mamun M. Adil | InpaperMagzine

Yesterday

Moni Mohsin author of Tender Hooks

“Hai, this book is simply tabahi!” Or so I would say if I were to converse in social butterfly-speak. The book in question is Tender Hooks, the second novel about the social Butterfly we all (should) know and love.

And it has come out at just the right time, I must say. Between you, me and these four walls, as Butterfly would say, I was getting a little tired of the angst-ridden writings that seem to be emerging from — or about — Pakistan these days.

(As Butterfly would exclaim: “You know what I mean, this bore-bore Granta Shranta, a case of expiring mangos — who wants to read about sarra hua fruit, tell me, na! And this Burnt Birds and these bhooka nangas! People have so much but they just don’t do Allah ka shukar!”)

After all, if it isn’t the slum dwellers they are writing about, then Pakistani writers are droning about fundamentalists, mullahs and terrorism, or affected Pakistanis living abroad. Yawn!

But although you may dismiss Tender Hooks as simply chick-lit, Moni Mohsin ends up taking up serious and relevant issues but in a far more interesting, engaging — and perhaps, effective — manner.

So, like all great stories, this one too is about boy finding girl, only except it should be mummy-approved girl. So, Butterfly is given the task of finding a girl for her cousin Jonkers (Jehangir) in a couple of months before Muharram, na, starts and wedding season temporarily comes to a halt. Butterfly, the doting mother of an only child — son — cannot afford to displease malicious aunts with the ability to cast evil eyes on other peoples’ children.

Jonkers mother is Butterfly’s “Mummy’s cousin from her mother’s side. Their mummies were sisters. If I was English, I’d say Jonkers was my first cousin once removed. As if cousins were bikini lines, once removed, twice removed, 100 times removed, but still there.”

Poor Jonkers, the bespectacled and bald “sun and air” is in a fix. His first wife Shumaila has just left him. She is now remembered as a “pushy, hungry and low class” girl, who “wore tight polyester shirts and frosted maroon lipstick and had big busts and wobbly hips,” or so say his angry relations who wanted him to marry a woman from the “right bagground”.

Thus begins a social circus of sorts, as Butterfly searches for a ‘suitable’ girl for Jonkers, meeting one girl after another at houses that are “huger than huge” with “erotic” plants that make his mother sigh with pleasure, and at kitty parties that are fab and weddings that are simply tabahi.

Tender Hooks begins with Butterfly at the height of her career, that is, socialising. A rich, ignorant and selfish Lahori auntie, she speaks Pinglish (Punjabi-English) and her world revolves around GTs (Get Togethers), meeting “business magnets” from the right “baggrounds” who have ‘good’ reps (reputations) and serve “Seizure Salad” at kitty parties, and buying fab satooshes, and staying well away from “bore NGO types”.

But poor Butterfly’s life is not entirely perfect. For one thing, her husband, Janoo, is becoming more of an ‘antisocialist’ than ever before. And for another, her son Kulchoo is such a bookworm that he is always on Facebook. She’s so afraid that he will turn out like his father that she urges him to interact more with the “nice children from rich homes.” And when Kulchoo says that they are “obnoxious rich kids who get high on coke and then go looking for a phudda” she patiently tells him not to fight with them and “if they offer you Coke, just say no thanks, I’ll take Fanta.”

But during the course of the novel, Butterfly learns a few lessons in sense and compassion. Almost against her will, she becomes more politically aware and confidently voices her opinions: “Vaisay, isn’t it a bit namak haraam of the jihadis to turn around and attack the army after every thing it’s done for them?”, she opines.

And being the “soft headed, charitable sole” that she is, she sends the IDPs all her favourite Mills and Boons and Barbara Cartland novels, issues of GT, chiffon saris and Armani ties to cheer them as well as “Lexos” (Lexotanils) that are a tad bit old to help them sleep better. She’s all heart.

Perhaps the reason for this change is that she ends up being exposed to a fair share of harsh realities as the book progresses. With elegance and a lot of humour, Mohsin adds dimension — and even sensitivity — to Butterfly’s character. “I realised what Janoo told me… things come and go. But people, once they go, they don’t come back. They just leave a hole.”

On the surface, Tender Hooks is a breezy, fun read. But if you look a little closer it brings to light the issues that all people living in Pakistan have to face — terrorism, violence and the rampant inflation — even those who live in envied, protected bubbles like Butterfly does. Tender Hooks hits home the fact that no one can completely deny reality anymore.

And the best part is that Mohsin conveys this without making a martyr out of Butterfly — she gets to keep her silliness, shallowness and her absurdities, qualities that make her character endearing, and aggravating.

The reviewer is Assistant Manager, Business Development and Research, The Dawn Media Group. In his spare time, he has delusions of being a writer and critic.

Tender Hooks
(novel)
By Moni Mohsin
Random House, India
ISBN 9788184001501
256pp. Rs395

This book is available at Liberty Books

Tender Hooks: The butterfly effect – The Express Tribune

 

I must confess that I’m not an impartial reviewer. Moni Mohsin’s ‘Diary of a Social Butterfly’ has been the bright spot in my otherwise dismal Fridays for many years now. But I must also confess that I’m as much of an ‘antisocialist’ as the long-suffering Janoo himself. That’s ‘antisocial’ in Butterfly-talk, in case you’re one of the uninitiated.

At once a biting social commentary, a masterpiece of satire and an all-around fun read, the ‘Social Butterfly’ columns have been a big hit ever since they were first printed. It’s a world of GTs, of ladies who lunch, party-shartys and lots and lots of gos(sip).

Tender Hooks is Moni Mohsin’s follow-up to the best-selling Diary of a Social Butterfly paperback, but this one isn’t just a compilation of random columns but a complete novel starring all the characters we’ve come to know, love and hate all at the same time.

The story revolves around the search for an ‘illegible’ (eligible) girl for Butterfly’s cousin Jonkers, who is browbeaten by his domineering mother Aunty Pussy. Along the way, we meet more than a few new additions to the cast, in all of whom we find echoes of ourselves or of people we know.

Mohsin walks a tightrope between her works turning into pure social commentary or else caricature. To her credit, it is a line she walks with expert ease, never plunging into the abyss of allegory or succumbing to superficiality.

Nor do her characters remain caricatures, unable to grow and adapt. As the novel progresses, we see the Butterfly we know (and love to hate, in some cases), show that she not only has a heart of gold underneath the layers of superficiality, but also possesses a surprising sting.

And while the characters may be fictional, the setting for the novel is very real. It is the Pakistan of suicide bombers, street crime, political and social corruption, and deep, deep denial. If we are honest, we will find echoes of real conversations in the uproariously funny exchanges that dot the novel. Like this one:

“Meanwhiles, Janoo and Shaukat and Jammy and Zafar had got back to discussing politics and Zafar was saying it was impossible for a Muslim to kill another Muslim. That’s why he was cocksure it wasn’t the Talibans who were doing the bombings. Janoo said okay then who did all the killing in the Iraq and Iran war in which a million people died and Zafar said that was tau cent percent the Americans. And then Jammy said it was the Israelis and I said to Zeenat that her highlights were very nice and who had done them and Shehla asked Tanya if she’d come and stay with them in Swizzerland and she replied, ‘No offence but Geneva sucks.’”

Move over Mrs Malaprop, you’re not a shade on our Butterfly.

Published in The Express Tribune, Sunday Magazine, February 13^th, 2011.

 

This book is available at Liberty Books.

There’s a lot of me in Butterfly: Moni Mohsin – Hindustan Times

A delayed flight, an almost two-hour ride from airport to hotel because of traffic, a v-e-r-y careful examination of her passport – because it’s Pakistani – that made check-in painful, and nothing to eat since dinner last night (it’s now 2.30 pm). After all this, you’d expect Moni Mohsin, the London-based Pakistani author of The End of Innocence, a novel, and The Diary of a Social Butterfly, a collection of her satirical columns for the newspaperFriday Times, to not like Mumbai much. This is, after all, her first visit to the city and she’s only here for a day to release her new novel, Tender Hooks.

But once lunch has been ordered – Goan prawn curry with rice (“You decide please, I don’t want North Indian food”), a roomali paratha (“You don’t get it in London and I miss it”) and green chillies on the side (“I hate it when people assume I don’t eat spicy food”) – Mohsin surprises you.

“I always thought Mumbai must be beautiful, but I never imagined it would be this beautiful,” she says, settling into her seat at Indus Cocktail Bar and Tandoor at Colaba’s Hotel Diplomat. “I was told I’d see appalling slums, but I saw nothing like that on the drive from the airport. What was really interesting was the trees. Lovely trees.”

Trees? Trees? Can Mohsin really be the creator of Butterfly, a Lahori lady who lunches, who thinks her husband’s farm is bore and who only worries about terrorists and fundamentalists because they get in the way of her parties and GTs (oho baba, get togethers, don’t you know anything?).

 

Was it difficult transferring Butterfly to a novel when she continues to turn up in your Friday Timescolumn?
Not at all. The column responds to what is happening in Pakistan. That’s journalism. Tender Hooks is not Like Butterfly, I’m a Punjabi girl. I know my character thoroughly. Once you know your character, you can, well, read her like a book. I know what Butterfly will do in any situation. For instance, while I was driving here from the airport, I knew what Butterfly would think about Mumbai.

Did you wonder, when Diary… was published in India, how it would be received?
People kept telling me I should publish the columns as a book, and I kept resisting. But then I attended the Jaipur Literature Festival and found that the halls where Pakistani writers spoke were as full as the hall where Ian McEwan spoke. I was writing a novel at the time, which wasn’t going well, so I compiled the columns. Since it took only a month, it was no skin off my nose if it didn’t do well, but I was told by a friend one day to check the Indian bestseller lists, and there it was! Tender Hooks is also being published in the UK now. I didn’t want to publish there before because there’s a lot of Urdu in the book, but we’re doing it now.

Why shouldn’t books with words in Urdu be published in the UK? I mean, we read books written in Irish and Scottish dialects.
I suppose they’re just not used to it coming back to them. But that’s changing now in the UK. They’ve been exposed to quite a lot of South Asian lingo recently, with TV shows like Goodness Gracious Me and movies like East is East. So Tender Hooks is being published in the UK, though it is in an English version – some of the phrases have been translated. For instance, ‘the bhookha-nangas’ has been translated to ‘the hungry-nakeds’ and ‘khandaani’ is ‘old family’ and so on. I don’t mind. I don’t like books that have, for instance, too much French.

Every chapter of Tender Hooks begins with a headline. The picture we get of Lahore is distressing. Bomb blasts, shootouts, schools threatened by fundamentalists… Is it really like that?
Yes. On a daily basis, it’s bad. If someone were to write a novel about it, it would be very grim. But people have become resilient, and that’s what I wanted to show by using those headlines in every chapter. People just carry on. That’s the sad part of it.

Your novel, The End of Innocence, didn’t do as well as Diary… Does that hurt?
I feel bad that something I slaved over wasn’t well received, but… it’s like children. Some do well, some don’t. But it did hurt because I’d put a lot of myself in it, which I hadn’t with Butterfly. Actually, no. No. Butterfly is me really. Exaggerated, but me. I notice things like brand names and labels. But that doesn’t mean this is all there is to my existence. If that was entirely true, I wouldn’t have had the distance and irony to write the book. But if I’d been Mother Teresa, I couldn’t have written it either.

For an extract from Tender Hooks, go to http://randomhouseindia.wordpress.com/2011/01/12/moni-mohsin-tender-hooks/

 

This book is available at Liberty books.