Tender Hooks by Moni Mohsin

Posted on: May 03, 2012

Tender Hooks by Moni Mohsin

Previously published in the Herald magazine. 

Moni Mohsin may have a few books to her name, but what she has always been known well for is The Diary of a Social Butterfly, her take on the experiences of a woman from the upper class of Lahore as chronicled in regular columns for The Friday Times. What started out as a much looked forward to column ended up a book, and now, with Tender Hooks, it has a sequel that is sure to be just as popular.

 

The woman known to everyone but Mohsin and her editor as Butterfly is back, and she’s more annoyed than ever before. Lahore is being haunted by the ‘beardo weirdos’, she’s scared she’ll be shot for ‘buying western food like chips or for wearing western clothes like pop socks’ and to top it all off Aunty Pussy has tricked her into swearing to find her son Jonkers a wife before Muharram. So our brave heroine is forced to be on the lookout for a suitable girl from the right ‘bagground’ to make sure that Jonkers does not (once again) fall into the evil clutches of someone like‘that aik number ki chaaloo cheez, Miss Shumaila’, while ‘honestly, the sich is so bad so bad that don’t even ask’. 

Mohsin never runs out of jokes at the expense of Butterflies mispronunciation, or misunderstanding of the larger picture. It would be easy to write Butterfly off as a caricature of the Lahori glitterati, but any Pakistani who has had exposure to the lot Mohsin writes about will know that Butterfly is really very close to reality. Mohsin has said people inevitably say how much of their friends and relatives they see in Butterfly and it is very unlikely that a single reader of this book will not do the same. Mohsin aptly brings out the insanity in each average social situation she writes about – whether it is a dinner party or a meal at home. There will be a great deal of familiarity in her style, her humour and her vernacular, but it is her snide satire that will linger.

Butterfly herself may be mostly vapid, but her husband is the perfect foil – Janoo is the voice of reason and his is Mohsin’s true opinion. Butterfly will often quote Janoo, whose opinion she quite readily accepts, and in this Mohsin expresses what she truly feels aboutPakistan’s current affairs. Of course, things are simplified a great deal, as Butterfly says, ‘we can’t do without American aids, na. I think so our country is bhooka nanga’. Mohsin’s attempts to connect the basic (and fairly superficial) story arc to the macrocosm of the book do shine through, even in her chapters headings.

While the story arc itself is very simple, and most of Moshin’s characters fade into the background, every so often a few of them will surprise readers. Butterfly manages to redeem herself too. Worth mentioning here is an odd, jagged little scene that disturbs very effectively: Butterfly and a friend are mugged while buying fruit on their way back from a kitty party. The incident is disturbing not because Mohsin offer’s any new insight into a simple mugging, but because it is, sadly, very common occurrence. Here, Mohsin manages to capture the tensions between two social classes very aptly, simply and evocatively.

Tender Hooks is what it is – a snide but straightforward look at Pakistani society and author’s concern about the country. Moni Mohsin has always been known for this particular brand of humour and writing. Will the jokes, puns and hilarity created by Butterfly’s mispronunciations make sense to anyone outside of the subcontinent? Does that matter when the primary readership is the subcontinent? As far as the subcontinent is concerned, Mohsin is not just a hilarious wit and mimic, but also a shrewd observer of the world as it stands.