The Reluctant Fundamentalist (2007) is set in Lahore, Pakistan. The narrator,
Changez, begins by approaching an American man in a café in the district of Old
Anarkali.
The
American is a stranger, but Changez offers to be of assistance to him. He
begins a conversation, telling the stranger that he studied and worked in
America. Changez was recruited to a
valuation firm in New York after completing his university course – beating over
a hundred students of the Princeton Class of 2001 to the job. He topped the
intake of five trainees and the end of the induction period. Readers come to
know that Changez, the Pakistani, is an elite scholar, working in a prestigious
company with an excellent salary for a 22 year old. In a competitive business,
the quiet Changez does extremely well. He is good at his job.
He
falls in love with an American girl, Erica, whom he met when he was on holiday
in Greece. He even meets her family who live in “an impressive building with a
blue canopy and an elderly doorman.” Erica’s boyfriend, Chris, had died of lung
cancer, and she found it hard to get over the grief of the love of her life. Changez
tells the stranger about her and her love for Chris: “theirs had been an usual
love, with such a degree of commingling of identities that when Chris died,
Erica felt she had lost herself; even now, she said, she did not know if she
could be found.” She could not be found – because she could not get over her
grief, and admits herself into a clinic for recovery.
And
then – New York was attacked. It was September 11, 2001. As both Changez and
Erica fall apart, emotions are laid bare. Three years have passed and Changez
returns to his home city Lahore, and to the time when the story starts, in the
café with the American stranger.
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