Mohsin Hamid: “Every Ending Is a Beginning”

Bardo is about the death of an old way of being. In your new novel, The Last White Man, Anders wakes up brown, and, in a similar way, you were catapulted into a different life after 9/11. What was that like for you? “…at 18, I returned to America from Pakistan to attend Princeton. I went to law school at Harvard, got a consulting job in New York City to pay off my loans, and was transferred to London in July of 2001. Then the September 11th terrorist attacks happened. I was a brown-skinned guy with a Muslim name, but in the 1990s, if you lived in certain cosmopolitan cities, and you had a reasonably high income and had gone to elite universities, you weren’t exempt from discrimination but at least reasonably unbothered by it most of the time. Yet suddenly I was being viewed with suspicion. I was being pulled out of the line at the airport and kept at immigration for five hours, people changed seats when I got on the bus, and I thought, “This is so weird, I’m still me.”

The bardo teachings say that when we die, it can take up to four days for us to admit we’re dead. Anders initially clings to the hope that a return to his old life as a white man is possible. After 9/11, was there a period where you wanted to go back to the life you’d known? At first, I kept hoping for things to return to normal. It’s like what you’re saying about it taking up to four days to accept that one has died, or that one has changed states. I think there’s something to that. There’s a spiritual kind of Wile E. Coyote phenomenon, where you’ve walked off the edge of the cliff and you think you’re floating there, but you’re really plummeting to the bottom of the valley…

Read the interview here.