Mohsin Hamid admits that English can be considered the language of power and the door to access larger audiences. But that’s not why he uses it to write fiction.

Speaking in a session named Challenging Truths at ThinkFest 2023 in Lahore, the Pakistani-born novelist discussed identity, migration, social disparities and his body of work. And he also presented an analogy about why writers from Pakistan do not necessarily have to write in their first language.

“It would be horrifically bad,” Hamid said of his possibility of writing in Urdu to moderator Waseem Anwar. He added that his mother language had been forgotten and that English wasn’t his preferred medium because he considered it his first language.

But then came the example that makes his view clearer.

“Imagine if you grew up in Pakistan and you learnt to play the guitar and you become good at it and then someone asks you to play the sitar because it is the instrument of your homeland,” he said.

But you should choose to stick to the guitar, Mohsin said, because it is the instrument you can play better.

He used the analogy to expalin how he had come to use English as a medium for his stories. “I think language is something that occurs over the course of your life.”

His life’s journey has taken him across the world. After spending part of his childhood in the US, he grew up in Lahore, only to end up in America again for his studies.

But the author of Moth Smoke and How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia does not always build his fiction on his Pakistani roots. He wants to avoid exoticising things and instead find universal human experiences to tell deepre stories. For example, he might base a story on Lahore but might change it to an unnamed city to find symbols that reflect the human condition, like he did in Exit West.

“Writing this way made me realise,” he said, “maybe Lahore is a unviersal city.”

Nostalgia is such a feeling. Mohsin Hamid thinks that the world is unable to articulate a future that is desirable and inclusive. And as the future becomes frightening to imagine, people find themselves longing to return to a better past.