Social Studies

Moni Mohsin has been writing a column, narrated in the first-person voice of a pathologically shallow socialite called Butterfly, in the Friday Times of Lahore since the early 1990s. In her second book, The Diary of a Social Butterfly (the first, 2006’s The End of Innocence, was a coming-of-age story set in West Punjab during the Indo-Pakistani war of 1971), she has culled columns spanning January 2001 to January 2008. The pieces are bookended by the flexing of Taliban muscles in Afghanistan and the assassination of Benazir Bhutto — and they constitute a hilarious social commentary.

At first glance, it seems odd that the period that saw 9/11, wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the growth of religious extremism in Pakistan, a President caught between the U.S. and Islamic fundamentalism at home, the worst earthquake in the country’s history and the imposition of emergency rule would inspire uproarious comedy. But as Pakistan and the world outside go to rack and ruin, all these register as noises off — if at all — in the consciousness of Butterfly, saturated as it is with frequently misspelled brand names (“La Prarry ki face cream and Landscomb ka mascara”), manic socializing and “GTs” (get-togethers).

There is a narrative of sorts that emerges from Butterfly’s solipsistic musing, but the book’s greatest triumph is her voice, a pitch-perfect mixture of malaprop subcontinental English and the colloquial Urdu spoken by her class — perhaps the most authentic example of what Salman Rushdie has termed the “chutnification” of the English language. Mohsin’s ear is preternaturally tuned to the exactness of its hilarious cadences, idiosyncrasies and reinventions (“bore-bore countries,” “spoil spots,” “what cheeks!”). There’s hardly a sentence in the book that doesn’t contain them.

The book is being talked of as a kind of subcontinental Bridget Jones’s Diary but Mohsin’s extraordinary achievement in exploiting the contrapuntal irony in the gap between the private and the public gives it a political depth that aligns it more closely to Rushdie’s novel of Pakistan, Shame. This is a wildly entertaining anthology, but beware: it also bites.