By Saeed Shah
McClatchy Newspapers
KARACHI, Pakistan – Americans who are searching for an explanation for the attempted bombing of New York’s Times Square this month should pick up two recent and critically acclaimed novels by Pakistani authors, which tell how the events that followed Sept. 11 made Pakistani New Yorkers feel alienated and angry.
Mirroring reports about the real-life case of Pakistani-American Faisal Shahzad, the Times Square suspect, Mohsin Hamid’s “The Reluctant Fundamentalist” and H.M. Naqvi’s “Home Boy” are set in New York and feature Pakistanis who work in the financial industry and are psychologically damaged by the aftermath of 2001 terrorist attacks. The fictional characters rediscover their Islamic identities.
The heroes of the books were integrated, happy immigrants who found that New York and the U.S. turned ugly after Sept. 11, which led to their inner journeys away from the America they’d come to love.