For David, the quest to discover what happened to his former lover, Zameen, causes a revision of his previous temporizing outlook. As a young man in 1979, he found himself caught up in a mob attack on the U.S. Embassy in Islamabad inspired by the recent revolution in Iran, an event that provided him with his first lesson in the inextricable link between the political and the personal. Having waited many hours for relief in the besieged embassy, David was later stunned to learn that President Carter thanked the new Pakistani dictator, General Zia, for his swift response. Subsequently, as a dutiful intelligence officer, "David himself was present on a number of occasions where the man [Zia] was extravagantly celebrated and flattered, his own voice adding to the dishonest chorus" (108). Of course, Zia had just deposed and executed the elected prime minister, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, and was about to commence his Islamization program in Pakistan with the full connivance of the United States, which was grateful for this reliable ally in the fight against a Soviet Union that by the end of the year would demonstrate its own imperialist intentions by invading neighboring Afghanistan.

XREF: Connects to broader themes in Tariq Ali's fiction about the entanglement of geopolitics, U.S. foreign policy, and individual moral development in South Asia.

Peter Morey, Islamophobia and the Novel, loc. 409