Husain Naqvi’s Home Boy is not about biryani. It is not about anaar, or sharifas or any fruit considered exotic anywhere outside of Pakistan and its not about cardamom or legions of grandmothers passing on the wisdom of their generations to flippant young grandchildren who have no cultural identity. It’s not about week long weddings and elaborate outfits. It is not about poverty and sickness; it is not about economic disparity and social tensions. It’s also not 700 pages long. Don’t you just love it already?

Its not that Naqvi doesn’t write lovingly of his country or his culture (he even does a bit on Karachi food!), it is just that he is able to save himself from that monster that is an exoticised version of Pakistan, playing loudly and clearly to the gallery. Somehow, Naqvi has escaped the South East Asian writer’s need to romanticizing his or her background; instead, he provides his readers with a clear, sharp picture of what it was like to witness the change in New York City and its denizens towards the city’s existing young urban Pakistani population. Home Boy is a story of belonging, of alienation and of discovery. It is also, to an extent, a hero’s journey: a young man goes through a series of difficult experiences that he must navigate using his own strength and intelligence before he can emerge stronger and with greater understanding of the world around him.

Jimbo, AC and Chuck are living the life in NYC – working hard for their money, partying even harder once they have it. They’re independent, they’re young and they are New Yorkers, imagining themselves to be ‘boulevardiers, raconteurs, renaissance men’, never imagining themselves as simply Pakistani. In fact, in the pre-9/11 part of Homeboy, the question of being Pakistani (or Muslim) in NYC doesn’t really come up – these young men could be anyone from anywhere. The city has absorbed them into its fabric, allowing them to be whoever they think they might be. But who they think they are is obviously questioned after the 9/11 attacks – in more ways than just the philosophical.

Home Boy’s narrative is clear and succinct. This is odd, because it is also pretty descriptive. The two mix together without much cacophony, however, and the over all effect is that of a texture that is deceptively smooth. A one time slam poet, Naqvi’s prose is rhythmic, detailed and effective without ever being effusive. His characters are well drawn out and even though there were points in the book when I felt distinctly remote from Jimbo as a personality as a narrator, as a voice, I’d suddenly be reeled right back in, almost as if I’d been forced to step back (or step forward!) to see things clearer. This, to me, made the narrative additionally interesting, once I realized what was going on. Jimbo is an increasingly sympathetic narrator – you know him, you’ve hung out with him, you’ve seen him go from a FOB to a slightly swaggering know it all who claims ‘New Yorkers can be born anywhere’. And so his story becomes your story - because really, it could have happened to any of you.