A Catalogue of Columns

The Diary of a Social Butterfly is a collection of columns by Pakistani writer, Moni Mohsin published in a Pakistani newspaper, the Friday Times.



The column, rumouredly very popular, aims to satirise Pakistan’s ladies who lunch, who ooh-la-la.

If this is satire though, it is laboured, contrived and usually in poor taste. Early on, "Butterfly" explains her mode of communication, "Nerves meri shatter ho gayee hain, that is why I am forgetting my English. vaisay tau I am convent-educated." Her nerves remain fragmented obviously, since her English never quite recovers, and by the end of the book, your nerves may need a chemical cuddle themselves.
A column that has spanned many years, Mohsin has Butterfly comment on serious historical events — September 11, 2001, "And as for skyscrappers, taubah baba, what if electricity goes?" "And then nice thing about Gulberg is mummy’s round the corner, Flopsy’s on my backside, Mulloo’s down the road. And because we’re so close to the ground, no plane can fly into us…" — Karachi blasts, January 2004 "Can’t wait for all the parties yaar." —Tsunami, December 2004 "I hear she knows everybody who is everybody, including Coffee Annan, Moody Allen and Paris Sheraton, sorry Hilton." The book ends with her documentation of Benazir Bhutto’s assassination. This is not treated facetiously, but honestly, by then, it is too late.
Mohsin also attempts to wring humour out of Butterfly’s relationships with her suffering husband Janoo, his family — the sisters-in-law, The Gruesome Twosome, his mother, The Old Bag (an anecdote featuring Butterfly’s attempts at a soiree and her mother-in-law arriving with a live goat who proceeds to pee on an expensive carpet is so slapstick you’re left looking for the banana peels) and her own family featuring an Aunty called Pussy and a serial-divorcee, Jonkers.
Flailing wildly for moderate clemency, you may say that some columns are alright in monthly doses but perhaps excessive when put together in a book. But even so, the fault lies firstly with the vanity of the author for assuming that such repetitive drivel would be of interest to a reader and certainly some commissioning editor at the publishing house who, in a mad rush to publish the first thing that seemed "Bridget Jones" with a South Asian sprinkle, has allowed this hideous thing to come to print.
Like snorkelling with a plastic straw in a sea of treacle, you will trawl for an insight, an intuitive moment, something that makes you go, "a-ha, so that’s what they’re like". You won’t find it. What you will find is phonetic (mis)spelling as humour, bad grammar as humour, common callousness as humour and most frighteningly, even though this is fiction, an insufferable ignorance of the world at large and at home that makes you dislike the main character intensely.
Mohsin is an intelligent woman, a good author and a woman of the world. I can’t imagine why she’d put her name to this do number ka maal.