"This week's story, "The Golden Boy," takes place in Pakistan in the nineteen-fifties, sixties, and early seventies. Its protagonist, Bayazid, was found as a small child, lost and alone, by the owner of a tea stall in a Rawalpindi bazaar. The story opens with that scene. Was this scenario-and this character-in your mind for a long time as the premise for a story?"
"In those years my family lived in Lahore, in a household that still resembled the one where my father grew up, in the medievalesque Old City of Lahore. It was sprawling, salted about with all sorts of Shakespearean characters, relatives of various degrees, functionaries without functions, ancient employees and all their progeny-their sons looking for jobs, their daughters looking for husbands-a gardener who was a martyr to pollen allergies, a carpenter who couldn't carpent, and on and on."
"Drivers are sophisticates-they have the master's ear, since they sit in the car with him (or her) for hours at a time, and they know the cities, travel all over, meet all sorts, are familiar with the high and low. A little mafia of Kashmiri drivers had formed in my father's garage (Kashmiris and transport are a peanut-butter-and-jelly combination in the Pakistani trades), and one day among this group appeared the original of Bayazid."
The setting spans Pakistan in the 1950s, 1960s, and early 1970s. Bayazid was found as a small child, lost and alone, by the owner of a tea stall in a Rawalpindi bazaar. Bayazid's style, humor, intelligence, and appearance are patterned on a man who joined a Lahore household as a driver in 1975. The Lahore household resembled the medieval Old City, populated by relatives, functionaries, long-standing employees, and their offspring. Drivers held a distinctive social position: intimate with masters, widely traveled, worldly, and organized into a Kashmiri drivers' network that maintained a clubhouse and shaped social life.
Read at The New Yorker
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