The present text is used to analyze  an extract taken from chapter 3 from Mohsin Hamid The Reluctant Fundamentalist.

The sequence considers the scene where the protagonist is telling the interlocutor about the new district of Lahore.

The narrator's fictional choice is to resort to the dramatic monologue as the most suitable means to silence the stranger. his interlocutor with the unmistakable mean to convey to  surface an Eastern point of view on events like the WTC attack and the global relationship between America and the alter-world.

Surely, the speaking voice is Changez, a Pakistani young man that wants to draw the Stranger's consideration  on the similarities/differences between Manhattan and Lahore's new District. This is done on purpose. Changez sounds ironical when he compares Manhattan to the new parts of Lahore. You can realize it in the use of the exclamation marks: "like Manhattan! Yes, precisely!".

The Stranger might feels rather surprise in front of the comparison since the speaker has just expressed a personal, socially and politically point of view relying on urban as well as social divide comparison.

Indeed, the divide-a social one as been anticipated by the contrast sending back to "an ancient, hierarchy" that just apposing the "mounted man" and "the man on foot" , brings to focus the opposition poor vs rich.

The intelligent reader  quickly sees the poor relate to Pakistan while the rich recalls well-of Manhattan.

There is no need to develop the dichotomy further because each lessical  choice in the extract underline it: Changez attempts obviously to persuade the Stranger on his moral in Manhattan, a sinedoch for New York , when he advises him that Urdu, his native language, could be heard in New York  as well as the typical Pakistan food could be tasted at Pak Punjab Deli to conclude with his memory of "a song which I had danced at my cousin's wedding".

It goes without saying that irony is a defence weapon by means of which when Changez found himself to live in New York he tried to overcome a sense of Nostalgia through the senses. His means of surviving the cultural shock are suitable to implicity emotionally highlight a cultural difference which he manage to overcome intellectually.