Character-driven stories of a feudal, modern Pakistan

Daniyal Mueenuddin’s exquisite collection of short stories In Other Rooms, Other Wonders was published in 2009. A mere 17 years later, his first novel, This is Where the Serpent Lives, has come out.

For non-authors like myself, the long gap between the two books is mysteriously fascinating. What took so long? Did it take years to be inspired to start writing, or did the words come slowly, or did he write and rewrite for years? (Arundhati Roy’s second novel came out twenty years after her first, but in the meantime she published at least a dozen pieces of passionate nonfiction and countless opinion pieces.)

Regardless, Mueenuddin’s novel is here now, and it is set in Pakistan, as was his first book.

The first chapter’s title, The Golden Boy, refers to Bayazid, an abandoned street child.

He had a memory more of forces than of people, a crowd, a hand, a hand no more. Yet the bazaars in those early 1950s were not so crowded as that, and Rawalpindi a town small enough that a lost little boy should be found. That was a bitter day when he accepted years later that there might have been no hand, no desperate parent seeking him in the crowd.

The boy was lucky enough to be taken in by Karim Khan, who ran the tea stall in front of which the little boy, just three or four years old, was sitting alone. Khan named him Bayazid after a Sufi mystic, and by his teens the boy was indispensable.

Yazid grew up exceptionally large for a Pakistani, six feet tall by the time he started shaving, and strong: big hands, big feet, a large head.

And he was ambitious. He taught himself to read, and would read the ‘Urdu newspaper to illiterate Karim Khan’, became a masterful chapati and naan maker. He watched the wealthy uniformed college students who came to the stall and slowly modeled himself after them in clothing and behaviour. When they developed a passion for playing carrom, he stored their carrom board, and eventually the games moved to Yazid’s room.

These are simple events, but Mueenuddin’s precise and delicate writing makes them fascinatingly vivid. The details come across as solidly authentic.

One afternoon several of the boys had gone shares on a case of pilfered beer sold from the back gate of the Murree Brewery, a sideline for the brewery workers.

Yazid gets drawn into the fringes of the life of Zain, one of the well-to-do boys, and gets asked to his house, where he eats with the men and is served by the women.

Malik Kamal [Zain’s father] had developed liberal tastes while running his fancy-goods grocery shop and liked to play a bit of the radical, proud that he was educating his son for a great future, educating even his daughter, and willing to send her too for higher education.

But class issues mean that this familiarity and liberalism go only so far. The cook sees him as a ‘jumped-up tea stall boy’ and treats him as such. Yazid dreams of Zain’s impudent, lovely sister, but is too humble to look her in the eye, and eventually leaves the town for a decade or more. The story leaps into a higher, much tenser and more violent level when he returns to Rawalpindi and meets Zain again.

After the explosive end to that chapter, it feels like a letdown when the next, Muscle, starts in 1988 with a completely different cast of characters. This, for me, was the main issue with this novel: it is not a novel. There are only some connections between one or more of the characters in each of the four novellas. Of course, it is entirely up to the writer to choose what and how he writes, but for this reader, it felt like false advertising. That said, each of the four novellas in this book are beautifully written and worth reading on their own.

Rustom, in Muscle, seems much like the author himself in broad details: grows up as a child in a feudal estate in Pakistan, studies in America, returns to the estate and attempts to keep it going. Rustom’s lack of understanding of the local customs and the ‘system’ is at the forefront of this story. Nearby villagers have stolen a section of telephone wire from the estate. The farm manager is smugly corrupt. The local DSP is dismissive and astonishingly rude. All of them are condescending to the young foreign-returned master. In frustration, he brings in the ‘muscle’ — the toughs who had

preyed on the weak and foolish around these districts, like wolves circling a herd of bison and pruning out the stragglers.

To the reader, this seems like inviting the wolves in to protect the sheep, and a deep sense of menace appears in the scene where the thuggish Sheikh Sharif meets Rustom’s upscale city friends.

Rustom, as the single owner of a feudal estate, must be, like Mr Bingley, ‘in want of a wife’, and the women of his class are distinctly conscious of his situation. The single women, like Nisa, make themselves at home and indicate their availability with subtle touches and hints. The married women like Shahnaz

lay out Nisa’s merits and demerits, subtly but with purpose.

The men are at the center of each story, with the women characters, who have little meaningful power except via their family connections, drawn from the perspective of the men. The Clean Release features Shahnaz again, a bit player in Muscle, but is really about the relationship between her husband Hisham and his brother. I found this story of less interest than the others.

The four novellas vary widely in time: The Golden Boy runs from the early 1950s to 1980, Muscle is set in 1988, The Clean Release bounces from 2005 back to the 1970s and then returns to 2005. Class is omnipresent: each upper-class person has a casual confidence in their position, whether in Pakistan or in America; while each poorer person is intensely aware of the hierarchy and their position built of proximity to the feudal lords.

Violence appears in each story too, and the final titular story is also the most brutal, while it ties together some of the threads from the others. Saqib, a smart young boy in Hisham’s estate, starts helping Yazid, and works his way up to being their chief gardener, running a money-making greenhouse operation for them. But Saqib has a hunger for success;