Because the stories of Daniyal Mueenuddin’s acclaimed fiction debut are set in
the Pakistan of a generation ago, there is nothing strange in the absence of
the Taleban. Locked in bitter conflict with the national army for control of
the Swat Valley, the insurgents are now at the heart of the wider conflict
to determine the country’s future. Yet there is a direct link between them
and the world evoked by the eight stories of Mueenuddin’s collection, In
Other Rooms, Other Wonders. The reason is simple. That world was dying
on its feet, rotten with graft and ripe for replacement, no matter how
fearsome and fundamentalist the alternative.
His characters are perpetrators and victims of petty fiddling and systemic
corruption. Their soundtrack is the long death rattle of the old order. A
manager class is trying to step into the power vacuum left by the passing of
the patricians. The onward march of inequality continues unchecked. If it
sounds faintly familiar, it is hardly surprising since this is Punjab of the
late 20th century, still sifting through its mixed legacy of British
influence. The context of decay and jagged renewal so embraces the lives of
the people here that it is as much foreground as backdrop. Describing the
people of the region where he lives and farms, he talks chillingly of how
even middle-class professionals, receiving backhanders themselves, now look
favourably on aspects of the Taleban ideology.
Because his yarns play out on straitened estates, and because you can hear a
virtual sawing-down of orchards in the near distance, Mueenuddin has already
had the Chekhovian tag hung round his neck — deceptively so since he has
less time and space for the nostalgia of it all than for the looming crisis
that he fears will engulf his country. Faulkner, to whom he is also likened,
is probably nearer the mark. Some of the stories have appeared in The New
Yorker, Granta and Salman Rushdie’s collection of the best
American short stories. He belongs to a new generation of Pakistani authors
trying to bring the predicament of their country to an international
audience. Others include Mohsin Hamid (The Reluctant Fundamentalist)
and Kamila Shamsie (In the City by the Sea).
When he gives reasons for his anxiety he moves into narrative mode. “I was
walking on the farm when some sleek men arrived in a smart car. They were
from the tax department.” It might have come directly from, or be going
directly into, his pages. And while he insists on his characters’ right to
fictive life, he is not about to disown all knowledge of where they come
from. He goes on: “I gave them the cold eye, because in Pakistan, when you
get a visit like this, it means you are about to be shaken down. Instead,
they tell me that the regional director of taxation is a fan of mine and
would like to pay his respects. I thought, this country has the most corrupt
people in the world, what are you talking about?
“Next afternoon this man came round and talked about the book. Clearly he
hadn’t understood it very well, and was not a sophisticated reader. Now,
this is a man who is extremely corrupt, almost by definition. He was in his
late fifties, I’d say, had come up through a corrupt bureaucracy, and was
not an obvious candidate for supporting the Taleban. But as I talked to him
I began to realise that he was very much on their side, taking the view of
‘Why not try it? How bad can it be?’ And this was a middle-class guy with a
nice car! The point is that there is no justice at all, no security, people
can’t go around leading ordinary lives without being terribly ****ed about
by the stratum above them — the police, the officials, the landlords, the
water guys.”
Mueenuddin’s stories are linked not only by time and place but also by the
figure of K. K. Harouni, an ageing feudal lord who prospered in his
connections with the British and who still has a far-reaching influence of
his own in the community. Like the light, his presence is sometimes felt
keenly and closely, at other times only in the shapes of shadows. Mueenuddin
even compares his “measured and concentric world” with that of the Sun King
at Versailles.
In one of the stories a young relative of Harouni gains access to his bed,
only to be expelled by his chilly, polished daughters after his death. In
another, a maid seeks to improve her lot by seducing Harouni’s cook, but she
too is rewarded with destitution. The new social princelings of this world
are Westernised plane-hopping hedonists, with a fearful contempt for the
poor and the provincial. Class, rather than race or religion, is the true
enemy of personal aspiration.
The 45-year-old author knows the country which these taut, teeming stories
anatomise. As a small farmer in Punjab, he works the land which was once his
late father’s. During the vegetable season, October to May, he has about 150
workers. There is also a large orchard, where he packs and markets, and
between June and August there are 200.
His life has been almost as cosmopolitan as President Obama’s. The father,
Oxford-educated in the 1920s, was a civil servant who met his wife, an
American journalist and author, when he was in Washington working on the
treaty to determine the borders between India and Pakistan. Daniyal was born
in Los Angeles, raised in Pakistan until he was 13, then sent to a US
boarding school. He went to Dartmouth College, then Yale Law School. He was
a New York lawyer for three years before returning to farm in Punjab. His
Norwegian wife is an Arabic scholar. They will spend much of next year in
London while she attends the School of Oriental and African Studies.
You find people as international as this in his own pages. You also find a
woman, Lily, who goes to live on her new husband’s farm but turns crazy with
isolation after a matter of weeks. It sounds as if Mueenuddin’s first wife
was similarly frustrated. His second, he says, is “the first to live there
and love it. Like me, she takes it very seriously. We have a school there,
with about 200 pupils, some the children of employees and others from
families in the area.”
The stories are strewn with the rubble of fine colonial homes. They are as
emblematic as are the abandoned swimming pools of J. G. Ballard’s
residential landscapes. One such building houses his Lahore High Court
judge, the dubious dignitary at the centre of a story about the “arranged”
nature of the legal process. In a matter-of-fact sort of confessional to the
reader, the judge explains how he came to be living here: “My wife got this
residence allotted to us by spending a month camped in the living room of
her second cousin, a deputy additional secretary, and our greatest fear is
that someone senior to me will see it and covet it and take it.”
We come back to the matter of vacuum. His country, his stories about it, his
own past life there, all are filled with vacuum, if that is not a
contradiction in terms. His country has it in the way he has described, as
if substance has been sucked out by self-interest. His stories have it in,
for example, the case of Harouni’s estate manager, Jaglani, who becomes
over-mighty through his master’s absence.
The stories are not without their justice, but it is often of a crude and
vengeful kind, more akin to a come-uppance than a judicial consequence. In
this system, he seems to ask, when sex and fertility are as much a commodity
as livestock, what are thechances for such an abstract currency as love? In Our
Lady of Paris, the Yale student Helen says of her Pakistani boyfriend,
Sohail, that he is gentler when he is in America than in his own country.
“It’s easier to be gentle in a place where there’s order,” she suggests.
During his time as a New York lawyer Mueenuddin worked for Debevoise &
Plimpton, the firm co-founded by the father of the late writer George
Plimpton. He describes it as one of the most renowned of the “white-shoe”
law firms, a phrase derived from the popularity of such footwear among Ivy
League graduates in the Fifties. Then he says, with sudden incongruity, that
his time there represented a stepping stone between poetry and fiction. He
means this literally, explaining that he had lost hope of being a poet,
certainly a lyric one, though he had given it a go, and that there was no
better place than this for learning the use of rigorous logic and precision
with language. “There is no such thing as writer’s block,” he says. “When
someone tells you they need 15 pages by noon the next day on some arcane
subject, you can’t say, ‘Sorry, I’m blocked’. ”
He is working on a novel that will probably draw material from his
relationship with his “almost twin” brother, who is one year older.
Meanwhile the narrative of his country moves rapidly on, with the Taleban
this spring asserting control of the Swat Valley, and thousands of civilians
being displaced by the army’s clashes with the insurgents. What, in his
view, is the next chapter? “There is no coherent opposition to the rising
extremists,” he says. “There is no class of society which is not deeply
conflicted about engaging against them — not the army, the Government, the
upper, middle, lower classes. In every city in Pakistan there are madrassas,
which are basically schools for producing an army powerfully motivated by
their ideology. This is an army that is deeply embedded throughout the
country.”
In Other Rooms, Other Wonders may be fiction — we have the author’s
word for it — but it is of such an authentic stamp that it is history as
well, more so by the day, and deserves to be read as such. At this time of
uncertainty, the only safe prediction is that his first collection won’t be
his last.
In Other Rooms, Other Wonders is published by Bloomsbury at £14.99. To
buy it for £13.49 inc p&p call 0845 2712134 or visit timesonline.co.uk/booksfirst
