Book Review: Daniyal Mueenuddin "In Other Rooms, Other Wonders"

Mueenuddin writes of life as he has lived it, but does not restrict his focus to the elite alone. Many of the best pieces in the collection center around the lives of servants and retainers the author may have come to know well while growing up in Pakistan. Though Mueenuddin is writing about Pakistan in some sense, this collection is above all else, the creative work of an artist who is as taken by the act and possibilities of fictional creation as he may be of recreating and recounting lived reality.

Mueenuddin consciously seeks to disabuse the reader of any fixed feeling they may have about Pakistan as a country noted for unmitigated poverty, destitution, misogyny and religious extremism. The Pakistanis one encounters in short stories such as “Lila,� “In Other Rooms, Other Wonders,� and Rafia “Our Lady of Paris� are rich, beautiful, sophisticated, and elegant. They are anything, but the self-loathing neo-colonials portrayed in Franz Fanon’s work. The women in the group are unapologetic and entirely unselfconscious about their pleasures and desires. Readers, less familiar with the culture of Pakistan’s uber-elite, will be shocked at the amount of wine, marijuana, and sex that appears almost quotidian in Mueenuddin’s recounting of those enjoying Pakistan’s high life. Member of this rarified circle enjoy exclusive invitations to parties with hundreds of waiters, chilled champagne flown in from Europe, and sand brought in by the truck load to create artificial beaches in the hills and lakes outside Islamabad.

The life of the elite may limit just as much as it expands the possibilities open to members of this group. It is quite apparent that individuals are, to a certain extent, trapped and hemmed in by their privileges. In “Our Lady of Paris,� Sohail, the son of a Pakistani industrialist, meets his parents in Paris where he also introduces them to his American girl friend, Helen, from Yale. The encounter is stilted, not because of the traditionalism of the parents, but because Helen, the American girl, with a unique and wholly American sense of the openness and possibility, appears uncomfortable with the class confidence that her boyfriend’s Pakistani parents exude.

Several stories center around the lives of particular servants in the household of an old money Pakistani landlord named Harouni. Again, the reader expecting a portrait of one-sided oppression will be surprised. The servants here vary a great deal in authority, wealth, and social influence depending on their length of service and personal proximity to the patriarch Harouni. Some such as Jaglani, a farm manager in the short story “Provide, Provide,� accumulate a significant amount of wealth and political influence through careful-self interested management of their patron’s property; Jaglani, for example, goes on to become a Member of the Provincial Assembly with vast landholdings, a rural mistress, and dynastic aspirations. Other servants such as Rezak, in the story “A Spoiled Man� rise by virtue of diligence and honesty only to find ruin and death at the end of their ill-fated quests. Within the servants’ quarters, Mueenuddin describes an elaborate hierarchical world of intrigue and romance. In “Saleema,� we meet a servant girl making her way in the Harouni household despite her husband’s addiction to amphetamines. Her romantic link with an older family retainer, Rafik, is described with tenderness and sensitivity; the romance brings with it social elevation and protection in the servants quarters, but this too ultimately collapses with the death of the Harouni patriarch and the departure, to another household, of Rafik. If there is one thing that links the lives of underprivileged strivers such as Saleema in “Saleema�, Husna in “Other Rooms, Other Wonders,� Rezak in “A Spoiled Man,� or Jaglani in “Provide, Provide� it is the precarious nature of good fortune for those lacking the proper pedigree and the extent to which these successes are ultimately rooted in properly cultivating the favor of the master class.

Those of us who hail from cities and locales such as Bahawalpur, Multan, and Rahim Yar Khan will greatly appreciate the recognition which Mueenuddin’s book bestows. A gifted Pakistani author with an eye for rural society and an ear for rural dialects has put regions where the majority of Pakistan toils on the world literary map. For these reasons, not to mention the first rate writing as well as the edifying surprises in each story, this book is a triumph for a long ignored and misunderstood nation.