In Other Rooms, Other Wonders Read online

  Further praise for In Other Rooms, Other Wonders

  ‘The voice of Pakistan from within Pakistan ... a fresh perspective’ Wall Street Journal

  ‘Mueenuddin has an eye for the tragedy and beauty in lives that a lesser writer might regard merely as miserable or eccentric ... In recent years, Pakistan has been regarded in the West with anger and horror. Perhaps Mueenuddin’s portrait will help to bring it a different kind of attention, colored with sorrow and even fondness’ New York Review of Books

  ‘A genuinely interesting and original new voice. There’s something in the leisurely, intelligent way that Mueenuddin’s tales of a dynastic Pakistani family unfold, bringing with them a host of satellite characters and stories, that is a refreshing antidote to stories and novels that seem to have ended before they’ve even begun. A real talent for the future’ Alex Clark, Waterstone’s Books Quarterly

  ‘His people sing ... Mueenuddin is a terrific writer, terse yet sensitive’ Time Out

  ‘Daniyal Mueenuddin takes us into a sumptuously created world, peopled with characters who are both irresistible and compellingly human. His stories unfold with the authenticity and resolute momentum of timeless classics’ Manil Suri, author of The Death of Vishnu

  ‘Mueenuddin portrays a troubled society in transition from the corruption of feudalism to the harshness and brutality of a modern state ... An impressive debut’ Anita Desai

  ‘From the wistful title to the final pages, Mueenuddin transports you to a faraway land ... His crisp, vivid voice glides effortlessly into his various characters’ heads, from the feudal landlord to the wealthy man’s butler to the yearning woman his butler takes as a mistress. And oh, can this man write from the perspective of women, all of whom in these pages are struggling in a sludge of powerlessness. Dark stuff, but full of beauty’ Entertainment Weekly

  ‘A marvellous collection’ Daily Telegraph

  ‘A stand-out debut’ Metro

  ‘The eight short stories of Daniyal Mueenuddin’s enchanting debut are dreamlike, illuminating contemporary Pakistan’s societal contradictions in prose as clear and serene as the contradictions themselves are subtle and tumultuous ... In Other Rooms, Other Wonders is neither a story collection nor a novel. It is a literary weave, much like its author and his swirling landscapes are cultural weaves ... In his gracious stories, Mueenuddin ponders that imperative of Pakistan, asking whether a home can be made among a people and place so splintered by change’ Boston Globe

  ‘Beautifully crafted ... an elegant stylist with a light touch, Mueenuddin invites the reader to a richly human, wondrous experience’ Publishers Weekly

  ‘If one of the aims of fiction is to create empathy with those outside one’s ken, Daniyal Mueenuddin’s short stories score a bull’s eye. Each room in this world is worth lingering in’ Indian Express

  ‘You may turn to historians or to primary sources like newspapers and letters, yet it would be hard to find a more direct experience of lives behind the feudal veil, a clear window through which we witness the ramifications of changes on particular lives of both the powerful and powerless’ Business Standard

  ‘This dusty, decaying world, where cicadas call and men and women learn to love and despise, pulsates to life gently with his smooth, elegant narrative’ Asian Age

  ‘Together, these tales make a vivid portrait of a feudal world, one which is rarely brought alive in the English language. Graceful and melancholy, In Other Rooms, Other Wonders gives you Pakistan as you may have never seen it before’ Times of India

  ‘In the sleepy, elegant yet ruthless world of post-partition Lahore, Daniyal Mueenuddin’s short stories throw light on marginal lives intensely lived’ Elle (India)

  ‘Evokes the sounds and smells of feudal Pakistan with exquisite delicacy and understatement – much like Narayan’ Outlook

  Daniyal Mueenuddin graduated from Dartmouth College and Yale Law School. After winning a Fulbright scholarship to study in Norway, he practised law in New York before returning to Khanpur, Pakistan, to manage the family farm. He divides his time between Cairo and Pakistan.

  Stories in this collection have appeared in the New Yorker, Granta and Salman Rushdie’s Best American Short Story collection. ‘Our Lady of Paris’ was nominated for a National Magazine Award.

  First published in Great Britain 2009

  Copyright © Daniyal Mueenuddin

  This electronic edition published 2010 by Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

  The right of Daniyal Mueenuddin to be identified as the author

  of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with

  the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

  `An Urban Convalescence,' copyright © 2001 by the Literary Estate of James Merrill

  at Washington University, from Collected Poems by James Merrill, edited by J. D. McClatchy

  and Stephen Yenser. Used by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc.

  `Nawabdin Electrician', `A Spoiled Man' and `In Other Rooms, Other Wonders'

  originally appeared in the New Yorker. `Provide, Provide' appeared in Granta.

  `Our Lady of Paris' appeared in Zoetrope: All Story. `Nawabdin Electrician' also appeared in Best American Short Stories 2008.

  Calligraphy by Saberah Malik

  All rights reserved. You may not copy, distribute, transmit, reproduce or otherwise

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  (including without limitation electronic, digital, optical, mechanical, photocopying,

  printing, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of the publisher.

  Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication

  may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.

  Bloomsbury Publishing Plc, 36 Soho Square, London W1D 3QY

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

  ISBN 978 1 4088 1084 2

  www.bloomsbury.com/daniyalmueenuddin

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  For my mother

  Three things for which we kill –

  Land, women and gold.

  – Punjabi proverb

  Contents

  Nawabdin Electrician

  Saleema

  Provide, Provide

  About a Burning Girl

  In Other Rooms, Other Wonders

  Our Lady of Paris

  Lily

  A Spoiled Man

  Nawabdin Electrician

  HE FLOURISHED ON on a signature capability, a technique for cheating the electric company by slowing down the revolutions of electric meters, so cunningly done that his customers could specify to the hundred-rupee note the desired monthly savings. In this Pakistani desert, behind Multan, where the tube wells ran day and night, Nawab’s discovery eclipsed the philosopher’s stone. Some thought he used magnets, others said heavy oil or porcelain chips or a substance he found in beehives. Skeptics reported that he had a deal with the meter men. In any case, this trick guaranteed his employment, both off and on the farm of his patron, K. K. Harouni.

  The farm lay strung along a narrow and pitted farm-to-market road, built in the 1970s when Harouni still had influence in the Lahore bureaucracy. Buff or saline-white desert dragged out between fields of sugarcane and cotton, mango orchards and clover and wheat, soaked daily by the tube wells that Nawabdin Electrician tended. Beginning the r
ounds on his itinerant mornings, summoned to a broken pump, Nawab and his bicycle bumped along, whippy antennas and plastic flowers swaying. His tools, notably a three-pound ball-and-peen hammer, clanked in a greasy leather bag that hung from the handlebars. The farmhands and the responsible manager waited in the cool of the banyans, planted years ago to shade each of the tube wells. ‘No tea, no tea,’ he insisted, waving away the steaming cup.

  Hammer dangling like a savage’s axe, Nawab entered the oily room housing the pump and electric motor. Silence. He settled on his haunches. The men crowded the door, until he shouted that he must have light. He approached the offending object warily but with his temper rising, circled it, pushed it about a bit, began to take liberties with it, settled in with it, drank tea next to it, and finally began disassembling it. With his screwdriver, blunt and long, lever enough to pry up flagstones, he cracked the shields hiding the machine’s penetralia. A screw popped and flew into the shadows. He took the ball-and-peen and delivered a cunning blow. The intervention failed. Pondering, he ordered one of the farmworkers to find a really thick piece of leather and to collect sticky mango sap from a nearby tree. So it went, all day, into the afternoon, Nawab trying one thing and then another, heating the pipes, cooling them, joining wires together, circumventing switches and fuses. And yet somehow, in fulfillment of his genius for crude improvisation, the pumps continued to run.

  Unfortunately or fortunately, Nawab had married early in life a sweet woman, whom he adored, but of unsurpassed fertility; and she proceeded to bear him children spaced, if not less than nine months apart, then not that much more. And all daughters, one after another after another, until finally came the looked-for son, leaving Nawab with a complete set of twelve girls, ranging from infant to age eleven, and then one odd piece. If he had been governor of the Punjab, their dowries would have beggared him. For an electrician and mechanic, no matter how light-fingered, there seemed no question of marrying them all off. No moneylender in his right mind would, at any rate of interest whatsoever, advance a sufficient sum to buy the necessary items: for each daughter, beds, a dresser, trunks, electric fans, dishes, six suits of clothes for the groom, six for the bride, perhaps a television, and on and on and on.

  Another man might have thrown up his hands – but not Nawabdin. The daughters acted as a spur to his genius, and he looked with satisfaction in the mirror each morning at the face of a warrior going out to do battle. Nawab of course knew that he must proliferate his sources of revenue – the salary he received from K. K. Harouni for tending the tube wells would not even begin to suffice. He set up a little one-room flour mill, run off a condemned electric motor – condemned by him. He tried his hand at fish-farming in a little pond at the edge of one of his master’s fields. He bought broken radios, fixed them, and resold them. He did not demur even when asked to fix watches, though that enterprise did spectacularly badly, and in fact earned him more kicks than kudos, for no watch he took apart ever kept time again.

  K. K. Harouni rarely went to his farms, but lived mostly in Lahore. Whenever the old man visited, Nawab would place himself night and day at the door leading from the servants’ sitting area into the walled grove of ancient banyan trees where the old farmhouse stood. Grizzled, his peculiar aviator glasses bent and smudged, Nawab tended the household machinery, the air conditioners, water heaters, refrigerators, and water pumps, like an engineer tending the boilers on a foundering steamer in an Atlantic gale. By his superhuman efforts he almost managed to maintain K. K. Harouni in the same mechanical cocoon, cooled and bathed and lighted and fed, that the landowner enjoyed in Lahore.

  Harouni of course became familiar with this ubiquitous man, who not only accompanied him on his tours of inspection, but morning and night could be found standing on the master bed rewiring the light fixture or in the bathroom poking at the water heater. Finally, one evening at teatime, gauging the psychological moment, Nawab asked if he might say a word. The landowner, who was cheerfully filing his nails in front of a crackling rosewood fire, told him to go ahead.

  ‘Sir, as you know, your lands stretch from here to the Indus, and on these lands are fully seventeen tube wells, and to tend these seventeen tube wells there is but one man, me, your servant. In your service I have earned these gray hairs’ – here he bowed his head to show the gray – ‘and now I cannot fulfill my duties as I should. Enough, sir, enough. I beg you, forgive me my weakness. Better a darkened house and proud hunger within than disgrace in the light of day. Release me, I ask you, I beg you.’

  The old man, well accustomed to these sorts of speeches, though not usually this florid, filed away at his nails and waited for the breeze to stop.

  ‘What’s the matter, Nawabdin?’

  ‘Matter, sir? O what could be the matter in your service. I’ve eaten your salt for all my years. But sir, on the bicycle now, with my old legs, and with the many injuries I’ve received when heavy machinery fell on me – I cannot any longer bicycle about like a bridegroom from farm to farm, as I could when I first had the good fortune to enter your employment. I beg you, sir, let me go.’

  ‘And what’s the solution?’ asked Harouni, seeing that they had come to the crux. He didn’t particularly care one way or the other, except that it touched on his comfort – a matter of great interest to him.

  ‘Well, sir, if I had a motorcycle, then I could somehow limp along, at least until I train up some younger man.’

  The crops that year had been good, Harouni felt expansive in front of the fire, and so, much to the disgust of the farm managers, Nawab received a brand-new motorcycle, a Honda 70. He even managed to extract an allowance for gasoline.

  The motorcycle increased his status, gave him weight, so that people began calling him ‘Uncle,’ and asking his opinion on world affairs, about which he knew absolutely nothing. He could now range further, doing a much wider business. Best of all, now he could spend every night with his wife, who had begged to live not on the farm but near her family in Firoza, where also they could educate at least the two eldest daughters. A long straight road ran from the canal headworks near Firoza all the way to the Indus, through the heart of the K. K. Harouni lands. The road ran on the bed of an old highway, built when these lands lay within a princely state. Some hundred and fifty years ago one of the princes had ridden that way, going to a wedding or a funeral in this remote district, felt hot, and ordered that rosewood trees be planted to shade the passersby. He forgot that he had given the order within a few hours, and in a few dozen years he in turn was forgotten, but these trees still stood, enormous now, some of them dead and looming without bark, white and leafless. Nawab would fly down this road on his new machine, with bags and cloths hanging from every knob and brace, so that the bike, when he hit a bump, seemed to be flapping numerous small vestigial wings; and with his grinning face, as he rolled up to whichever tube well needed servicing, with his ears almost blown off, he shone with the speed of his arrival.

  Nawab’s day, viewed from the air, would have appeared as aimless as that of a butterfly – to the senior manager’s house in the morning, where he diligently paid his respects, then sent to one or another of the tube wells, kicking up dust on the unpaved field roads, into the town of Firoza, zooming beneath the rosewoods, a bullet of sound, moseying around town, sneaking away to one of his private interests, to cement a deal to distribute ripening early-season honeydews from his cousin’s vegetable plot, or to count before hatching his half share in a flock of chickens, then back to Dunyapur, and out again. The maps of these days, superimposed, would have made a tangle; but every morning he emerged from the same place, just as the sun came up, and every evening he returned there, tired now, darkened, switching off the bike, rolling it over the wooden lintel of the door leading into the courtyard, the engine ticking as it cooled. Nawab each evening put the bike on its kickstand, and waited for his girls to come, all of them, around him, jumping on him. His face often at this moment had the same expression, an expression of childish innocent joy, w
hich contrasted strangely and even sadly with the heaviness of his face and its lines and stubble. He would raise his nose and sniff the air, to see if he could find out what his wife had cooked for dinner; and then he went in to her, finding her always in the same posture, making him tea, fanning the fire in the little hearth.

  ‘Hello, my love, my chicken piece,’ he said tenderly one evening, walking into the dark hut that served as a kitchen, the mud walls black with soot. ‘What’s in the pot for me?’ He opened the cauldron, which had been displaced by the kettle onto the beaten-earth floor, and began to search around in it with a wooden spoon.

  ‘Out! Out!’ she said, taking the spoon and, dipping it into the curry, giving him a taste. He opened his mouth obediently, like a boy receiving medicine. The wife, despite bearing thirteen children, had a lithe strong body, her vertebrae visible beneath her tight tunic. Her long mannish face still glowed from beneath the skin, giving her a ripe ochre coloring. Even now that her hair had become thin and graying, she wore it in a single long pigtail down to her waist, like a young woman in the village. Although this style didn’t suit her, Nawab saw in her still the girl he married sixteen years before. He stood in the door, watching his daughters playing hopscotch, and when his wife went past, he stuck out his butt, so that she rubbed against it as she squeezed through.