In Other Rooms, Other Wonders—Unspoken yet universally known tragedies

Daniyal Mueenuddin’s debut short story collection ‘In Other Rooms, Other Wonders’ brings vignettes from the everyday lives of people mired in Pakistan’s complex feudal society

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Book cover (Image source: Amazon)

“The old servant had come far by knowing the ways of his masters.” In Other Rooms, Other Wonders, has many such old servants—Nawabdin, the electrician, Chaudhary Jaglani, the manager, Rafik, the valet, Ghulam Rasool, the majordomo, Hassan, the cook, who come far by knowing the ways of their masters—the Harounis, dynastic landowners with farms in Dunyapur and a family home in Lahore.

The unspoken yet universally known rules of social interaction that underpin the complex class hierarchies of a feudal Pakistan foreground the eight loosely interlinked tales, spanning the 60s, 70s and 80s, in Pakistani-American lawyer, farmer and writer Daniyal Mueenuddin’s debut short-story collection. But that is not what the stories are about. “The old man did not merely lack interest in the affairs of his servants—he was not conscious that they had lives outside his purview,” says the narrator about the patriarch K K Harouni. In Other Rooms, Other Wonders attempts to peek into these hidden lives.

In his impassive matter-of-fact style reminiscent of another South Asian author Kiran Desai, Mueenuddin sets out to uncover the unspoken yet universally known secrets of his characters—their machinations, their mistresses and their mortality. It comes as no surprise that sex, with its potential for intimacy and power, is a recurring trope in Mueenuddin’s narrative. “A week after she moved into the annex, Husna slept with K K Harouni.” Be it the zealous Saleema’s naïve search for meaning in love, the stoic Zainab’s uncharacteristic desperation for a child, the conflicted Lily’s easy boredom with the ties of monogamy, the manipulative Husna’s ambition for upward social mobility—sex is never just about sex for Mueenuddin’s characters, especially his women.

For a book whose plot develops in the bedrooms of its protagonists, Mueenuddin’s bland prosaic descriptions of sex can often be jarring. “She took off his clothes, peeling off his tan socks. Their skin touched. Standing up and going to the corner, she bent down on purpose to pick up her shirt, letting him see her. She saw reflected in his eyes the beauty of her young body. They made love, he came almost immediately, then lay on her.”

Where Mueenuddin’s description is successful is in bringing to life the Pakistani countryside, either directly—“The place seemed immense and empty, a huge bowl of rock, with the cool river running through it, the blue and white stripes of the two tributary rivers beginning to mingle, a confusion at the middle of the stream” or at times, in service to a character—“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 her 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.” Like his characters who often act with multiple objects in mind, Mueenuddin spins a rich layered tapestry with his narrative that tries to convey multitudes all at once.

The backdrop of the Pakistani countryside with all its beauty and vibrance is just that though—a backdrop. In true Chekhovian style, a self-professed influence for Mueenuddin, the tales themselves are often bleak. The wonder of other rooms is lost when the voyeur goggles are off and one takes a deep dive into the uncertain hardships of the lives of the people Mueenuddin chooses to showcase. Even the rich, lacking-no-privilege K K Harouni is not immune from the race to oblivion that Mueenuddin has his characters lead a slow march down.

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